Return of the Pod People? DeWayne Wise’s separated shoulder frees the White Sox of a free-swinging out machine for a couple of months, but it may pave the way for a less-than-promising Scott Podsednik revival. Ranking just 10th in the league in scoring so far, that’s not exactly what the doctor ordered.

http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=8755

David Simon

April 17, 2009

The executive producer of HBO’s critically-acclaimed show THE WIRE, David Simon talks with Bill Moyers about inner-city crime and politics, storytelling and the future of journalism today. After a dozen years covering crime for the BALTIMORE SUN, David Simon left journalism to write books and tell stories for NBC and HBO, including his Peabody-winning cop show THE WIRE, which looked at the drug wars and the gritty underbelly of the inner-city. Simon is now producing the pilot for a series about musicians in post-Katrina New Orleans, called TREME.

Simon on Fact and Fiction

Dickensian childIn his extended conversation with Bill Moyers, David Simon touched not only on the plight of America’s cities, the drug war and prison numbers and the state of the news media, but also on the art of telling hard truths through stories rather than statistics.

I started to realize “Dickensian” was a shorthand for “I don’t really actually care about the underlying economic dynamic that is creating this nightmare. I don’t want to examine that. I just want some sweet stories about some kids who are poor and are being hurt. I could win a prize in that. Be Dickensian.” And I thought it was sort of an affront to Dickens almost. I mean, if Dickens heard it, I think he would have gotten mad.

Making Institutions Work

This week on the JOURNAL, Bill Moyers spoke with David Simon, a former journalist who created HBO’s award-winning television series "The Wire." The series, which was informed by Simon’s 12 years as a crime reporter in Baltimore, was widely praised for its gritty, unflinching portrayal of the harsh realities of life in one American inner-city.

Simon attributed the stubborn persistence of many social problems to institutions’ practice of "juking the stats," or manipulating numbers to make themselves look better:

"You show me anything that depicts institutional progress in America – school test scores, crime stats, arrest stats – anything that a politician can run on [or] anything that somebody can get a promotion on, and as soon as you invent that statistical category 50 people in that institution will be at work trying to figure out a way to make it look as if progress is actually occurring when actually no progress is… The same game is played everywhere – nobody’s actually in the business of doing what the institution is supposed to do… If there’s an institution that is supposed to serve you or that you are supposed to serve, and it’s supposed to care for you and be a societal positive, it will betray you."

When Bill Moyers asked how he suggests addressing inner-city social problems, Simon said:

"I would put all the interdiction money, all the incarceration money, all the enforcement money, all of the pretrial, all of the prep, all of that cash – I would hurl it, as fast as I could, into drug treatment and job training and jobs programs."

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/blog/2009/04/making_institutions_work.html

someone could find a clip of someone from BBTN giving Andy Phillips nothing but praise.