Twitter became an Internet phenom as a tool for posting short text messages, but now it also wants to feature multimedia content more prominently.
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Previews of photos and videos will now appear on users' timeline streams, whereas before people had to click on links to see them. The new feature is available on Twitter's iOS and Android apps, as well as on its Web version.
The changes apply only to photos uploaded using Twitter, and to videos created with Twitter's Vine app. People still have to navigate to an outside page to see photos or videos from third-party services.
Users can expand the photos or watch the videos by tapping them on mobile and clicking on them on the desktop.
With this feature, Twitter wants to provide a more media-rich experience for users and to better compete against big rivals like Instagram and Snapchat. "These rich tweets can bring your followers closer to what's happening," the company said in its announcement.
But the changes also come as Twitter faces pressure to build out its advertising business, as its public debut on the New York Stock Exchange looms.
Video ads constitute a major element of Twitter's advertising business, which generated 85 percent of the company's revenue last year, the company said on its IPO documents. Placing more video and photo content front and center in users' feeds, therefore, could give marketers an added incentive to advertise with Twitter.
Twitter has already partnered with more than a dozen broadcasters and media networks through its Amplify program, which places promotional video content in users' feeds. Some of those partners include Bloomberg TV, A&E, and BBC America.
Zach Miners covers social networking, search and general technology news for IDG News Service. Follow Zach on Twitter at @zachminers. Zach's e-mail address is zach_miners@idg.com
FILE - In this Aug. 6, 1999 file photo, Penn State head football coach Joe Paterno, right, poses with his defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky during Penn State Media Day at State College, Pa. A lawsuit by Joe Paterno's family and others against the NCAA is scheduled to go to court Wednesday, Oct. 30, 2013, one day after Penn State announced settlements with 26 young men over claims of abuse by Jerry Sandusky. (AP Photo/Paul Vathis, File)
FILE - In this Aug. 6, 1999 file photo, Penn State head football coach Joe Paterno, right, poses with his defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky during Penn State Media Day at State College, Pa. A lawsuit by Joe Paterno's family and others against the NCAA is scheduled to go to court Wednesday, Oct. 30, 2013, one day after Penn State announced settlements with 26 young men over claims of abuse by Jerry Sandusky. (AP Photo/Paul Vathis, File)
BELLEFONTE, Pa. (AP) — A hearing on a lawsuit filed by the family of longtime Penn State football coach Joe Paterno began Tuesday as his relatives seek to reverse the NCAA's penalties against the school over the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse scandal.
The courtroom swelled with lawyers ahead of the hearing that began at 10 a.m., and some Paterno family members were there, including Paterno's son Scott.
The lawsuit by Paterno's family challenges penalties the NCAA imposed against the school — including voiding 111 wins while Paterno was head coach. The NCAA alleges the wins were tainted by school administrators' alleged mishandling of the Sandusky scandal.
The NCAA also fined the school $60 million, which is being paid in installments, banned the football team from bowl games for four years and cut the number of football scholarships it could offer.
The Paterno family contends the NCAA violated its own rules in imposing the sanctions, which resulted in, among other things, Paterno no longer being officially recognized as the Division I coach with the most wins, at 409.
Judge John Leete scheduled Tuesday's court session so he can hear lawyers argue if he should throw out the claim.
Paterno's family maintains that he didn't know Sandusky was a pedophile and didn't cover up child sex abuse allegations against the assistant coach.
The hearing comes a day after Penn State said it was paying 26 young men $59.7 million over claims of child sexual abuse at the hands of Sandusky, the school's former longtime defensive coach.
He was convicted of abusing 10 boys, some of them at Penn State facilities. Eight young men testified against him, describing a range of abuse they said went from grooming and manipulation to fondling and rape when they were boys.
Sandusky, 69, did not testify at his trial but has long asserted his innocence. He has acknowledged he showered with boys but insisted he never molested them. Sandusky is pursuing appeals while he serves a 30- to 60-year sentence on 45 criminal counts.
The abuse scandal rocked Penn State, bringing down Paterno and resulting in unprecedented sanctions against the university's football program.
Three former Penn State administrators await trial in Harrisburg on charges they engaged in a criminal cover-up of the Sandusky scandal. Former president Graham Spanier, retired vice president Gary Schultz and retired athletic director Tim Curley deny the allegations, and a trial date has not been scheduled.
The school said 23 deals are fully signed and three are agreements in principle. There are six other claims, and it believes some of them are meritless.
The settlements have been unfolding since mid-August, when attorneys for the accusers began to disclose them. Penn State has not been confirming them, waiting instead to announce the deals at once.
Penn State has spent more than $50 million on other costs related to the Sandusky scandal, including lawyers' fees, public relations expenses and adoption of new policies and procedures related to children and sexual abuse complaints.
The 32 claimants involved in negotiations with Penn State include most of the victims from the criminal trial and some who say they were abused by Sandusky many years ago. Negotiations were conducted in secret, so the full range of the allegations wasn't disclosed publicly.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Trayvon Martin's mother told a panel of senators Tuesday that state "stand your ground" self-defense laws do not work and must be amended, reviving the politically charged gun control issue a year ahead of the 2014 midterm elections.
But little besides politics emerged from the session, held in the Senate's made-for-television hearing room. Democrats who hold majority power in the Senate and are trying to keep it supported Sybrina Fulton's call.
"This law is an invitation for confrontation," said Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., who chaired the session.
Republicans, led by Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, said the matter should be left to the states that passed the laws.
"The states are doing quite well ... without our interference," Rep. Louie Gohmert testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Said Cruz: "This is not about politicking. This is not about inflaming racial tensions. This is about the right of everyone to protect themselves and protect their families." Cruz made reference to statistics which, he said, show that blacks invoked stand your ground defense in prosecutions at least as often as whites.
Race and politics were unmistakably woven into the event and in the broader public policy debate. There is little willingness in Congress to weigh in on the laws of at least 23 states that have some form of the policy. These laws generally cancel a person's duty to retreat in the face of a serious physical attack.
Members of Congress are busily engaged in their re-election efforts for next year's midterms, with 35 seats at stake in the Senate, all 435 seats in the GOP-controlled House and the majorities of both chambers hanging in the balance. Gun control is a politically divisive issue, more so in the wake of mass shootings in Newtown, Conn., the Washington Navy Yard and more.
The 2012 shooting death of Martin, 17 and unarmed, and the acquittal this year of neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman stirred racial tensions and sparked debate over stand your ground laws in Florida and at least 21 other states.
Martin's mother told the panel that she attended the hearing so senators can "at least put a face with what has happened with this tragedy."
"I just wanted to come here to ... let you know how important it is that we amend this stand your ground because it certainly did not work in my case," Fulton said, speaking without consulting prepared remarks. "The person that shot and killed my son is walking the streets today. This law does not work."
Lucia Holman McBath, the mother of Jordan Russell Davis, implored the Senate to resolve the nation's debate. Her 17-year-old son was shot and killed nearly a year ago when Michael David Dunn, 46, allegedly opened fire on a Dodge Durango with four teenagers inside after complaining of their loud music and saying he saw a gun and thus a threat. Jordan had been inside. Authorities never found a gun in the vehicle, the Florida Times-Union reported. Dunn's trial is set for next year.
"You can lift this nation from its internal battle in which guns rule over right," McBath told the panel.
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, at least 22 states have laws that allow that "there is no duty to retreat (from) an attacker in any place in which one is lawfully present." The states are Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and West Virginia, according to the NCSL.
Alaska also passed a stand your ground law this year, which makes clear a person has no duty to retreat if he or she is in a place legally.
At least nine of those state laws include language stating one may "stand his or her ground": Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and South Carolina, according to the NCSL.
___
Associated Press writer Becky Bohrer in Juneau, Alaska, contributed to this report.
2013 iPad buyers guide: How to choose between Rogers, Bell, TELUS, and their discount subsidiaries, Fido and Virgin Mobile.
Once you've decided you're getting a new iPad Air and picked your capacity and color, now you have the option of picking a carrier if you want wireless data. The vast majority of users just stick to Wi-Fi networks for their fix, but you can also get data over cell towers. If you're in Canada, that means going with one of the big three carriers: Rogers, Bell, or TELUS, or one of their lower-price subsidiaries. All of the big three have confirmed that they'll be offering the latest and greatest iPads and Apple announced the iPad Air with cellular connectivity would start at $649. So which carrier should you go with? We've chewed through the plans and coverage, and here's what we've found!
The big three: Rogers, Bell, and TELUS
Across the board, the 16 GB iPad Air with cellular costs $649, the 32 GB model is $749, the 64 GB iPad Air is $849, and the gigantic 128 GB iPad Air with cellular is $949.
Plans differ a bit depending on if you're getting a stand-alone plan or if you're attaching it to an existing account. Unlike smartphone plans, iPad data plans don't have to be on contract, though you can sign up for two-year plans to save a little bit. Exact pricing details on that front aren't yet solidified.
Bell and TELUS share the same towers for their GSM/LTE network but have different back-hauls (different connections to the internet from the towers). That means the Bell/TELUS tower near your home, school, or work could still provide better speeds on one or the other networks. For a comprehensive look at speed and network quality, be sure to check out PC Mag's in-depth study.
The budget carriers: Fido and Virgin Mobile
Each of the big three carriers owns a subsidiary that typically offers lower-cost options by way of a tab system. Rogers owns Fido. Bell owns Virgin Mobile. TELUS owns Koodo. When it comes to the iPad Air, these don't offer much beyond what you'll get on the primary carriers, since they're all on the same network, and you aren't getting a contract with device subsidy anyway. Koodo doesn't even have a tablet plan - they suggest you just use your existing smartphone line as a portable hotspot if you want your iPad to have connectivity - but Fido and Virgin will be supporting the iPad Air.
Who should get their iPad on Rogers?
Rogers is the big boy on the block. Since the spring, Rogers has spread to Manitoba, offering LTE coverage to Winnipeg and other nearby areas. Of course all of the major centers are covered with LTE, including Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, Ottawa, Calgary, Regina, Edmonton, and lots of others.
This is going to get repetitive, but if you're in those areas and speed matters more to you then money, go with Rogers. All of their tablet plans are "Flex Rate," which means simply that they'll bump you up to the next tier after you've gone through the cap of your original one. For some reason, you get half as much data on their $20 plan compared to the other guys, but that may get amended prior to launch. If you already have a Rogers line, you can share you data bucket with your iPad for an extra $10/month on select Share Everything plans. You can also use mobile hotspot on your phone so long as your plan is over 1 GB.
For coverage, you'll see that there are a few areas where Bell reaches that others don't, namely up north. Bell regularly boasts to having Canada's largest LTE network, but take that claim with a grain of salt. When it comes to speed, Bell has the same kind of 150 Mbps LTE as Rogers in the Greater Toronto Area, Cambridge, and Kitchener-Waterloo.
Bell has Flex Plans like Rogers, and provides a lot more data at the $20 tier. Bell also has the best overage rates beyond the 5 GB limit at a cent and a half per MB. As an alternative to the Flex rates, Bell also has fixed 30-day passes, but the only real appeal there is for their 5 GB package, which is $5 less than the Flex plan. Apparently this is still active, and may be worth your while. If you're a lighter user, you can also use mobile hotspot on any smartphone plan. If you already have a Bell line, you can share your data bucket to your new iPad for $10/month. If you end up getting a new data plan with Bell for your iPad Air, you'll get access to some popular public Wi-Fi hotspots, including McDonald's Tim Hortons, and Chapters. They'll also toss in 10 hours of tablet TV per month for the first two months, which doesn't count towards your data cap. After that two months, Tablet TV costs $5/month. All in all, Bell is looking like a very attractive offer, assuming they provide coverage in your area.
I've always been a big fan of TELUS, mainly because among The Big Three, I find it's easiest getting plan information from them. Also, the cute branding and nice-looking stores help too. You can see from the coverage map that the Ontario corridor is well covered, as well as the Maritimes. Alberta's also looking pretty good, and it looks like there's even some decent service in the Northwest Territories. I've generally been happy with the speeds I get on TELUS, though I haven't spent too much time on their LTE.
Like Rogers, the TELUS iPad plans are all Flex plans, so they automatically get bumped up when you exceed your cap. Beyond the top tier, it's $0.05 / MB. The $20 plan on TELUS is much better than Rogers, and the overage rate beyond 5 GB is also half (though not as good as Bell). If you want to get your iPad on your existing TELUS smartphone plan, it would costs an extra $10/month, or you can use mobile hotspot on any plan.
Even the discount carriers like Fido and Virgin Mobile offer data plans for tablets, though Koodo doesn't. T-Mobile also getting the iPad Air, so you can expect a version that works on WIND or Mobilicity. Though the rates at WIND and Mobilicity are great for mobile internet, you'll be taking a hit in coverage - make sure they can keep you covered in the important places.
If you're still not sure about which Canadian carrier to get for your iPad Air jump into our iPad discussion forums and the best community in mobile will happily help you out, or hey, maybe Wi-Fi-only is good enough for you. Let know in the comments - which one did you go with and why?
London (AFP) - Juan Mata made a point to Jose Mourinho as the Chelsea midfielder's superb strike inspired his side's 2-0 win at Arsenal in the League Cup fourth round on Tuesday.
Mata has struggled to convince Mourinho he is worthy of a regular place in his team and the Spanish midfielder has started just six games this season.
But he was back in the starting line-up at the Emirates Stadium and made the most of his opportunity with an influential display capped by a fine second half strike which booked Chelsea's place in the quarter-finals.
Mata's first club goal of the season came after Blues defender Cesar Azpilicueta had opened the scoring before the break.
Chelsea, twice League Cup winners under Mourinho, were always in control despite 10 changes to the team that beat Manchester City 2-1 on Sunday.
Mourinho had been incensed that Chelsea were forced to play twice in just three days, claiming that Arsenal had been given an unfair advantage because their weekend fixture against Crystal Palace took place at Saturday lunchtime.
He insisted he would send out a weakened team in protest and was true to his word as only Gary Cahill retained his place, although the strength of Chelsea's squad was clear to see as the likes of Mata, Willian and Samuel Eto'o hardly constituted a significant drop in class.
Arsene Wenger had hoped Arsenal would be able to inflict a psychological blow on one of their main challengers for their current position on top of the Premier League.
But Wenger made eight changes from the win at Palace and his stand-ins can have no complaints if they go back to the bench after a disjointed performance.
Mourinho and Wenger had a spikey relationship at the best of times during the Chelsea manager's first stint in England, but their relationship seems to have thawed a little judging by the warm smile and handshake the old rivals exchanged before kick-off.
That good-natured exchange set the tone for a surprisingly tame opening to a usually frantic London derby.
Yet with Arsenal struggling to find any rhythm, it wasn't a surprise that the opening goal in the 25th minute came from a miscue in the Gunners rearguard.
After clearing a corner, Chelsea broke at speed with Eto'o leading the charge before Aaron Ramsey's challenge on Michael Essien sent the ball looping towards the edge of the Arsenal penalty area.
Carl Jenkinson and Jack Wilshere hesitated over who should clear and when Jenkinson finally took action his attempt to head back to Lukasz Fabianski lacked both the power and direction to reach the Gunners goalkeeper.
Azpilicueta took full advantage of the gift, lunging in bravely to poke the ball past Fabianski into the far corner.
The Chelsea right-back nearly returned the favour when his careless play moments later let Nacho Monreal in for a low strike that flashed just wide.
That was Arsenal's only serious chance of the half, which spoke volumes for the way the Gunners were hamstrung by Nicklas Bendtner's lack of sharpness in a rare start for the Danish striker.
Eto'o wasn't far away from increasing Chelsea's lead with an opportunistic long-range strike early in the second half, prompting Wenger to send for the cavalry in the shape of German playmaker Mesut Ozil, who replaced ineffective Japan winger Ryo Miyaichi.
But before Ozil had a chance to make an impact, Mata had put the game beyond Arsenal with a brilliant strike in the 66th minute.
A loose ball fell to Mata on the edge of the Arsenal area and the Spaniard took one touch to control with his left foot before unleashing a ferocious right-foot strike that bent away from the despairing dive of Fabianski.
Students who sign up for Duolingo’s language courses will be tasked with translating BuzzFeed articles, one sentence at a time. The translated stories will then appear online.
Photo illustration by Lisa Larson-Walker. Photo by STR/Reuters
The idea that electronic media would bring the world together is not particularly original—remember Marshall McLuhan’s “global village”?—but its proponents have always been hazy on the details. Are we to celebrate the fact that the “Gangnam Style,” a satire of South Korean hipster lifestyle, has garnered roughly 1.8 billion views on YouTube when most viewers probably never got the joke?
Thanks to social media, ideas can now spread at rapid-fire speed. Just look at “Kony2012,” last year’s ill-fated viral campaign to hunt the Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony. Alas, the speed doesn’t easily translate into action: Instead of deep engagement with an issue by a dozen committed people, we get rather shallow engagement by a few million—and in ways that might undermine efforts to promote global awareness about a problem like guerrilla warfare in Africa. Such viral campaigns might work for highly targeted interventions like fund-raising, but anything beyond that is tricky.
The latest innovation in digital cosmopolitanism comes from BuzzFeed, a site that has rapidly become one of the most visited online properties. In August 2013, BuzzFeed had 85 million visitors, three times more than just a year ago; by next year, it expects to become one of the most popular sites in the world.
By and large, BuzzFeed’s stories are written to be shared—the site used to prominently display the slogan “The Viral Web in Real-Time”—which explains why, according to one recent study, its stories receive more shares on Facebook than stories by any other site, including those of the New York Times and the Guardian. (A typical BuzzFeed story: 10 quotations, with pictures of Kanye West and Freddie Mercury, presented in a quiz-like format under the headline “Who Said It: Kanye West Or Freddie Mercury?”)
Judging by the spectacular results, BuzzFeed has turned “virality” into a science: Thanks to advanced analytics and tools of Big Data, they know exactly what needs to be said—and how—to get the story shared by most people. Its approach is best described as Taylorism of the viral: Just like Frederick Taylor knew how to design the factory floor to maximize efficiency, BuzzFeed knows how to design its articles to produce most clicks and shares. The content of the article is secondary to its viral performance.
Until now, there was just one barrier to BuzzFeed’s plan for world domination: While many of its stories are highly visual, they still contain a fair amount of text—a barrier to non-English speakers. Well, this barrier is no more: BuzzFeed has struck a deal with Duolingo. Duolingo is a promising startup for studying languages that was founded by Louis von Ahn, the person we have to thank (or blame) for inventing the anti-spam CAPTCHA system that prompts us to type what we see in two pictures to make sure we are not robots on a spamming mission. Initially, the CAPTCHA system relied on random text, but then Von Ahn realized that he could get people to fight spam and help to digitize books at the same time: Why have people enter random text if they can be entering hard-to-read text from scanned books?
Internet guru Clay Shirky sees such logic—which he has dubbed “cognitive surplus”—at work in many other parts of digital culture. In his 2010 book of the same name, Shirky argued that we must find ways to harness this “cognitive surplus” and turn it into social good. Duolingo is Von Ahn’s attempt to build a business by leveraging “the cognitive surplus” that is inherent in language learning. Millions—perhaps billions—of sentences are translated every day by students of foreign languages. All those sentences tend to disappear into the void of language textbooks and student notebooks. This is where BuzzFeed comes in: Students who sign up for Duolingo’s language courses would be tasked with translating BuzzFeed articles, one sentence at a time. The translated stories will then appear online. The model is quite elegant: Students have to translate sentences anyway; Duolingo doesn’t charge students for language learning, but BuzzFeed does pay it for the final translations.
Here is BuzzFeed’s version of “global village”: If its plan works, more and more people around the globe will be reading about U.S. popular culture in their native languages. No, what it is interested in is taking viral stories that have already proven their worth in English and taking them global, conquering even more eyeballs that were previously hard to reach due to language barriers.
Instead of deep engagement with an issue by a dozen committed people, we get rather shallow engagement by a few million.
In the process, it gains even more traffic and could someday enter local advertising markets—BuzzFeed is launching local editions in Spanish, French, and Brazilian Portuguese, too. National news players that produce genuine hard news—the kind that takes money to report and might not receive many likes and shares on social networks, as it focuses on issues that are grim rather than viral—would have a powerful new competitor. There’s no scenario in which BuzzFeed’s “cosmopolitan turn” is good for foreign news sites: They will be pressed to either soften up their own news coverage—to boost social media friendliness—or be faced with the prospect of making even less money off their online advertising.
In some respect, BuzzFeed is putting the toolkits of Big Data and crowdsourcing to logical use—assuming that it doesn’t really see itself as being in the news business. BuzzFeed’s goal, after all, is to get the maximum number of shares and likes on social media—for it’s the shares and likes that determine how much money the site is making. In this, BuzzFeed thinks more like a Silicon Valley startup rather than a traditional journalistic entity, with its outdated civic concerns that go beyond the need to maximize and monetize traffic.
The BuzzFeed-Duolingo partnership reveals the difficulty of operating with apolitical concepts like “cognitive surplus” that are not properly grounded in economics or theories of globalization. On the face of it, Duolingo and BuzzFeed are harnessing plenty of “cognitive surplus,” having found an effective way to tap into the vast market of people who want to learn English to succeed in today’s global economy. But what is here to celebrate?
This particular instance of harnessing of “cognitive surplus”—in the name of building a global village, with BuzzFeed as its most popular international news outlet—might actually undermine the work of news outlets that keep the world informed about news that do not revolve around Kanye West, Hollywood, or cats.
Will there still be any serious news outlets in the “global village”? Or will it, like most villages, thrive on gossip alone? So far, the latter seems more likely—and for reasons that have everything to do with economics and little to do with technology.
Correction, Oct. 29, 2013: This article originally used different analytics platforms to compare the BBC’s and BuzzFeed’s traffic. The sentence about the BBC has been removed because the comparisons are not exact. The piece also said that“The Viral Web in Real Time” is BuzzFeed’s motto. It was a prominently displayed tag line on the site for some time, but no longer is.The article also said that BuzzFeed is not interested in bringing local foreign news to the English-language blogosphere; BuzzFeed has a foreign editor and correspondents in Turkey, Syria, and Moscow. That sentence has been removed.The article also originally suggested that BuzzFeed is entering local advertising markets in foreign countries. BuzzFeed is not currently in local markets.
This article arises from Future Tense, a collaboration among Arizona State University, the New America Foundation, and Slate. Future Tense explores the ways emerging technologies affect society, policy, and culture. To read more, visit the Future Tense blog and the Future Tense home page. You can also follow us on Twitter.
Rarely as the rush of romance felt so, well, rushed as it does in Rebecca Walker's maiden novel Adé: A Love Story. It's a wild ride along with an unnamed (more on that later) biracial college student who's traveling through Africa with her white best friend. Our unnamed narrator falls in love with a Swahili man she meets on an island just off the Kenyan coast, grows apart from her friend and closer to her lover's family, and must struggle with the brutal realities of life under brutal Kenyan leader Daniel arap Moi — all in 112 short pages.
The irony here is that Walker is an insightful writer whose two major non-fiction books — Black White and Jewish and Baby Love — had the heft and the narrative flow of the best fiction. But with Adé, Walker has penned a novel that feels abridged; more like a truncated treatment than a fully fleshed out book. The result is a too-brief love story about the kindling of love which, reads as though it was designed for the Kindle.
Part of the problem is that Walker's such a gifted storyteller that I wish she'd take the local streets instead of always opting for the expressway. Her sketch of the intellectual namedropping — Kahlo, de Beauvoir, Borges and, of course, Bob Dylan — in an Ivy League student's life is dead-on, as is her take on the casual cruelty college kids can exhibit. Walker's narrator and her friend espy a cute young man – "a little James Dean cum Jackson Pollock, very drunk and emotionally cut off, and thus, very manly" at a party, and engage him in a ménage-a-trois. But as soon as it's done, he's kicked out of the bed and, it turns out, the book as well. His character was there solely to serve to show the two women getting closer and nothing more. But because of Adé's brevity, the callous memory of that act lingers perhaps longer then Walker intended, and undermines some later dramatic turns.
The two women decide to spend a couple of years traveling around Africa after graduation.. In Egypt, Walker's narrator begins to change as she interacts with the folk of color around her, and there are some lovely passages about her experience. But too much falls through the cracks as Walker races ahead towards the 'meet cute' moment between the narrator and Adé.
She spots him from behind, "his slender hips" to be exact, and is instantly enthralled. After a few meaningful conversations, her friend has literally been sent packing to travel alone and Adé — who has decided his beloved needs an Arabic first name — and the newly and finally named Farida are now an item.
Rebecca Walker's previous work includes the memoirs Black, White & Jewish and Baby Love. Adé: A Love Story is her first novel.
Amanda Marsalis/Courtesy of Little A / New Harvest
Rebecca Walker's previous work includes the memoirs Black, White & Jewish and Baby Love. Adé: A Love Story is her first novel.
Amanda Marsalis/Courtesy of Little A / New Harvest
While the gesture is both sweet and meaningful — as Adé says, the name Farida "means the woman is exceptional, a jewel" — it would have had more import had the reader known her given first name from the get-go. Then Farida's decision to shed it would be truly transformative. But the only way to do that is give her a fully developed backstory — and instead, Walker is content to drop hints of Farida's life before Adé: her African-American mother's a writer based in Northern California and her Jewish father's an attorney with a practice in New York. (Sound familiar?)
The book's deftest characterizations are of Adé's family. Much of Walker's best writing is about Adé's mother Nuru Badi and his sisters, who consistently test Farida to see if she is worthy of the man whose name means "royal." Farida's acceptance of these tests and these women as an extended family, as well as her gradual adoption of Muslim tradition is well-rendered. And the contrast of that familial love with a brief, tense encounter with Adé's estranged father is beautifully done.
It's when Adé insists on meeting Farida's parents in the U.S. that Walker's pacing shifts into frenetic overdrive. The hellish depictions of Kenya under President Moi — the corruption and violence — as Farida tries to get a passport for Adé are chilling, but they fly by at such an accelerated clip that the horrors don't sink in. We're already on to the next terrible circumstance, whether it be malaria, an unsanitary hospital or a military crackdown. And the book's denouement raises more questions than it answers: Farida's so-called clear-eyed assessment of life in Africa struck me as rather insensitive and – unfairly or not – a reminder of her previous incarnation as the college student who coldly kicked that boy out of her bed.
Will the novel hold your interest? Absolutely. Walker's too good a writer not to. But with some additional fleshing out, Adé: A Love Story could have captured our hearts as well. Instead, I'm reminded of an old Frank Sinatra song: "We're on the road to romance, it's safe to say, but let's take all the stops along the way."
Harlem-born and Brooklyn-bred, Richard Torres is the author of the novel Freddie's Dead. He has written for many publications including XXL, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, The Village Voice and The New York Times, and has also penned album liner notes for a number of artists including Marvin Gaye, Richard Pryor and Dave Brubeck.
Source: 