[joeblogsmomma]

Pablo Torre and Julie K. Brown are the only truly deserving winners here. Anyone willing to break down and discuss the Epstein case is a real journalist and both of them have done exactly that. The Times and other major outlets were reticent to cover it, and have since routinely run puff pieces. Riley Walz and the folks at Jmail deserve a lot of credit as well.

[jkestner]

Aaron Parsley's account of the Kerrville flood in Texas Monthly is deserving. A waterline-level personal account that makes a disaster real. https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/texas-flood-first...

[ignoramous]

> A waterline-level personal account that makes a disaster real

  ... when Baby Jessica fell to the well & she really suffered and her parents must have been incredibly miserable, she got more CNN coverage than Rwanda and Darfur, right? And the question is, why does this happen and why do people care so much? And it turns out, there's research on what's called the "identifiable victim effect."

  ... you would expect it as more lives are at stake, we would care more, maybe in a linear relationship. Or, maybe we would care more in the beginning & there'll be kind of a diminishing return ... But it turns out, the function is different: We care a lot about individual life and care less and less as the pie... as the number of people become bigger. 

  ... Stalin said, "One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic." And Mother Theresa said in the same spirit, "If I look at the masses, I will never act; if I look at the one, I will." ... It turns out that every time you activate cognition, calculation, thoughtfulness, you turn off the emotion — people care less and give much less. 

https://bigthink.com/videos/why-we-have-more-sympathy-for-ba...

Dan Ariely (who unironically isn't moved by plight of the Palestinians) also discusses this in the introduction of his book, The Upside of Irrationality.

[joeblogsmomma]

Will say if you haven't checked pablo's clippers saga both hilarious in the way it was covered and that Balmer and Co thought that they could get away with this! Hamburger!!

[NeutralCrane]

There is a significant chance they do get away with it.

[jkestner]

But thanks to the visibility Torre has given it, it'll be a lot harder for the NBA to go light on them.

[a_bonobo]

Some evidence as to why Brown did not originally win the Pulitzer, instead this citation a few years too late:

>Brown’s “Perversion of Justice” series won a prestigious George Polk award. The Herald entered the Epstein series for a Pulitzer Prize that year, but it was not a finalist. Alan Dershowitz, the attorney and television personality who helped broker Epstein’s original deal, wrote a letter to the Pulitzer committee that year, urging them not to honor Brown’s work.

https://www.inquirer.com/news/pennsylvania/julie-brown-pulit...

The rot runs deep

[gaws]

One-track mind.