This American Life's retraction and the question that actually matters

I’m not a fan of This American Life. This will come as a shock to anyone (or any robot) crawling through this site gathering demographic information, because I fit the listener profile to a T: well-educated in the humanities, a writer, a liberal, a youngish white woman who listens to NPR almost constantly the rest of the time.

But the show just doesn’t do it for me. It’s a combination of things, I think. They tell a very structurally-specific type of story, one which, as they say on their website, centers around characters, conflict, and a universal takeaway. Clearly, I do love stories with characters and conflicts, but I find the ever-present universal takeaway on this show a bit too easy, something that allows listeners to feel as though they’re participating in the world simply by joining in the larger feelings-session. (More on this, specifically, later.) Also, I just don’t like Ira Glass’s delivery.

So when I realized last weekend that I was likely to be driving a uhaul truck over the Sunol grade from noon to one pm, smack in the middle of the This American Life broadcast on KQED, I was all set to bring my ipod and listen to another podcast. That is, I was going to listen to something else until I remembered that this weekend was Retraction Weekend, a one-hour show about a January episode entitled “Mr. Daisy Goes to the Apple Factory.” As I’m sure you’ve heard, Mr. Daisy was less than truthful about what he found in Shenzhen, and This American Life was retracting his piece and spending an hour talking about how and why this had happened. So I tuned in.

This piece encapsulates my impression of the general fact-checking failure; to put it briefly, Daisy told Glass that his translator, Cathy, could no longer be reached. That was that, until holes started showing after the original piece aired back in January. When Glass and his team started looking into things, Daisy said that, actually, her name was Anna, not Cathy, and he didn’t think she’d like to be contacted as she hadn’t known she was in a story at all.

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Pretty awesome local news

The DREAM act gets some momentum. 

This is what I love about history

The world we have ended up living in, and the past that we think we understand, are so, so random. They tell you in elementary school that history is a fixed set of dates and names, when really it's far more akin to Dadaist poetry, the kind where you pull random words out of a bag. What survives and becomes significant may appear to be inevitable from our position at this late date, but in reality, it's all a bit of a fluke. (And the whole impression of living at a late date, well, that's another post.)

If things had gone slightly differently, we could have all been referring to, say, movie plots in a totally different way. You know, like that romantic comedy that is totally a Turnip Princess Story.

Five hundred fairy tales have been found in Germany, collected by local historian Franz Xaver von Schönwerth back in the 1850s. The volume didn't take off like that of his contemporaries, the Grimm brothers, but according to this article, they held him in high regard.

Until these things are all translated, I won't be able to weigh in on whether they were misplaced due to some ineffable quality they lacked or were a victim of some random event of the kind that often happened in the nineteenth century, like maybe an absentminded monk or a public that just wasn't into turnips. According to the Guardian, this should be soon, and I can hardly wait.

The Hardest Two Words: Not Yet

I’m on what is likely, no joke, my thirtieth draft of my novel. If I knew the actual number, maybe I’d also know how to tell you just what qualifies as a draft—is it a new start, regardless of the portions revised? Is it only when you get through the full monty?—but I make it my business to not know such things. It would only get depressing, then funny, and then right back to depressing again. Besides, I’m not out of the ordinary. If you don’t hang out with writers, this might come as a surprise, but taking five years to work on a first novel is pretty typical. And I’m not necessarily telling you that NaNoWriMo has it all wrong; I’ve found is that the first draft is actually pretty quick. It’s what comes along later that has a way of settling into your life like bedbugs. THIS time, you tell yourself and your loved ones, this time I’m really about to get rid of them! But I know that it’s not nearly as simple as that, and what’s worse, if your loved ones are at all smart, so do they. They know it’s not quite safe to come sit on your couch again. 

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