Conversations with Brainiacs
jjacquet | July 22, 2009The American press is on suicide watch as Frank Rich declared earlier this year. With the fold of major print media outlets, like Rocky Mountain News, and the Seattle P-I and the bankruptcy of the chain that owns the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune, it seems that the predictions of the EPIC 2014 slideshow are right and that Frank Rich is, too.
So why would a photojournalist say: "As long I as I am alive, newspapers will be, too"?
Yet this was the battlecry of photographer Michel du Cille, who I had the pleasure to hear speak last Saturday at the Bellingham Visual Journalism…
jjacquet | June 6, 2009There are obvious hazards associated with forgetting, such as angry women (think birthdays and anniversaries) and the shifting baselines syndrome, where we come to accept degraded environments as 'natural'.
Forgetting about the past is particularly dangerous when it comes to making decisions about the future. I think this was summed up well in an article on Alzheimer's titled Probing a Mind for a Cure in The Philadelphia Inquirer.
"Their frame of reference is disappearing," said Christopher Clark, director of Penn's Memory Discorders Clinic and Bob Moore's doctor after his diagnosis [with…
jjacquet | April 23, 2009Back in 2005, I interviewed fisheries biologist Daniel Pauly for a small article on seafood consumer campaigns. This would evolve into the work we do today. I was not able to publish large chunks of the transcripts then, but I am now. I think what Daniel said about average vs. extreme consumers was relevant, particularly in light of the studies on the preference for rare commodities and the recent chow-down on the megamouth shark caught in the Philippines (the 41st megamouth ever found, ever; pictured here).
Here is what Daniel had to say:
The reason why we have giraffes is not because we…