Re: Experienced News Writer, Author (Vanity Fair, HuffPo, etc)

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 3:09 AM, Diana Sweet <diane@rawstory.com> wrote:

Hi Barrett,

Thanks for getting back to me so quickly. How is around 1pm? Our executive editor, Ron Brynaert will be conducting the interview. Is the 512-560-2302 the best number to reach you?

Plan around an hour to talk.

-Diane

On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 1:55 PM, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi, Diane-

Certainly, I'll make sure to be available between those times.

Thanks,

Barrett Brown
Brooklyn, NY
512-560-2302

On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 3:32 AM, Diana Sweet <diane@rawstory.com> wrote:
Hi Barrett,

Thanks for submitting your resume. Are you available for a phone interview this Friday between noon and 5pm EST?

Best,

Diane Sweet
Senior Editor

On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 3:08 AM, Raw Story <rawapps@gmail.com> wrote:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 7:14 PM
Subject: Experienced News Writer, Author (Vanity Fair, HuffPo, etc)
To: job-gsvzv-1559968596@craigslist.org

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Howdy-

I'd like to be considered for the open writing/updating position. I'm a regular contributor to Vanity Fair, Huffington Post, True/Slant, The Onion A.V. Club, and Skeptic; my work has also appeared in dozens of other publications including public policy journals such as Towards Freedom. My first book, Flock of Dodos: Behind Modern Creationism, Intelligent Design, and the Easter Bunny, was released in 2007 to praise from Alan Dershowitz of Harvard Law School and Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone, among other sources; my second, Hot, Fat, and Clouded: The Amazing and Amusing Failures of America's Chattering Class, is set to appear this April. I've worked as a professional blogger for two now-defunct news outlets - Politicalbase.com, founded by the CNET crowd, and Evote.com, which appeared in the '90s before the blog scene and for which I wrote from 2004-2006.

I'm currently looking for a steady news writing gig to supplement my income, so I'd be very interested in working for Raw Story in the capacity described in your craigslist ad. I'm also a big advocate of online news outlets in general; having done a great deal of research into the failures of traditional news outlets for both my upcoming book and much of my other output over the past year or so, I see the internet as a far superior medium than print, partly because of its technical capabilities and partly because of the conventions that have arisen around it (hyperlinking to sources, for instance, as well as the easy verification of facts by way of search enginges).

I've pasted a resume and two samples below; please take a look and let me know if you'd be interested in discussing the position further.

Thanks,

Barrett Brown
Brooklyn, NY
512-560-2302

BARRETT BROWN
WRITER/ EDITOR/ WEB CONTENT PRODUCER
Brooklyn, NY

512-560-2302
barriticus@gmail.com

Communications Industry Skills

Writing for all media. Web content development, strategic blogging, consumer and corporate feature writing. Creating copy for print, broadcast and interactive collateral, concept development for advertising and marketing campaigns.

Editing for consistency, accuracy and content AP, Chicago, and new media styles. Editorial oversight for brand positioning and enhancement.

Media appearances and oral presentations. Have appeared on Fox News as debate participant and on several radio programs for interviews regarding my books and other projects; have delivered lectures on topics relating to philosophy, biology and politics at Rutgers and at various bookstores in conjunction with promotional book tour.

Published Work/ Media Experience

Sterling and Ross Publishers - Authored nonfiction book of political humor, Hot, Fat, and Clouded: The Amazing and Amusing Failures of America's Chattering Class, for release in April 2010.

True/Slant - Contributor to online outlet of news and commentary. September 2009 - present.

Huffington Post - Regular contributor to online outlet of news and commentary. August 2009 - present.

Vanity Fair  Regular contributor, specializing in political commentary and media criticism. March 2009 - present.

BushwickBK.com - Weekly columnist for outlet covering Bushwick section of Brooklyn. May 2009 - present.

Fortean Times  Book reviewer for monthly, London-based magazine. January 2009 present.

Thomas Riggs and Company  Contributed 20,000 words of material for academic publishing company's upcoming reference book on U.S. cities. January 2009.

Studio 2a  Part-time marketing consultant for Chicago-based architectural rendering firm, handling all sales letters, marketing copy, and long-term branding strategies. 2007 2009.

PoliticalBase.com  Created content and served as paid blogger for online political news start-up founded by CNET. 2007 - 2008.

Fox Business Channel, Yahoo, Minyanville.com  Writer on freelance creative team for animated humor seriesMinyanville, which aired on Fox Business Channel's Happy Hour program as well as on Yahoo Finance. 2007.

The Onion  Freelance copywriting for The Onion's features department covering Austin, Texas, 2006 - 2008, covering New York 2009 - present.

Sterling and Ross Publishers  Authored nonfiction book of political humor, Flock of Dodos: Behind Modern Creationism, Intelligent Design, and the Easter Bunny, released in March 2007. Book received praise from Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, Rolling Stone, Skeptic, Air America Radio, Huffington Post, others.

Anglesey Interactive, Inc.  Produced online marketing collateral web text, press releases, blogging in support of firm's integrated search engine. 2007 2008.

Dining Out - Feature writing for national restaurant publication. 2006 2008.

National Lampoon Contributor, 2004 2005, 2008 - 2009

Sullivan Perkins  Served as junior copywriter at Dallas-based advertising firm. 2003.

Evote.com - Weekly columnist and feature writer for political analysis site. 2004 2005.

AOL CityGuide - Web content writer. Researched and created coverage of event and entertainment venues. Served as regional correspondent for Dallas, Austin, New Orleans, Houston and Little Rock markets. 2000 2004.

Additional magazine work - Ongoing, have contributed feature articles from serious political commentary and book reviews to humor pieces and dining overviews for outlets including Vanity Fair, academic publications Skeptic andFortean Times, business-to-business publications Pizza Today, 360, Club Systems International, Destination Dallas, D.C.-based public policy journal Toward Freedom, London-based public policy journal Free Life, humor magazine Jest, regional publications The Met, Austin Monthly, Dallas Child, literary journal Swans, dozens more.

Other writing projects - Created book proposal and provided related consultation for Hollywood film producer Pat Stack, with project currently under consideration by several major literary agencies based in NYC as of January 2010. Created both print and online marketing collateral for New York tech start-up Organic Motion, Inc. Wrote online marketing collateral for New York corporate training firm Illuminata Global. Researched and wrote entertainment/dining/venue content for Dallas ad agency Avacata and clients' marketing collateral, including that of luxury resort real estate firm. Have produced website copy for design firm NPCreate.com, provided public relations pieces for Texas energy companies EBS and S.K. Oil and Gas and Dallas real estate firm Dunhill Partners.

Friedman Makes Another China Prediction Despite Past Failures With Same

Thomas Friedman's January 12th op-ed in which he predicts continued and steady economic gains for China's foreseeable future will no doubt have convinced the fellow's readership that the Middle Kingdom's future is on the right track, particularly if those readers are unaware of Friedman's past attempts at predicting the future - and we may presume that they are indeed unaware of such things insomuch as that they bother reading the fellow's nonsense to begin with. There is, in fact, a direct correlation between how much one knows about Friedman's various failed predictions and how deeply one sighs when the fellow makes yet another one of the damned things. That Friedman has predicted an extended duration of Chinese economic growth does not necessarily mean that the Chinese economy is instead about to slow down, of course. Rather, it means nothing at all.

Friedman's most recent foray into the Far East leads the New York Times mainstay to provide "two notes of caution" to those who suspect that Chinese economic growth may soon be coming to an end:

First, a simple rule of investing that has always served me well: Never short a country with $2 trillion in foreign currency reserves.
... particularly if one lives in some bizarrely simplified dimension wherein no other factors need to be taken into account when determining the prospects of the world's most populous country. But then I am interrupting. Sort of. Not really. Anywho:

Second, it is easy to look at China today and see its enormous problems and things that it is not getting right.
It was also easy back in 2001, when Friedman dedicated a column to addressing various "myths" regarding that country and predicted that the biggest threat to its regime would be a massive increase in unemployment "as superior U.S. sugar and wheat start flooding China" due to relaxed trade barriers. In fact, unemployment had been rising in China since 1999 and continued to do so until 2003 - at which point it decreased and remained relatively low up until last year. Meanwhile, U.S. wheat and sugar failed to make any significant inroads at all - even as the Chinese continued to consume greater quantities of wheat, total imports from all other nations amounted to less than a tenth of China's domestic production in 2005. U.S. sugar didn't do much better.

In the same column, Friedman dismissed concerns over whether the Chinese regime would successfully insulate its population from dangerous ideas conveyed by way of the internet:
Yes, it's true that the Chinese government has tried to block access, but it's not working. Come with me here in Nanjing and I will show you how to view online Tibet.com -- the official Web site of the Tibetan government in exile -- or NYTimes.com. No problem. Deep down, the leadership here knows that you can't have the knowledge that China needs from the Internet without letting all sorts of other information into the country, and without empowering more and more Chinese to communicate horizontally and create political communities. In the long run this will only give more tools to the forces here pushing for political pluralism.

It turns out that "the leadership" didn't know anything of the sort, which is why they promptly established what's known today as The Great Firewall of China and continue to crack down on such things as social networking sites as new "problems" arise in their wake. Meanwhile, the regime even managed to force Google into compliance with the nation's censorship policy until such time as the company's executives got huffy at being spied on as if it were some sort of Chinese person using the internet or something. Perhaps some high official managed to figure out that free access to the internet would "only give more tools to the forces here pushing for political pluralism" and, being opposed to such things, decided to oppose such things. That would have been a tough one to predict, of course.

Our Pulitzer-possessing columnist has not fared much better in sizing up the future of Russia or even its past and present. In late 2001, he called on Americans to "keep rootin' for Putin," who had already proven himself a crook to those who were paying attention; three years later, he announced that the country "was tilted in the wrong direction and is now tilted in the right direction," noting that being titled in the right direction entails "enough free market, enough rule of law, enough free press, speech and exchange of ideas that" that the next generation "can grow up, plan its future and realize its potential." It was not until 2007 that Friedman finally got around to noticing that Russia can no longer even be termed a democracy and explained this to his readers, who are always the last to know. In Friedman's defense, he's not as bad as Putin.

At any rate, China's economy may continue to hum, or it may begin to decline. If you'd like to find out which is most likely, ask a fucking economist.

Stanley Kurtz Tries to Tie Gay Marriage to Divorce, Accidentally Proves Opposite

Does the legalization of gay marriage really contribute to the decline of heterosexual marriage? A good number of our fair republic's cultural conservatives seem to believe that it does, which is to say that it probably doesn't. But perhaps we should check anyway.

"[I]n the Netherlands and places where they have tried to define marriage [to include gay couples], what happens is that people just don't get married," evangelical kingpin James Dobson told a typically credulous Larry King in November of 2006. "It's not that the homosexuals are marrying in greater numbers," he continued, although obviously homosexuals are indeed marrying in greater numbers since that number used to be zero and is now something higher than zero, "it's that when you confuse what marriage is, young people just don't get married."

If what James Dobson says is true, several of the states which have been have been moving towards equal rights for gays are going to be in huge trouble, and Massachusetts, which legalized gay marriage in 2004, must already be. Of course, James Dobson is wrong. But where is the degenerate old fascist getting his disinformation from this time?

The culprit in this case may be Stanley Kurtz, a regular contributor to the perpetually terrible Weekly Standard, the consistently amusing National Review, and the description-defying Commentary. A few years ago, Kurtz wrote a highly influential essay which set out to refute the work of William N. Eskridge, Jr., the John A. Garver professor of jurisprudence at Yale University, and Darren Spedale, a New York investment banker, who together had recently written a book called Gay Marriage: For Better or For Worse? What We've Learned From the Evidence. The authors discussed their preliminary findings in a Wall Street Journalop-ed before their work was more formally published (in fact, Kurtz weirdly dismisses it as "unpublished" several times in his article, as if it were somehow unseemly for a paper to exist between the time it is written and the time it is published).

Denmark, the authors noted, began allowing for gay civil unions in 1989. Ten years later, the heterosexual marriage rate had increased by 10.7 percent. Norway did the same in 1993. Ten years later, the heterosexual marriage rate had increased by 12.7 percent. Sweden followed suite in 1995. Ten years later, the heterosexual marriage rate had increased by 28.7 percent. And these marriages were actually lasting; during the same time frame, the divorce rate dropped by 13.9 percent in Denmark, 6 percent in Norway, and 13.7 percent in Sweden.

Confronted with statistics indicating that marriage in Scandinavia is in fine shape, Kurtz instead proclaimed that "Scandinavian marriage is now so weak that statistics on marriage and divorce no longer mean what they used to."

Brushing aside numbers showing that Danish marriage was up ten percent from 1990 to 1996, our paper puritan countered that "just-released marriage rates for 2001 show declines in Sweden and Denmark." He didn't bother to note that marriage rates they were down in 2001 for quite a few places, including the United States, which of course had no civil unions anywhere in 2001; presumably this was left out due to space constraints. In all seriousness, though, I'm not accusing Kurtz of being dishonest; it's evident that he is simply unable to anticipate very obvious objections to his muddled, demonstrably incorrect analysis even despite having spent some years at Harvard obtaining a degree in social anthropology, a degree which is apparently worthless.

I will defend Kurtz further. Having not yet had access to the figures, he couldn't have known that both American and Scandinavian marriage rates had gone back up in 2002, a year after the dip he deemed to be apocalyptic in gay-friendly Scandinavia while completely ignoring it in gay-adverse America. As for Norway, he says, the higher marriage rate "has more to do with the institution's decline than with any renaissance. Much of the increase in Norway's marriage rate is driven by older couples 'catching up.'" It's unclear exactly how old these "older couples" may be, but Kurtz thinks their marriages simply don't count, and in fact constitute a sign of "the institution's decline." And of course, it's clear from his phrasing that only a portion of the increase is attributable to these older citizens. So Kurtz's position is that Norwegian marriage is in decline because not only are younger people getting married at a higher rate, but older people are as well. I don't know what Kurtz makes per word, but I'm sure it would piss me off to find out.

Kurtz also wanted us to take divorce. "Take divorce," Kurtz wrote. "It's true that in Denmark, as elsewhere in Scandinavia, divorce numbers looked better in the nineties. But that's because the pool of married people has been shrinking for some time. You can't divorce without first getting married." This is true. It's also true that Denmark has a much lower divorce rate than the United States as a percentage of married couples, a method of calculation that makes the size of the married people pool irrelevant. Denmark's percentage is 44.5, while the United States is at 54.8. Incidentally, those numbers come from the Heritage Foundation, which also sponsors reports on the danger that gay marriage poses to the heterosexual marriage rate.

Still, Kurtz is upset that many Scandinavian children are born out of wedlock. "About 60 percent of first-born children in Denmark now have unmarried parents," he says. He doesn't give us the percentage of second-born children who have unmarried parents, because that percentage is lower and would thus indicate that Scandinavian parents often marry after having their first child, as Kurtz himself later notes in the course of predicting that this will no longer be the case as gay civil unions continue to take their non-existent toll on Scandinavian marriage.

Since the rate by which Scandinavian couples have a child or two before getting married has been rising for decades, it's hard to see what this has to do with gay marriage - unless, of course, you happen to be Stanley Kurtz. "Scandinavia's out-of-wedlock birthrates may have risen more rapidly in the seventies, when marriage began its slide. But the push of that rate past the 50 percent mark during the nineties was in many ways more disturbing." More disturbing indeed; by the mid-'90s, the Scandinavian republics had all instituted civil unions, and thus even the clear, long-established trajectory of such a trend as premature baby-bearing can be laid at the feet of the homos simply by establishing some arbitrary numerical benchmark that was obviously going to be reached anyway, calling this milestone "in many ways more disturbing," and hinting that all of this is somehow the fault of the gays. By the same token, I can prove that the establishment of the Weekly Standard in 1995 has contributed to rampant world population growth. Sure, population growth has been increasing steadily for decades, but the push of that number past the 6 billion mark in 2000 was "in many ways more disturbing" to me for some weird reason that I can't quite pin down because I'm all Kurtzing out over here. Of course, I'm being a little disingenuous - by virtue of its unparalleled support for the invasion of Iraq, the Weekly Standard has actually done more than its part to keep world population down.

Why is Kurtz so disturbed about out-of-wedlock rates? Personally, I think it would be preferable for a couple to have a child and then get married, as is more often the case in Scandinavia, rather than for a couple to have a child and then get divorced, as is more often the case in the United States. Kurtz doesn't seem to feel this way, though, as it isn't convenient for him to feel this way at this particular time. Here are all of these couples, he tells us, having babies without first filling out the proper baby-making paperwork with the proper bureaucratic agencies. What will become of the babies? Perhaps they'll all die. Or perhaps they'll continue to outperform their American counterparts in math and science, as they've been doing for quite a while.

Intelligent Design, Online Edition

Back in the dark days before ubiquitous Internet, disinformation was sustainable. When you were told that Marilyn Manson is actually Paul from The Wonder Years, it would have been difficult to prove otherwise; one would have had to find someone's old VHS tape on which they'd recorded one of the episodes, check the credits to figure out what that actor's name was, and then find someone's copy of Antichrist Superstar and look for the same name on the liner notes. And it was unlikely that you would find old Wonder Years episodes and Marilyn Manson albums in the same place. It was easier to just half-believe that Paul was Marilyn Manson.

Life is different now, if less interesting. Consider William Dembski, the mathematician and theologian who rose to the top of the nascent intelligent design pack in the late '90s after claiming to have proven that certain aspects of biology can be attributable only to the intervention of one or more intelligent entities. As for who or what those entities might be, Dembski is coy when addressing a potentially secular audience, claiming that there "are many possibilities." Among these possibilities, we may determine, is that Dembski is lying; in a 1999 interview with the Christian magazine Touchstone, Dembski stated unambiguouslythat "[i]ntelligent design is just the Logos theology of John's Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory." With ID being increasingly under attack as theology clothed in science, Dembski has since been more hesitant in giving due credit to either John or the Logos.

Bits of information are no longer compartmentalized like so many scattered VHS tapes and gothic rock album liner notes, which is why Dembski and company can't get away with trying to portray ID as a scientific theory with no religious intent while having already admitted that same religious intent to sympathetic Biblical literalists. But that crowd doesn't seem to understand this fundamental aspect of the Internet, that Google waits in watch of dishonesty. And thus it is that Dembski's blog Uncommon Descent is among the most interesting things that the Internet has to offer. More importantly, it provides us with a sense of how the leaders of the ID movement would run things if they were ever to run anything other than a blog.

Dembski began blogging in 2005, perhaps as a means of procrastination; 2005 was also the last year in which he and his movement colleagues bothered to put out a new issue of their own scientific journal, although their lack of output hasn't stopped them from criticizing mainstream journals for declining to publish their work, non-existent though it may be. Some choice moments in the years since:

* In conjunction with his friends at the pro-ID Discovery Institute, Dembski decided to commission a Flash animation ridiculing Judge John Jones, the Bush-appointed churchgoer who, despite being a Bush-appointed churchgoer, ruled in the 2005 Dover Trial (known more formerly as Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District and even more formally as something longer and more formal) that intelligent design could not be taught in public school science classes. The animation consisted of Judge Jones represented as a puppet with his strings being held by various proponents of evolution; aside from being depicted as unusually flatulent, poor Judge Jones was also shown to be reading aloud from his court opinion in a high-pitched voice (Dembski's, it turned out, but sped up to make it sound sillier). The point of all of this, as The Discovery Institute explained, was that Jones had supposedly cribbed some 90 percent of his decision from findings presented by the ACLU, and that this was a very unusual and terrible thing for Jones to have done. On the contrary, judges commonly incorporate the findings of the winning party into their final opinion, either in whole or in part, and Jones' own written opinion actually incorporated far less than 90 percent of the findings in question. For his part, Dembski agreed to reduce the number of fart noises in the animation if Jones would agree to contribute his own voice. Jones does not appear to have accepted the offer.

* One of Dembski's hand-picked blog co-moderators, Dave Springer, once received an e-mail to the effect that the ACLU was about to sue the Marine Corps in order to stop Marines from praying; outraged, Springer posted it on his blog in order that his readers could join him in being affronted. After all, the e-mail had told him to. "Please send this to people you know so everyone will know how stupid the ACLU is Getting [sic] in trying to remove GOD from everything and every place in America," the bright-red text exhorted, above pictures of praying Marines. "Right on!" Dembski added in the comments. It was then pointed out by other readers that the e-mail was a three-year-old hoax; the ACLU spokesperson named therein did not actually exist, and neither did the ACLU's complaint. Springer was unfazed by the revelation. "To everyone who's pointed out that the ACLU story is a fabrication according to snopes.com -- that's hardly the point," he explained. "The pictures of Marines praying are real." Dembski himself had no further comment.

* Dembski has spent much time and energy pointing out that Charles Darwin made several racist statements back in the 19th century, even going so far as to call for a boycott of the British ten-pound note due to Darwin's picture being displayed thereupon. Incidentally, Dembski has spent most of the past decade working at universities within the fold of the Southern Baptist Convention, which was founded in the 19th century for the sole purpose of defending slavery.

* Springer, the aforementioned aficionado of e-mail forwards, once noted that he stopped reading an article by a critic of intelligent design because it contained a cartoon depicting the famous Black Knight routine from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. "Anyone who needs to resort to Monty Python in a scientific argument can be safely ignored as not having any legs to stand on," he announced. Springer can be forgiven for not being aware that Dembskihimself has referenced Monty Python in the context of a scientific argument more than once. Somewhat more inexplicable is that Springer himself has done the exact same thing, making reference to the very same Monty Python routine and doing so in the very same context as did the article he was criticizing -- twice. I mean, come on.

* Upon being told that University of Texas Professor Eric Pianka had given a speech in which he'd supposedly asserted that the world would be better off if most of humanity was killed via a global contagion, Dembski announced on his blog that he had just reported Pianka to the Department of Homeland Security out of concern that the elderly biologist was planning to somehow contribute to the destruction of humanity. The FBI interviewed Pianka but took no further action, having perhaps determined that the recipient of the 2006 Distinguished Texas Scientist award was not actually planning on killing off the majority of the world's population.

* Seriously, it was the exact same Monty Python routine.

As much as he puts into his blog, his professorships, and his voice acting, Dembski is still as prolific an author as ever. His latest effort, set for release later this year, takes on the wave of pro-atheist books that have seen publication over the past couple of years. Among the pundits whom he'll be countering is Christopher Hitchens, contributing editor at Vanity Fairand author of God is Not Great. If you happen to spot Hitchens drinking, it's probably just to calm his nerves.

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