Latif Nasser is Director of Research for WNYC's Radiolab. He wrote a piece for Transom about how he comes up with story ideas for the show. He has an interesting "bag of tricks" to find stories and have lots on hand so that he doesn't panic under a deadline. The tricks include setting up dozens of Google Alerts on the names of interesting people, "juicy phrases" (such as “the human equivalent of”), and topics he finds fascinating (such as the "alford plea"). He signs up for lots of newsletters -- "The more obscure the field the better." (He recommends creating a separate email account for newsletters). He searches for oral histories on ArchiveGrid. He also talks to strangers -- on planes, in lines, "even wrong numbers." The piece includes many other tricks I didn't include here. Highly recommended!
Image: Transom.org
Even tho they are only updated once a day (at most) I check, check and re-check 91-divoc and the IHME COVID-19 Projections. The linear scale graphs on 91-divoc have given me the best picture of ‘is the curve flattening’ for the regions I watch. Tribalism runs rampant during Trump’s Pandemic and I am naturally more […]
Going against conventional wisdom, researchers at the University of Portsmouth in the UK say the way to consistently make better espresso is by using fewer beans and grinding them more coarsely, reports Interesting Engineering: “When beans were ground finely, the particles were so small that in some regions of the bed they clogged up the […]
It's been 20 years since Napster burst on the scene, and after decades of lawsuits, draconian criminal penalties, even no-knock gunpoint search warrants, there remains no evidence that "copyright enforcement" has a measurable impact on copyright infringement -- and at the same time, there's persistent, credible evidence that infringement goes down when product offerings get […]
Twitter rants and various online ugliness aside, social media has actually grown up a bit over the past 15 years. In general, users are warier of their interactions on platforms like Facebook or Instagram — and marketers have taken note. In fact, if you felt retailers you saw on social media were only looking to […]
Virus quarantines and shuttered restaurants sent millions of Americans back to their homes, only to rediscover the joys of firing up an oven and cooking something special for themselves. Whether by desire, necessity, or both, many of us have certainly been spending more time in the kitchen these last few months. And we haven’t just […]
Now that the world is starting to re-emerge from its self-imposed COVID-19 quarantine, we’re all going to have to start making some adjustments to both short-term and long-term changes. And the questions… Should customers be hounded out of a store if they aren’t wearing a face mask? Are crocheted face masks safe or not? And […]
