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Emmy Shahinian

‘We were so happy we were going to live, we showered the officer with kisses. We showered his horse with kisses.’ By J.D. Lasica ‘Emmy” has never before told her story to an odar, the Armenian word for foreigner. There is a reason for this: She does not speak English. Emmy — an English transliteration of the Arabic word for “mother” — is what everyone calls Haygouhi Shahinian. At an even 5 feet tall, she is a slight, wiry woman of 86, with white hair and a high-pitched voice. Her son, George, translates, but she forges ahead with her story before he can get the words out. “I remember when the troubles started,” she begins. “I was in the first

The boy who was sold into slavery for a silver coin

Mesrop Boyajian recounts his experience in the Armenian Genocide By J.D. Lasica Joyce Poirot is the only offspring of Mesrop Boyajian, the boy who was sold into slavery for a silver coin. Boyajian seldom talked about his experience, so it was not until adulthood that Poirot understood her father’s place in the massacres. But she knew, from her early years in Detroit, that there was something about her heritage that set her apart. “I knew it from the secret language we spoke at home and the way my grandmother dressed me,” she says. “I knew it when I’d open my lunch box in kindergarten. Everybody else would have bologna on Wonder Bread. I’d open mine, and a couple of kuftas

Martyrs Day: Witnesses to genocide

As the 20th century’s first mass slaughter of civilians slips from the memory of a world grown accustomed to atrocity, the Armenians’ resolve to remember grows stronger. This article originally appeared in The Sacramento Bee’s Forum section on April 24, 1988. By J.D. Lasica It was a remarkable gathering. Salpi Ghazarian, a 32-year-old Armenian activist, studied the strong, lined faces of the men and women who sat before her in the slat-wood chairs of Sacramento’s St. James Church on a recent Sunday afternoon. Yervant Ohanesian, 92, and his wife, Vart, 83, were here. Many years ago they had separately survived the forced march across the barren Syrian sands that Armenians came to know as the Desert of Death. Aghasi Ivazian,

The Net has forgotten how to forget

The digital attic has begun collecting and storing scraps of our lives — forever This column appeared in the June 1998 issue of The American Journalism Review. For a more thorough look at this issue, see my article in Salon (with errant formatting given that they’ve switched publishing systems). Gigabytes have been written about the digital revolution, but little attention has been paid to one of its most potentially profound social changes: The Internet doesn’t forget. Memories fade, but electronic archives are turning fleeting snapshots of our past lives into permanent records that may follow us forever. And that has enormous consequences for us as communicators, journalists and citizens. The common perception is that the Web is a fragile creature

Net gain

It’s time for mainstream media to trade in their gatekeeper role for a reader-empowered brand of Interactive Journalism This in-depth look at online journalism appeared as the cover story of the November 1996 issue of The American Journalism Review. It was considered groundbreaking for its day. Introduction Agreat many of the Internet’s 20-million-plus users consider Old Media’s practice of top-down, father-knows-best journalism to be clunky, obsolete and irrelevant to their lives. And, in an age when anyone with a computer and modem can be a virtual reporter, they’re right. So does this mean that professional journalists — the middlemen in the news equation — are expendable in a wired world? Hardly. Many Net users want reporters, editors and news directors

Strange vibrations: An afternoon with a New Age psychic

This article appeared in the September/October 1996 issue of The Skeptical Inquirer, the journal of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, an international organization. ‘This is very, very unusual,” Emma says, leaning closer to inspect the whorls on my fingertips and the lines on my right palm. She pauses for a heartbeat and raises her eyes. “This is going to just knock you out of the water, Joseph.” I ease forward in the cream-colored armchair, keeping my feet flat on the carpet, careful not to cross my energy. I peer down and study the lines of my palm. I look for patterns. Instead, I see a jumble of cracks and creases. Mostly, I see chapped

John Perry Barlow: ‘People want to bypass the mass media’

The co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation calls the current wave of media realliances ‘the rearrangement of deck chairs on the Titanic’ John Perry Barlow is a retired cattle rancher, a lyricist for The Grateful Dead — and the theoretical architect for the cyberspace community. He spoke by phone on May 24, 1996, from a New York hotel room after a speaking tour of Dusseldorf and Paris. Do you think people are generally tired of the top-down model of journalism, where professional journalists decide what’s important for the public, where it’s all push and no pull? They’re absolutely sick of it. Most people have become profoundly skeptical of what they read through mass media. For all intents and purposes, the

Nicholas Negroponte: The revolution will be digitized

In which the Guru of the Digital Generation discourses on McLuhan, electronic neighbors and square dancing Nicholas Negroponte, 51, founding director of the Media Lab at MIT and Wired magazine’s popular columnist from its inception, is one of the leading lights of the digital revolution. His 1995 book, “Being Digital,” looks at the implications of the new technologies for global communication, interpersonal relationships, censorship, and our very notions of reality. This transformative technology will fundamentally alter how we learn, how we work, how we entertain ourselves — essentially how we live. J.D. Lasica caught up with Negroponte via modem on March 21, 1995, during the author’s world book tour.

Photographs that lie

Welcome to journalism’s newest ethical nightmare: digital enhancement This article appeared in the Washington Journalism Review, the Boston Globe and the Sacramento Bee in 1988-89. Afew years ago I wandered into one of those seminars touting the wonders that digital technological would someday bring to photography. Up on the screen, a surreal slide show was in progress: Joan Collins was sitting provocatively on President Reagan’s lap. Click. Joan was now perching, elflike, on the president’s shoulder. Click. Reagan now had a third eye. Click. Now he was bald. Click. And on it went. The man from Scitex, one of the high-tech outfits that makes these machines, was saying that computers could now alter the content of photographs in virtually any

The death of an idealist

This article appeared in The Sacramento Bee on Oct. 1, 1988, as well as in the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner on Nov. 13, 1988. As dusk neared, the sun sent crazy orange streamers skipping across the surf. Two skateboarders snaked by on the pavement, a Frisbee toss away. A seagull hung in midair, caught in the sea breeze. A perfect day for a funeral service. On the Venice beach, 100 people — most in their 30s, some sporting sunglasses —had gathered, settling into the blankets and folding chairs that made a half-circle on the warm sand.