Grim Reader, October 7, 2011: Steve Jobs, Anwar al-Awlaki and Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth
by Michael Schaffer
OCTOBER 7, 2011 TAGS:
GREETINGS, OBIT READERS: This week, the Obitosphere moved quickly to memorialize Steve Jobs, had precious little to say about dead terrorist Anwar al-Awliki, and covered luminaries like civil rights icon Fred Shuttlesworth and TV-ratings measurer A.C. Nielsen Jr.. Plus: The guy who broke the code of silence in the Dallas Cowboys locker room, a kooky son of Gamel Abdel Nasser, and a poet who dissed T.S. Eliot. Let’s turn to the obits:
STEVE JOBS: Grim Reader was noodling around on his computer--an Apple product--on Wednesday night when Twitter lit up with the news of Steve Jobs’ death. Not long afterwards, apple.com was taken over by a picture of Jobs with the years “1955-2011” underneath. The formal obits came a bit later: Though Jobs had been ill, and though his August departure from the computer firm helped reporters get their tributes and mini-bios together, it still took an hour or so for old media to catch the story. In the meantime, it proved an interesting peek into how death gets reported in the world Jobs made--a world where Apple invites tributes from customers, a world where corporate archrival Google could make news by linking to a jobs tribute off its usually spare homepage, a world where people post and read their obits wirelessly from subways and sofas and sidewalks outside the Apple store. Grim Reader was particularly struck by how many of his own pals took to Social Media to express how surprised they were at their emotional reactions to Jobs’ death. As for the formal obits, the Wall Street Journal declares that Jobs had “pioneered the personal computer industry and changed the way people think about technology,” while Wired says that “Apple’s mercurial, mysterious leader did more than reshape his entire industry: he completely changed how we interact with technology. He made gadgets easy to use, gorgeous to behold and essential to own. He made things we absolutely wanted, long before we even knew we wanted them.”
All the obits tell the well-known story of Jobs’ rise, fall, and redemption: The ‘60s-influenced college dropout who was worth $100 million by age 25, who brought the mouse to the masses only to get booted from his company, spending a dozen years in the wilderness (a wilderness where he made millions on the animation firm Pixar) before being brought back to save Apple with gadgets like the iPod and iPhone, devices that turned hardware firms into culture delivery systems. Nearly everyone mentions his famous “three stories” Stanford University 2005 commencement speech, where he told grads to “stay hungry, stay foolish” (video of the speech is here). “He was a historical figure on the scale of a Thomas Edison or Henry Ford,” says Walt Mossberg of All Things Digital, who goes on to recount how Jobs personally approved the glass for Apple’s retail stores. Like Edison’s, Jobs’ aphorisms abound, but now they’re conveyed by tweets and retweets. Even more webbily, Fast Company produces a true obit for the cloud era, pulling together a meta tribute entirely composed of hyper-linked passages from other Jobs tributes. (Hey, that’s Grim Reader’s job!) ODD FUN FACT: Jobs’ biological sibling was novelist Mona Simpson: They were adopted by different families, but became adult friends. BEST JOBS QUOTE: From the New York Times, on why he trusts his gut over market research: “It’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want.” BEST POSTMORTEM LINE: From the band Superchunk’s Twitter feed: “A role model for control freaks everywhere.”
THE BIN LADEN OF THE INTERNET: His killing was huge news, interrupting TV broadcasts and spurring a presidential press conference. But who was Anwar al-Awlaki? Oddly, none of the major U.S. outlets that covered his death devoted obits to his life. For versions of the terrorist’s life story, turn instead to the British media, where the Telegraph explains “Awlaki was not a gun-toting terrorist warlord, but a preacher, broadcasting his ideology in sermons in mosques and, more pervasively, the internet” where “Awlaki’s particular contribution to terrorist strategy was to encourage his followers to mount small-scale attacks causing widespread fear.” His alleged devotees included the planners of the failed Christmas air bombing, the Fort Hood shooting and a foiled Toronto terror plot. Born in New Mexico while his father was a Fulbright scholar, al-Awlaki moved back to Yemen at age 7 but returned to the U.S. for college and grad school. He “was one of the few senior operatives schooled and orientated to western behaviour,” says the Independent, which dubs him "the bin Laden of the internet...He ran a blog, had a Facebook page and had posted hundreds of videos of his sermons on YouTube, where he gained a wide audience of disenchanted Western Muslims.” DON’T TELL THE IMAMS: Though he first gained a reputation for fiery preaching at mosques in San Diego and Virginia, says the Telegraph, “his devout image was sullied by several arrests for soliciting prostitutes.”
TOP RATED RATINGS FIRM: A.C. Nielsen Jr. turned his family’s obscure market-research firm into “a sprawling worldwide measurement giant with a brand name that, in the U.S. at least, became a household synonym for television ratings,” says the Los Angeles Times. Before the advent of their scientific ratings, radio and TV execs judged their shows’ success based on how many letters arrived. Nielsen changed that, first with diaries maintained by 22,000 ratings households, then with meters they installed. The firm also developed checkout scanners to track consumer goods. INTERESTING TAKE: Though networks gripe about Nielsen methodology, the AP argues that the ratings are more relevant than ever today, with more channels slicing up the market, and more attention to possible ratings inaccuracies.
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FACED DOWN BULL CONNOR: Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth “was brutally beaten by a mob, sprayed with city fire hoses, arrested by police 35 times and also blown out of his bed by a Ku Klux Klan bomb during his struggle against segregation,” says his hometown Birmingham News. The trucker-turned-preacher “never gained the kind of fame outside his native Alabama bestowed on the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other luminaries,” says the AP. “But without him, King might not have sent his forces to Birmingham when he did.” In 2008, Barack Obama pushed Shuttlesworth’s wheelchair across the Edmund Pettis Bridge during a Selma tribute. GREAT QUOTE: “He was the first black man I knew who was totally unafraid of white folks,” Alabama’s first black federal judge tells the wire service. GRAIN OF SALT: The comment thread at the end of the Birminham obit contains enough noxious, racist comments to remind Grim Reader that Shuttlesworth’s work isn’t done.
PRINCIPLED PROF: The New York Times catches the death of Derrick Bell, the first black tenured professor at Harvard Law School. Bell made a career of quitting on principle, the obit says, but also reshaped legal scholarship by embracing critical legal theory and pioneering the use of narrative, rather than just dry reasoning, in law review articles. While in law school, student activist Barack Obama compared his teacher--who was quitting Harvard to protest the lack of professorial diversity--to Rosa Parks.
COWBOY NOVELIST: Peter Gent is remembered as the Dallas Cowboy turned author of North Dallas Forty, the 1973 roman a clef that “portrayed professional football as a dehumanizing business that drove pain-racked players to drug and alcohol abuse,” according to the New York Times. What’s most striking 38 years later is the shock that greeted revelations that pro sports were less than pure and noble: Sportswriters--who in those days largely ignored stories of on-field danger or off-field shenanigans--praised its realism, while the Cowboys’ owner called Gent “sick” and labeled his book a “total lie.” Devastating quote, via the Washington Post: “During the first couple of years after I left football, there was no justification for living,” Gent once said. “It was a nightmare.” Disappointingly, the Dallas Morning News has a wire-service obit for the former Cowboy.
HE DISSED T.S. ELLIOT: Obits in the Telegraph and the Guardian for Emanual Litvinoff recall him as a poet who wrote a great memoir of growing up Jewish in England. But everyone seems to agree that his greatest claim to fame was a poem attacking T.S. Eliot for anti-semitism--one that Litvinoff debuted before an audience that included the famous poet himself. The New York Times does the best job of dramatizing the reading, with Eliot walking in unexpectedly not long before it was Litvinoff’s turn to read. Aftewards, audience members denounced Litvinoff for his effrontery. There was one dissenter: Eliot himself, who praised the poem.
MOTHER OF HIP-HOP: The Independent dubs producer Sylvia Robinson “the mother of hip-hop” because she oversaw its first smash hit, the Sugarhill Gang’s 1979 “Rapper’s Delight.” A Washington Post obit likewise quotes a music historian who says Robinson’s “achievements as a record producer are difficult to overstate” because she “sensed the music’s potential” and sought out rappers to turn into stars. Robinson’s life story is actually more interesting than a typical producer’s: A former R&B siren herself, she was a has-been looking to stay relevant when she discovered rap. Detail Grim Reader wishes there was more about: Top early recruits like LL Cool J and Run-DMC shunned Robinson after “less than scrupulous financial practices” ate into her label’s success. What were these alleged practices?
NASSER 2.0: The New York Times and the Telegraph run obits for Khaled Nasser, son of the swashbuckling post-WWII Egyptian president. Most of the real estate is gobbled up by descriptions of Nasser’s trial on allegations that he worked with a left-wing rebel group that wanted to assassinate U.S. and Israeli diplomats--a trial that the Egyptian government was relieved to see end in an acquittal, since it didn’t want to jail the son of a national folk hero. He may also have been a bit nutty: Both outlets recall that, after the elder Nasser’s death, Anwar Sadat paid a visit to the family to ask that the armored presidential limo be returned. An argument ensued, during which Khaled ran to the garage, doused the car in gas, and lit it on fire.
DIED BEFORE CLAIMING HIS NOBEL: It’s the rare obit whose identifier line concerns an event that post-dates a person’s death. But consider this New York Times lede: “Dr. Ralph M. Steinman, a cell biologist who was named one of three winners of the Nobel Prize in Medicine on Monday for his work on the human immune response, died Friday.” The Los Angeles Times explains that there generally are not posthumous Nobels, but that Steinman’s family will get his share of the prize because the committee did not know he had died when it awarded the prize. The obit says Steinman “was a creative and dogged researcher who spent years convincing a doubting scientific community that he had found cells that were key to the working of the immune system.”
CORRECTION OF THE WEEK: Grim Reader was perusing the obit section of the Washington Post when he saw what appeared to be some enormous buried news: A picture of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia graced one of the obits. On closer inspection, it turned out the obit was for Peter Terpeluk, a major Republican fundraiser. A day later, a correction explained how Scalia got there: “The image was inadvertently cropped to show Scalia, who appeared next to Mr. Terpeluk in the original image,” it explained.
STEVE JOBS: Grim Reader was noodling around on his computer--an Apple product--on Wednesday night when Twitter lit up with the news of Steve Jobs’ death. Not long afterwards, apple.com was taken over by a picture of Jobs with the years “1955-2011” underneath. The formal obits came a bit later: Though Jobs had been ill, and though his August departure from the computer firm helped reporters get their tributes and mini-bios together, it still took an hour or so for old media to catch the story. In the meantime, it proved an interesting peek into how death gets reported in the world Jobs made--a world where Apple invites tributes from customers, a world where corporate archrival Google could make news by linking to a jobs tribute off its usually spare homepage, a world where people post and read their obits wirelessly from subways and sofas and sidewalks outside the Apple store. Grim Reader was particularly struck by how many of his own pals took to Social Media to express how surprised they were at their emotional reactions to Jobs’ death. As for the formal obits, the Wall Street Journal declares that Jobs had “pioneered the personal computer industry and changed the way people think about technology,” while Wired says that “Apple’s mercurial, mysterious leader did more than reshape his entire industry: he completely changed how we interact with technology. He made gadgets easy to use, gorgeous to behold and essential to own. He made things we absolutely wanted, long before we even knew we wanted them.” All the obits tell the well-known story of Jobs’ rise, fall, and redemption: The ‘60s-influenced college dropout who was worth $100 million by age 25, who brought the mouse to the masses only to get booted from his company, spending a dozen years in the wilderness (a wilderness where he made millions on the animation firm Pixar) before being brought back to save Apple with gadgets like the iPod and iPhone, devices that turned hardware firms into culture delivery systems. Nearly everyone mentions his famous “three stories” Stanford University 2005 commencement speech, where he told grads to “stay hungry, stay foolish” (video of the speech is here). “He was a historical figure on the scale of a Thomas Edison or Henry Ford,” says Walt Mossberg of All Things Digital, who goes on to recount how Jobs personally approved the glass for Apple’s retail stores. Like Edison’s, Jobs’ aphorisms abound, but now they’re conveyed by tweets and retweets. Even more webbily, Fast Company produces a true obit for the cloud era, pulling together a meta tribute entirely composed of hyper-linked passages from other Jobs tributes. (Hey, that’s Grim Reader’s job!) ODD FUN FACT: Jobs’ biological sibling was novelist Mona Simpson: They were adopted by different families, but became adult friends. BEST JOBS QUOTE: From the New York Times, on why he trusts his gut over market research: “It’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want.” BEST POSTMORTEM LINE: From the band Superchunk’s Twitter feed: “A role model for control freaks everywhere.”
THE BIN LADEN OF THE INTERNET: His killing was huge news, interrupting TV broadcasts and spurring a presidential press conference. But who was Anwar al-Awlaki? Oddly, none of the major U.S. outlets that covered his death devoted obits to his life. For versions of the terrorist’s life story, turn instead to the British media, where the Telegraph explains “Awlaki was not a gun-toting terrorist warlord, but a preacher, broadcasting his ideology in sermons in mosques and, more pervasively, the internet” where “Awlaki’s particular contribution to terrorist strategy was to encourage his followers to mount small-scale attacks causing widespread fear.” His alleged devotees included the planners of the failed Christmas air bombing, the Fort Hood shooting and a foiled Toronto terror plot. Born in New Mexico while his father was a Fulbright scholar, al-Awlaki moved back to Yemen at age 7 but returned to the U.S. for college and grad school. He “was one of the few senior operatives schooled and orientated to western behaviour,” says the Independent, which dubs him "the bin Laden of the internet...He ran a blog, had a Facebook page and had posted hundreds of videos of his sermons on YouTube, where he gained a wide audience of disenchanted Western Muslims.” DON’T TELL THE IMAMS: Though he first gained a reputation for fiery preaching at mosques in San Diego and Virginia, says the Telegraph, “his devout image was sullied by several arrests for soliciting prostitutes.”
TOP RATED RATINGS FIRM: A.C. Nielsen Jr. turned his family’s obscure market-research firm into “a sprawling worldwide measurement giant with a brand name that, in the U.S. at least, became a household synonym for television ratings,” says the Los Angeles Times. Before the advent of their scientific ratings, radio and TV execs judged their shows’ success based on how many letters arrived. Nielsen changed that, first with diaries maintained by 22,000 ratings households, then with meters they installed. The firm also developed checkout scanners to track consumer goods. INTERESTING TAKE: Though networks gripe about Nielsen methodology, the AP argues that the ratings are more relevant than ever today, with more channels slicing up the market, and more attention to possible ratings inaccuracies.
FACED DOWN BULL CONNOR: Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth “was brutally beaten by a mob, sprayed with city fire hoses, arrested by police 35 times and also blown out of his bed by a Ku Klux Klan bomb during his struggle against segregation,” says his hometown Birmingham News. The trucker-turned-preacher “never gained the kind of fame outside his native Alabama bestowed on the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other luminaries,” says the AP. “But without him, King might not have sent his forces to Birmingham when he did.” In 2008, Barack Obama pushed Shuttlesworth’s wheelchair across the Edmund Pettis Bridge during a Selma tribute. GREAT QUOTE: “He was the first black man I knew who was totally unafraid of white folks,” Alabama’s first black federal judge tells the wire service. GRAIN OF SALT: The comment thread at the end of the Birminham obit contains enough noxious, racist comments to remind Grim Reader that Shuttlesworth’s work isn’t done.PRINCIPLED PROF: The New York Times catches the death of Derrick Bell, the first black tenured professor at Harvard Law School. Bell made a career of quitting on principle, the obit says, but also reshaped legal scholarship by embracing critical legal theory and pioneering the use of narrative, rather than just dry reasoning, in law review articles. While in law school, student activist Barack Obama compared his teacher--who was quitting Harvard to protest the lack of professorial diversity--to Rosa Parks.
COWBOY NOVELIST: Peter Gent is remembered as the Dallas Cowboy turned author of North Dallas Forty, the 1973 roman a clef that “portrayed professional football as a dehumanizing business that drove pain-racked players to drug and alcohol abuse,” according to the New York Times. What’s most striking 38 years later is the shock that greeted revelations that pro sports were less than pure and noble: Sportswriters--who in those days largely ignored stories of on-field danger or off-field shenanigans--praised its realism, while the Cowboys’ owner called Gent “sick” and labeled his book a “total lie.” Devastating quote, via the Washington Post: “During the first couple of years after I left football, there was no justification for living,” Gent once said. “It was a nightmare.” Disappointingly, the Dallas Morning News has a wire-service obit for the former Cowboy.
HE DISSED T.S. ELLIOT: Obits in the Telegraph and the Guardian for Emanual Litvinoff recall him as a poet who wrote a great memoir of growing up Jewish in England. But everyone seems to agree that his greatest claim to fame was a poem attacking T.S. Eliot for anti-semitism--one that Litvinoff debuted before an audience that included the famous poet himself. The New York Times does the best job of dramatizing the reading, with Eliot walking in unexpectedly not long before it was Litvinoff’s turn to read. Aftewards, audience members denounced Litvinoff for his effrontery. There was one dissenter: Eliot himself, who praised the poem.
MOTHER OF HIP-HOP: The Independent dubs producer Sylvia Robinson “the mother of hip-hop” because she oversaw its first smash hit, the Sugarhill Gang’s 1979 “Rapper’s Delight.” A Washington Post obit likewise quotes a music historian who says Robinson’s “achievements as a record producer are difficult to overstate” because she “sensed the music’s potential” and sought out rappers to turn into stars. Robinson’s life story is actually more interesting than a typical producer’s: A former R&B siren herself, she was a has-been looking to stay relevant when she discovered rap. Detail Grim Reader wishes there was more about: Top early recruits like LL Cool J and Run-DMC shunned Robinson after “less than scrupulous financial practices” ate into her label’s success. What were these alleged practices?
NASSER 2.0: The New York Times and the Telegraph run obits for Khaled Nasser, son of the swashbuckling post-WWII Egyptian president. Most of the real estate is gobbled up by descriptions of Nasser’s trial on allegations that he worked with a left-wing rebel group that wanted to assassinate U.S. and Israeli diplomats--a trial that the Egyptian government was relieved to see end in an acquittal, since it didn’t want to jail the son of a national folk hero. He may also have been a bit nutty: Both outlets recall that, after the elder Nasser’s death, Anwar Sadat paid a visit to the family to ask that the armored presidential limo be returned. An argument ensued, during which Khaled ran to the garage, doused the car in gas, and lit it on fire.
DIED BEFORE CLAIMING HIS NOBEL: It’s the rare obit whose identifier line concerns an event that post-dates a person’s death. But consider this New York Times lede: “Dr. Ralph M. Steinman, a cell biologist who was named one of three winners of the Nobel Prize in Medicine on Monday for his work on the human immune response, died Friday.” The Los Angeles Times explains that there generally are not posthumous Nobels, but that Steinman’s family will get his share of the prize because the committee did not know he had died when it awarded the prize. The obit says Steinman “was a creative and dogged researcher who spent years convincing a doubting scientific community that he had found cells that were key to the working of the immune system.”CORRECTION OF THE WEEK: Grim Reader was perusing the obit section of the Washington Post when he saw what appeared to be some enormous buried news: A picture of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia graced one of the obits. On closer inspection, it turned out the obit was for Peter Terpeluk, a major Republican fundraiser. A day later, a correction explained how Scalia got there: “The image was inadvertently cropped to show Scalia, who appeared next to Mr. Terpeluk in the original image,” it explained.
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