A vital Disconnection is made

Much as I love being a creature of the Internet and the constant flood of information at my fingertips, I sometimes feel like I'm drowning in data. Last year, I made a pledge to myself that I would spend at least one week per year out of the www-dot waters. No email, no blogging, no Google searches, no tweets. Smartphone is turned off and stays off.

Last year, I took my Internet-free vacation in August in St. John in the Virgin Islands. This year, it was taken in January in Jamaica. The Caribbean turns out to be a nice distraction from the call of the digital wilds.

Though, on both trips, I cheated one time and snuck a peek at my email. Perhaps punishment for that should be to take another Internet-free vacation this year. At the moment, I could accomplish that by hopping on a flight to Cairo. Though I prefer making the choice to abstain from the Internet rather than having it forcibly taken away.

Apparently, people still read this blog...

...As evidenced by a recent comment from a real live reader. I thought that only my mom kept up with this blog. (Hi, Mom!)

A career update for any other readers that might be out there. I'm over at Forbes these days writing about life on the Internet. You can find me here.

What Saul Bellow Thought About the Fourth Estate

‎"I'm afraid there's nothing we can do about the journalists; we can only hope that they will die off as the deerflies do towards the end of August."

-Saul Bellow, in a 1984 letter to Philip Roth, after a "crooked little slut" at People interviewed him and "turned my opinions inside out, cut out the praises and made it all sound like a disavowal, denunciation, and excommunication" of Roth. The journalist is now a director at NYU. (Via The New Yorker)

Note to self: Strive never to choose quotes from an interview that will make any of my sources feel how the author of Mr. Sammler's Planet felt while writing this letter.

Music obsession of the month

Via my New Zealand-wandering sister:

Journalistic June Round-up

Midway through June, it's been an eventful month. I...

• Was the victim of a Craigslist Casual Encounters prank;
• Wrote a piece on the ubiquity of surveillance cameras for Next American City (Sorry, non-subscribers);
• Proposed that Justice Clarence Thomas consider a presidential run in the Washington Post;
• And admitted to some not-so-casual digital lurking in the Assembly Journal.
  

And now I'm off to LA tomorrow for journalism law school.

A Master of Journalism

May marked the end of my graduate studies at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. I am now officially a "master" of the craft.

I'm glad I decided to go to journalism school -- it helped me move definitively into journalism, and my Portfolio project led to the creation of the Not-So Private Parts. The only downside is that I now have student loan debt for the first time in my life.

Though finished with NYU, I'm already heading back to school: Loyola Law School, to be exact.

(Dramatic pause)

Not for my JD. I'm just attending for four days. Loyola has a Journalist Law School program, for reporters who cover the legal world but lack law degrees. I'm looking forward to a very abbreviated version of law school, a week in Los Angeles, and to not having to take any actual law school exams.

Other big happenings in June: I'm emceeing the Electronic Privacy Information Center's "Champion of Freedoms Award Dinner." EPIC is a non-profit devoted to bringing public attention to emerging privacy and civil liberties issues (image at right courtesy of their site). Given my contrarian views on privacy, this will be an interesting night. Anybody know any good privacy jokes?

Following the dinner, I'll be attending a Privacy Law Scholars Conference at GWU Law School.

So lots of law and lots of privacy next month. A big lesson I learned in journalism school: The mastery of subject areas never ends. Get as far into your niche as you can.

Foolish April

April may be my least favorite month of the year. Though it usually marks the long-awaited arrival of true spring weather, it starts with April 1. April Fools' Day. Aka Everyone-has-an-excuse-to-be-a-jerk day.

I'm not really a prankster type -- my allegiance to sincerity is too strong -- but I do love holidays. So I usually take the lead in coming up with some kind of joke for Above the Law. This year, I presented a racy date between two lawyers. I prefer pranks that contain the reveal, so that you're only fooled if you neglect to read all the way through or to click on a stray link (e.g., TechCrunch's foolery).

But Above the Law played a small part in a massive prank yesterday: a legal blogger claiming to have been chosen by the White House to man a new national law blog. Though some recognized it as an April Fools' joke, the venerable New York Times fell for it.

Though it made Gawker laugh, I feel badly about the Grey Lady's slip and fall. My heart is just not totally into pulling the wool over people's eyes.

I'm in journalism because I want to provide people with information they can rely on. I realize April Fools' Day is an escapist holiday, but pranks that involve the spread of misinformation happen too often in the blogosphere already (e.g., Anyone remember John Roberts's retirement?)

Humans seem to have some innate tendency to believe one another. A day of the year that makes a mockery of that sad, beautiful human condition makes me feel foolishly despairing.

Happy April 2.