Brugge Blog

The nominees are set, so Bill Moyers can’t be president this time around, but it seems like he should be put in the running for vice president, or cabinet position or some place where he can have the influence he deserves. Or perhaps he should just be left alone to do what he does best: […]

The PBS Frontline crew has helped keep the story of the Guatemalan National Police Archives alive by airing a segment about the ongoing work being done, in what may be the first significant television coverage since I first heard about the story two years ago.
Along with the story of the archives, they do a […]

The good news: the Guatemalan National Police Archive was discovered last year, with records that could give closure and consequences to many of the people affected by the country’s civil war.
The bad news: there are 80 million documents to go through, and creatures and the elements have taken their toll on some of them.
Like a […]

I had not been on an airplane since early 2000, so heightened airport security was just news stories to me. For our vacation, though, we were not only flying, but flying out of the country, so we were preparing ourselves and the kids for all of the non-flying standing around we would be doing.
As it […]

I admire and envy cartoonists. Even though I know it’s not an easy job by any stretch, they have a channel for venting their frustration, and in a way that can make you smile. Jef Mallet does a great job on a daily basis with The Fraz, but he outdid himself in my eyes with […]

Supposedly, there are lots of alt news sites that have RSS feeds, but try finding the one at CommonDreams.org. I can’t.

The AlterNet site supposedly has one, but they don’t point you to it. I managed to find it by trial and error after searching for “RSS” on their site, and coming across a couple of […]

The folks at Berkeley, trying to measure the immeasurable, have figured that the amount of information created in 2003 was 5 exabytes. That is, roughly, “the the information contained in half a million new libraries the size of the Library of Congress print collections.” That is a very big number for the human scale.

It makes […]

Besides reading Al Franken’s new book for laughs, getting to some of the deep issues of media ownership from a more staid perspective is usually heavier reading. I don’t know if there’s a way around it, but just having access to arguments is an important part of having a debate. Helping that out, Lawrence Lessig […]

Part of me knows that I always have to use critical filters when reading news stories to look for exaggerations, falsehoods or conjectures. I sometimes forget to be on the lookout for omissions, partly because, by their nature, they’re hard to spot - how do you know something is missing if you don’t know much […]

I enjoy the times when insights found in a book show examples of themselves in the world of the moment. I’m reading Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time, where Alan Grant, a Scotland Yard detective finds himself using his convalescence time in a hospital to uncover the truer story of Richard III - he […]