The “This American Life” retraction episode went up Friday night. You can download it or read the transcript here.
I listened to the whole thing over the weekend, and frankly I recommend listening rather than (or in addition to) reading the transcript. The transcript does not convey just how Mike Daisey comes across in Ira Glass’s discussion with him:
The Retraction episode of This American Life contains the most excruciating dead air I’ve ever heard.
— Matthew Baldwin (@matthewbaldwin) March 17, 2012
One thing that bothered me about this episode, though (and both Lawrence and Matthew Baldwin have made this same point).
Ira Glass says, “At that point, we should’ve killed the story,” when they found out that Daisey couldn’t (or wouldn’t) give them contact information for his interpreter.
Glass goes on to say “But other things Daisey told us about Apple’s operations in China checked out, and we saw no reason to doubt him. We didn’t think that he was lying to us and to audiences about the details of his story. That was a mistake.”
That’s not good enough. Someone should have been there and asked Glass: “Why didn’t you kill the story at that point? What were your reasons for going on with it? If you felt like it was an important enough story to run with, what were your reasons for going with Daisey, rather than someone like Rob Schmitz or the NYT reporters you spoke with?”
Yankees fan (well, nobody’s perfect) John Gruber has been all over the story since it broke on Friday as well. I’d suggest just going over to Daring Fireball and scrolling down from the top, clicking on whatever Daisey links interest you.
In non-Daisey related news: I gave up on Slate a few months ago. I felt like it had reached the point Salon came to quite a while back (when I gave up on them): saying outrageous and stupid things just to get page views, increasingly dumb writing (“Dear Prudence” in particular seems to have gone nucking futs), and generally not worth the time and effort involved in paying any attention to it.
However, I did see some good word of mouth on one Slate article recently, so I decided to click over. I’m happy that I did, as I can enthusiastically recommend Annie Lowrey’s “Where’s _why?”, a long article that simultaneously covers three things:
- the culture surrounding the Ruby programming language (with a good explanation of what Ruby and Ruby on Rails are, and why they matter)
- the author’s attempts to learn programming using Ruby as her first language
- and the mystery of what happened to “Why the Lucky Stiff” a beloved figure in Ruby culture.