In the Charlotte Tradition: Lily Sheep & Flock

For many, myself included, one of the seminal reads of our youth was the traumatizing, tantalizing and entertaining story of a writer, surrogate mom and spider, Charlotte. EB White’s “Charlotte’s Web” is indeed a masterpiece, and recently I watched two movies that are in its tradition.

Like “Charlotte’s Web,” both “The Sheep Detective” and “Project Hail Mary” feature nonhuman characters who reveal a lot about humanity. It’s a common modern narrative device, used in novels and movies and TV shows, to have the non-human commentator observe humans and remind us of how weird we sometimes are. Think many Pixar or Disney sidekicks, Leonard Nimoy as Spock on the Enterprise or Alan Tudyk as the resident alien in Resident Alien.

Anyway, I’m sure Charlotte isn’t the first example of this trope, but she’s one of the ones who has the power to awaken new ways of looking at the world. Selfless love, mortality, empathy—it’s all there in that arachnid. And, for that matter, in that lovable bundle of stones in “Project Hail Mary.”

By the way, I appreciate the humor of Andy Weir, who wrote the book and named Dr. Leland Grace, even if someone else had to point out to me one of the obvious puns: Dr. Grace is the only human to survive on the spaceship Hail Mary. Hail Mary is full of Grace. I’ll write more later about that particular movie after I finish the book it’s based on. Don’t hold your breath—I’m a reader, but I read like I ride a bicycle or tricycle. Very slowly.

For now, back to the town of Denbrook and the intrepid ewe Lily and her flock, who work with a bumbling local police officer to solve the murder of the flock’s beloved shepherd. Obligatory and probably unnecessary aside: Yes, as I reflect on this tale, there will be spoilers—such is the nature of commentary. You have been mildly warned.

To anthropomorphize animals (or humanize aliens) is a  common narrative tool that doesn’t always work. That’s the way with character tropes in any story, I suppose. If the animals are two-dimensional stereotypes, the story may be entertaining but ultimately fails. It’s the “Penguins of Madagascar” trap—you can have action sequences, witty quips and still come up with a stale tale that’s flat and forgettable.

“The Sheep Detective” is anything but flat. Through the eyes and ears of ewes and rams, the film ruminates well on prejudice, bullying, murder, mortality and the role of memory.

I appreciate the ensemble nature of the flock. The murdered shepherd, George Hardy, has spent each evening reading murder mysteries to his sheep, and Lily has taken in the nature and “rules” of such stories. She’s not alone—there is the hapless Winter Lamb, the excluded and abused Wilbur of our story. There’s the sometimes-sad Mopple, “cursed” with the ability to remember when other sheep can easily forget. There’s Sebastian, the Aragorn of our tale: the rugged, masculine outsider with his own tragic back story.

And like Fern in “Charlotte’s Web,” another aspect of this pleasing story is that the humans also have complex layers. For a while, I suspected the harsh lawyer—Lydia Harbottle, who is excellently played by the wonderful Emma Thompson—but it turns out she’s just a really tempting red herring. There’s Tim Derry, played by Nicholas Braun, the bumbling small-town cop who, despite his limits and awkwardness, in the end is smart enough to figure it out (led by the sheep, of course).

The comedy is partly what keeps this movie moving through it’s darker thematic elements. Like many entertaining mysteries, it both keeps you on your toes and tickles your funny bone. Lily, voiced by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, undergoes genuine growth. She learns to remember even the painful past as the way to be fully alive, and ends up embracing the outcast Winter Lamb.

Several main characters die, and their deaths have impact. The killer is satisfyingly caught. The lost daughter returns to read to the sheep and keep the now enlarged flock going.

It’s a satisfying, well-done animal story that made this viewer feel more fully human, and that’s the mark of storytelling that’s not baaaaaad.

Hoping a Meeting Sparks More Journalism

Jada Veasey, adjunct advisor to the MMU Times.

The cookies were exceptional and the energy was good. I hope it picks up and something comes of it—the energy, that is.

On March 12, I was invited to speak with a small number of Mount Mercy University students in the newsroom of the Mount Mercy Times. For various reasons, the Times, which had been a student newspaper in years past and now is a student online news source, has been inactive this year, and some at MMU are hoping to change that.

I retired in May 2025 as a communication professor at MMU, and was the faculty advisor to the Times for two decades. This year, a relatively recent MMU graduate, Jada Veasey, was named as the adjunct advisor to the Times. I was speaking with the students at her invitation.

The main reason to bring me in, I think, was to give the students a sense of what journalistic writing is—how a news story is structured. But I started by asking the students what they were doing in the room—what they saw as the role of journalism at MMU.

The questioned stumped them, a bit, but that’s OK. I wasn’t seeking a quick answer nor a “correct” answer, I was more interested in prompting them to think about the “why” of the MMU Times. If you know why you’re doing journalism, the “how” has something to drive it.

Lainey Henley, sophomore English and political science major.

Anyway, we had a bit of a broad-ranging philosophical discussion, and then I went over a bit of newswriting 101. I reviewed, briefly, what a lede is, what a bridge is and how to proceed form there.

It was way too quick to turn aspiring writers into journalists but I guess the whole point of the meeting wasn’t to cover a semester’s worth of intro to journalism. It was more to try to feed the spark, prime the pump, get the students to get out there and get started.

Kade McPherrin, sophomore social work major with a minor in sociology.

Meanwhile, Jada, the advisor, also has her own cooking blog and had brought in a set of chocolate chip cookies to test our reactions.

I don’t know how the open-ended ramblings of the old man would be rated. I did leave the meeting feeling good about the potential for student journalism at MMU and hoping that the students, who were only a day away from Spring Break, would feel now is the time to dive in and get something done. As for the cookies, my rating was simple. They were 10 of 10.

Keira Carper, senior English major and creative writing minor.

Jada, a registered nurse in her day job, was an excellent student journalist at MMU. As a nursing student, she had a difficult, time-consuming major, yet managed to make time to be a guiding light at the Times. She seems to viscerally understands that a community, even a student community, is richer and more informed with journalists active in it.

I think the students there sensed that, too. I hope that they live it.

Missing The Disappearing American Newspaper

A few sobering notes from a report called “The State of Local News 2025” by the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University: Since 2025, the number of daily newspapers in the United States has declined by 40 percent. News deserts, defined as a county in which there is no local news outlet, increased from 150 in 2005 to 210 in 2025.

Well, I don’t live in a news desert, but it is getting dry out there.

Map of news deserts--there are still a lot of local news sources in U.S., but many local outlets like The Gazette are far less robust than they recently were. Map from: 

https://localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu/projects/state-of-local-news/2025/report/

In November, The Gazette, my local newspaper, announced that it was being sold—going from an employee-owned local company to the property of something called Adams Multimedia.

And the change comes with cuts to the shrinking Gazette news staff. For example, long-time sports journalists Mike Hlas and JR Ogden wrote farewell columns. I’ll miss then both, but JR in particular, since he was very kind to many students of mine over the years.

As an old news man, of course that makes me a bit sad. Four decades ago, I was working hard as a local journalist in a small town in Missouri. Those were difficult, busy days, but rewarding ones, too. I later became a business journalist covering banking and then a professor at a small university teaching media writing and editing skills. Because of my background, I can’t claim to be neutral about news nor the decline in the newspaper industry.

But I also firmly believe we, the larger “we,” are suffering due to the loss of local news. It does feel like we’re living in a time and culture that celebrates ignorance and doesn’t discern well between fact and nonsense. Our “marketplace of ideas” is too often a cacophony of competing “realities” where everyone is shouting and nobody is listening nor watching the watcher.

Dec. 8 front page of The Gazette.

As the Gazette continues, it feels like it’s a shadow of its old self, an army on a long death march that sadly seems to have the end in sight.

The world turns and changes. Back when I was a reporter for The Boonville Daily News, there wasn’t an internet. Communication scholars were aware of a growing online world and anticipated something that they called the “information appliance,” without necessarily understanding it would be our phones that would come untethered from our desks and walls and start accompanying us everywhere and seducing us with their siren call of social media—and, these days, AI deep fakes.

When our attention shifted to the online world and ad revenue followed our ears and eyeballs, the demise of the local newspaper became an almost inevitable byproduct. But the shift of my local newspaper from local ownership to a Minnesota based regional media chain still hurts. In the 1980s, the newspaper I worked for went from being owned by a small chain to a larger regional company, and the shift was catastrophic—the paper became un-tethered from serving its audience and entered a deep decline.

I would wish that a similar fate doesn’t await The Gazette. The loss of many respected and experienced staff members doesn’t bode well. Then again, yet that doesn’t mean that The Gazette could have continued operating the way it had been. The meta forces at work in the media world are inevitably going to reshape who informs or misinforms us and how.

Nothing is as it was—that’s life. The world turns. We hope that the long arc of history is bending towards a better future, but that is clearly not always the case.

I can’t help the feeling that part of our current cultural, political mess is an extension of The Washington Post’s tagline: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” Maybe there are glimmers of light in new online media yet to emerge but it’s feeling very twilight out there, and that makes me melancholy.

Cue Joni:

 

 

Netflix Movie Touches on What Music Means

The fictional members of imaginary KPop group Huntr/X, Zoey, Rumi and Mira, Netflix image.

“Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung.”
Pierre de Beaumarchais, “The Barber of Seville”

As a retired media professor, I’ll disclose right up front that I am ignorant of music. I never took an intro to music class, never learned to play an instrument (beyond briefly ringing in a hand bell choir) and don’t have insight into music structure or history or much of anything else.

Yet, I have required students in the past to use music in a communication class—to pick a song of their choice that includes a video, and unpack what they see as the communication meanings or concepts portrayed in the work. I don’t doubt that Pierre had a point—“Baby Shark” is sung, after all. But even a musically ignorant person can understand that music, including pop songs, can be very expressive of ideas both verbally and non verbally.

And one of the points I was indirectly making to students is that communication is both data and feelings. So music, even pop music, can express our inner feelings. Music can have depth.

Which brings me to this year’s movie phenomenon, “KPop Demon Hunters.” As an old man, I freely admit I have zero experience with KPop. I’m aware of the term, but this Netflix movie served as my introduction to the genre.

And what an introduction. The movie follows three pop singers, Rumi, Zoey and Mira. The trio, a KPop group called Huntr/X, is also the chosen group, a mystical, generational set of super heroes who protect the world from demons through both their songs and their fighting prowess.

It’s “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” meets “Frozen.” Except it’s more than that. For one things, although I wish there was more character development, it’s got multiple characters who are complicated and surprising. Not just the trio, who each has their own distinct characteristics, but the demon boy band, the demon king, the band manager, the quack doctor—there are lots of interesting characters who are well written and well acted.

The story is fantastic, but works because it’s both animated, which gives it lots of license to be in its own imaginary reality, and internally cohesive. The characters believe in their universe and behave reasonably as a result.

And—those songs. This is an animated musical where each song works—they are catchy, well sung, lyrically interesting and advance the story. That it’s pop music doesn’t detract from its quality. Pretty much any of the videos of the songs would have worked in my class—there are characters and depth in each to dig into, communication ideas interestingly expressed.

True, I found the song about soda pop to be the musical equivalent of the food—there’s not a lot of depth there .But then again, in the context of the movie, these are demons attempting to snag fans, not anybody expressing truths about their life.

For me, the song that hit the most was the final one. I wish it had more set up—the quick resolution of the movie was, in my mind, one of its weaknesses—but I like both the sound and the lyrics of this song. “My voice without the lies, this is what it sounds like?” Yeah, I have fallen in love with three cartoon girls by that point. There are lots of quotable lines in the song “What it Sounds Like,” but I really love one of its final verses:

“We broke into a million pieces, and we can't go back
But now we're seeing all the beauty in the broken glass
The scars are part of me, darkness and harmony
My voice without the lies, this is what it sounds like.”

It’s a message of truth and self-acceptance. I’m not a poet, but it seems like decent poetry to me, wrapped in a catchy pop sound.

There is a lot that I like about the movie. The cast, both signing and speaking, seems excellent. The look of the movie is bright, colorful and eye catching. There is a serious tone and message, but also a lot of silliness and levity.

I feel lucky that I didn’t see this movie on Netflix. They released a “sing along” movie theatre version, and a grandson wanted his grandparents to go with him and his mother to see it. Luckily, I saw it in Iowa, a Midwestern state where most movie audiences are too uptight to actually sing along, so no audience voices interfered with the songs.

It’s not a perfect movie. As noted earlier, to me the resolution was nice but too rushed and needed more setup. The demon king could have used a much more effective physical appearance, particularly for the climatic battle. I liked seeing girls portrayed as creatures who actually eat, but they were also razor thin, which cut against that message. The quick cuts and pace sometimes gave the movie a too frantic feel to me.

Still, it’s very good. It’s an animated film that can appeal to a grandson and his grandfather. It’s Golden.

TB Persists as Deadly Disease Because We Allow It

 

My copy of John Green's latest.

The author John Green has a nifty tradition—when he has a new book coming out, he gets a bunch of paper and signs his name to thousands of sheets, which then go into the first edition of the book.

Thus, my copy of “Everything is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection” has “signed edition” on the cover and a Sharpie Scrawled “John” on a page before the title page.

I have a J name, too, but not such a great J as John.

I recently read the book. I recommend it. But be prepared for some frustration.

Not with John, whose prose is breezy and readable, but with what he recounts. I’m not surprised that our deadliest infectious disease attacks our lungs—as the recent COVID-19 pandemic and previous flu pandemics show, our bodily oxygen interface is a vulnerable system in our anatomy.

So, why did I feel frustration? As Green reports, in 2023, more than a million people died from tuberculosis, “more than died from malaria, typhoid and war combined.”

We only have ourselves to blame for wars—they are not an inevitable part of nature that is imposed on us.

Tuberculosis, on the other hand, is natural, and it is also curable and has been for many decades. We found out how to cure this stubborn bacterial infection in the 1950s, yet it still harvests more souls than any other other human disease. Why?

“The cure is where the disease is not, and the disease is where the cure is not,” Green writes. That reality, made worse this year as America pulls back from life-saving foreign aid efforts, is a result of poor human decisions.

Anyway, one interesting aspect of Green’s book is the history of tuberculosis—how it was framed and what it meant. TB was a bit romanticized before we understood what the disease actually was. It caused sufferers to waste away, and was conflated with some rather messed up feminine body ideals—if the cultural aspiration is that women should be pale and thin, as it has been in some Western cultures, a disease that slowly causes its poor sufferers to waste away (it was once called “consumption” because the disease consumes the body) has some chic, some cool factor, in a sick (literal and figurative) way.

It was even at times associated with intelligence and education—and for many White “experts” back in the day, there was suspicion that Black people could not get TB. It was an upper class disease, or so they thought when diseases overall were way more common and hard to diagnose.

Then, as the 19th century faded in to the 20th, it became known that TB was caused by a specific germ, a bacterium. It was not genetic; it was not from character or intelligence—it was aided by crowding and filthy living conditions. Very quickly, TB went from being “cool” to being associated with the lower orders.

Finally, hooray, in the post WWII world, antibiotics knocked tuberculosis down and made it rare—in places. In others, where drugs are less available and more expensive, where modern health care does not exist—TB never went away.

Thus, we meet a young African who represents the reality of the disease. The book returns often to the narrative of a man who was a boy when Green first met him in Sierra Leone—Henry. Henry had TB, and was treated, on and off (for various reasons, medical treatment in west Africa is often on and off) over years. His case was drug resistant, and his life was endangered for years in slow, painful ways.

Luckily, Henry’s story did not end in one of the millions of deaths that TB causes each year. He eventually got effective treatment. For once, the cure and the disease were in the same place.

Yet, too often they are not. I do not think it is a spoiler to quote the very end of Green’s book, since early in the book the reader already understands the idea Green is stating is central to this text:

“In a world where everyone can eat, and access healthcare, and be treated humanely, tuberculosis has no chance. Ultimately, we are the cause. We must also be the cure.”

We must be. We are not, yet. These days, our ability to think well of collective needs has ebbed badly. May the tide of human compassion and knowledge rise soon. If it does, Green’s book may be part of that tide. So, I encourage you to read this book. It will frustrate you, but it’s an important piece of writing.

Cancelling Colbert: Media Becoming Mumbles

The shocking announcement this week that the CBS parent company Paramount is cancelling the highest-rated network late-night talk show, “Late Night with Stephen Colbert,” has set off a firestorm of angry reaction, including suspicions that Paramount was cravenly caving in to political pressure from President Trump.

After all, Paramount just opted to donate $16 million to Trump’s library to settle a lawsuit over a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris. Paramount probably would have won that lawsuit if it stuck to its guns—courts are loathe to dictate the editing process of a free press—but the suspicion is that Paramount would rather have a cozy relationship with Trump than stand up for a free press. Paramount is seeking approval of a large media merger and doesn’t want enmity with the overlords to mess up a business strategy.

Stephen Colbert in 2019. From Wikimedia Commons,
image by Montclair Film. 

Thus, was Colbert tossed under the bus as part of that larger deal?

The company says it was a purely financial decision, which I’m not buying because I don’t think any media decision is “purely financial.” But the company has a point about finances—the economics of network talk shows have been shifting dramatically in recent years, part of the many shifts in media that for more than a decade have been rocking our information infrastructure.

Ad revenue for network TV talks shows has plunged. While Colbert had the largest audience among such programs, it is the biggest slice of a pie that has shriveled to tart-size in recent years—the New York Times reported recently that Colbert’s TV audience is around 2.4 million viewers, not exactly an avalanche in a country of more than 340 million souls and 219 million TV sets.

The Times further reports that in June, for the first time in media history, online streaming replaced cable and broadcast TV as the leading distribution method for video entertainment. I am part of that trend. A fan of Colbert’s, I catch him most often in YouTube clips, since I months ago stopped watching “live” TV.

The signs of change have been around for a while. In March, Taylor Tomlinson announced she was leaving “After Midnight,” the show that came after Colbert’s, and CBS cancelled that show. (Colbert was executive producer of that show).

Still, while there are powerful economic forces working against late-night talk shows, the timing of the Paramount announcement, the same week that Colbert famously blasted the company for what he called “a big fat bribe” to Trump, certainly does not look good.

And it occurs in a backdrop of a Republican administration and Republican Party willing to use “liberal media” as a punching bag. As the Critics Notebook in the New York Times by James Poniewozik noted July 18: “But you have to wonder about the long-term future of topical comedy on major networks, if the owners are vulnerable to pressure and the shows have diminishing ratings to justify their sharp elbows. Jimmy Kimmel is still on ABC, though that network settled its own lawsuit from the president last year. In January the president said that NBC’s owner, Comcast, should ‘pay a big price’ for the jabs that Seth Meyers has taken at him.”

And it comes at an overall challenging environment for our media system. My local newspaper, The Cedar Rapids Gazette, has withdrawn, like many newspapers, from daily printing. Congress just rescinded federal support for PBS and NPR, with all members of Congress form Iowa voting for that unfortunate change.

This means that at the same time that much of our legacy media doesn’t have the economic strength to fulfill its watchdog function, the alternative of public media is also being undermined. Trump has long called journalists “enemies,” and he’s at least honest in his attack on my tribe. But I think unfettered power in the hands of would-be authoritarians is a more clear and present danger to America’s wellbeing, although that’s an opinion. Still, I’m not in a position to act on my worst instincts. Trump is.

Let’s get real. Do NPR and PBS have a liberal bias? It’s a big question and not a simple one, but bottom line for me is that I think they clearly do. More in the past than now, but to the extent they have a “point of view,” it’s a very urban, educated and thus generally liberal point of view.

Does that embedded political bias mean they are unworthy of public support? No, they fulfill an important function for the public in presenting education and information that is not in the hands of Paramount and other media conglomerates. Public broadcasting’s alleged bias, which I just said I do buy into, calls for more effective oversight and more pressure on those organizations to maintain a higher standard of fairness. Not to chop them. We need a vigorous public media now more than ever. Below, PBS News Hour coverage of Colbert story.

Sadly, we won’t get it. And now, even the late-night shows that helped balance those in power with their sharp wit are also in decline. In recent years, the Daily Show on Comedy Central, the Tonight Show, Late Night—commentators there have been an important set of voices to hold the powerful, to some extent, accountable. Yet, with Colbert cancelled, it all seems to be vulnerable, now. Holding those in power accountable isn’t, these days, a main priority for media companies. To be fair, those media companies are skittish and scared because they don’t see their way through the fog, either—but again, that’s an argument in favor of public media, not against it.

In Colbert’s case, the suspicion is that loyalty to “the man” was lacking, and thus Colbert was being undermined by external political forces led by the evil orange Tribble man. I don’t think that the real narrative is so simple, although I do think this is part of the story.

Ad from 2015 for the then-new host of Late Night, Stephen Colbert. Flickr image by Brecht Bug.

Which is one reason why I want more funding for NPR and PBS, not less. We can’t maintain all aspects of the media systems as they are, yet I wish we could, across the political spectrum, recognize that we still need journalists and journalism. A free press isn’t just there for Paramount to make more money—the media have a key role in our political system.

And like many aspects of that ailing democratic system, the media component seems to be breaking down.

The End is Coming for a Cool U of I Facility

Clouds over lake at Macbride Recreation Area on June 25.

The state of Iowa has, for years, been stingy on support for state universities, and that led, this year, to another unwelcome announcement.

According to a July 10 story in the Cedar Rapids Gazette, the University of Iowa has decided to end its arrangement with the Army Corp of Engineers for its use of the Macbride Nature Recreation Area. The reason is cost—the university determined that almost $15 million in maintenance is needed for the Macbride facility, money that the university cannot afford.

This June marked my first trip to see the Iowa Raptor Project there. My wife and I took some grandchildren to see the injured birds of prey kept there. Besides those majestic dinosaurs, that June 25 visit marked one of the first days I had seen a Monarch butterfly in Iowa this year, as several were flitting about a garden at the center.

The Macbride Nature Recreation Area is not closing right away, and indeed the Raptor Project may be relocated. But the nature area included numerous programs that enhanced education for University of Iowa students and others. The federal government owns the land via the Army Corps of Engineers, and the university maintained its facilities there to provide the programs.

To quote Vanessa Miller’s article in the Gazette: “In exchange for that upkeep, the university for decades has experienced broad benefits via its UI WILD programs, like the Iowa Raptor Project, Iowa Wildlife Camps, Lifetime Leisure Skills classes, and School of the Wild — a 26-year-old program that brings more than 1,200 elementary and middle school students into the ‘wild’ every year.”

June 25, seen at Iowa Raptor Project at Macbride Recreation Area: Owl, Kestrel, Monarch Butterfly, Eagle.

Well, it’s not the only piece of public property our unwise overlords seem to be abandoning. Public funding for public media—at a time when more high-quality media is more needed, not less—is going away. I know we can’t afford everything that anybody could want, but I do wish the drive to save my tax money wasn’t so ruthless. Jack up my taxes a bit, please, and take care of our collective needs.

Of course, that maintenance at the Macbride facility mounted up to tens of millions may reflect neglected past work. That too often is how it goes in public facilities—to save money today, repairs are delayed until they become too expensive to do and then public property is closed or abandoned.

That makes me sad. I’m feeling that some important things are slipping away from us, not always noticed or mourned, while are eyes and ears are distracted by too noise over too many trivialities.

And I would rather keep the Recreation Area (and PBS and NPR, for that matter).