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There may come a time you get too successful as a freelancer and must decide if you prefer sleep, money, or headaches. The step up to becoming a studio with more than one person can be a nightmare… or very rewarding. Not everyone can do it and not everyone wants to do it. So, what happens if you are forced into expanding your business?
When I’m handed a business card from someone I know is a solitary freelancer and they list their position with their “design studio” as “CEO,” I have to laugh: sure, there’s a board of directors for your desk-sized design studio. These are the people who dream big of fame and fortune, but can’t quite see the business end of the design industry. It’s not an easy transition once you are responsible for another person you have to pay, deal with, and collaborate. Throw in increased business responsibilities and the increasing loss of creative time and you have the conundrum many successful freelancers face.
For me, my first foray into the world of forming a studio from being a simple freelancer was not a tale of being too busy, but a purposeful trade-off of involvement and a unique twist on design/illustration studio and a creative representation firm (being an agent for other creatives). The idea was born in a simple bitch-session in a pub with a couple of fellow board members of a creative organization we volunteered for.
The executive director for the organization overheard us talking about a group project for several board members that would make us all some money. He confronted us and demanded we turn over the project to the organization, so the income would go to the organization. We weren’t too pleased by that idea and as a couple of weeks went by, with more insistent nudging from the director, we decided to take the time we put into volunteering to help other creatives—many of whom we had met and felt they were not deserving of any help—and we would put the time and effort into the idea we had been discussing.
In those days, in New York City, portfolio books were still the preferred method of showing one’s work and it had to be dropped off in the afternoon and picked up the next day. I had five portfolios so I could cover ad agencies with 100 or more art directors a little faster. If one portfolio was called in for a drop off, then I had more to drop elsewhere. It took a lot of time and effort and bike messenger fees to have them carry portfolios to different drop off points were not in our budget. My simple idea: if I have to run around dropping off and picking up portfolios, I might as well include a collection of designer’s and illustrator’s work. If I didn’t get the work, then maybe someone else in the group would and at least I would get 25% fee for being the agent.
With two other former board members, a designer and an illustrator, we set up our business, printed cards, rented a mailbox in the Flatiron building and put together three portfolios with the work of 14 designers and illustrators. It didn’t take long for one partner to crap out by never taking a portfolio anywhere and missing partnership meetings. The other partner bailed, thinking it was too much work (he was retained as an illustrator and became one of the biggest producers). So, I inherited the studio… and the headaches.
It didn’t take long for the 14 creatives represented by the studio to be carved down to 10… and then 8. After months of portfolio drops offs, calls, lunches and begging, I managed to win over Ogilvy and Mather advertising. It took one illustrator ten minutes to destroy it all. One designer decided he could do better on his own and started contacting all the clients I had gotten so he wouldn’t have to pay a commission. Another illustrator needed a friend every day and would call in the morning to find out if he was going to get any work that week, and one designer kept calling a regular client directly to make sure he got the work, which caused major resentment from other designers in the studio. These, unfortunately, are not the most painful memories.
Eventually, the number of creatives, which had been overblown from the beginning, even with three partners to handle everyone, dwindled to a manageable number and those that remained were truly professional. Still, there was the running of the business that took up most of my time. I had worked out a deal with a large publisher that had an entire department empty due to layoffs and made a deal, exchanging rent for design work. I had to install my own phone lines and supply my own equipment but that worked out well and there was plenty of space for the other designers and illustrators.
I had to deal with accounts, taxes, payments, billings, collections, PR, drop offs, pick ups, client service and taking out the trash. I was trading my own design time for money, hoping eventually the studio would grow and I could hire assistants and other personnel so I could get back to being creative.
Several larger creative agents talked to me about a merger… or rather absorbing me, but what killed my studio was I ended up taking an offer with a large corporation that drove a dump truck of money up to my house, so I’ll never know if I would have ever gotten back to being creative and giving up some of the un-fun responsibilities.
When you are a boss, when you can hire, and are forced to fire people, when your decisions have to be based on the entity of your business and not friendship, compassion or favors, then you will know why some freelancers don’t want to run a business. When you are screwed by an old friend and lose a lot of income, or have to apologize to a client for your friend’s behavior, or even have to fire them and see the friendship end right then and there, you will know why some creatives want to stay in their own little creative dominion.
Design is the only professional business where the professional is not respected (for the sake of this argument), payments need to be torn from the unwilling hands of some clients, fees are negotiated after the fact, an eight year-old girl who won a finger painting contest is suddenly the taste filter the client has placed over the creative’s abilities, and must deliver a product usually designed-by-committee but take all responsibility, not for success, but for failure. ‘Tis a wondrous magical place! Do you want to increase the amount of that you get every day?
After I was booted from my last big corporate position, I had to figure out my strengths and what did I want to do with the rest of my career. I had great luck freelancing and working staff positions. I had my corporate position for seven years. I was used to a certain rhythm in my life. I had some heavy hitter contacts and the thought of starting up the old studio was tempting. Technology, however, had made it easier to do so. There were no portfolio books to carry, no need for FedEx in most cases and plenty of business apps to help with the un-fun stuff of running a business. I called it a “Virtual Studio” comprised of photographers, designers, illustrators and animators I had met throughout my career. This time, I wasn’t going to fool with commission percentages. I would quote, negotiate and traffic the projects. I was shooting for 50% this time around.
Unfortunately, for the same reasons I was booted, my contacts—all peers in age and experience—were also getting the boot. Then the recession blew out of control and I consider myself lucky to have survived it on a singular freelance basis. The lesson from that is:
It’s not just watching trends for design inspiration when you are in business—freelance or studio. The economy shifts will let you know what kind of year you are going to have. When the economy starts declining, the creative industry is the first hit. It’s also the last to recover, which is opposite to basic business rules of increasing a business’ advertising and social media when business drops.
It’s people who know you and trust you who will give you projects. If they are looking for work, too, then you are going to have to try to gain the trust of the new replacement person as well as keep in touch with your friends as they try to establish themselves again.
Other fun lessons you will face if you venture to expand your business have to do with very non-creative things… and that’s what kills the fun of being creative. If you can hire an accountant to meet with once a month to pay bills, balance the books and send out invoices, then that’s a big part of the un-fun stuff gone!
An accountant will also know the legalities of using freelancers on-site and other regulations for employers. You should also start by talking to an accountant to see if you can afford an employee. There are many costs involved with employees.
One studio owner I met years ago ran her business out of her home. She had a staff of five people, including a secretary that did accounting and other administrative duties. She set up her basement to be comfortable and that’s where they worked. At lunchtime, she cooked a meal for everybody. I believe she now has a professional space downtown, a larger staff, is not cooking lunch, hates commuting and misses the “old days.” Sometimes you need to weigh how big you want to get.
If you decide you want to expand your business and you’ve considered how it will affect your family life, kill any free time, suck every bit of juice from your veins and are going to do it, then do it all the way! Make the commitment, get financing for the first year in business (estimate your expenses and make sure you can cover them even if you have no clients the first year) and get started on day one.
This is a tough one because everyone loves a free ride to success and there are friends you really want to help. Now, this isn’t always the case, but a good general rule (see “Lessons learned… the hard way”). You need to see the spark of the desire to achieve in your employees. They should be people you consider great enough to be a partner, because one day, in consideration of their dedication to your business, they may be. That’s what a great employee is hoping.
The closeness you share with someone may just end up being a hinderance to working together. It’s better to steer clear unless you are willing to put your life into that friend’s hands… preferably you already have and lived to thank them.
Most nations still allow individuals to strive and succeed in their own businesses. The rule of working hard and reaping the rewards is true. The hours are long, you sweat buckets and you lose a little bit of your soul. Even though this is a creative business, which you love and enjoy, it is a business and the bigger the business the more business you have to do. Eventually, you may be able to rightfully have “CEO” on your business card.
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It was the middle of the night when Sako Narita received an urgent phone call from Japan with a request: a disaster response team headed for the Philippines after Typhoon Haiyan needed her expertise.
The call did not come as a surprise to Narita �04, interdisciplinary studies (international emergency health services), currently a master�s student in emergency health services (EHS). She had prior experience providing disaster response for the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in her native Japan and a previous typhoon in the Philippines in 2012. This time, she had to be ready in a matter of days to travel with the Japan-based Humanitarian Medical Assistance (HuMA) disaster response team.
Narita spent ten days in the Philippines in November 2013 providing needs assessment: assisting patients, negotiating with local and international health and government organizations, setting up mobile medical clinics, and doing whatever she could to ensure typhoon victims received the care they needed.
�Believe it or not, the people were more positive than we expected. Sometimes people were already moving on�they started a new life and started building new houses,� says Narita. �But deep inside, they still are struggling.�
Negotiating Solutions
In addition to providing needs assessment and medical assistance, a big part of Narita�s job was negotiation�a skill she has developed through both hands-on experience and her EHS education at UMBC.
The on-the-ground situation during Narita�s first mission in the Philippines in 2012 required her to negotiate with local officials to gain access to the disaster site for HuMA. During her more recent trip, she used her negotiation skills again to discuss partnering with an Israeli disaster response team that she previously worked with in Japan.
How did Narita feel prepared to serve in such a critical role? �All of my knowledge about disaster response I got at UMBC,� she reflects.
As a student from Japan interested in studying medicine and emergency health services, Narita says the decision to come to UMBC was easy given the EHS department�s international reputation as a leader in its field.
�What makes our program different from every other program is that our focus is on that area of overlap between public health and emergency management,� explains Rick Bissell, EHS professor and graduate program director. The graduate program teaches emergency clinical response, management and public health, and prepares students like Narita to meet everyday and disaster-related emergency health needs in both domestic and international situations.
The Whole Person
The EHS department began at UMBC in 1980, following Maryland�s national leadership in developing a statewide emergency medical services program in the 1970s. The department historically has had strong relationships with agencies such as the Maryland Institute for Emergency Medical Services Systems (MIEMSS) and University of Maryland Shock Trauma Center, as well as several state, county and local emergency health service providers.
Those partners, who have played such an important role in providing training opportunities for EHS students, are now the beneficiaries of the EHS program. Today, alumni serve in a variety of roles�locally and around the globe�as physicians, EMS directors and coordinators. Jonathan Bratt is the MIEMSS coordinator for region 5, which covers Montgomery, Prince George�s, Calvert, Charles and St. Mary�s counties. Christoph Redelsteiner served as chief of EMS for the Vienna, Austria Red Cross before joining the faculty of St. Pölten University of Applied Sciences in Austria. One alumnus, physician Matt Levy, has returned to UMBC to serve as EHS medical director.
�We educate the whole person,� says Bruce Walz, professor and chair of the EHS department. �What we�ve heard back from employers is that our students know how to think. They�re not just doing a protocol. They know why they�re doing that protocol, they know why they�re giving that drug and they can make those decisions in the field.�
This priority on educating students as �whole people� is evident in the work of EHS alumni and students like Sako Narita, who is also a national registered paramedic and Maryland emergency medical technician-paramedic. The level of dedication and quality of work the program�s graduates are known for propels them to the top of their field, while also having a palpable impact on patients� lives and on communities in need.
�HuMA could contact me again,� Narita says, �and I hope they do.�
(03/21/2014)
Homepage image: © Herman Lumanog | Dreamstime.com
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If you’ve searched recently for tips on optimizing WordPress’ performance, then you have definitely come across various techniques that people recommend. These include all sorts of caching mechanisms, such as reverse proxies, object caching and cache plugins, CSS minification, using sprites for images, and so on. All of them are viable and effective ways to speed up a WordPress website’s performance. However, be careful when implementing any of these techniques, and always test their effect on your particular website.
In this article, we’ll cover some of the most common issues with various speed boosters that I have encountered and share solutions to help you fix those problems or find ways around them.
I will start with the reverse proxies because, when used correctly, they can give you the biggest speed boost and, when used improperly, can cause serious problems, such as making your website inaccessible or showing the wrong information to the wrong visitors.
Reverse proxies, like Varnish and Nginx, stand between your visitors and your Web server. When a request for one of your pages is made, your Web server usually has to execute the PHP service that makes calls to the database and then provides the page output and the static resources needed to visualize the page. With a reverse proxy enabled, this result is cached, and the next time someone requests that page, the ready output will be delivered by the reverse proxy, which is much faster and causes no load on your server.
This is great, but to operate correctly, the cache must be purged every time something on the page has changed. This is where things can go wrong, mostly because WordPress does not natively support reverse proxies and requires additional tweaks for the cache to be cleared correctly. Usually, such tweaks rely on WordPress’ default core hooks (think of them as events) to purge the cache when necessary — when a post is updated, when a comment is added, when a post is created, etc. However, if an important hook is missed in the implementation of the reverse proxy that you’re using, then you might have a problem. Additionally, numerous events — ones not a part of WordPress’ core hooks but rather performed through plugins — could change the content on your website.
When updating, WordPress puts your website in maintenance mode, updates its files and then disables maintenance mode. The reverse proxy could possibly cache some of your pages while your website is in maintenance mode. This means that if the cache is not purged, then this maintenance page would continue being served to visitors, actively preventing them from reaching your website even when it is operational on the Web server.
When you update a plugin, WordPress disables it, deletes its entire folder and then adds the new files. During that time, the plugin does not actually work. If it’s a big plugin that adds a lot of functionality, such as a gallery or online store, then your reverse proxy could cache pages with errors on them, instead of the actual content.
When you update manually, the easy fix is either to disable the cache during the update or to purge the cache manually once you are ready with the update. However, when you use WordPress’ native automatic update, these solutions are not very practical. What a good reverse proxy should do instead is automatically purge the cache on each update event. Because both core and plugin updates have hooks in the core, this is easily achievable and should be done by you (if you are implementing the reverse proxy yourself) or by your hosting provider (if you rely on the host’s implementation).
No matter which WordPress plugin you use for your online store, you should be very, very careful when implementing reverse proxy caching.
For example, you could create a lovely mess with a shopping-cart widget that displays the products that a customer has selected to buy. If that content is cached by the reverse proxies, then all of your visitors would see the products that the first customer has selected for purchase. Things could get even worse if pages containing personal information, such as thank-you pages, are cached and displayed incorrectly to the wrong visitor. Needless to say, this should be avoided at all costs.
The safest way to avoid such problems is to exclude the entire e-commerce part of your website from the cache. Usually, reverse proxies implemented by hosting companies exclude the most common WordPress e-commerce plugins from the cache by default.
If excluding the whole e-commerce part of your website does not sound to you like an elegant solution — because you would obviously lose the speed benefits — then, theoretically, there is a more intricate way around: using Edge Side Includes (ESI) to specify that parts of your pages should not be cached. In theory, you would simply surround your HTML with ESI tags:
<esi:include> Dynamic content <esi:remove>
Then, the content between those tags would be dynamically retrieved every time this page is requested.
Unfortunately, implementing ESI with WordPress is not straightforward at all, due to WordPress’ lack of native support for reverse proxies. Thus, ESI is usually not a viable option with hosts that support reverse proxies. But it is worth considering if you have an online store built with WordPress and you are implementing the reverse proxy yourself.
When you use a rating plugin on a WordPress website that is cached by a reverse proxy, chances are that visitors will often see an incorrect cached rating, instead of the real up-to-date rating. The reason is that a visitor’s vote given through such a plugin is not part of WordPress’ default hooks and will not trigger a cache purge.
Similar to the e-commerce issues, you could either exclude pages that you collect rankings for from the cache or implement the ESI model for those pages, if feasible.
In case your hosting provider doesn’t provide you with a reverse proxy caching service, you could rely on one of the so-called full-page caching plugins for WordPress. When a visitor requests a page, the plugin would save the actual HTML output in a physical file on your server. The next time someone requests that page, it would be served as a static HTML file, which is much slower than a reverse proxy but still faster than not caching at all.
Unfortunately, due to the caching technique being used, all of the possible problems I’ve explained for reverse proxies hold true for the full-page caching plugins, plus some new ones.
Be careful using such caching on a website with many posts or pages. When you create content on a WordPress website, more pages are automatically created than just the one you’re working on directly: category pages that list all posts in that category, tag pages, archives, author pages, pages for uploaded images, etc. All of these add up to a big number of URLs that your website serves. Now, imagine all of those URLs being turned into HTML files in some folder (usually the uploads folder) on your Web server. When thousands of files are in a single directory, even listing those files is difficult, and we’re talking about the Linux OS here. The result for a big website is usually a huge number of files, a heavy I/O load on the server and, eventually, a slower website and problems with the hosting provider.
There is no exact number of posts above which you should not incorporate this method, and it also depends on the particular way the plugin stores the cache — using multiple folders instead of one, for example, would be more efficient, but still might not be enough for a really large website. Just bear in mind that if you use such a caching technique and your website starts slowing down, then this might be the reason.
Object caching is great for a website that gets a lot of requests to its database, and it can really speed up some websites. Memcached stores the result of the most commonly executed queries to your database in the server’s RAM and serves the cached results instead of querying the MySQL server each time. Unfortunately, in some scenarios, you could actually decrease your website’s performance, and here is why.
Some WordPress plugins are coded (badly) to store a huge amount of data in the application database. The Memcached service has a limited amount of memory for caching. Imagine what happens when a plugin stores huge images in the database. Memcached will try to store the result of this query in its buffer but will run out of space. Then, it will start to delete previously cached content on a first-in, first-out basis. If the query’s results are big enough, then no actual content would be cached because it would be removed before being served a second time. In this case, your website would actually slow down because not only would you fail to spare this load on the MySQL service, but you would add another service in the process that requires its own computing time.
If you find your website is working more slowly after enabling Memcached, then unfortunately your only solution is either to disable all plugins that store a huge amount of data in the database or to disable the Memcached service itself.
I love sprites for the performance boost they give to a website when used correctly. This is why, when we redesigned SiteGround recently, we moved all navigation and UI elements and many other page elements to sprites. Our website became much faster, and we were quite happy with the result. Then, we continued adding elements to the sprite image, until at some point we noticed problems when some pages loaded on iOS devices.
This happened because we hit mobile Safari’s limit on the maximum number of decoded pixels that can be displayed. This limit is different for different devices. You could easily generate a sprite with a lot of pixels, and if it reaches the size limit, then the browser won’t load it, which will leave your website without all of the elements contained in that sprite. Of course, you don’t want this to happen.
A good man by the name of William Malone has crafted a nifty tool to check whether a sprite image will display correctly on all iOS devices. Enter the dimensions of your sprite image in the calculator, and the answer will appear.
If your sprite is too big, a possible solution is to split it into two images. If you have to do this, my advice is to relegate only the newest elements to a new image; otherwise you would have to adjust all of the CSS code that uses the sprite, a task that you’d want to avoid if possible.
CSS and JavaScript minification is another of the most common techniques for speeding up a website. Generally, minifying these files entails removing all unnecessary symbols (new lines, semicolons after the final CSS property, comments, etc.), thus reducing the size of the files. This technique applies not only to WordPress but to any page that uses CSS and JavaScript.
Many tools and plugins will automatically minify files. However, some minify more aggressively than simply removing empty symbols. Some tools will rearrange CSS selectors, for example, grouping them by property, etc. In some cases, this could break the entire logic of a CSS file and turn your website into something that merely resembles the original.
To avoid such problems, use basic non-aggressive minification tools that remove only unnecessary data from JavaScript and CSS files, without reordering properties. In addition, always keep a copy of your unminified files because, after minification, they will become practically unreadable, making any further changes much harder. I use either a plugin or the online FreeFormatter.
Enabling Gzip for WordPress will greatly improve loading speed. Gzip compresses a page’s output and transfers it to the visitor’s browser, like a regular ZIP file, whereupon the browser decompresses and renders it. It’s great because the time a browser takes to decompress archived content is many times less than the time needed to physically transfer the uncompressed content from the server to the browser.
Most WordPress users rely on plugins when they can — at least the ones who can’t or don’t want to code — including for Gzip. Unfortunately, Gzip plugins run through PHP, which, although fast, is not as fast as running directly from the Apache server. All you need to do is install mod_deflate (ask your hosting provider if it is available — it should be because it is pretty much an industry standard) and add a few lines to your .htaccess file:
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript
Knowing all of the risks involved in optimizing the speed of your WordPress website should not stop you from experimenting. To achieve the best results, just follow few simple principles: don’t change too many things at once, benchmark your loading speeds, use staging copies when possible, and test the website’s functionality after applying each new technique. In doing so, you will speed up your website without breaking any functionality or causing problems for visitors.
(dp, al, il)
© Hristo Pandjarov for Smashing Magazine, 2014.
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GSS is geared toward boosting Web UI development by fixing CSS's inherent layout issues and is regarded as an alternative to the ballyhooed Famo.us JavaScript framework.
]]>Hewlett-Packard updates their Application Lifecycle Management or ALM suite of products accommodating today’s fast pace software development teams.
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Catonsville resident Gus Russo ’72, political science, is married to the mob. And to U.S. history. He is a writer and investigative reporter specializing in the shadowy netherworld of American crime and politics. Russo has worked on 15 television documentaries for major networks in the United States and elsewhere, and he is the author of seven books – including “Where Were You? America Remembers the JFK Assassination” (Lyons Press, 2013).
The 1960s and 1970s (when I was a student at UMBC) were not just defined by musical 
revolutions, but also by the tumult of politics and conspiracy – and the frantic efforts by public officials to keep secrets: Who killed JFK, MLK and RFK? Why were we in a senseless and seemingly endless war in Vietnam? Who ordered the Watergate break-in and what were the burglars after in the Democratic National Committee headquarters? What were all those silver discs people thought they saw in the sky?
In the 1980s, I gave up work as a musician to embark upon a journey to find answers to those sorts of questions as an investigative journalist. While it’s often portrayed as a glamorous profession, the skills and tools I employ are the same mundane ones that previous generations of gumshoes have relied upon: developing and working sources, skip-tracing (locating subjects), and obtaining documentary records from courts, real estate transactions, federal archives and law enforcement agencies.
Other than giving faster access to a small percentage of available records, the digital revolution hasn’t changed the work much. Investigative reporters rarely find their best stories online. The real truth (or as close as we can get to it) often lies buried in undigitized repositories of primary source documents, or in the closely guarded memories of the first-hand players and witnesses.
It’s often hard to win the trust of those actors and witnesses to history. It requires patience and perseverance, especially in the areas that most interest me: organized crime and intelligence agencies domestic and foreign. Old school wiseguys and retired spies don’t open up their vaults (or memories) just because you sent a nice email or even snail mail. I’ve sent Christmas presents, birthday presents, get-well cards, and funeral floral arrangements. (When I’m in the middle of a project, I have “Edible Arrangements” on speed dial.) I’ve hopped on countless planes, trains and autos to take someone out to dinner and slowly gain their trust. It often takes many months. In some cases, years.
But more often than not, determination pays off. When I flew to Chicago in 2000 to take ten members of former boss Sam Giancana’s family to dinner in a suburban restaurant infamous for its parking lot whackings, I thought I must have lost my mind. But it worked. The clan introduced me to many of Sam’s still-living friends and associates – a treasure trove of information for my then work-in-progress, The Outfit.
Then there is the paper trail – and the elusive “smoking gun” that everybody wants to find. But the truth is that document trolling is painstaking and boring 99 percent of the time. (I should know: Staff members at the National Archives have told me I’ve spent more hours there over the last 20 years than any other researcher.) And for every useful page, I’ve discarded a thousand others.
It’s also difficult to find the best documents. They certainly aren’t all at the National Archives. I’ve pulled FBI files from garages and attics of retired agents. My eyes have gone blurry pouring over faded real estate quitclaim deeds. I’ve begged Congressional committee chairmen to open up investigative files stored in the Library of Congress before the traditional 50-year lockdown date expires, and appealed FBI and CIA denials more times than I can count. When the FBI tried to tell me they only held 275 pages on the mob’s longtime fixer, Sidney Korshak, I hounded them for two years to obtain the rest of what I intuited they must possess. Eventually I was rewarded with 7,500 pages delivered to my doorstep at no charge. Maybe they felt guilty about the two-year runaround.
There was gold in those files, but there were no “smoking guns.” In fact, that concept should be erased from the minds of budding and seasoned journalists alike. The only “smoking gun” proof is the literal kind: a perpetrator caught holding one of them over the body of a victim. Nothing that dispositive can ever be found after the fact. Any document can be forged, any picture Photoshopped, and any witness mistaken or corrupted.
The seasoned investigative reporter knows that the more sensational the information you have, the more corroboration is needed so that one can arrive, at best, at an approximate truth based on a preponderance of evidence. If you require concrete proofs in your life, I suggest majoring in math. Otherwise you’ll be in for one major disappointment after another.
Serious investigative work – pounding the pavement, working the phones, and poring through over documents – can max out your stamina and your credit card. But it’s the only way I have been able to find answers to the questions that dog me about the shadow powers in our country.
Plus, you make some lasting human connections along the way. (What a concept!) In the week that I wrote this piece, I had phone calls from Sam Giancana’s daughter, Carlos Marcello’s son, the man who found Lee Harvey Oswald hiding in a Dallas theater after the Kennedy assassination, and two members of JFK’s Secret Service detail.
Often when these friends call or we visit in person, I feel sad for a generation that has been led to believe that all information, knowledge and wisdom reside inside in an invisible digital server or the “cloud.” It is a failure of my generation, which created and sold the myth, and it certainly doesn’t bode well for the future of my profession.