Cyrus Farivar

“GETTING THERE”, The New Yorker; April 17, 2006: A map is a piece of art. It is also a form of language — a rendering of information. A good map can occupy the eye and the mind longer than almost any other single page of data, including Scripture, poetry, sheet music, and baseball box scores. A map contains multitudes.

The toughest, most demanding and most ultimately rewarding professor I ever had, Sam Freedman, has just come out with his latest book, Letters to a Young Journalist. Poynter (a clearinghouse of journalism industry happenings) has a great interview with him: You’re tough on bloggers, FOX News and citizen journalists. As a former New Yorke Times reporter and tenured professor at Columbia Journalism School, what separates you from charges that you’re an elitist scold? I don’t mind being called an elitist…

Variety reported last night that J.J. Abrams (the mastermind behind “Alias”, “Lost”, and the soon-to-be-released “Mission:Impossible III”) and his team from “Lost” is going to make the next “Star Trek” feature film, to be released in 2008. Damon Lindelof and Bryan Burk, Abrams’ producing team from “Lost,” also will produce the yet-to-be-titled feature. Project, to be penned by Abrams and “MI3” scribes Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, will center on the early days of seminal “Trek” characters James T. Kirk…

Clive Thompson is at it again — this time he’s just penned a long piece on Google in China for The New York Times Magazine: It was difficult for me to know exactly how [Kai-Fu Lee, head of operations for Google in China] felt about the company’s arrangement with China’s authoritarian leadership. As a condition of our meeting, Google had demanded that I not raise the issue of government relations; only the executives in Google’s California head office were allowed…

No, I wasn’t imagining things. After 13 months of use, my iBook battery has cycled 279 times, thus reducing its capacity. It now can run on the battery for about one hour. A new battery is about $100 – $120. Damn. So that reduces the resale value of this iBook when I sell it, whenever the new MacBooks come out.

In journo-speak that means that The World isn’t airing it. It happens all the time, but it still sucks. They were kind enough to provide me with the mixed version of it, as it would have aired. You can listen to it here. Here’s the intro, that would have been read by the show’s host: Over the last few years, wireless Internet access, known as WiFi, has become more and more widespread. Various cities, ranging from Philadelphia to Paris are…

Stuff.co.nz: The cost of bringing justice to remote Pitcairn Island has already topped $14 million NZ, and there are several sex crime hearings still to go. That’s about $9 mil US. That’s over $200,000 US spent on each of the 42 residents. Wow.

The World: Today’s answer is Senegal. The World’s David Leveille talks to a new Peace Corps volunteer there to find out what life is like for someone who’s recently been dropped in completely unfamiliar territory. Listen here.

I realized I can’t go, but would like to go on the 16th or the 18th. Wanna trade or buy my tickets?

But many San Franciscans left the city permanently. Oakland’s population doubled to 150,000 between 1900 and 1910, spurred by the earthquake and developers Francis “Borax” Smith and Frank Havens. There was also a big jump in population in Marin and on the Peninsula. All these new suburbs, however, were stained by the racism of the time. The promoters of the new Rockridge Tract in Oakland distributed a leaflet that said, “It is probably unnecessary even to mention that no one…