Slow Journalism

Why not?

February 25

Because it’s crazy. It’s insane. It will never work. You’ll hear this a lot if you have a lot of far-out ideas. “Moonshots” is the term I prefer for such ideas, or a really big swing.

And then in an instant he realised that rather than building a cable through the wildernesses of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia in the hope of saving a couple of days’ transmission time for the telegraph, one could build a cable directly from Newfoundland to Ireland, under the narrowest point of the entire Atlantic Ocean. If he was able to do that, it would reduce the time for a message to pass between the two greatest cities in the nineteenth-century world from a matter of days to just a few seconds.

~ from, https://www.slow-journalism.com/app-issues/the-death-of-slow-news

Why not, indeed. Because what if your idea actually worked?

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From scratch

February 19

Clear cut and plant. Clear cut and plant. I’m not sure, but this doesn’t feel like a great idea. I started reading this article thinking it wasn’t going to be that interesting. I was wrong. I’ve moved through forest where there are no trails: doing boundary monitoring and corridor maintenance for the Appalachian Trail Council, and bush–whacking towards rock climbing. It’s type-2 fun. But reading about what these super-humans do to move through clear-cut “blocks”… *shudders* that’s definitely type-3 fun.

Up in the sparsely populated wildernesses of the north, meanwhile, logging companies work 24/7 to fell trees for lumber, leaving behind ‘cut blocks’ – bleak fields of stumps, mulch, roots and detritus covering thousands of hectares. Following in their wake come hordes of seasonal tree planters, who drive for miles up dangerous roads to enter these remote areas. Staying in basic bush camps, off the grid and armed only with shovels and bags of saplings, they set about creating new forests from scratch.

~ uncredited, from https://www.slow-journalism.com/app-issues/the-tree-musketeers

“Fun” comes in 3 types: Type-1 fun is fun in the moment. Type-2 fun isn’t fun now, but we’re really going to enjoy this once we get past this sucky part, even more so as soon as we’re done, and especially years from now when we retell this story. Type-3 fun isn’t fun now, mistakes have been made, life choices need reconsidering and this is actually going to be a cautionary tale when retold.

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