not-so-hidden signals

Post quoted in entirety from The Slog, since I don't have time right now to be fancy:

In this week's web-only Constant Reader, I join Barack Obama's book club and discover that there might be a secret message or two involved.

Since the election, every book that Obama has been photographed carrying has resulted in a sales boom for booksellers. The first book he was seen carrying after the election, Doris Kearns Goodwin's story of Abraham Lincoln's cabinet Team of Rivals, inspired much talk about his cabinet choices. When he was spotted with a copy of West Indies author Derek Walcott's marvelous, book-length poem Omeros, there was a (admittedly smaller) bump in the book's sales. Even people who don't generally pay much attention to the book world are scrutinizing those long-shot photographs of our president-elect disembarking from car to plane and back again, trying to read the title of whatever is tucked under his arm.

Provided that no president-elect ever has to carry his own shit around if he doesn't want to, it's enough to make one wonder whether Obama is sending codes—like those secret messages, solvable only by decoder ring that used to be included in serial movies for children. The message of Team of Rivals was pretty obvious: It was impossible to turn on a cable news network during the cabinet-selection process without hearing the title slip from one anchor or another's lips in reference to the fact that Obama wasn't going to have a cabinet of yes-men. But if this Secret Presidential Book Club theory is correct, what is Obama trying to tell us with The Defining Moment?

We learn a lot about FDR, including his weird feelings about the Irish and Catholics, too. I hope you'll give it a read.

Nice.

lost photos from a lost city

Design Observer (online magazine?) reports on an exciting discovery - lost photos from Hiroshima. There were previously very few due to the clampdown on photography and any reports on the bombings.

But the War Department created a Physical Damage Division to go over and record the details for official purposes. They did, but even their evidence has been largely unknown for decades... until somebody found a huge stockpile of them in a surburban garbage bin. The story of their recovery is interesting enough in itself, and can be found here. The photos themselves, of course, are awe-inspiring.

image and reality

More on the Atlantic cover controversy, plus Newsweek's horrible evil non-retouching of Sarah Palin on their cover. "Politics of the Retouched Headshot" in The Atlantic.

Consider a recent political controversy involuntarily involving this magazine. After taking a series of shots for a conventional cover portrait of John McCain, Jill Greenberg tricked the candidate into having a picture taken in which she lit him from below, a classic technique to make the subject look evil. Neither the candidate nor his staff noticed that the photographer had literally cast McCain in a bad light. “I guess they’re not very sophisticated,” she told the online magazine PDN, boasting further that she hadn’t retouched the neutral shot she sold The Atlantic. “I left his eyes red and his skin looking bad,” she said.

As this story illustrates, having a portrait taken for publication demands a great deal of trust in the competence and good will of the photographer and photo editor. Greenberg deceived not only McCain but The Atlantic, which objected strenuously to the abuse of trust. But suppose the magazine had been in on the ruse. Does a portrait subject have a reasonable expectation of normal lighting?

Maybe. What's funny is when Fox starts to whine about things NOT being retouched. So honesty is now dishonesty - the epitome of Bush-Rove!! Woo!