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As I see it, the real pleasure of the taxi whistle is its outmodedness; the core of its charm is atavistic. In a world where virtually everything we do is mediated by technology, taxi-whistling is old-fashioned and physical: With just two fingers and one not even very deep breath, you can produce a delightful, if slightly shocking, noise. A loud, compelling statement — “Yo, over here!” — is always at the ready, literally at your fingertips. Nothing needs to be plugged in, charged or connected to a network. Not a single password (no passwords!) or two-factor authentication is required.
The Robots Can’t Take Taxi-Whistling Away From Me - The New York Times
Jon Gluck
As Michael Schudson pointed out in “[Discovering the News](https://www.amazon.com/Discovering-News-History-American-Newspapers/dp/0465016669/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Discovering+the+News&qid=1675095630&s=books&sr=1-1)” (1978), the notion that good journalism is “objective”—that is, nonpartisan and unopinionated—emerged only around the start of the twentieth century. Schudson thought that it arose as a response to growing skepticism about the whole idea of stable and reliable truths. The standard of objectivity, as he put it, “was not the final expression of a belief in facts but the assertion of a method designed for a world in which even facts could not be trusted. . . . Journalists came to believe in objectivity, to the extent that they did, because they wanted to, needed to, were forced by ordinary human aspiration to seek escape from their own deep convictions of doubt and drift.” In other words, objectivity was a problematic concept from the start.
When Americans Lost Faith in the News | The New Yorker
Louis Menand
But, for connoisseurs of C-SPAN, serial failure made for riveting television, at least by that network’s normal production standards, which veer more toward vintage Soviet broadcasts than toward “Real Housewives” or the N.F.L. on Fox. The usual approach features locked-down cameras focussed tightly on individual speechmakers, a rigid mise en scène only occasionally enlivened by a wide-angle shot of the House floor, as if cutting to security-camera footage. But as the G.O.P. butted heads with its own rump faction, humiliating the Party’s nominal head Kevin McCarthy through round after round of losses, C-SPAN’s cameras, freed from their normal strictures for reasons we’ll get to in a moment, were panning and zooming and cutting back and forth with an almost cinematic brio.
C-Span Unleashes Its Inner Scorsese
newyorker.com
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