My first website, braverman.org, debuted in New York on 16 August 1997. We didn't have things called "blogs" back then, but over the course of about four years I posted jokes, stories, and poetry—almost all of it submitted by other people—two or three times per week. It was kind of blog-like, except I had to add actual Classic ASP pages to the site until I figured out a way to automate it in May 1998.
I'm going to start re-posting the archives, with their original time stamps...
Here are the first ones, from May 1998.
A few weeks ago, Brooklyn writer Noah Shannon wrote a New York Times feature purporting to chronicle his near-death experience on a flight from D.C. that made an emergency a precautionary landing in Philadelphia. No one who knows anything about aviation believed him.
Writer and pilot James Fallows, who knows quite a lot about aviation, checks in:
I was not on that plane, but I can tell you: This. Did. Not. Occur. The dangling cap-in-hand; the sweat stains; the captain coming out of the cockpit and saying he would "yell" his commands; the "not going to sugarcoat it" and "just going to try to land it." No.
Today he got Shannon on the record:
What have you learned about from this experience? Are you intending to make your career in reportorial-based journalism, in academic essays? What do you know now about yourself and your plans based on this last month?
Well, I would love to continue to write nonfiction--to continue to report. I guess the last month has instilled in me a greater need for careful scrutiny of my own work. It was driven home to me that it was wrong to give the impression of certainty, of fact, and the things I was a little uncertain or hazy on, I should have qualified those observations, and I think that would have been the better journalistic thing to do--or done more background research. But I didn't at the time, and I have to apologize to the readers and The New York Times for that, and I take full responsibility. Looking forward, I can only hope to do better work and use this motivation to do better work in the future.
Yeah. You know, I edited a newspaper when I was 21, and I didn't need to be told not to—how does one say? embellish? exaggerate? make up?—something billed as non-fiction. I think Shannon has a lot more to write before anyone will take him seriously again, and for his sake, if he wants actually to be a journalist, it had all better be completely accurate. Completely.
In vaguely-related news, Airbus flew an A350 for the first time today. That's for real.
The Showtime series The Borgias will end its three-year run next week, mainly due to salaries increasing while ratings decrease. But creator Neil Jordan also understood the story had ended:
[W]hile filming a pivotal scene in the Season 3 finale, Jordan said [Jeremy] Irons turned to him and told him that “this feels like the end of something, that the family has come to an end.” While mulling a potential fourth season, Jordan said he wasn’t sure he had enough material for 10 episodes and wasn’t sure whether Showtime would want to commit to another season either. “As a compromise, I proposed to finish the arc of all the characters with a two-hour movie,” Jordan said, adding that Showtime commissioned the script and he wrote it. “When they looked at what it could cost, it was just too expensive,” he said.
Having just finished the penultimate episode of the series, I might go farther: the final scene of tonight's episode was, in fact, the technical climax[1] of the story. I would have liked more of this story; but tonight, the central conflict—the driving force of the story—resolved.
But what is it about penultimates in modern television fiction, though? Every Game of Thrones season builds up to Episode 9 and then uses Episode 10 to set up the next season. It's becoming a trope.
Ah, show business.
Let me say that again: show business.[2]
I plan to write more about the connection between The Borgias and that last bit there. For now, let me just say: Babylon 5, The Prisoner, and Lost. Three great stories, none of them finished right. (But J. Michael Straczynski at least had a plan.)
—
[1] The technical climax of a story is the point where the story can only go in one direction from that point. The dramatic climax is the payoff. For example: in The Godfather (one of the best films ever made, as far as I'm concerned), the technical climax happens when Michael visits his father in the hospital, and says, "I'm with you now, Papa." The dramatic climax occurs during the baptism. If you don't know what I mean, you really need to watch this movie.
[2] This is how my dad begins every screenwriting course he teaches. It's shocking to every student in the room. And it's the best description of entertainment I've ever seen.