Author: jbenton

Here’s my story from today’s paper, on why urban superintendents seem to burn out so quickly.
I’m in New York City, on vacation, gazing out over the treetops of Central Park. Life is good.
ATTENTION NEW YORK READERS: The CD Mix of the Month Club will have its first NYC reunion Monday evening at The Magician, 118 Rivington St. (Lower East Side, map here.) All crabwalk.com readers are invited. If you want to play, make a mix CD and bring a copy (or 12) to the bar — we’ll be swappin’ like sexually liberated ’70s suburbanites. If you just want to come say hello, that’s great, too. I’ll be getting there a little after 6:00 p.m — most folks are showing up around 7 or 8. Hope to see you there.

Here’s my story from today’s front page, an analysis of Mike Moses’ tenure as Dallas schools superintendent. (Moses resigned yesterday.) If you get a chance and live in Dallas, pick up today’s paper — the DMN did a fine job on this package, if I do say so myself.
And if I wasn’t going to be on a plane tomorrow morning, I’d be invading public television tomorrow. Shame.

Geez, doesn’t Mike Moses know I’m about to go on vacation? Priorities, man, priorities!

Crabwalk.com Northern Tier Listening Tour 2004 update: That most evil of human inventions (the limited vacation schedule) has forced me to sever three fine American cities from my trip itinerary: Boston, Washington, and (most painfully) Toledo.
(You know, not many people could recite that list and call Toledo the most painful omission truthfully. But I can!)
So the tentative schedule: New York City (and environs, with potential side jaunts to Connecticut, New Jersey, and upstate) from Friday, July 16 to Wednesday, July 21. Philadelphia on Thursday, July 22. Pittsburgh on Friday, July 23. Columbus on Saturday, July 24 to Sunday, July 25. Departure from Columbus early July 26.
Bonus announcement: Attention New York City readers! There will be a CD Mix of the Month Club reunion sometime early next week! More details to come. Get in touch with me if you’re interested in swapping some mix CDs with a few dozen of New York’s finest young people.

John Darnielle, the man behind the Mountain Goats, does a great fake interview with black metal band Kult ov Azazel. (Whoever the hell they are. John, whose own music is a sort of twisted autistic folk, has always shown a strange affection for the darkest of metal.)
Disclaimer: the interview that follows never took place. We do not doubt that an actual interview with Kult ov Azazel would go pretty much the way all black metal interviews go: interviewer asks a question that indicates he’s part of the 1337 BM h0rdez [“Your sound recalls the early Spear of Longinus demos, but in a more necro and ultimately progressive way. Was this your intention?”], band goes directly into the script, remaining in character and, after the manner of a politician, on-message [“Yes. We felt that whereas others have shown the way and we must give them hails as brave warriors along the path to total war, yet must we carve our own grim visages into the stones at road’s end, as it were. Our second demo continued in this ripped vein,” etc], interviewer asks follow-ups whose main purpose is to assert that he has in fact managed to construe some sense out of what is essentially swords-and-sorcery gobbledegook [“Certainly. But don’t you think that what’s happened with the commercialization of pro-nationalist black metal has eliminated the weak, leaving a cleaner field for the few remaining, the discerning listeners?”], rinse lather repeat.
By the way, it’s pronounced “darr-neel,” not “darr-nell,” as we learn about 5:40 into this KEXP in-studio. The tone gets a little icy with Stevie Zoom, who clearly doesn’t like being corrected.
Bonus trivia: John’s wife Lalitree keeps both a LiveJournal and a blog.

Here’s my Zambia story. It looks nice in the paper, too. There’ll be another Zambia story in next Sunday’s paper — less pathos but more information in that one.
My only objection: the headline (“Joshua Benton: Where the only growth industry is death”) makes it sound like that’s my personal slogan. “Ah, Josh Benton — death is the only growth industry with that guy!”

Here’s my (non-Zambia) story in today’s paper. Probably not worth your time.
Also of note in today’s paper: this profile of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the late spiritual leader of Hasidic Judaism. It’s of note for at least two reasons: (1) the great headline, “Rebbe With A Cause,” and (2) it’s written by Michael Kress, my first editor-in-chief at my college newspaper.
Finally, I’ve finished updating zambiastories.com, including the addition of about 50 photos relating to tomorrow’s story in the DMN. (The captions will make more sense if you’ve read the story first.)

Also: I’ll be on TXCN tonight and tomorrow, talking about (you’ll never guess!) standardized testing.

WaPo White House correspondent Dana Milbank, one of this site’s favorite journos, hosts an unusually free-spirited Q&A on the Post’s site.
Question from Boston, Mass.: Anything new on the Palme investigation?
Dana Milbank: The Olaf Palme assassination remains, tragically, unsolved, a source of great agitation to all who love Sweden.
The Plame investigation, by contrast, chugs along in the secrecy of the grand jury and Justice department.

Fascinating Landsburgh piece about the problems with research into the economic impacts of minimum-wage laws. (Grafs 5-9 being the important ones.) I get the impression this is the sort of thing I would know if I’d ever taken a statistics course. It would come in handy, considering the mountains of crappy biased research I sift through every day.