Globally speaking

According to Jason DeParle, we can “pick any headline in the news, and between the lines, there is a chapter in the story of global migration.” This rather awkward sentence raises two questions: How can I find something “between the lines” of a “headline”? And what “chapter” am I supposed to find “in the story of global migration”? Of course, it is obvious that I am alerted to the fact that I could pick any news story and discover that it is somehow connected to global migration. Alas, it is the writer’s – often torturous – job to make a clear statement not the reader’s to sort it out.
Still, I took the author’s advice and two days later looked at some headlines. This is what I found: Efforts on Bicycling Also Attract Thieves and Effort Uses Dogs’ DNA to Track Their Abuser.

Dear New York Times,
there are no efforts on anything, and efforts don’t use anything either. Besides, although there may be efforts to promote bicycling that also attract thieves, and dogs’ DNA may be used in an effort to track their abusers, neither story included a line connecting it to global migration – unless some of the stolen bikes made it across the border.

Kosher or not, that is the question

Something is not quite kosher, if “Uncle Sam [is] munching on a Hebrew National beef hot dog as a heavenly voice assures him it is free of the additives and byproducts present in lesser processed meats” ("Red, White and Kosher"). After all, the higher authority knows – among everything else – that Hebrew National franks are “made with the finest ingredients and contain no artificial flavors, no artificial colors, no by-products, and no fillers” (HN). They are kosher, or “fit to eat,” because they don’t contain all the artificial stuff “present in processed meats of lesser quality.” That's what makes all the difference between kosher and not so kosher. Still, only franks made of meat even less processed would perhaps be accepted by orthodox authorities - obviously the highest authorities - and earn the label glatt kosher.

Check for blind spots

The Checklist Manifesto contends that using a checklist for any task helps to avoid overlooking details. Kathryn Schultz sees a problem with those checklists because they need to be kept short to make them useable, and “omissions can have grave consequences.” Leaving out items that “are deemed either too routine or too rare to merit inclusion,” leads to a “phenomenon known as inattentional blindness: when you ask people to look for something specific, they develop a startling inability to see things …that would normally be glaringly obvious” (Huffington Post 4/1/10).
Wouldn’t we know that he did it on purpose just to be expelled from West Point, we could assume that it was this blindness that caused Edgar Allen Poe to attend a parade where gloves and a belt explicitly were required. He showed up wearing those two accessories – but nothing else.
Yet, a checklist can be a good thing, for example when deciding whether to purchase a cartridge coffee maker or a drip coffee maker. The cartridge machine may come out the winner because it has one decisive advantage: it helps to avoid “making a pot, most of which will be thrown out” (Sam Allis/Boston.com 3/8/10). Normally glaringly obvious that no method of brewing coffee requires to discard parts of the pot, a writer’s inattentional blindness may make him indeed throw out the pot with the coffee - or the music with the money. “The only lessons I had as a child were piano lessons, and believe me, the $3 my determined mother forked over to Mrs. Donohue every Saturday morning for two years was a musical calamity” (Michael Winerip/NYT 3/28).
While money certainly isn’t a musical dilemma, Congress’s modus operandi apparently is a political one. “It is an ugly process. It was ugly when Republicans were in charge, it was ugly when Democrats were in charge” (B. Obama/Fox News 3/17/10). Was it attentional or inattentional blindness which made the speaker not see that Democrats still are in charge? Yet, according to David Brooks, Democrats prefer anyway to be remembered for their glorious past, a time when they “protected the unemployed starting with the New Deal, then the old, then the poor” (NYT 3/21/10). And what came (ro comes?) after the poor deal?

Always check the antecedent: an antecedent is an expression (usually a noun or noun phrase) to which another expression (an anaphor) refers. The relationship between noun and anaphor must be absolutely clear. Sentences in which this relationship is strained, avenge themselves on a writer's inattention by twisting his or her intention.

Missing antecedent: “...making a pot, most of which will be thrown out:” the pronoun which grammatically refers to pot instead of the correct but missing antecedent coffee. ..."making a pot of coffee, most of which will be thrown out."
Intervening antecedent: “The only lessons I had as a child were piano lessons, and believe me, the $3 my determined mother forked over to Mrs. Donohue every Saturday morning for two years was a musical calamity:” The writer probably did not want to say that the $3 were a musical calamity, rather that the lessons were. Yet the three dollars are the closest subject of the verb was to which the subject complement musical calamity can refer, and thus three dollars usurps the role of antecedent. To avoid such unclear references, the proper antecedent must be repeated and the sentence slightly changed. "... and believe me, despite the $3 my determined mother forked over to Mrs. Donohue every Saturday morning for two years, those piano lessons were a musical calamity.")
Ambiguous antecedent: They “protected the unemployed starting with the New Deal, then the old, then the poor:” Even though we can assume (based on the use of lower case versus capitals) that the old and the poor are a continuation of the list that began with the unemployed, the placement of these two items suggests that the adjectives old and poor modify the immediately preceding deal. To avoid ambiguity, the sentence needs rephrasing. "Starting with the New Deal, they protected the unemployed, then the old, then the poor."