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Posts Tagged ‘journalism’

things I’ve started doing since the New York Times erected its paywall (and a workaround that works!)

May 12th, 11 / 1 Comment

1. I’m much slower to click on a link to a news item, whether the link is in my Google News feed or posted by a member of one of my social networks. There’s a 20-article limit each month, see, after which point readers are required to pay for access.

2. I’m likely to scan NYTimes headlines and page fronts, then search elsewhere for articles about the issues that interest me.

3. I’m extremely unlikely–one might say ‘completely unlikely’–to post a link to a New York Times article that I think might interest members of my social networks.

In part, this change in my behavior is due to my own misconceptions about what the paywall means: As this letter to subscribers from publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. (warning: this link directs you to a New York Times article) notes, readers who come to NYTimes content through social networks like Twitter and Facebook will be able to read this content for free, regardless of whether they’ve reached their 20-article limit.
There is also, it turns out, a workaround. Mashable tells you how to climb over the paywall:

Readers who have surpassed the 20-article limit can also remove “?gwh=numbers” from the URL, clear their browser caches and/or switch browsers to get rid of the pop-up message and continue reading.

Which is nice to know, though it took me almost two full months to learn about the workaround; I imagine most casual NYTimes readers haven’t bothered to find out whether this sort of back door exists. (In fact, pageviews at the NYTimes site have decreased significantly, by somewhere between 5 and 15 percent.)

And here’s another side effect: if I’m less willing to click on a link to a news item, that means I’m less likely–even if marginally so–to click on non-NYTimes links, that means my pageviews for other news sites are also going to suffer, even if marginally. And if that marginal drop in page hits is common among users like me who rely heavily on Google News and social networks for news updates, then what might be marginal for individuals becomes significant in the aggregate.

When Osama bin Laden was killed in Pakistan a few weeks ago, my first impulse was to go directly to the New York Times. Instead, I went first to CNN’s news site, then to Al Jazeera. I had never before turned to Al Jazeera as a primary source for news about the Middle East, but their coverage of bin Laden’s assassination was so excellent that I’m now a loyal reader. That change in loyalty–from the New York Times to Al Jazeera–is a direct result of the NYTimes paywall. Thanks, Arthur Sulzberger.

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arrest warrant issued in recent Bloomington anti-semitic vandalism

Dec 15th, 10 / 1 Comment

As I’ve mentioned before, the only daily non-collegiate newspaper in Bloomington, IN, is the Herald-Times. The Herald-Times sticks its news behind a paywall. This is deeply problematic, perhaps even egregiously so. When it seems useful and important, I post full stories from the Herald-Times Online here.

Bloomington has recently been the host to a spate of anti-Semitic vandalism attacks, and today a warrant was issued in relation to at least one of those attacks. When it comes to hate speech, almost nothing is more important than spreading the word about the source of the speech and the community’s reaction to it. In situations like this, a paywalled story is nothing less than shameful for the newspaper and the community.

In the comments section below the story, several readers posted links to online writing by the alleged vandal, Mark Zacharias. These writings are horrifyingly bigoted, and I’m including some of those links below. Be forewarned that you will be appalled.

Full story, paywall-free, below, followed by links to Zacharias’s racist screeds.

Warrant issued for man in IU anti-Semitic vandalism case

By Abby Tonsing 331-4245 | atonsing@heraldt.com
December 14, 2010, last update: 12/14 @ 6:47 pm

The staff directory at Goodbody Hall was vandalized on Nov. 30. H-T file photo

An arrest warrant has been issued for a man Indiana University police say vandalized the Jewish Studies Program Directory at Goodbody Hall on Nov. 30.

Mark Zacharias, 54, of Ellettsville, has been identified by police in the Goodbody Hall vandalism case, according to a news release from IU police chief Keith Cash. A rock was thrown at the staff directory for the Jewish Studies Program in the lobby of Goodbody Hall the morning of Nov. 30.

Zacharias is an IU employee at the Hutton Honors College, serving as a scholarship coordinator.

Matthew Auer, dean of the Hutton Honors College since the fall of 2008, said Zacharias largely enters scholarship activities data in his support staff role. He has worked for the office for a number of years, Auer said.

“We’re naturally upset. We work with Mark. We’re not a huge department,” Auer said Tuesday evening.

“These are allegations and we’ll have to see what’s pieced together by law enforcement,” he continued.

He described Zacharias as “quite solid in a number of ways in the work he does for us,” but said he did not know Zacharias personally outside of work.

The arrest warrant for Zacharias lists a Class D felony charge of institutional criminal mischief, campus police report. According to Indiana criminal code, a Class D felony may carry a six-month to three-year prison sentence and $10,000 in fines.

Cash said Tuesday afternoon that police do not yet have Zacharias in custody. “He may be making arrangements with an attorney to turn himself in,” Cash said. He did not have a time estimate on when Zacharias was expected to be in custody.

Campus police have interviewed Zacharias two times, Cash estimated. Zacharias did not have an attorney present in those interviews with police. Cash could not comment on what Zacharias said in the police interviews or if he admitted to the vandalism to the Jewish Studies Program directory at Goodbody Hall.

“This will be treated like any other instance where an employee is accused of a criminal act. And we’ll immediately review his employment status,” IU spokesman Larry MacIntyre said in a phone interview Tuesday evening. “I don’t know what the decision will be.”

IU employees can, for example, be placed on administrative leave during police investigations.

“I don’t think we’ve made a decision yet on which status he’ll be placed under,” MacIntyre concluded Tuesday evening. “But we do consider this a serious charge.”

Auer said members of the Hutton Honors College had already started working with University Human Resource Services on how to proceed.

The rock-throwing incident at Goodbody Hall is just one of several reports of anti-Semitic vandalism campus and city police have investigated since Nov. 23. Rocks have been thrown through windows twice at the Chabad House, once at the Hillel Center and once at the United Presbyterian Church, where a Jewish group meets. On Nov. 29, eight different Hebrew texts were taken from research collection shelves at IU’s Wells Library, where they were thrown in toilets and urinated on.

IU police are continuing their investigation into the recent acts of anti-Semitic vandalism.

Here are some things this guy has said out loud:

Disturbed by bus attack

To the editor:

On Dec. 1, 1955, 42-year-old African-American Rosa Parks became famous for refusing to obey Montgomery, Ala., bus driver James Blake’s order that she give up her seat to a white passenger. Because of this act of civil disobedience, Rosa Parks became an enduring symbol of the American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. On Tuesday, Dec. 4, 2007, when 26-year-old white American Sarah Kreager tried to sit down on a Baltimore, Md., city bus, an African-American teenager told her she couldn’t. When she attempted to take another seat, another African-American teenager wouldn’t let her. Finally, Sarah just sat down. She was immediately attacked by nine African-American teenagers, three females and six males. They punched and kicked her and then dragged her off the bus. Her life was saved by the intervention of a woman from a corner house at the intersection of 33rd Street and Chestnut Avenue. Sarah had to be transported to the University of Maryland Shock Trauma Center.

In 1955, the time had come for an American civil rights movement. In 2007, the time has come for another American civil rights movement.

-MARK ZACHARIAS, Ellettsville

In a comment on a Dec 2008 story, Mark Zacharias wrote:

Black men have been lazy, immoral, spoiled, and irresponsible — and also violent. The black community and our society in general has accomodated and enable this behavior — and it has become increasingly bad over time. Rap and hip hop reflect the values of black males: bling-bling, 9mm pistols, sunglasses, misogyny, sexism, racism, violence and thuggery are all glorified in their “music” (rap and hip hop are not music, they’re nothing but racket) — not to mention wearing their caps sideways and their pants below their rear-ends. Black males don’t want to join our society, they have no desire to become responsible and mature adults and make a contribution. They want to make fast money as drug-dealers, “entertainers”, athletes, etc. They’re not willing to roll up their sleeves and get to work. And so it goes…

Puh.

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on wikileaks and public delusion

Dec 2nd, 10 / 0 Comments

There’s a scene in season 4, episode 3 of the new Doctor Who series that goes like this:

Donna: It’s weird, being with you, I can’t tell what’s right and what’s wrong any more.
The Doctor: It’s better that way. People who know for certain tend to be like Mr. Halpen.

Julian Assange appears to be the single leader of Wikileaks, which makes it exactly the kind of centralized power structure that he loathes so much. Further, he’s attempting to wield his power in the same kinds of ways he decries in others–by calling for resignations, by speaking with arrogance about his own / Wikileaks’ importance, etc. Oh–and ALSO, Wikileaks and Assange himself are absolutely cloaked in secrecy. So in the end, are we looking at another example of ‘meet the new boss, same as the old boss’?

ON THE OTHER HAND:

Wikileaks is forcing us to deal with issues we didn’t really care to think about: our classical diplomatic ideal no longer holds up in an era of increased openness and transparency. National ‘borders,’ whatever we thought they meant, no longer mean what we thought they meant. And the idea that established news sources are the best resources an educated public has at its disposal…well, hmm.

Lots of us have been crowing about the new ‘pro/am’ era of news generation, an era in which ‘the people’ have as much capacity to shape and report events as do journalists. But here we have vast swaths of information that was neither reported by established news sources nor reported by citizen journalists–it took the establishment of a new institution–Wikileaks–for this information to be made available. And its availability still depends on the willingness of mainstream media sources to report the information back to us. So I wonder: When it comes to reporting and shaping the news, are ‘we’ really as powerful as ‘we’ have been telling ourselves we are?

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book review: Kenneth King’s Germs Gone Wild

Nov 1st, 10 / 0 Comments

summary: and you thought you saw journalists, scientists, and the government as dissemblers and obfuscators before….

At any given point in my life, I have a small handful of friends and acquaintances who view me as an angry, bitter human being who holds her rage inside like it’s a cold and heavy stone. My pal Rafi tells me I should let go of my anger because it’s weighing me down and wearing me out.

But although I’m angry at an awful lot of goddam bullshit going on in the world, I’m not an angry person. Even though I spend lots of my time railing against injustice, I’m actually fairly joyful most of the time–even, sometimes, while I’m really effing mad. I take enormous joy in truth, in all its versions, and I get mad when someone or something stands as a barrier to the truth being told. I get mad when people tell lies, and I get mad when people believe lies. It’s sort of why I got into all this social justice stuff in the first place.

That’s why I’m really enjoying Kenneth King’s book Germs Gone Wild: How the Unchecked Development of Domestic Biodefense Threatens America. I’m not an expert on bioterrorism or advances in biodefense research, so if you want to know if this text is an Important Addition to the Growing Evidence that Biodefense Research is Bad, you’ll have to look elsewhere. I am sort of an expert in crusading against lying liars and the lies they tell, though, and from that perspective I can tell you that this text is an important addition to that growing canon.

Much of this text is focused on the efforts of a small group of citizens to fight the establishment of the nation’s second-largest biodefense lab in rural Pulaski County, Kentucky. According to King, the lion’s share of the fight was against an onslaught of pro-biolab propaganda that declared the planned lab to be, according to U.S. Rep Hal Rogers, “as safe as going to Wal-Mart.” King shares statistic after statistic designed to dismantle this propaganda, and in the process he paints a picture of politicians, scientists, and journalists as misguided or misinformed at best; at worst, they are shown to be master dissemblers, motivated by greed and fear.

King–a longtime Kentucky resident–makes no bones about how angry he is. If the title doesn’t clue you in to the general attitude of this book with respect to America’s biodefense industry, then you’ll have it figured out by the third paragraph of Chapter One, in which King refers to regional proponents of expanding biodefense research as “the local ‘influentsia’.” On page 2, you’ll see King point to “biodefense shucking and jiving” as he describes his decision to join in on efforts to block the expansion of biodefense within America’s borders. This is a man who is clearly deeply committed to truth-telling and equally deeply committed to pulling back the curtain on what he perceives as anyone’s efforts to obscure the truth.

For example: King describes the objection of U.S. Representative Gene Green (D-TX) to the use of the term “bio-weapons agents” to describe what he says are actually “infectious agents occurring naturally in nature”; Green wonders if there might be a more accurate and less emotionally charged term to describe the chemical compounds mixed in biolabs around the country. The research scientist being questioned by Green agrees with him. “Ah yes,” King writes,

poor misunderstood bioweapons angents. All those decades of being abused by mad scientists in the U.S., Great Britain, and Russia, brutalized and trained to be CIA and KGB killers–anthrax, brucella, tularemia, smallpox, Ebola. Forcefully tattooed with swastikas; implanted with Bjorg control modules; forced to assassinate generations of monkeys and guinea pigs and pretend they enjoyed it. When all they really wanted to do was snuggle up in a dead cow leg somewhere in a Texas ditch and get back in touch with their inner cowboy.

And poor misunderstood biodefense complex, which is not in the scary old bioweapons agent business at all, but is just trying to do the humane thing and give these poor abandoned germ orphans some rehabilitation and stability in their lives…. And isn’t it wonderful how we were able to spend $60 billion plus to save the millions of Americans the Graham-Talent WMD Commission predicts will die sometime in the next decade from excessive consumption of sick rabbits and the careless handling of cow carrion? Please, whatever you do, don’t call the germs in biodefense laboratories bioweapons agents. Call them emerging pathogens, or Little Orphan Annies, or little boll weevils, jes-a-looking-for-a-home.

King’s furious that anyone would dare to lie so baldfacedly, to obfuscate and rename and dance around the truth so persistently. That’s an anger I understand.

Whether King makes a convincing case is probably better left to someone who wasn’t already pretty much in his camp in the first place. And by the way, if you are on the fence about whether the federal government really does work against the best interests of its own citizens, if you aren’t convinced that the majority of the “credible terrorist threat” rhetoric is intended to keep us afraid and willing to give up our own and others’ freedoms and safety, then this probably isn’t the book for you.

If you are already convinced, even partially, of any of the above, then this book offers a heartfelt, genuine David-and-Goliath story, except that in this case Goliath basically wins. But the Bible doesn’t tell us very much about why David would try to fight Goliath in the first place, while Germs Gone Wild gives us a glimpse into why King has taken up this particular crusade. As King explains, the 2007 campaign against the Pulaski biolab came at a time of great personal loss for him: His wife had recently died suddenly; his parents were suffering from ill health; and–though he never comes out and says this–it becomes clear that King is looking for somewhere to channel his pain and his energies.

The only significant stumbling block of this book is its density–it weighs in at just under 500 pages and contains so many acronyms that I kept wishing for a glossary to help me keep them straight. Then again, the history of contemporary bio-warfare is a complicated one, and by the end I ended up wondering if the acronyms weren’t just another tactic for keeping the public passive and confused. That’s what this book does so well: Leaves you wondering whether you really were skeptical enough about the government before you started reading it.

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Fox News is either stupid or evil. Which is it?

Aug 26th, 10 / 0 Comments

If it wasn’t clear already, I’m with Wyatt Cenac on Team Evil.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c

The Parent Company Trap

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

how Jim Gee and I soothe our guilty consciences

Jun 8th, 10 / 0 Comments

In the video below of a presentation to the Education Writers Association 2010 Annual Conference, Jim Gee says this about how to introduce innovative ideas into education:

There’s a choice of strategies here…. One strategy is: Let’s take our innovations to the center of the school system and spread them as fast and quickly as we can. People believe that this current school system as it is will just co-opt those innovations and make them … just better ways to do the old thing. Another strategy is: Let’s make these innovative learning and assessment tools and put them at the margins, in places that will tolerate innovation, and then show it works. Now if you think about it, in technology outside of schools, going to the margins first and then to the center–that’s always been the way innovation happens. The only place we’ve ever tried to keep putting the new thing right in the center at once is in schooling, and it’s never worked. What i would love to see is that we hive of some of the (Race to the Top) money for a national center that would trial these new assessments, show they work in places that tolerate innovation, and then spread them there, just the way you would want if we have to keep coal and oil–let’s at least have something trying out new forms of energy, so that we’re ready for these markets but also we can prove they work. if we don’t do that, we’re just gonna get a better mousetrap.

I absolutely agree with the sentiments in the quote above, except for the BP oil spill. Let’s say there’s some innovative energy research going on in the margins, ready to prove it works and to take over where coal and oil left off. That’s fantastic, and it doesn’t do a single goddamned thing to help the birds, the fish, the sea mammals, the tourist industry, the ecosystem, the fisheries, and the human residents of the Gulf Coast. Those are simply casualties, not a single thing we can do to help them now no matter what awesome innovative fuel source we finally embrace, no matter how much more quickly we may embrace a cleaner fuel source as a result. Even if tomorrow’s birds are safe from Big Oil, today’s birds are drowning right in front of us.

Working at the margins of education is a fantastic way to innovate and offer useful evidence that innovations work. I fully support this approach–but not at the expense of the kids who exist at the center of our education system today. Yes, the school system can and does and maybe always will co-opt any innovation we try to introduce. But that doesn’t excuse us from trying anyway. That doesn’t give us license to give up on today’s children, even if it keeps tomorrow’s children safe.

And of course this isn’t what Jim Gee wants to do, anyway. But the Jim Gees of the world who urge us to work at the margin live in symbiosis with the Jenna McWilliamses of the world who believe we must also work from the center, where–ironically–the most marginalized kids in education commonly reside. I can’t innovate as much as I’d like from the center, maybe I can’t help tomorrow’s marginalized kids as much as I’d like either. And Jim Gee can’t help today’s marginalized kids as much as he’d probably like from the edges. So we need each other, if for nothing else than to assuage our guilty consciences for being unable to do more of what we know must be done.

I should probably also note that Jim Gee is one of my absolute all-time heroes, so I hope he’s not mad at me for this post.

This video also stars Daniel Schwartz, who I believe is one of the smartest guys thinking about assessment and learning these days. I had the great luck to attend an assessment working group with him and a big crew of assessment-focused researchers, and I was amazed and blown away by just about everything he said.

In a recent publication, Choice-Based Assessments in a Digital Age (.pdf), Schwartz and his co-author Dylan Arena make this argument:

Educational assessment is a normative endeavor: The ideal assessment both reflects and reinforces educational goals that society deems valuable. A fundamental goal of education is to prepare students to act independently in the world—which is to say, to make good choices. It follows that an ideal assessment would measure how well we are preparing students to do so.

I can’t remember when I’ve agreed more emphatically with the introductory sentence of a scholarly article about education.

Here’s the video, which is well worth a watch.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyiOlWXDd-Q&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0]

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This I Believe: informed citizenship and informed citizenry

Jun 1st, 10 / 0 Comments

Here’s an inalienable right for you: the right to informed citizenship.

Citizenship, the informed kind, has two distinct angles to it. The first is the personal: We, all of us, have an absolutely inalienable right to the information that allows us to act in a civic and socially responsible way, and Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise thereof. The second is the social: We, all of us, have an absolutely inalienable right to live in a society populated by informed citizens. We have a right to live among an informed citizenry, and any policy, law, or practice that restricts this right exists in opposition to a free and functional democracy.

In America, we embrace the right to informed citizenship; or, more accurately, we shout our support of informed citizenship up to the very rafters. Then we give Big Business a million incendiary devices to burn down that house.

There are explosives, like the recent SCOTUS decision knocking down campaign finance laws and giving corporate lobbyists unfettered access to our legislative and executive branches (and, by extension, the judicial branch as well).

Then there’s the kindling, the petrol, the oxygen that keeps the fire blazing. Among the most powerful of these is the news paywall, which sequesters off information to which citizens have an absolute right. In theory, paywalls are no different from their precursors, subscription fees and newsstand prices. But two things have changed–our model of citizenship, and our access to circulated information–since those pre-internet days.

For example: In 1990-1991, during the first Gulf War, news was circulated fairly evenly across multiple platforms. An American who didn’t want to pay for a newspaper could still gather information through television and radio. She could walk into a library and read the news for free. Certainly this wasn’t a utopian ideal of a free press on every street corner, but the news that enabled a citizen to act was available through multiple outlets.

Today, the speed and reach of internet news sources make them by far the dominant news circulation platform. Indeed, the speed and reach of internet news are part of why a new model of citizenship is emerging. If there was ever a time when it was possible to measure civic engagement by looking at voter turnout on Election Day, that time is long past. Today’s civically engaged citizen is the one who is aware of Facebook’s abominable approach to privacy and has made decisions about how (or whether) to use Facebook as a result of this knowledge. Today’s informed citizen may not know how many electoral votes are needed for a candidate to win the presidency, but she knows how to find that information when necessary. She votes on Election Day, sure, but she also votes with her feet and her eyeballs and her fingertips, constantly making informed decisions about how to parcel out her energy and time, when to dance along with corporate and political influences and when to resist, when to leave the dance floor entirely.

Paywalls make it harder for an informed citizen to stay informed, which in turn restricts my right to live among an informed citizenry. It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that the news that sticks is the news that spreads–via blogs, social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, and news aggregating sites like Boingboing. News that’s stuck behind a paywall is news that can’t spread and is therefore news that dies.

And that’s not all: I believe that news paywalls are likely to have long-term effects on citizenship, as well, since I agree with James Seddon’s point in his recent Wired article that young people who grow up without unfettered access to local news are likely to grow up without a sense of social and civic connection to their communities.

I recognize that the current business model for print journalism isn’t working. I recognize that newspapers need to do something if they want to try to save their jobs. But in America, the eight-year reign of Baby Bush notwithstanding, we don’t let business interests trump fundamental human rights.

I’m rooting for newspapers, I really am. I hope they survive this challenge. But news paywalls are in direct opposition to our fundamental right to informed citizenship, and my message to the print media folks is this: Find another way.

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a call for businesses to boycott the Bloomington Herald-Times

May 28th, 10 / 20 Comments

Tonight will mark the last commencement ceremony for Aurora Alternative High School, whose doors will shut at the end of this school year after 15 years of serving the Bloomington, IN, community.

The Bloomington Herald-Times ran a nice short article about Aurora this morning, which I’m posting in a separate post. I’m posting it here instead of directing you to the article because the Herald-Times has stuck its online content behind a paywall, a decision I oppose deeply. The paywall seems even more wrongheaded and socially irresponsible during times of community crisis, as in, for example, when an economic recession paired with terribly short-sighted and heinously pro-rich tax laws force local school boards to make excruciating decisions about which programs to cut.

The publisher of the Herald-Times, Mayer Maloney, has stood firmly behind the paywall decision from its inception, arguing that it guarantees advertisers’ access to local readers who, because they live in the community, are far more likely to purchase the goods and services being advertised.

Let’s analyze this stance. First, the paywall is not an effort to recruit local readers; it’s an effort to keep non-local readers out. Which means that what happens in Bloomington stays in Bloomington, since the vast majority of readers live or work in the region.

Second, the economic value of a local newspaper is directly related to its community value, and community value is directly related to the newspaper’s penetration into the community it serves. As I’ve mentioned before, the Herald-Times is pretty much the only game in town, which perhaps explains why Maloney feels justified in prioritizing the paper’s value to advertisers over its value to community members. But eventually, I believe this approach will fail the Herald-Times. It’s inevitable that one of the following will happen: Another news outlet will provide good (or good enough) local reporting that will be made freely available to all community members; or, in the absence of another quality news source, a community whose primary news source is sequestered behind a paywall will be a community to whom local news matters less and less. Maloney has said that subscription rates have been steady since the inception of the paywall, and this may be so; but it won’t be so forever.

And even if business remains good at the Herald-Times, this doesn’t justify the social irresponsibility of making news available only to those who are willing to pay. Especially during times of crisis–and let’s not mistake this time for anything less than crisis–access to local news is essential for an engaged, politically active community.

If the Herald-Times refuses to stand down from its short-sighted position on news paywalls, then I call for local businesses to boycott the paper for the good of the community these businesses serve. If the Herald-Times will not heed the needs of its community members, then perhaps it will listen to the groups whose interests do seem to matter.

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my mom gets on CNN

Apr 12th, 10 / 0 Comments

I recently published a post about my mom, Janet McWilliams, who has been fighting an excessively high water bill and has had a great deal of trouble getting local officials to respond to her attempts to communicate about the bill. After months of trying to communicate with township officials about her bill, she got tired of getting stonewalled and turned to local news media.

A letter to the editor of the local newspaper led to an article in the same newspaper, which led to a television interview with local news affiliate WDIV, which led to distribution across multiple national networks, including MSNBC and CNN. The video below ran on local stations, and clips from this video have been running on CNN’s Headline News for the last two days.

Despite the media attention, my mom hasn’t heard a thing from her local officials, who were also apparently contacted by the various media outlets and were not available for comment. I’ve also contacted several local and state officials about the issue and haven’t heard back. I’ll let you know if anyone does manage to get a response from those folks, but don’t hold your breath.

For now, enjoy my mom’s moment in the sun!

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