{"id":4581,"date":"2010-01-04T09:23:02","date_gmt":"2010-01-04T14:23:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/2parse.com\/?p=4581"},"modified":"2010-01-04T09:23:02","modified_gmt":"2010-01-04T14:23:02","slug":"a-witness-who-thinks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/?p=4581","title":{"rendered":"A Witness Who Thinks"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

George Brock, writing about Timothy Garton Ash<\/a> (the noted journalist of the people power movements that ended the Cold War)\u00a0for the British Times Literary Supplement,<\/em> uses a profound phrase to describe what Ash does – creating the “first rough drafts of history” (borrowing a phrase) “written by a witness who thinks<\/strong>.” [My emphasis.]<\/p>\n

I suppose I like the phrase because it is what I seek to be – a witness to history who thinks.<\/p>\n

With that, welcome to 2010, and happy new year.<\/p>\n

Over the long weekend, I’ve decided on 2 changes to the blog:<\/p>\n

First, and a long time coming, I’ve decided to focus more on research and reporting – and to make that a regular feature. Given my time constraints, I’m expecting to have about 1 story a month with a significant amount of original reporting and research – with some more in-depth research and reporting complementing other opinion pieces. I have also decided to attempt to get responses from every subject of a piece who I criticize before publishing it – which I have tried to do sometimes but not always managed to do.<\/p>\n

Second, rather than the 1 or 2 long posts a day, I’ve decided to sprinkle in another 4 or so shorter posts passing along links or making minor points.<\/p>\n

[Image by me<\/a>].<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

George Brock, writing about Timothy Garton Ash (the noted journalist of the people power movements that ended the Cold War)\u00a0for the British Times Literary Supplement, uses a profound phrase to describe what Ash does – creating the “first rough drafts of history” (borrowing a phrase) “written by a witness who thinks.” [My emphasis.] I suppose […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[23,458],"tags":[2512,1242],"class_list":["post-4581","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-the-opinionsphere","tag-george-brock","tag-timothy-garton-ash"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8qcx-1bT","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4581","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4581"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4581\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4595,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4581\/revisions\/4595"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}