BY DAN
KENNEDY
Serving the reality-based community since 2002.
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Monday, December 27, 2004
COMING TO GRIPS WITH THE
QUAKE. I suspect it will be another day or two before the full
impact of the terrible earthquake in Malaysia becomes clear, although
what we know already is bad enough.
The Star, which is based in
Malaysia, has put up a photo
gallery, but an
interactive
feature (click on "Asia's
Deadly Waves") put together on the New York Times website -
with photos from India, Thailand, and Sri Lanka - is more
evocative.
Glenn Reynolds has links to some
Malaysian
bloggers. The most
frightening observation - one that will become more apparent as the
week wears on - is that millions of people have lost access to
drinkable water.
The headline on CNN.com right now
is "Asia
Quake Death Toll Tops 23,000."
I think everyone understands that the number is going much, much
higher than that.
"EATING HAM FOR UNCLE SAM."
My former Phoenix colleague Seth Gitell, now press
secretary to Boston mayor Tom Menino, has written a must-read
essay for a website called
NextBook
on a trove of letters his grandfather wrote while fighting in Europe
during World War II.
The letters, about 1,000 of them,
somehow made their way to the Boston Athenaeum, shedding new light on
the role of Jewish soldiers in the war - an underexamined subject,
Gitell notes, despite the fact that such celebrated Jewish novelists
as Norman Mailer and Joseph Heller wrote about it.
posted at 10:03 AM |
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1 Comments:
More evidence of the uselessness of local TV news: even 22 thousand people dying in a horrible disaster can't top an ordinary snowstorm in New England. Information seekers trying to depend on broadcast news had to put up with 15 minutes of shoveling before the real news could begin.
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Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
