Journalists don’t do that. We are supposed to hold up the mirror and show you your jowls. So it was with some trepidation that Latitude News agreed to let a journalism student from Northeastern student base her final project on us.

Her report shows us what we think of ourselves. Other than calling us “tiny,” she offers little assessment of our effort. Instead, it’s all us telling her what we think. She uses links from our stories to illustrate points. She may or may not agree with what we are saying; she plays it straight. Journalists should play it straight, but when straight means telling people what your one source said, it feels like a one-sided story. Of course, it’s my side that’s being heard, so I should be happy.

i did scratch my head at one quote I gave her. Did I really say it’s better when a staff is small? Maybe I did, but I can’t remember why.

Here’s the video she shot of us talking about trying to create more conversational journalism:

I was just reading this piece on Damien Hirst and it looks like I undershot what an artist can make by at least a zero. Maybe I should go back to that story.

Two friends had attended it, and gave it mixed reviews. One thought the language was stilted and awkward, and surmised that they were mimicking the propaganda of the times. The set also bothered her. It varies from a farm in rural China to the urban bustle of Beijing. At one point, the stage becomes a farm complete with dirt for hoeing. Cleaning the farm off the stage provides a natural spot for an intermission, only the play spans five acts in 90 minutes. What we get instead is a relatively long interlude that slows the flow of the play. Perhaps it also reflects something of the pace of Chinese life in the 1940s.

Though she was lukewarm on the play while seeing it, she says it has stuck with her and her husband, so rated it worth a look.

A second friend saw it and loved set and show without reservation.

I thought the set was fine, and sometimes clever, especially in its use of multimedia. The language did not bother me. perhaps it was because the entire cast is Asian, so I was not expecting a traditional American or British play. I don’t think I have ever seen a play that featured more than one Asian actor.

What struck me were the contrasts; in a play about three women, the dominant character is a man, Shou-yu, and one of unyielding principle. He is in that sense much like Sir Thomas More in Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, struggling against forces larger than he is by drawing a line and saying ‘this is what makes me a man, and without my principles I am nothing.’ Only the line in this case, the cause of communism and an ideal that shared effort means shared reward equally.

Wild Swans, then, like so much of 20th century American literature, pits humans against forces they cannot control, forces that should overwhelm them. Indeed, the Communist party itself cannot control its own destiny, though the middle of the play shows it trying mightily. Each character makes choices about how they will respond to these forces. And you can draw a sense of the frustration that we sometimes see coming out of China, when orderly plans and prediction falter.

In the end, the tension builds as to whether anything can shake Shou-yu’s principles. No spoilers here. But I will note that afterwards, a random theatre-goer told his companion “it should’ve run 10 minutes longer.” Like much modern fiction, it leaves some things unresolved.

As the Times put it:

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.

“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”

Say what you want about newspapers, but the NYT piece clearly matters. In just a few days, Apple’s gone from being the company for the rest of us to being on top of the 1 percent. It didn’t help that the head of Foxconn, Apple’s major supplier of iPhones and other products (the company that employed the slave-driver foreman), chose the same weekend to call his workers “animals.” But the Foxconn gaffe was just a bit of grease for the skids. Today a search on Google News reveals more than 2,000 articles about Apple’s image problem. Erik Sherman in his column takes this damning shot at Apple:

However, the screen swap example reveals something else even more stunning. What company changes a major design at the last minute? That betrays a serious lack of managerial foresight and planning. In other words, the real reason Apple operates in China is so it can have a captive workforce in what amounts to the high-tech equivalent of a company mining town. Employees are supposed to be on-call at any hour, while earning a pittance, to make up for Apple’s mistakes.

Of course, Apple just posted spectacular financial results. And for all the noise, the Daily Beast apparently could only find 18 Twitter users giving up Apple.  I don’t have an iPhone, but I am typing this on a MacBook Pro, sitting next to it is my iPad, and off in the kitchen on the table radio is my iPod Touch. I feel uncomfortable about all these Apple products. But will I switch? Large numbers of people profess to hate Microsoft, but it remains incredibly profitable. I still have and use a Windows computer. I have an XBox Kinect, too. It is truly cool, but that doesn’t make Microsoft cool, as this Bloomberg BusinessWeek article shows.

I hope Apple gets its act together, and stops behaving like the Durham Company in “The Jungle.” But its Cool Kid  days are over. All that’s left now are profits.

Andreas talked about his work and his new book, Hannibal and Me, over a couple of glasses of Lateral Bordeaux. The picture wasn’t flattering, but Andreas is never dull.

The book is reviewed here and plugged here, and also given a read by the inimitable Mr. Crotchety (I confess I sometimes wonder if Mr. Crotchety is Andreas’ mouthpiece, a la Ben Franklin’s Silence Dogood or Mike Royko’s Slats Grobnik). It’s high on my list, which never seems to get any shorter, a consequence of knowing lots of good writers with valuable things to say.

Palantir is a contradiction of a company: started by a diehard libertarian in order to sell software to governments that has the potential to undermine civil liberties, enticing bright engineers in Silicon Valley to take jobs that lack large financial returns, uses a demo and anonymous sources to highlight its potential. still, an interesting read in Business Week: Palantir, the War on Terror’s Secret Weapon.

Working my way through Best American Magazine Writing 2010. The latest update to the series reminds us just how good non-fiction writing can be. This morning was a feature writing finalist, Evan Ratliff’s Vanish, an engrossing, suspenseful story of his effort to disappear for a month. See also this: How We Caught Missing Wired Writer Evan Ratliff