Memoirous

I heard a snippet of a podcast the other day that reminded me of one of the tenets of this blog: to pay attention to small things, write about the mundane, stay present to daily life. Rough Translation is a podcast that explores language and crossover of language. It delves into the social and anthropological surrounding language and how culture and tribalism also impacts words. Yeah, fairly broad. A recent episode “The Cat Must Still Be Fed” is about: a hyperlocal news site in Red Hook, N.Y. posts a job opening. A journalist in Ukraine applies. And what readers think of as "local news" is going to change dramatically. At first the editor thinks its spam, a joke, a bot. Then she contacts the respondent. No, he just likes using the world wide web as a way to escape, to live vicariously—so no, he doesn’t have a background in journalism nor is he especially proficient in English. But, using algorithms and data sourced from the internet he thought he might be able to writ...