The Breaking Time

Hell yeah for the First Amendment

In all its glory, from the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund

I have no lack of problems with laws in this country, or ones we should have, or rights that don't get the protections they need. But, this BBC piece about the lack of abominable "super-injunctions" in the US reminds me of one thing America actually does pretty well:

While in the UK, the story has evolved into a debate about a "two-track" legal system - one for mainstream media and one for social media - in the US that debate rarely happens, because all media can get away with a lot more.

And injunctions? Forget it. Americans are bemused that famous people in the UK are able to stop the publication of details of their private lives, because it goes against one of their country's founding principles, free speech.

Does the First Amendment make violations of free speech impossible? Hardly, and it remains an ongoing fight. But the First, and the years of law built up around it significantly raises the potential cost for violators, and assures that a lot of loathsome laws will face a heavy challenge right out of the gate.

Every day working in media, I'm reminded that there are significant protections that most institutions, albeit gritting their teeth, have to abide by because the potential legal/media shitstorm if they don't is actually a deterrent.

Countries can learn from what others have done, and modify it to fit their own circumstances. In areas of health care, for example, or infrastructure, or legislatures not grinding to a halt, there's much America can adapt from elsewhere.

But when I see ridiculous things like burqa bans or hate speech arrests, I'm reminded that the First Amendment is to this country's credit, and could stand a serious look, worldwide, from those seeking to workably protect a fundamental human right.

Spinning down superpower: An interview with Quinn Norton

Photo by Danny Benitez and Michael Broxton

Quinn Norton leads an interesting life, to say the least. She's written for publications from Wired to the Guardian, taken aim at the tech elite's class bubbles and still found time to get a magnetic implant. Currently, she's among the adjunct faculty at NYU, teaching courses on body and self, among other matters.

Recently, we sat down (virtually) for an interview/conversation that used the digital divide as a starting point. It ended up going into upheaval, political lock-in, labor strife, infrastructure, the Romans, the difficulties of spinning down a superpower and how community remains the most profound prosthetic human beings have ever invented. Also; Thomas Jefferson was apparently the first psychohistorian (you heard it here first).

So, in what I hope is the finest Breaking Time tradition, it ended up militantly eclectic. My own questions are in bold. Enjoy, there's plenty of food for thought here.

What are some of the biggest mis-impressions popularly about the digital divide, or lack thereof?

You have to scope it, because the digital divide is a really different matter in the US than it is internationally. Have you heard the statement that “after dark, Twitter is black”? 

Twitter, unlike most of the social networks, actually overrepresents African-Americans compared to percentage of population, and there's a black Twitter-sphere that looks very different from the white Twitter-sphere. After night, you see a lot of social grooming and a lot less of the broadcast branding that many of the white Twitterers do. So at night, after work, you can look at the trending topics and see ones — like things my boyfriend or girlfriend says — that don't seem to relate to the “normal” trending topics. If you go and look, the people tweeting them will often be black; it's a whole different type of tweets.

Yes, to some degree I've seen that happening in my own city. Essentially, different times of the day, different social groups use Twitter. If you can't go on Twitter at work, which tends to happen when you have a desk job, you'll go on at night.

You mentioned that scope differs. How is it different between the U.S. and internationally?

I don't know if you've followed Danah Boyd's research, it's really interesting. She researches youth and social networks. You remember when MySpace was the old Facebook? It was huge. What Danah identified that it was actually white flight to Facebook. You don't have that kind of divide with Twitter, but you do have an emerging phenomenon of racial homophily on the internet.

I don't know what exactly to make of that. I think we're in a situation where there's less of a big digital divide than there used to be and many, many more small digital divides than there used to be. So you have the internet being used by different groups for social grooming in a way it didn't used to be, but social grooming along a lot of race and class lines.

At the same time you do have a really profound destruction of the local going on, so homophilies are replacing local in kind of a mindshare.

This is one reason why local news coverage has a really big problem on its hands, because that's just not as strong of an identity marker anymore, not when you can find a lot of other people that are like you online. It's an opportunity/cost issue; paying attention to the particulars of the place you are in takes away from time to pay attention to the particulars of people who are like you.

The Rundown: Unrealistic wars, meathook and machete

I mean, seriously, how over the top can you get...

* From Livejournal, of all bloody places, comes this brilliant little blast on how unbelievable and unconvincing the plot of World War II was:

Let's start with the bad guys. Battalions of stormtroopers dressed in all black, check. Secret police, check. Determination to brutally kill everyone who doesn't look like them, check. Leader with a tiny villain mustache and a tendency to go into apopleptic rage when he doesn't get his way, check. All this from a country that was ordinary, believable, and dare I say it sometimes even sympathetic in previous seasons.

I wouldn't even mind the lack of originality if they weren't so heavy-handed about it. Apparently we're supposed to believe that in the middle of the war the Germans attacked their allies the Russians, starting an unwinnable conflict on two fronts, just to show how sneaky and untrustworthy they could be? And that they diverted all their resources to use in making ever bigger and scarier death camps, even in the middle of a huge war? Real people just aren't that evil. And that's not even counting the part where as soon as the plot requires it, they instantly forget about all the racism nonsense and become best buddies with the definitely non-Aryan Japanese.



Not that the good guys are much better. Their leader, Churchill, appeared in a grand total of one episode before, where he was a bumbling general who suffered an embarrassing defeat to the Ottomans of all people in the Battle of Gallipoli. Now, all of a sudden, he's not only Prime Minister, he's not only a brilliant military commander, he's not only the greatest orator of the twentieth century who can convince the British to keep going against all odds, he's also a natural wit who is able to pull out hilarious one-liners practically on demand. I know he's supposed to be the hero, but it's not realistic unless you keep the guy at least vaguely human.

Yeah, the whole piece is that awesome. A reminder that when viewed through the right lens, history is a strange place.

* Problems of permission culture You know the copyright police are getting bad when even the Wall Street Journal is starting to balk. A discussion that notes how literary anthologies are rapidly becoming unprintable, and even clear fair use cases like quoting eight words from a song run into the risk of a lawsuit.

Interestingly, I don't mind the idea of copyright in theory. There does need to be some bulwark against outright plagiarism and I do like making money off my creative works. At the same time, as public domain has rapidly been pushed closer to nonexistence, this sort of crap really starts to create a cultural stranglehold. Ironically, I think we would be better off going back to the old setup, with a strictly set limit (e.g. 30 years or life of the author +10), estates and all, on how long an author has before their works hit the public domain.

* Grim Meathook Future How I missed this nice, barbed bit of insight from the lovely Josh Ellis is beyond me. But it's pretty close to my own take on the frustrating ignorance of much of the tech classes. I also appreciate the way Ellis speculates about multiple futures existing at once. A must-read.

* Detroit newspapers team up to start aggregator Faltering old school papers combine their resources to send a rocket away from Krypton start an aggregation service to cover the whole state. Keep your eye on this trend. One of the media survival tactics broached at the Foo Camp journalism discussions was combining resources to make formerly resource-heavy activities (like long-form journalism, for example) more practical.

Chief to this strategy is the realization that news is an ecosystem. Many blogs still need the glut of content from wire services and even investigative pieces to chew over, while the resources and structure provided by older news outlets can help gather otherwise dispersed content. There's potential here, and we'll see where it goes.

* In conclusion, MACHETE!

NPR goes new media. Hilarity ensues.

I've come back from the West Coast to find the journalism fray waiting for me, hungry as ever. Until I get some longer, meatier posts pulled together, enjoy this plain out f'ing funny missive from NPR on their new media efforts. It's a lovely satire of older media's tendencies to plunge into the new without really, well, getting it.

Of course, NPR, defying conventional wisdom, has a larger market share and more listeners than ever, so they're laughing all the way to the bank. That makes some of the above barbs particularly apt, as they've thrived by not just rolling with the punches of new media, but in some ways actively defying what one is supposed to do in such an environment (turns out plenty of people like long-form analysis just fine, especially in an info-heavy environment). It also proves they have something absolutely vital in a fractious media age: a sense of humor.

Also, for those of us who grew up regularly listening to NPR, hearing those uniquely solemn radio voices utter things like "I'm dumping your ass" is priceless.

(a tip o' the hat to Quinn Norton for showing me this little gem)

The Rundown: March of the Skeleton Army

The Skeleton Army fights the Salvation Army in the streets, 1884

I'm leaving later today for the West Coast, for Foo Camp. In the meantime, blogging will be light. Keep the homefires burning, y'all, and enjoy this assemblage of interesting links.

* The Skeleton Army Resisting the Salvation Army's attempts to shut down drinking dens in the 1880s, groups of ruffians banded together in a surprisingly organized fashion, calling themselves the Skeleton Army and fighting the pious Salvationists in the street in unrepentant defense of their vices.

They adopted macabre imagery like the Skull and Crossbones (obviously), along with the slogans "Blood and Thunder" and "Beef, beer and Bacca." This was all quite real, and another reminder that history is freaking awesome.

* 5 Reasons You Should Be Scare of Google Yes, it's a Cracked article, but one that makes some surprisingly good points. Some interesting info about exactly how far Google's reach extends, and how badly it's handled collisions with political and privacy issues. A reminder that putting your faith in companies as anything other than carefully watched tools is a bad idea.

* Judge throws out $1 billion copyright suit against YouTube/Google To give the media giant their due, however, Google's on the right side of this suit, protecting the vitally important "Safe Harbor" provision from Viacom. Good to see a legal ruling that actually goes media freedom's way.

* Monopolies, Gov 2.0 and Community The long knives come out in a fight over conferences and tech companies. Worth reading and some legit points about entrusting too much future government program development to large companies with a spotty track record. This is one of the reasons I keep calling for Gov 2.0 efforts to expand past the tech business-government agency sphere.

Another reason is that, were there a broader coalition, some enterprising activists would take this moment to say "Cut this squabbling shit out, we got work to do."

* In jail for being in debt Hellishly horrifying. Not only do large parts of the corporate classes act as if they're an aristocracy, but debtor's prisons (yes, you read that right) are making a comeback. Yes, this is quite illegal, but creditors have been slowly shoving back at debtors' protections, and this is the latest example of overreach. This sort of shit needs to be stopped now, before lettres de cachet and Dukedoms make a comeback as well.

* Coercive Games Some interesting ideas from John Robb on shifting non-violent political action away from the moribund protest cultures to actively ruining the peace of mind of officials from a larger organization who, right now, aren't being held responsible. Certainly, with the current lack of accountability, I don't think many would shed any tears if BP executives or corrupt officials started losing sleep and had their lives made hell. Fear is part of politics and movements that don't instill some measure of it into their opponents don't get very far.

At the same time, it's easy to see these tactics of individual intimidation having some pretty devastating impacts on the social fabric if widely enough applied. Food for thought.

* Saving newspapers, one dead blogger at a time Via Coilhouse comes this hilarious trailer for a fictitious Citizen Kane remake that manages to also serve as a sharp satire of both "print is dying!" hysteria and over-the-top action movie cliches. I lost my shit at the AP Stylebook line.

The Rundown: Razing Arizona edition

Flank attack!

* LA boycotts Arizona. Arizona threatens to cut off power LA invades Arizona, rounds up supporters of draconian anti-immigrant law and deports them to Mexico. Ok, so I'm making that last part up (though, as Grumpy Owl points out, LA already has their marching music).

On another note, the fight over Arizona's law illustrates a number of interesting breaking points and important shifts. The first is how ill-equipped state lines mostly drawn in the 19th century are to dealing with today's environmental and resource issues. One of the major things states fight about is resources: who's stealing whose water, power, etc. Part of this is because environmental regions are hacked up, pie-style, between any number of arbitrary boundaries. The basic support system for a modern city stretches across many political jurisdictions, something that makes tackling disagreements or problems extremely difficult.

Also, notice that it's LA fighting Arizona: a city versus a state. Within Arizona, Phoenix is notable as a hot-bed of opposition to the law. As more and more people move to cities, they become greater centers of political power, often deeply at odds with the surrounding territory. Forget Red States and Blue States (one of the dumbest political memes of the past decade), look at a more accurate map and you'll see that the biggest political divide is urban-rural.

* New Social Networking Site Changing the Way, Oh, Christ, Forget It "Let someone else report on this bullshit." The Onion goes there. Spectacularly.

* Is the Drug War more militarized than the military? A soldier argues that raids in Afghanistan and Iraq often have more restrictions than SWAT teams busting in the doors of suspected drug traffickers. An interesting read.

* Robot conducts wedding in Tokyo No word yet on if the infernal machine seduced the bride beforehand. 

An interesting example of how culture can drive technology as much as the other way around. Japan has more (and often more sophisticated) robots than anywhere else in the world. This is partly because Japan's is a first-world industrial power with the resources to build such devices. However, there's also a cultural fascination that shapes what it builds with that capability, and what ends it's put to.

Speaking of...

* Because Every Country is the Best at Something Yes, Japan actually is number 1 in the world in the robotics department. The US leads in, uh, serial killers (send them to fight the robots, I smell a hit movie here). The UK leads in CCTV cameras and France in sugar beets. It's a strange world.

* The French Anti-Burqa Jihad An excellent column by Indian atheist Shikha Dalmia on the crusading and dictatorial impulses behind France's new law. Includes this passage, which could stand to be repeated often:

Nor will it do to justify this ban on grounds that it will save women from having to make painful personal choices. It is not the job of liberal governments to make personal tradeoffs painless--just possible. Giving individuals the right to exit without fearing physical retaliation provides an automatic check on oppressive traditions without taking away the crucial tool that minority communities in liberal polities have to perpetuate themselves: moral suasion. Banning the burqa or the Sikh turban or the Jewish yarmulke is tantamount to telling observant Muslims, Sikhs and Jews that they don't have a right to exist.

Despite years of sectarian bloodletting, if Indians still intuitively understand this and take a benign view of the burqa, it is hardly because they are inherently more rational. It is because their secularism has been shaped by India's dominant religion--Hinduism--whose non-monotheistic ethos allows the space for multiple faiths. In this sense, Hinduism is perhaps more profoundly in sync with liberal tolerance than monotheistic faiths.

More crucially, however, there is nothing in Hinduism that makes an individual's spiritual salvation anyone's business except the individual herself. By contrast, Hitchens, et al, who have been raised in the cradle of a Christian civilization, have imbibed a certain comfort level with the crusading notion that people can--and ought to--be saved even against their will. Hence, it does not matter if Muslim women don't regard the burqa as oppressive. They have to be given sartorial liberation in the same way that the heathens need to be given spiritual liberation.

This is a profoundly anti-liberal and anti-secular idea. Indeed, if the French and Hitchens were serious about either secularism or liberalism, instead of asking Muslim women to shed the burqa, they would be shedding their own proselytizing prejudice against it.

Amen. I've always found it interesting that the anti-Roman Christian sects ended up becoming the heir to the Roman Empire. Similarly, I can't help but wonder if a certain strand of atheism won't end up embodying the crusading and socially meddlesome mentality of its worst foes. The wheel turns...

Going Ghost

Evan Ratliffe, photo by Joe Pugliese

So, exactly how does a person disappear in today's modern world? Wired decided to answer that very question, using writer Evan Ratliffe as the guinea pig:

I’m driving East out of San Francisco on I-80, fleeing my life under the cover of dusk. Having come to the interstate by a circuitous route, full of quick turns and double backs, I’m reasonably sure that no one is following me. I keep checking the rearview mirror anyway. From this point on, there’s no such thing as sure. Being too sure will get me caught.

I had intended to flee in broad daylight, but when you are going on the lam, there are a surprising number of last-minute errands to run. This morning, I picked up a set of professionally designed business cards for my fake company under my fake name, James Donald Gatz. I drove to a Best Buy, where I bought two prepaid cell phones with cash and then put a USB cord on my credit card — an arbitrary dollar amount I hoped would confuse investigators, who would scan my bill and wonder what gadgetry I had purchased. An oil change for my car was another head fake. Who would think that a guy about to sell his car would spend $60 at Oil Can Henry’s?

I already owned a couple of prepaid phones; I left one of the new ones with my girlfriend and mailed the other to my parents — giving them an untraceable way to contact me in emergencies. I bought some Just for Men beard-and-mustache dye at a drugstore. My final stop was the bank, to draw a $477 cashier’s check. It’s payment for rent on an anonymous office in Las Vegas, which is where I need to deliver the check by midday tomorrow.

Crossing the Bay Bridge, I glance back for a last nostalgic glimpse of the skyline. Then I reach over, slide the back cover off my cell phone, and pop out the battery. A cell phone with a battery inside is a cell phone that’s trackable.

Wired then offered a reward for enterprising investigators to find him. What follows is an interesting cat-and-mouse game, and full of interesting information about exactly how seemingly hard it is to disappear in our increasingly surveilled age.

Of course, Ratliffe's disappearance was still a game. It was an extremely revealing game, and he's clearly a smart guy who did a whole bunch of research in how not to be found. But it missed some key factors that I'll get into in a moment.

By contrast, federal agencies have, for the past seven years, been spending millions to create a system that better tracks homeless and transient populations. Ratliffe, with ingenuity and extensive preparation, had an extremely difficult time keeping ahead of his pursuers. Meanwhile, the government's spending millions because social agencies have a hell of a time tracking down individuals whose invisibility was often accidental, conducted with practically no resources.

This happens because the best way to escape notice is when no one's looking; and when there's an entire social network out there to keep it that way. Despite the seeming pervasiveness of records and monitoring technology, there are entire populations of such "ghosts" in the cities of our time.

What grassroots?

My Mountain Xpress analysis (one of the first on our brand new staff blogs) on exactly how deep Asheville's vaunted grassroots really run is up. Take a look:

In November 2009, 12,648 voters decided who would lead the city of Asheville.

To put those numbers in perspective, that’s 19.6 percent of the city’s registered voters or roughly one in five. To put it in starker terms: this number is the lowest turnout ever in a municipal election, beating 2007’s city council elections for that dubious honor. Despite economic difficulties, a mayoral race (albeit a rather one-sided one) and two of the victors putting their emphasis on large volunteer operations, four out of five Asheville voters chose to stay at home.

Looking closer at the numbers, the picture doesn’t improve. Montford, often touted as an activist hotbed, only narrowly exceeded the average, with a 20 percent turnout. Its citizenry came out comparatively well, the city’s other four most populous precincts saw turnout at or under the city average.

Minority voters turned out by lower percentages, with only 15.6 percent of black voters showing up to the polls, and just 10 percent of Hispanic voters.

It’s true that many voters don’t show up for municipal elections, even during hotly contested years. Still, added to 2007’s decline (22 percent of the city’s voters turned out for that race), this represented a fairly rapid drop in public participation in elections.

However, you wouldn’t have known it by the rhetoric.

“We rocked this city tonight!” newly elected council member Cecil Bothwell proclaimed at his victory celebration.

“I think the voters are a true reflection of Asheville,” Esther Manheimer said, adding. “I think the people have given City Council a mandate.”

This was something of a change in attitude for Manheimer. After her primary victory a scant few weeks earlier, she called the low turnout a challenge, and declared “it’s our job to reach people, to get them to the polls by any means necessary.”

Twitter was all a-twitter, both during the primary and general elections, with proclamations of Asheville’s grassroots coming of age and similar such hyperbole.

This isn’t to speak for or against the policies of anyone elected that night, but the victory talk needs to be tempered, four months on, by some cold facts that tell a far different story: it is absolutely absurd to pretend that a large drop in voter turnout represents a triumph of popular activism.

The Rundown: Long Overdue edition

My, it has been a bit, hasn't it? Plenty of interesting items out there lately. Let's let loose a horde, shall we?

* Lost Exile An excellent Vanity Fair article on the rise and fall of The Exile, Russia's ballsiest and most asinine paper, which also launched Matt Taibbi's journalistic career. A fascinating reveal of a particularly anarchic time in recent Russian history. As Taibbi's gone onto bigger things, it's also an enlightening glimpse into what's right, and vastly wrong, about his "FUCK YOU!" style of journalism.

* Scrapheap Transhumanism In which the author cuts himself open with a scalpel and inserts an RFID chip. The first successful Grind? You be the judge.

* How a new jobless era will transform America Don Peck wraps economic upheaval, the Great Depression, sociological trauma and the perils of helicopter parents up in one neat package in this tour de force Atlantic article. Read it. You might need a drink afterwards.

At the same time, consider that a generation desperately searching for a purpose might be awesome if it can chuck a bullshit sense of entitlement and that a better awareness of how the vicissitudes of class drive many political battles might be sorely needed.

* The mystery of Zomia Does the vast land stretching from Vietnam through Tibet offer a radically different lesson in societal organization? Or are some academics slathering their own theories on top of vastly different societies? Either way, this article touches on some interesting debates about exactly what civilization is, and how desirable we find it.

(thanks to m1k3y for this one)

* Search the world's government data Courtesy of the wonderful people over at The Guardian. A great resource, right at your fingertips.

* The New Caveman lifestyle The New York Times finds Gotham crawling with people embracing the new caveman lifestyle, trying to eat and exercise in a fashion closer to our distant ancestors (raw meat and lots of jumping).

I'm always interested to see how experiments play out, and I'd be interested in the results of such a change, as well as more research on the cultural factors fueling it. At the same time, these modern primitives are working in fields like online advertising and live in one of the largest cities on the planet, so I have to ask: does just a diet and exercise routine define a lifestyle?

If only there were a blast-from-the-past lifestyle more up my alley. But what would such a thing look like?

* Machiavelli 2.0 Fuck yeah! That's what I'm talking about! I want to go to that conference (with my own food taster, a bulletproof vest and a good knife). Joking aside, that article in the Harvard International Review has some interesting things to say about applying good 'ol fashioned manipulation to a modern, "networked" society. In casting Machiavelli as a prophet of the modern state, it misses many of the deeper lessons about power that he observed (there's a reason 'ol Niccolo used ancient examples), but it's worth a read.

* Ask me anything Still answering questions, and loving it. Guilt, individualism, transhumanism, blogging and more. Keep 'em coming.

Thanks for your patience over the last week, readers. While it was unfortunate that work and life put me out of the blogging realm for a bit, I returned to find all sorts of interesting suggestions, links and more. So thanks, y'all are awesome.

D&D killers meme returns (and must be stopped)

Why does this all sound so terribly familiar?

Last Friday, Amy Bishop, a faculty member of the University of Alabama, (allegedly, technically) opened fire on her colleagues, killing three and putting two others in critical condition. It was a senseless, stupid tragedy, especially for those who have just lost their mentors and loved ones.

That, I figured, was about the end of it, other than hoping that Bishop never again sees the light of day. I didn't really feel the need to comment. I've written here, at length, about my strong feelings on the hysterical need to turn every lone nut shooting into a symptom of some larger social ill. Bishop was an upper-class professional, not part of a controversial minority, so it seemed like this case might be hard for the worst parts of the media to transform into any of their favorite bogeymen. The news outlets, I hoped, would report on the event, get the stories it needed to and then move on.

How wrong I was. From today's Boston Herald:

Accused campus killer Amy Bishop was a devotee of Dungeons & Dragons - just like Michael “Mucko” McDermott, the lone gunman behind the devastating workplace killings at Edgewater Technology in Wakefield in 2000.

Bishop, now a University of Alabama professor, and her husband James Anderson met and fell in love in a Dungeons & Dragons club while biology students at Northeastern University in the early 1980s, and were heavily into the fantasy role-playing board game, a source told the Herald.

“They even acted this crap out,” the source said.

When questioned about it yesterday, Anderson, 45, a research scientist in Huntsville, Ala., dismissed the egghead escape as “a passing interest. It was a social thing more than anything else. It’s not the crazy group people think they are.”

McDermott studied engineering at Northeastern in the late 1980s, but Anderson said he never met him. Police seized two Dungeons & Dragons books from McDermott’s Haverhill apartment after he shot seven co-workers to death on Dec. 26, 2000.

The popular fantasy role-playing game has a long history of controversy, with objections raised to its demonic and violent elements. Some experts have cited the D&D backgrounds of people who were later involved in violent crimes, while others say it just a game. A federal appeals court recently upheld a prison ban on the game in Wisconsin, where prison officials reportedly testified they were afraid the game could promote “hostility, violence and escape behavior.”

What the fuck is this? 1984 (the literal year, not the Orwell novel)? This is, from the first paragraph on, idiotic, hack journalism at its worst. An editor let the "egghead escape" description fly? Really?

I bet if I wade through the last decade's worth of shootings, I can find somebody who happened to drink milk or watch football. Perhaps I could then string together some vague innuendos, ignore the overwhelming cases of people who did the activity in question and didn't go batshit, and then put out an article claiming to have discovered some important fact that the public needs to be warned of. 

Bullshit.

This is not the work of anyone who could ever, in a million years, call themselves a journalist.

A good reaction to this is to start by letting the Boston Herald clearly know your displeasure. Be calm, be polite, but firmly let them know that this is unacceptable. Believe it or no, most papers are acutely aware of their public image, especially in this business climate. Herald Editor-in-Chief Kevin Convey can be reached at 617-619-6403 or at kconvey@bostonherald.com. Sweet can be reached directly at 617-426-3000, x7610 or at lsweet@bostonherald.com.