Collection

Haha! Here's the thing about the medicine beat in journalism. By nature, it goes for the shiny and the positive. "NEW BREAKTHROUGH" is a headline. "FURTHER TESTING QUASHES HOPES" is not. I recently included an NPR headline in a Collection post, even saying then that I tend toward skepticism. Here we have NPR explaining how headlines like that can be misleading. Which: exactly.

Because shiny. And sigh.

Teach your children well, fella babies. Critical consumption is, well, critical.

Image: Google image search, Labeled for Reuse
The Blue Diamond Gallery

Here is a piece on what it's like for perfectly legal people of Mexican heritage to live in the United States these days. If you don't want to read the whole piece - if you can't take the politics of it all - scroll down to "On whether her life has changed after the election of President Donald Trump" and take in the STORY, because it's a terrible and a great one. Here is how the disadvantaged are forced to work around the bigoted. I don't care how much you think this doesn't apply to you: please click.

It's a good thing sometimes to view the news from outlets outside of the United States. Hindustani Times has a look at a video from Ohio and a website lamenting the "Indian IT Mafia." But for those described, it's wrong to feel creeped out or threatened, of course.  Because throwing the words mafia, notorious, and outrageous at a group is totally friendly!

So, has anybody else heard of the "farewell address" from the leader of the so-called Islamic State? Yeah, me neither, until I pulled up news outlets outside the U.S. Do a Google News search on his name, and I don't even see any American outlets appearing in the search results - none current, and note covering this story. Shouldn't a retreat like this from the "supreme leader" of the so-called Islamic State be kind of big news? I could not find this on NPR, CNN, Newsweek, or the New York Times online.