dan oshinsky dot com: A blog about journalism. And my mother.

Jorge Chávez International Airport is not a fun place to be, especially after midnight when you’re leaving Peru but your flight back to Houston has been delayed yet again. But my delay at Lima’s airport gave me a few minutes to reflect on my recent trip abroad, and especially on a few things that I (…)

Today is my birthday, and my annual reminder of how much I dislike the concept of time. Truth is, time is unfair. When I see someone wearing a watch, I don’t see someone with punctuality in mind. I see someone slowly counting down the seconds until the grave. What is a day, after all? It’s (…)

About a month ago, I started writing a blog post that I never finished. It was about Dunbar’s Number, which explains a simple human limitation: we can only really care about so many people. Dunbar puts a limit on it: 150. But thanks to Facebook and Twitter, we’re more easily connected to others than ever (…)

What follows is a brief thought about the nature of God. It is not a serious thought. I hope you do not find it blasphemous. — Dan I have recently begun to consider the idea that if there a God, he is probably not very good at multitasking. I’ll direct you to this recent study, (…)

Soon, I found myself keeping score. About to graduate, aimless, preparing for joblessness and possessing a degree worth about as much as the paper it was printed on, I realized — belatedly — that I wasn’t exactly a modern guarantee of potential. I started searching for something tangible, something worthwhile to get me through my (…)

The revelation came to me in the moments before sleep, and I went searching for something to scribble it down on. All I could find was a small envelope on my kitchen table. But what else could I be expected to write on in such a moment? What hit me last night, what pulled me (…)

There is a very good chance that my generation is totally screwed. Certain jobs are disappearing, and that’s a shame. It’s a shame that copy editors at newspapers are being fired. It’s a shame that accountants are being replaced by inexpensive computer software. It’s a shame that elevator operators are out of jobs (and have (…)

The chart above is from Steve Rubel’s blog, and I think it’s a monumentally important step in terms of defining the scope of all this new media. (1) I’ll let Mr. Rubel explain what the chart means in terms of his blog: How would you feel about a structure like this where I theme the (…)

I’d like to take just a minute to discuss a word that, too often, gets misused and misapplied in the English language. I’m talking, of course, about the word ‘dedication.’ It’s a word that gets associated with athletes and scholars and really anyone for whom hard work is a core value. But I’d like to (…)

I had a very strange feeling of sensory overload this afternoon, and it nearly ended with me driving to the grocery store for the sole purpose of buying clam chowder. Now I feel compelled to explain why. Of course, I’ll understand if you’re not interested; this story doesn’t exactly fit with this blog’s two main (…)