I encourage you to listen to the full comics journalism panel from the National Conference on Media Reform, even though it is an hour and a half long. I wrote a bit about it over at Graphic Journos, so please go read that because I don’t like the idea of cross-posting.

I’m working on a few stories right now, including some preparation and investigation for a project in which I will be going under cover in a few months, something I haven’t done before. This year is shaping up to be far and away my best ever as a freelancer, and I have to think this is in part because I’ve gotten a lot gutsier. This was on my mind as I was writing up some new pitches this morning, and then I read this first part of Susannah Breslin’s “How Your Journalism Sausage Gets Made” (from Forbes.com, who loves my CC-licensed art!).

I have to imagine there are young female journalists out there who are missing out on stories, jobs, and opportunities because they aren’t being aggressive enough, because they hesitate rather than go barreling after a story, because when push comes to shove, it is easier to not get in a shoving match.

If you are one of those girls, I hope you will go out and do good stories, the hard stories, the weird stories. Not because they need to be told, even though they do, but because they are fun, because they are the places in which you will find yourself, because they are the times that will crystallize your understanding of who you really are. That’s the thing about journalism I always forget until I’m back in it, until days like today. That packing up your gear and heading into the unknown of a story unfolding is really what journalism is all about, not jobs, not your peers, not the words. It’s just you and the story and whatever is about to happen.

So yeah. I liked that.

Me: It’s like Chicken Fucking Little over here. I’m planting my seeds and sifting my flour and no one’s around til I’m done baking my bread.
My mom: Um, it’s the Little Red Hen, dear.
Me: Oh. Well. Whatever.
My mom: (laughter) Chicken Little was the one who said the sky is falling.
Me: Oh the Little Red Hen had a pessimistic kid and everyone was surprised??

This will be a comic when I’m done with the diaries I’m sure. Four more, so keep your pants on! I know I am!

This review is of the “Best American Comics 2008″ edition, which actually took chances on “up & coming” creators (that Eleanor Davis cover! my god!) as opposed to this year’s volume, which is about as recession-proof safe as one could imagine. My guess is they’ll sell as many(/few) of the boring as of the good ones, but try to convince some Houghton-Mifflin editor of such economic realities? Good fucking luck, he’s banking on modest Crumb-driven sales. (No, I cannot bring myself to blame guest editor Charles Burns.)

And I’m starting the year-end awards early, because really, there’s no way anything could top this.

I haven’t subscribed to the New Yorker for a couple years now since it’s pretty pricey and it’s not like I read the thing for the cartoons, so I don’t mind getting the articles online. I haven’t been blown away by anything since the profile of David Foster Wallace many issues ago, but this, now this… this is good.

Elizabeth Kolbert profiled Colin Beavan, a.k.a “No Impact Man,” in terms of the absurdity of his project to live with a carbon footprint of zero — in Manhattan. She also writes about other Thoreau-wannabes who’ve undertaken similar pseudo-eco-friendly stunts in order to propel their writing careers (including one woman who gave up toothpicks but bought a three-story house and went on several cross-country plane trips).

The nouveau Thoreauvians have picked up from “Walden” its dramaturgy of austerity. Their schemes require them to renounce (if only temporarily) various material comforts—cars, elevators, Starbucks—that their neighbors take for granted. Renunciation sets them apart and organizes their lives in the name of some higher purpose. The trouble—or, at least, a trouble—is that it’s hard to say exactly what that purpose is.

At twenty-eight, [Vanessa] Farquharson is almost exactly the age that Thoreau was when he set off for Walden Pond. And she’s a lot like him, too, if he’d been the type who, as she writes of herself, enjoys blowing a “month’s savings on a bottle of pink Veuve Clicquot and pairing it with back-to-back reruns of ‘America’s Next Top Model.’ ”

(Yeah, she’s the one who bought the house and started going to “eco-friendly spas.”)

These projects are about guilt, gimmicks and cold hard cash. But of course Kolbert, writing for a print publication, looks over the most absurd bit of all: that the goddamn “No Impact” book is printed on a whole lot of environmentally unfriendly paper (really, is it even New Leaf? and how many copies will be sent back coverless to the publisher when the next gimmick rules). Still, at least someone is calling these people out while they sit in the scented soy-candlelight eating their organic grass-feed kobe beef and counting their money.

From this week’s missive. “A metastudy by several U.S. universities applied the Tightwad-Spendthrift scale to romantic relationships and determined that cheap and profligate people can love each other.”

I’m not saying it’s not possible, just highly unlikely, at least from where I’m standing. More from the study itself:

“That is, ‘tightwads,’ who generally spend less than they would ideally like to spend, and ’spendthrifts,’ who generally spend more than they would ideally like to spend, tend to marry each other, consistent with the notion that people are attracted to mates who possess characteristics dissimilar to those they deplore in themselves (Klohnen and Mendelsohn 1998). In spite of this complementary attraction, spendthrift/tightwad differences within a marriage predict conflict over finances, which in turn predict diminished marital well-being.”

I love the heavy parsing on “diminished marital well-being.” But I’m sad to hear that these tightwads are so ashamed and self-hating. I think moderate to extreme cheapness is one of the most attractive traits in a potential mate; I actually become very anxious around people who spend more than they should. But I never would have suspected that this is a rarity. Especially in this economy, amirite?

This Old Gray Lady piece on bias against female playwrights presents some interesting facts — not least of which is this one that touches on a theme I’ve been batting around since high school. Namely, that girls are huge bitches to other girls.

Ms. Sands sent identical scripts to artistic directors and literary managers around the country. The only difference was that half named a man as the writer (for example, Michael Walker), while half named a woman (i.e., Mary Walker). It turned out that Mary’s scripts received significantly worse ratings in terms of quality, economic prospects and audience response than Michael’s. The biggest surprise? “These results are driven exclusively by the responses of female artistic directors and literary managers,” Ms. Sands said.

Amid the gasps from the audience, an incredulous voice called out, “Say that again?”

Ms. Sands put it another way: “Men rate men and women playwrights exactly the same.”

You know, blah blah patriarchy creates social structures in which women turn on other women, breaking apart the power of the sisterhood in order to divide and conquer blah blah. Anyway, I’d love to see the results of an economic study like this done on comics by women… I imagine they might be a bit different.

No, not actually for kids. Well, maybe. I don’t know. It’s Tuesday, give me a fucking break.

Researchers learned that ants that perform specific tasks are no more efficient than regular ants. “It turns out,” said scientist Anna Dornhaus, “that the ones that are specialized on a particular job are not particularly good at doing that job.” … Ann Coulter had her mouth wired shut. … Planned Parenthood of Indiana announced plans to offer holiday gift certificates that can be applied toward the cost of checkups, contraception, or abortions. “They deserve coal in their stockings,” said Sister Diane Carollo of the Indianapolis Archdiocese.

And on that whole Wal-Mart stampede thing:

“It was crazy,” said a worker in the electronics department. “The deals weren’t even that good.”

I don’t read Jezebel, but I do subscribe to their Joan Didion tag. This is what Sadie Stein had to report back from Didion’s “cold, detached” presence at last week’s New York Review of Books panel.

She started by describing the “unexpressable uneasiness” she and some others had felt early on in the campaign. Why? “We were getting what we wanted,” she continued, meaning, a smart, qualified, decent candidate the Eastern elite could get behind. And yet the frenzy surrounding Obama made her uneasy — both the sense that he was a young person’s candidate, “a generational thing we couldn’t understand” and the unthinking embrace of “naivete transformed to hope, partisanism as consumerism.” Didion bridled at the wanton use of “transformational” and said she couldn’t count the number of times she heard the 60’s evoked “by people who apparently had no memory that the 60s” didn’t involve decking babies out in political onesies.

Didion was at pains to say that she did not think any of this was Obama’s doing, nor to his tastes. He would, she speculated “welcome healthy realism” and achievable expectations. In our frenzy, we are doing him a disservice, expecting miracles “at a time when the nation can least afford easy answers.” She recalled, the day after the election, an overexcited newscaster declaring that we now possess “the congratulations of all the nations.” She likened this to the naivete of thinking we’d be regarded as beloved saviors in Iraq. But, she ended, “in the irony-free zone that our country has become, this is not what people wanted to hear.”

Sorry, you can go back to worshiping your Hope posters now, kids.

“The Federal Reserve is refusing to identify the recipients of almost $2 trillion of emergency loans from American taxpayers or the troubled assets the central bank is accepting as collateral.” –Bloomberg

If you’ve led a life like mine, rich in shame and filth, there are few opportunities for being sanctimonious and you have to seize those that offer themselves quickly.

– Another journo goes vegan and rails about how tough his life was without bloody shanks in perhaps the douchiest display yet (think: Bourdain forced to eat curry for a week and then waxing whiny about it to some 150 wpm assistant); but perhaps because he’s British (and employed by the Guardian) the humor makes up for some of the whine. Still, dude could use a cookie.