TresSugar

New York Times Traces First Lady's Slave Roots

TresSugar — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 14:00:00 -0700

The New York Times ran a captivating historical piece today about a six-year-old slave named Melvinia. The paper traces her family's five-generation journey from slavery to modern success.

It's a fascinating American story that just so happens to be part of first lady Michelle Obama's story, too. Using old public records, fading photos, and recollections of older family members, the New York Times, along with genealogist Megan Smolenyak, have uncovered Melvinia's story, which fully connects the first lady to the history of slavery for the first time.

To see an excerpt from the piece, read more.

In 1850, the elderly master of a South Carolina estate took pen in hand and painstakingly divided up his possessions. Among the spinning wheels, scythes, tablecloths and cattle that he bequeathed to his far-flung heirs was a 6-year-old slave girl valued soon afterward at $475. In his will, she is described simply as the “negro girl Melvinia.” After his death, she was torn away from the people and places she knew and shipped to Georgia. While she was still a teenager, a white man would father her first-born son under circumstances lost in the passage of nearly two centuries.

In the annals of American slavery, this painful story would be utterly unremarkable, save for one reason: This union, consummated some two years before the Civil War, marked the origins of a family line that would extend from rural Georgia, to Birmingham, Ala., to Chicago and, finally, to the White House.

Melvinia Shields, the enslaved and illiterate young girl, and the unknown white man who impregnated her are the great-great-great-grandparents of Michelle Obama, the first lady.

To many, Michelle's family story powerfully represents African-American advancement. But her mixed background is also representative of Americans in general, as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. explored in his definitive documentary on genealogy called African American Lives. A historian who discovered that he had black relatives when he researched his memoir tells the New York Times: "We’ve all mingled, and we have done so for generations."

Your Personality Quirks Come Out When You Eat Out

TresSugar — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 02:00:00 -0700

People say you really get to know someone when traveling with them or living with them. To that I would add - and when you go out to eat with them.

New York Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni would agree. He recently wrote about the odd quirks and desires people bring to the dinner table. Whether your quirks are about sharing food, hoarding food, being picky, or pretending to make a big show of eating when you've left most of the food you started with on your plate - it seems that your relationship to eating, especially when you eat out, can be a key to your personality. "People are as strange about eating as they are about love," he says. "They want what they want."

I have to say - I’m definitely a hoarder type. I hope this doesn’t mean I’m a selfish person in other ways, but I’m not big on family-style eating. One of my biggest pleasures is going to a restaurant, poring over the menu, and after an anguished process of elimination I take dead seriously (salad or soup? steak or risotto?), I settle in and hope I chose well. (But yes - you can have a bite!) I'm a sharer when it comes to bills, however. Folks who pull out the calculator (mentally or literally) drive me bananas. And don't get me started on people who are rude to wait staff or cheap tippers!

What are your quirks when eating out?

Craigslist Casual Encounters: A New(ish) Sexual Frontier

TresSugar — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 10:00:00 -0700

I wonder how many people Craigslist founder Craig Newmark has helped to find an apartment, sell a guitar . . . or hook up.

Besides its helpful housing, for sale, and job sections, Craigslist has a personals section that caters to every predilection, ranging from the strictly platonic to relationship seekers to Casual Encounters - its anonymous sex hookup section.

Sometimes dangerous and often disappointing, Casual Encounters is nevertheless part of what gives the Craigslist personals section higher traffic than other online personals sites - including Match.com, eHarmony, and Yahoo personals.

"Our users like the ability to be both candid and, initially, anonymous," says Newmark matter of factly about Casual Encounters, which accounts for 2 percent of all Craigslist postings.

In a recent New York Times trend piece, 100 or so users were interviewed about their experiences and provided a peek into who posts and answers those ads: Craigslist Casual Encounters attracts a gamut, from "desperados" to prostitutes and spammers and thrill-seeking hotties. Click here to read more.

Nola, a 42-year-old saleswoman in Manhattan, seeks men who will meet her in a public place, so she can go to the bathroom, take her underwear off, and hand it to them in an envelope - for a fee. Melvin, a 35-year-old divorcé, recently made the mistake of going to a woman's apartment before meeting her in public, finding that she was insecure about her weight and trying to hide it by turning out the lights.

And then there's someone like Michael, a handsome artist who claims, "I've met some extraordinarily beautiful women, had a few extraordinary sexual encounters that made my teeth itch and my brain sweat, put me in states of weird contemplation like, 'My God, I’ve never experienced that before.'"

Casual Encounters has been around since 2000 and has probably changed the way a lot of sexually frustrated people deal with dry spells. The question is - does it work? And is it healthy for the parties involved?

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Blaming the Victim? NYT Calls Out Madoff's Investors

CitizenSugar — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 08:00:14 -0700

Earlier this week most of you said you didn't think Bernard Madoff acted alone in the $50 billion-plus Ponzi scheme. Well one New York Times reporter thinks he found the accomplices: the victims. In the article, Joe Nocera asks: what were they thinking?

Nocera thinks what happened to Madoff's investors was horrible, but he also points out that the first rule of personal finance is diversification. He wrote:

People lose it all because they start a company that turns out to be misguided, or because they do something that is risky, hoping to hit the jackpot. Taxpayers don’t bail them out, and they shouldn’t start now. Did the SEC foul up? You bet. But that doesn’t mean the investors themselves are off the hook. Investors blaming the SEC for their decision to give every last penny to Bernie Madoff is like a child blaming his mother for letting him start a fight while she wasn’t looking.

Removing Madoff from the equation, do you think some victims acted negligently by putting all their money in one place, or does most of the blame lie with the SEC?

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Would You Pay to Read the New York Times Online?

CitizenSugar — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 10:30:00 -0800

The New York Times executive editor Bill Keller is answering readers' questions online, but one day we might have to pay to read those answers.

When asked if the paper would accept donations to support such a valuable service that is currently free online, Keller brought up subscriptions. He said:

Really good information, often extracted from reluctant sources, truth-tested, organized, and explained - that stuff wants to be paid for. So far, it gets paid for mainly by advertisers, but a lively, deadly serious discussion continues within the Times about ways to get consumers to pay for what we make.

He went on to describe possible ways to get money from web users, including: putting the entire site behind a wall only accessible to subscribers; making people pay as they go a la iTunes; or promoting versions for reading devices like Kindle that cost money to download.

No News Is Good News: Companies Going Broke

LibertySugar — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 00:01:13 -0800

Announcements from major media companies yesterday made it clear that the recession has hit those who report on it. Meanwhile, the Pulitzer Prizes announced plans to accept submissions from web-only news outlets, providing a redundant wake-up call to traditional news companies failing to get by. Here's a roundup of traditional media's most recent struggles:

New York Times: Like many Americans, the New York Times Company will borrow against its house to keep the cash flowing. Specifically, the paper of record will take $225 million out against its Manhattan headquarters.

For the rest of this sad news story, read more.

Tribune Co.: The media giant, which owns the LA Times and the Chicago Tribune filed for bankruptcy protection yesterday. Following the filing, the CEO sent employees a memo that said business will carry on as usual. He wrote: "The good news is that we have great brands, and we produce great products every day. It's up to all of us to continue to focus on what it is we do best."
NBC: The peacock network has had its head in its feathers apparently, as its chief Jeff Zucker told investors yesterday that a bad Fall performance may result in programming cutbacks. Last week, NBC laid off 500 employees. Zucker said: "We're in an era where if we don't change the models of these local TV stations, we will be newspapers, we will be car companies. I don't want to be a company that files for bankruptcy."

While the Tribune Co. seems optimistic about its products, Zucker's comments make it clear that he's happy to be in the TV business rather than newspaper. In a day where everyone seems to have an insatiable craving for information, it's a shame that these media companies cannot quickly adapt, especially since their reporting resources are still valuable in an online world.

Do you think stalwart media organizations like the New York Times and NBC can find a model that works as technology speeds ahead and a recession hits most businesses, or has their time passed?

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Bono to Rock His Opinions in the New York Times

CitizenSugar — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 03:00:30 -0700

He is a world famous singer and songwriter, a spokesman for Africa, a Noble Peace Prize nominee, and now he’s a writer for the New York Times. My David Brooks is looking at some rocking competition. Bono, lead singer of U2, is set to be a contributing writer for the NYT, offering his insight on topics including Africa, poverty, and a little Frank Sinatra too. Bono will be penning as many as 10 pieces for the paper spreading throughout 2009.

Editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal, who announced this new appointment this week, may also have had an ulterior motive: it seems as though Mr. Rosenthal is learning the guitar. Bono’s pay may also be a factor in his assignment, as he will be receiving no money whatsoever.

Does a Bono op-ed sound like music to your ears? Or does it hit a sour note?

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Interactive Info on Ads: Who Spent How Much & Where

CitizenSugar — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 06:00:05 -0700

We've been soaking in a bathtub full of political ads for so long, my fingers are beyond pruney. Though there's great talk of who has how much money to spend on making the suckers, it's not until you can see the true data behind of the ad campaigns compared side by side that you can get a real fix on it.

Ever the masters of the interactive graphic, the Times has maps that let you pit the groups with money side by side to see how much was spent, and where ads were bought. The McCain vs. Obama number is interesting ($90,415,962 to broadcast 57 television ads compared to Obama's $145,064,338 to broadcast 86 television ads) but I was most struck by the DNC vs. RNC as shown in the maps above: $436,015 to $10,080,774. That's a discrepancy. Most of the RNC dough as you can see is pretty geographically targeted.

There are more fun features to play with, read more.

The feature lets you search by issue as well. For instance, a total of $1,356,628 was spent to broadcast five ads related to the presidential campaign on the issue. For comparison? My pal T. Boone Pickens spent $24,026,256 to broadcast nine ads.

It all makes me remember a wackier time in political ads, when Hillary wrapped up some Christmassy goodness, and Bill Richardson gave a pretty stellar and funny job interview, and who can forget - "my plan to secure the border? Two words: Chuck. Norris.

What do you make of the differences in spending?

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Dudes For Palin? What the Times Is Saying About the GOP

CitizenSugar — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 06:00:58 -0700

You know how there are just some girls who always seem to have a pack of guy friends? According to the Times, Sarah Palin is the candidate equivalent of that. With crowds that seem to be tipping heavily male (I suppose the legendary Joe Six-Packs?) the vocal man-fans aren't afraid to be heard. With calls of, “You tell ’em baby,” and “You rock me out, Sarah,” Palin seems to be comfortable with the demographic saying, “I feel like I’m at home."

At one rally a female supporter taking a snapshot said of the ratio, “This is not a ladies campaign. There seem to be lots and lots of guys here. I’d guess 70-30, maybe 65-35, men to women. It’s quite noticeable to me.”

To see what the Times had to say about another woman on the trail, Cindy McCain, as well as Christopher Buckley, read more.

This weekend also saw a piece on Cindy McCain the response to it has vacillated from "humanizing" to "gutter journalism." Touching on her challenges as the second wife in Washington, her substance problem, and ties to the Keating scandal, the piece also notes: "Mrs. McCain has exhibited the signal trait of the political spouse: a burning desire to win."

Christopher Buckley also got his time in the Times sun this weekend, with a feature on his now famous decision to back Obama. In the piece one friend says, “When you live in that Buckley bubble all those years, you’re not really allowed to say what you think. This is probably the last liberation for him. He put his flag in the sand.”

What do you think of the Times' coverage of the Republican Party recently?
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The Long and Short of It: Does Size Matter in a President?

CitizenSugar — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 12:15:22 -0700

Do looks matter in a president? Perhaps, though, you can ask the infamous JFK/Nixon debate match up on that one - but how about sheer size? With Obama's workout regiment closely watched earlier this campaign, in the face-off between 6'1.5", 180 lbs. Obama, and 5'7", 165 lbs. McCain, will the top dog be the biggest in the pack?

The New York Times took the weights and measurements of the men running for president back to the turn of the century to see if there's any truth to the rumor that tall men rule.

The results? Not always. Perhaps presidential shorter/heavier loser Ford is a little resentful that he lost his match up on the scale with Jimmy Carter, while Nixon was similarly shorter and heavier than both McGovern and Humphrey and won both match-ups.

To see some of the other stand out numbers, read more.

Though taller doesn't always win, the taller man has won 17 times to the shorter victors' eight in the elections since 1896.
Does a battle of the bulge have anything to do with winning? Ask William Taft, I suppose. At 332 lbs. he still beat his opponent - as did 18 other "heaviers." The lighter man only won eight times.
What's the real long and short of it? The tallest president was Abraham Lincoln at 6'4"; the shortest was James Madison at 5'4".
The Times graphic is worth a look, all the heights and weights are right there. I mean, if that's what it takes to be president . . . uh, maybe I'll pass? None of your beeswax, voters!

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