People wait in line for public assistance at a food stamp center in downtown Brooklyn (Photo: Tiffany Ap/The Brooklyn Ink)

More of my reporting, this time on the unemployed at a food stamp center. Read the article here.

“Nobody considers a doctor inhumane who takes a sharp instrument and opens the body of a living human. Nobody thinks they are inhumane because they can engage in that process without getting faint of heart or nauseous. Journalists step back from the fray to serve humanity on a different level… Yet journalists have been largely incapable of making that point to the American people.” –Paul McMasters, the First Amendment ombudsman at the Freedom Forum’s First Amendment Center.

“Follow your conscience. Your humanity – your ability to empathize with pain and suffering, and your desire to prevent it – does not conflict with your professional standards. Those impulses make you a better journalist, more attuned to the stories you are tasked with telling. If you change an outcome through responsible and necessary intervention because there’s no one else around to help, so be it. Tell your bosses, and when it’s essential to a story, tell your readers and viewers, too.

Remember, though, that your primary – and unique – role as a journalist is to bear witness. If you decide to act, do so quickly, then get out of the way. Leave the rescue work to first responders and relief workers whenever possible.

The journalists covering Katrina showed compassion by offering water, rides and rescue, but their most enduring service was to expose the suffering of citizens trapped in hellish shelters and on sweltering interstates, and to document the inexcusable government response.

Without journalists fulfilling that essential role, the resources to help on a larger scale might never have arrived.”–Rachel Smolkin for the American Journalism Review

You can read the full article here.

Finally, an answer!

“Did you ever wonder what English sounds like to someone who doesn’t speak the language? Brian Fairbairn has directed a short film called ‘Skwerl,’ in which the actors speak English words and syllables, but in a way that makes no sense, giving the viewer the sensation of not being able to understand their native tongue.”

Police have set a $2000 reward for information leading to the arrest of any of these suspects (Photo: NYPD)

Here’s my coverage of the new arrest in connection with the string of Brooklyn sexual assaults.

The Good Body by Eve Ensler

It’s a real effort to keep up non-class related reading as we get further into the semester (alongside all the daily news, magazines, and hundreds of blogs I read) but with all the access Columbia has to offer, I’m behaving like Augustus Gloop in a chocolate factory. I think I’m knocking off a book every week, two if they’re slim ones.

“In the midst of a war in Iraq, in a time of escalating global terrorism, when civil liberties are disappearing as fast as the ozone layer, when one out of three women in the world will be beaten or raped in her lifetime, why write a play about my stomach?

Maybe because my stomach is one thing I feel I have control over, or maybe because I have hoped that my stomach is something I could get control over. Maybe because I see how my stomach has come to occupy my attention, I see how other women’s stomachs or butts or thighs or hair or skin have come to occupy their attention, so that we have very little left for the war in Iraq–or much else, for that matter.” –Eve Ensler

Aged patrons sit in the nearly empty dining room of the Danish Athletic Club while mariachi music plays in the next room. (Photo: Tiffany Ap / The Brooklyn Ink)

Click here above to read my new article on the quickly-disappearing Scandinavian community in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.