Tag: New York

We’re headed out to Manhattan today to visit the Museum of Natural History. We’ve made several trips in the past but never quite make it past the dinosaur exhibit and the planetarium.

I themed my breakfast around our trip. I had a cup of freshly brewed Ethiopian Harrar1 from my French Press. Bhavana and the kids bought some bagels from Wegman’s during their Wednesday afternoon grocery shopping trip. I slathered some low fat Philadelphia cream cheese on both sides and inserted some Nova Lox. Coffee and a bagel. Isn’t that a New York breakfast?

  1. I get my coffee freshly ground from Rocky Hill Buy the Cup. ?

digithoughts:

Retracting “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory”

Ira Glass:

I have difficult news. We’ve learned that Mike Daisey’s story about Apple in China - which we broadcast in January - contained significant fabrications. We’re retracting the story because we can’t vouch for its truth.

1. Shame about such a great podcast/performance. I held my breath for the whole episode. Now, I of course feel bad for Mr. Glass, but I don’t think any less of HIM for this. 

The response to the original episode, “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory,” was significant. It quickly became the single most popular podcast in This American Life’s history, with 888,000 downloads (typically the number is 750,000) and 206,000 streams to date. 

2. The podcast almost single handedly set the mainstream media ball rolling with the following front page story in The New York Times and the ABC iFactory documentary. Heck, even I linked to it…

“In our original broadcast, we fact checked all the things that Daisey said about Apple’s operations in China,” says Glass, “and those parts of his story were true, except for the underage workers, who are rare. We reported that discrepancy in the original show. But with this week’s broadcast, we’re letting the audience know that too many of the details about the people he says he met are in dispute for us to stand by the story.

3. The lying is in the details. As with most good lies.

“I’m not going to say that I didn’t take a few shortcuts in my passion to be heard,” Daisey tells Schmitz and Glass. “My mistake, the mistake I truly regret, is that I had it on your show as journalism, and it’s not journalism. It’s theater.”

3. Well, in the theater, it’s theater. When passing it on to This American Life, it’s shameless lying. 

4. Some good things has come out of this. Heightened awareness and increased insight for starters. 

Photo: Tech2

London, not New York

… if you follow the flow of money around the world, you might be surprised to find that the central node of global finance, the place where money passes through most often, is London, not New York. Wall Street, of course, is no piker. American investment banks — partly because the U.S. economy is the largest in the world — do more business and make more money. But when it comes to international transactions, London is the world’s financial center. The City of London, its Wall Street, employs more than 300,000 people, whereas Wall Street itself employs fewer than 200,000. Banks in the United States hold total assets that come to about 85 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. In Britain, the banks hold almost 400 percent more money than its G.D.P., mainly because so much international business takes place there. And as the U.S. share of global finance shrinks, international business matters more.