Paul Schmelzer's blog

Paul Schmelzer, 5/1/08 • A year of trying to reconnect with the people behind the products

I don’t have much to say about this project that GOOD hasn’t already said, but this is an idea I can get behind. And part of this blogging experiment is amplifying ideas I believe in. So, behold the Consume®econnection Project, in which New York’s Scott Ballum (founder of Consume®evolution magazine) spends his 30th year trying to reconnect with the people behind the products he consumes. He describes the project:

Paul Schmelzer, 4/30/08 • Print news is in such famously bad shape that Advertising Age is running “The Newspaper Death Watch,” which quotes an expert who gives an industry in “terminal decline” 20 to 25 years to live. In this context, it’s noteworthy when any publication decides to launch a pulp version: This week the Twin Cities culture magazine Rift, which ditched its print version not long ago for a web-only enterprise, announced that it’ll start producing a “newspaper style guide” to goings-on in the area.

by Paul Schmelzer, 5/3/08 • Dr. Steven Miles, an internationally known expert on medical complicity in torture at places like Abu Ghraib (and professor at the University of Minnesota’s Center for Bioethics), was scheduled to speak at St. Joan of Arc Church in Minneapolis before tomorrow’s mass. But when the anti-choice lobbying group Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life got wind of it, they called on the Catholic archdiocese to shut it down. They did — on grounds that, while Miles’ work on torture is exemplary, he doesn’t toe the church’s pro-life line. St.

• by Paul Schmelzer, 4/23/08 • I hope this woman — calm, polite, asking the kind of incisive questions often missing in our political discourse — is studying journalism at Knox College. Check out her question to the ornery former Attorney General on waterboarding (which Ashcroft says is is not prohibited by the Geneva Conventions because it leaves no “lasting scars”):