![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/Images\/Bates_Magazine\/summer05\/D42U6704_Jay_small.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
At a recent off-campus event in Freeport, French professor Kirk Read got laughs when he said that a Bates education ought to help one distinguish \u201ctruth from truthiness\u201d in the news media.<\/p>\n
The laughter was in part kudos to Read for his spot-on pop culture reference. \u201cTruthiness\u201d was the 2005 word of the year (as determined by the American Dialect Society) created by Stephen Colbert on Comedy Channel\u2019s parody news talk show, The Colbert Report<\/em>. Colbert\u2019s character spoofs blustery news pundits. \u201cI don\u2019t trust books,\u201d announced his straight-faced character in 2005. \u201cThey\u2019re all fact, no heart.\u201d What is true, Colbert told his audience, is what he feels is true.<\/p>\n The ability to discern truth from truthiness, and to articulate the former, comes through in this issue\u2019s story on Poland Spring\u2019s expansion plans in Maine. Tom Brennan \u201983, Andy Tolman \u201970, and Keith Taylor \u201982 each have dealt with those who would substitute truthiness for the facts. Colbert coined truthiness, of course, in the wake of all that has happened since Sept. 11, 2001. (\u201cDoesn\u2019t taking Saddam out feel like the right thing?\u201d he asked on his first show.) But setting aside cynicism, can we explain the role of emotion and perspective in the construction of \u201ctrue\u201d personal stories? That\u2019s the topic of researcher Jonathan Adler \u201900\u2019s essay introducing five alumni lives since Sept. 11. His essay explains one kind of truth-seeking \u2014 how we\u2019ve created our own personal stories from the true-life experiences of Sept. 11, and what those stories say about us and our nation.<\/p>\n On pages 58 and 59 is a question-and-answer article with Kirk Read, whose off-campus appearances were made to thank donors to The Campaign for Bates<\/em>. From Freeport to the West Coast and on to London and Paris, his easy wit and obvious affection for and knowledge of Bates undoubtedly created fresh connections between Bates people and the College. With that in mind, his interview is within a new magazine department called Connections. This section will share the issues and ideas that Bates people discuss at off-campus Bates events \u2014 from Bates Business Network gatherings to meetings of Bates Book Clubs \u2014 where people gather in a spirit of Bates generosity.<\/p>\n At this year\u2019s Convocation, poet Robert Farnsworth defined this particular Bates quality as \u201cpassing on and being receptive to the voltages of various enthusiasms, and completing these in a shared circuit of ideas, of commitment, of fellowship.\u201d<\/p>\n Anyway, Bates gatherings are where you\u2019ve always gotten societal insights. In Boston in 1921, President Clifton Daggett Gray explained, albeit less wittily than Read, how the world needs \u201cmen and women who think straight.\u201d\u00a0 As reported in the inaugural Alumnus<\/em>, Gray explained how the modern world was becoming a fast-paced \u201cneighborhood.\u201d \u201cAbout the only places left where one cannot get stock market reports are Greenland and Tierra del Fuego,\u201d he said. \u201cThe long-distance telephone makes it impossible to escape insistent calls of business. If we ever need to think straight, it is today.\u201d<\/p>\n Ain\u2019t that the truth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" At a recent off-campus event in Freeport, French professor Kirk Read got…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":221,"featured_media":0,"parent":1108,"menu_order":1,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"_dimp_site_id":"","_dimp_override_contact":false,"_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"class_list":["post-1123","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/221"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1123"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1123\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11297,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1123\/revisions\/11297"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1108"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}