Hello to Hello Louisville, which is good because Kevin Gibson is part of it.

Hello Louisville is a new place to read about the Louisville scene, except that it's an old place, at least according to the web site's description.

In late 2017, we started a project of highlighting Louisville, Kentucky in the way we saw it and began posting these short stories on our social channels. What began as a passion project, geared toward the local modernist, has now evolved into something more. We wanted to create a place where people in Louisville could come and find information on local eateries, breweries, farmers markets, new restaurants, old restaurants, trendy places, dog friendly places, and so much more—without the hassle of all the negative stories one may have to sift through. Don’t get us wrong, the bad is just as important as the good, but we’re here to focus on the good.

What matters to me is that Kevin Gibson is back into the mix. I'll be reading.

Hello ... from Hello Louisville (and me), by Kevin Gibson (Hello Louisville)

I started writing about the Louisville and Southern Indiana area in 1987. Yep, more than three decades as a writer, covering everything from local sports — my first assignment was a Bullitt North High School football game — to government, business, music, the arts, food and drink. Thirty-three years. (I know, I don’t look that old, do I? But I digress.)

Anyway, anyone who knows me probably knows how disappointed I was last summer when Insider Louisville abruptly shut down operations. We were literally told in a Monday morning meeting that we had to be out of our offices by end of day on Wednesday. Insider Louisville had become part of my identity in a way. I realized only when it disappeared that’s not something one recovers from quickly.

Now there’s Hello Louisville. Part of the mission here is to fill some of the void left by Insider simply by seeking out and sharing some of the best things in the city, from new restaurants and breweries, to cool events, people, new business news and anything else we think people will want to know about.

Oliver Sacks: "Information is different from knowledge."

Oliver Sacks died in 2015, and it's not clear when this essay first was published, but it's excellent. That's all I have to say. Technology obviously isn't going away. However, individuals can resist its ubiquity. I recently wrote about this.

Just an off-the-cuff rumination about taking our sweet time to get it right.

My resolution for the year 2019 is that whenever prompted to breathlessly participate in our short, social media-driven collective attention span, I'll do my very best to opt out, remain calm and seek space sufficient for deliberation.

Want me to hurry up? Sorry, this only encourages me to stop and think harder about it. Pour yourself another drink, because my musings might take a while.

Want me to scroll through the image carousel and indulge in the national flashcard kaleidoscopic consciousness? Nah. I'd rather slow down and mull the topic in depth -- and look at the pictures later, once I'm familiar with the context.

Now, to Sacks.

The Machine Stops, by Oliver Sacks (The New Yorker)

The neurologist on steam engines, smartphones, and fearing the future.

 ... I have not adjusted as well as my aunt did to some aspects of the new—perhaps because the rate of social change associated with technological advances has been so rapid and so profound. I cannot get used to seeing myriads of people in the street peering into little boxes or holding them in front of their faces, walking blithely in the path of moving traffic, totally out of touch with their surroundings. I am most alarmed by such distraction and inattention when I see young parents staring at their cell phones and ignoring their own babies as they walk or wheel them along. Such children, unable to attract their parents’ attention, must feel neglected, and they will surely show the effects of this in the years to come.

In his novel “Exit Ghost,” from 2007, Philip Roth speaks of how radically changed New York City appears to a reclusive writer who has been away from it for a decade. He is forced to overhear cell-phone conversations all around him, and he wonders, “What had happened in these ten years for there suddenly to be so much to say—so much so pressing that it couldn’t wait to be said? . . . I did not see how anyone could believe he was continuing to live a human existence by walking about talking into a phone for half his waking life.”

These gadgets, already ominous in 2007, have now immersed us in a virtual reality far denser, more absorbing, and even more dehumanizing. I am confronted every day with the complete disappearance of the old civilities. Social life, street life, and attention to people and things around one have largely disappeared, at least in big cities, where a majority of the population is now glued almost without pause to phones or other devices—jabbering, texting, playing games, turning more and more to virtual reality of every sort.

Everything is public now, potentially: one’s thoughts, one’s photos, one’s movements, one’s purchases. There is no privacy and apparently little desire for it in a world devoted to non-stop use of social media. Every minute, every second, has to be spent with one’s device clutched in one’s hand. Those trapped in this virtual world are never alone, never able to concentrate and appreciate in their own way, silently. They have given up, to a great extent, the amenities and achievements of civilization: solitude and leisure, the sanction to be oneself, truly absorbed, whether in contemplating a work of art, a scientific theory, a sunset, or the face of one’s beloved.

A few years ago, I was invited to join a panel discussion about information and communication in the twenty-first century. One of the panelists, an Internet pioneer, said proudly that his young daughter surfed the Web twelve hours a day and had access to a breadth and range of information that no one from a previous generation could have imagined. I asked whether she had read any of Jane Austen’s novels, or any classic novel. When he said that she hadn’t, I wondered aloud whether she would then have a solid understanding of human nature or of society, and suggested that while she might be stocked with wide-ranging information, that was different from knowledge. Half the audience cheered; the other half booed ...

Newspaper lip syncs ZZ Top: "We Gotsa Get Paid" for sheriff's sales notices.

Seeing as I'm very nearly paralyzed with eagerness while waiting for Sunday's multiple religion columnists, let's turn it over to Mark and Jeff to dissemble the most recent of the local chain newspaper's ever rarer editorial utterances. First their replies, then the opinion piece, called "Public notices belong in the newspaper."

C'mon, management. A region turns its lonely eyes to Son of Cooking School, which surely must be on the horizon.

Does Tom May get to do THAT one, too? Is he a shareholder yet?

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Mark Cassidy
So, you are saying that for me to get this public information, I have to buy your newspaper. Correct? Isn’t that what this all boils down to? You get paid to print it and then you get paid again when you sell the newspaper with the public information in it. Sounds pretty much like a subsidy to me.

Jeff Gillenwater
Indeed, Mark, there is nothing other than their own business plans keeping newspapers from reporting the issues mentioned without anyone purchasing an ad. Likewise, many low and fixed income people are eligible for Internet service at rates that are less than or comparable to the monthly print subscription fee. It’s often a question of who gets paid rather than how much.

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Given the critical importance of getting the word out to the public about House Bill 1212, I hope management won't mind my publishing the editor's thoughts in their entirety. Don't forget to call your legislator and tell him or her that you'd like to see another Christian advocacy column on Sunday.

OUR OPINION: Public notices belong in the newspaper, by Susan Duncan (Where the Buffalo and Tom May Roam)

H.B. 1212 limits access to foreclosure information

THE ISSUE: Indiana House Bill 1212 would change the publication requirement for notice of sheriff's sales (mortgage foreclosures), eliminating newspaper publication in favor of posting the information on a website operated by the county or the sheriff.

OUR OPINION: Publication of sheriff's sales in the local newspaper maximizes community access while closing the door on potential misconduct.

Before Indiana legislators is H.B. 1212, which passed the House Committee on Financial Institutions on a 7-3 vote. A full vote by the House could come as early as midweek.

The bill's author, Rep. Wendy McNamara, R-Evansville, has said she wants to eliminate newspaper publication of public notices altogether. We believe that goes against the public good.

Should mortgage foreclosures be relegated to digital publication, only people with internet access and an enabling device, i.e. computer, tablet or smartphone, would be able to see them. The disadvantaged would be denied access, unless they had bus fare for a daily trip to the public library.

Public notice of foreclosures protects the elderly, disabled, uneducated and those out of the country – like members of the Armed Forces. It also helps the holder of the mortgage by enlarging the pool of bidders should a property actually go to foreclosure sale. Newspaper public notices alert an entire community of an event that serves the property rights of a member of the community.

Public notices in newspapers are in plain sight. CNHI Indiana newspapers also post the notices to their websites, to ensure the widest possible public exposure. Hiding them away on government websites as McNamara suggests increases the opportunity for self-dealing or collusion. It helps attorneys who handle the foreclosure process and predatory insiders interested in buying the properties at the lowest price possible, so they can turn a larger profit on the resale after the homeowner is evicted.

Under H.B. 1212, the county or sheriff's department — with more critical duties before them — would be responsible for uploading the information. They would have to reassign or hire staff to post the information in a timely fashion, ensure its accuracy, provide proofs of publication and maintain individual listings for three years. Who would pay for that? Already overburdened taxpayers.

The cost of newspaper publication, though, falls squarely on those who benefit from the sale. That's who should pay the fee for service. And while the money does go to help pay printing costs and journalists' salaries, it's hardly a subsidy, as McNamara has framed it.

Newspapers are at their core information aggregators. Three million Hoosiers read a printed newspaper during an average week, according to data provided by the Hoosier State Press Association. They pick up the paper for many reasons, not the least of which is to peruse the Classified Ads, where jobs are found, cars are sold, and public notices are printed, everything from the school superintendent's salary and the city's budget, to name changes and, yes, sheriff's sales.

Newspapers have the expertise to maximize accuracy, oversee the integrity of the process and disseminate the information to the most people. They serve a broad audience that is looking for news.

When a choice is to be made on access to information, we urge lawmakers to join us in protecting the public's right to know. They should side with the people they serve and reject H.B. 1212.

"All facts are not equal. The fact is, people do not really know what a fact is."

We're almost six full months into 2018, and this is my favorite lead paragraph to date.

My late friend Christopher Hitchens once told me that his American friends often expressed surprise at the number of articles and books he was able to produce. He said that there was a simple reason for his high productivity, which was: “I never watch television.”

So very, very true.

All Facts Are Not Equal: Inside Claud Cockburn’s MI5 File, by Patrick Cockburn (CounterPunch)

 ... People have always had an exaggerated respect for facts and, thanks to the internet, these are now easily accessible in far greater quantities than ever before. There is a tedious debate about “fake facts”, but this is not really the problem. The fact is, people do not really know what a fact is.

My father Claud Cockburn, a journalist formerly on The Times, once did some damage to his reputation by explaining that facts were not “like pieces of gold ore in the Yukon”, waiting for the prospector to dig them out and give them to the world.

Unlike gold nuggets waiting to be excavated, there are an infinite number of facts in the universe, but these only gain significance and have a meaning because somebody – a journalist, a policeman – decides that they matter, so every fact in the media is the result of the point of view of the person who chose to report them and related them to other facts.

This theory, which became known as the “heresy of the facts”, earned my father some abuse from people who thought he was admitting, as they had long suspected, that journalists make things up.

But many years after he had written about it, I requested his file from MI5, and a year later 26 bulky folders were deposited in the National Archives at Kew. They very much bore out his belief that what mattered most was not the collection of facts, so much as the choice made about which of these were significant and true ...