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Vapur Pro Team
Their adventures take Vapur Anti-Bottles to the ends of the earth (quite literally!) and their experience in the field offers insight into what extreme outdoor athletes and adventurers demand in a hydration companion. These respected individuals, Eric Larsen, Laura Bylund, Chris Davenport and Anna Levesque, of the outdoor realm have chosen to represent Vapur and the Anti-Bottle as members of the official Vapur Pro Team.
Eric LarsenPolar Explorer
Modern-day explorer, educator, expedition guide and environmental enthusiast, Eric Larsen's life epitomizes adventure.
A polar adventurer, dog musher and educator, Eric has spent the past 15 years of his life traveling in some of the most remote and wild places left on earth. In 2006, Eric and Lonnie Dupre completed the first ever summer expedition to the North Pole. Eric successfully led his first expedition to the South Pole in 2008, covering nearly 600 miles in 41 days. Eric is now one of only a few Americans in to have skied to both the North and South Poles. He recently embarked on the final leg of the Save the Poles expedition - climbing to the summit of Mt. Everest. Eric has dedicated his adult life to sharing his love for the outdoor world with others. As an educator, Eric strives to connect people to places and issues. In recognition of those efforts, Eric was elected as one of Outside Magazine's Eco All Stars in 2008. He was also inducted as a member of the Explorer's Club based in New York City. Eric splits his time between Boulder, Colorado and Grand Marais, Minnesota
Laura BylundPro Rock Climber
Laura Bylund is a lifelong rock climber, engaged in all types of climbing, all over the world for over two decades.
Laura is an Outdoor Education and Rope Rigging Professional from Southern California and she has been canyoneering since 2007 throughout the western region of the US and Hawaii. Laura is a certified Single Pitch Instructor with the American Mountain Guides Association, a NFPA certified Rope Rescue Technician, and a Course Provider for the Climbing Wall Instructor Program with the Professional Climbing Instructors& Association. Laura works full-time as a manager for Adventure Programs at the University of California, Santa Barbara and is a lead instructor and stunt rigger for Alpine Training Services and ATS Filmworks. Laura is also a Wilderness First Responder and part time guide for Earthworks Climbing School of Ventura, CA.
Anna LevesqueChampion Kayaker
Anna Levesque, an accomplished international competitor, instructor and guide, is a leading expert in her field.
Anna is a world-class paddler and instructor dedicated to enhancing the lives of women through kayaking, yoga and travel. During her career as a professional athlete, Anna was a member of the Canadian Freestyle Kayak Team from 1999 to 2003 and earned a bronze medal at the Freestyle World Championships in 2001. She placed in the top 3 in several freestyle competitions and extreme races during that time and has paddled in over 10 countries. Now Anna is the owner of the woman-empowered kayaking group called Girls at Play, inspiring lives &on and off the water.& Anna combines her expertise in kayaking with her experience as a yoga instructor, a student of meditation and personal transformation to provide a holistic, empowering experience for her students.
Chris DavenportWorld Champion Skier
Two-time World Champion skier Chris Davenport is widely regarded as one of the premier big mountain skiers in the world today.
Among his many ski mountaineering achievements, in 2007 Chris became the first person to ski all fifty-four of Colorado's 14,000-foot peaks in less than one year. He has numerous first descents of peaks around the globe under his belt, and recently guided and skied on Mt. Everest. Chris has been featured in more than thirty ski films by Warren Miller and Matchstick Productions.
He is also a TV commentator for ESPN, ABC sports, and Outside Television, and is an Olympic and World Cup announcer for ski racing events. Chris is a professional speaker who often lectures on risk management as it relates to business and mountain sports. Chris is the author of two beautiful coffee-table books that celebrate North America&s mountains, Ski The 14ers and Fifty Classic Ski Descents of North America. When not traveling the globe Chris resides in Aspen, Colorado with his wife and three boys.
Jake NortonClimber, Guide, Photographer
A renowned climber, guide, photographer, and speaker, Jake Norton&s career has always been focused beyond the summit.
Jake climbed Mt. Rainier at age 12, and was instantly hooked. He began guiding professionally at age 18, and guided his first 8000m peak, Cho Oyu, 5 years later. In 1999, Jake helped discover the remains of George Mallory high on Everest. He’s since been to Everest 7 times, reaching the summit 3 times via the Northeast and Southeast Ridges. Jake led the 2012 Eddie Bauer West Ridge Expedition, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the route’s 1st ascent.
In 2011, Jake and his wife, Wende Valentine, started Challenge21, a multi-year climbing/fundraising project dedicated to raising awareness and funds for the global water and sanitation crises. To date, Jake’s climbs and efforts have raised over $250,000 for Water For People, and spread the word to over 1 million people worldwide.
Jake’s biggest – and most rewarding – adventure to date is being the father of two children, Lila and Ryrie. He lives in Golden, Colorado.
Get SocialJake Tapper: The Snoozeroom | The New Republic
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THE RIVETING DRAMA and moral risks that are part of TV journalism offer a fertile field for artists. Paddy Chayefsky in Network told us the story of “the first known instance of a man who was killed because he had lousy ratings.” In Broadcast News, James L. Brooks showed us the real dangers to the soul of journalism when vacuous flash is valued over substance. Into the ranks of the protagonists of these classics—mad prophet of the airwaves Howard Beale and the smooth but unethical Tom Grunick—now ambles Will McAvoy, the anchorman hero of Aaron Sorkin’s “The Newsroom,” who has made it his mission to “speak truth to stupid.”
I wanted this show to be great. When asked to participate in a conference call, gratis, where I shared some of my reporting experiences with the writers, I eagerly did so. But I won’t further bury the lede: “The Newsroom,” which debuts June 24 on HBO, is sadly disappointing. There’s much to criticize in the media—and TV news in particular. But though “The Newsroom” intends to lecture its viewers on the higher virtues of capital-J journalism, Professor Sorkin soon reveals he isn’t much of an expert on the subject.
SORKIN HAS a well-known penchant for projecting his political fantasies onto his protagonists: See the crusading presidents Andrew Shepherd (from The American President) and Jed Bartlet (of “The West Wing”). McAvoy (who is played by Jeff Daniels) is the journalistic equivalent, a messiah sent to save broadcast news.
The series begins with McAvoy’s conversion from cynical hack to truth-telling idealist. We first meet him as part of a Northwestern University panel where he’s pilloried for his passionless impartiality. “You’re the Jay Leno of news anchors,” he’s told. “You’re popular because you don’t offend anyone.” Further goaded by his old-school, bourbon-soaked boss at the (fictional) ACN cable network, Charlie Skinner (Sam Waterston), and his new executive producer, MacKenzie McHale (Emily Mortimer)—with whom he has a messy romantic past—McAvoy experiences an epiphany. He goes on air and apologizes to the public for having pursued unimportant stories in pursuit of ratings. He will now only report on what is serious and real. He will dedicate himself to protecting civic virtue.
But that prompts the question: protect it from what? This is where Sorkin’s high-minded critique falls flat. McAvoy sanctimoniously laments the deterioration of public discourse and the news media’s complicity in it. But if that is the problem, his subsequent actions reveal a commitment to a uniformly partisan solution. McAvoy—and, by extension, Sorkin—preach political selflessness, but they practi they extol the Fourth Estate’s democratic duty, but they believe that responsibility consists mostly of criticizing Republicans. This is done through the oldest trick in the book for a Hollywood liberal: by having McAvoy be a “sane Republican” who looks at his party with sadness and anger.
The fact, then, that the show begins in 2010—at the height of the Tea Party’s fervor— it’s what enables the show’s didacticism. Sorkin’s intent is to show how events of recent memory could have been covered better by the media if journalists had only had the courage. Some of Sorkin’s lessons are well-taken. We see McAvoy under pressure from his bosses to confirm, or at least repeat, the false NPR report that Representative Gabrielle Giffords had been killed. Those scenes ring true, as do others in which ratings pressures are discussed.
But more often than not, Sorkin simply demonstrates his own confusion about what ails journalism. He begins with the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster. One of McAvoy’s producers has expert inside sources at BP and Halliburton, so ACN’s “News Night” leads with the story as a tale of environmental disaster, corporate sloth, and government impotence. Meanwhile every other network—bereft of such information—is myopically focused on the fire on the oil rig and the deaths of eleven workers. But citing the BP oil spill is a curious way to charge journalistic malpractice: By my recollection, that was a story the media covered fairly aggressively and responsibly.
In another episode Sorkin pats McAvoy on the back for limiting his coverage of the failed Times Square bomber and resisting the temptation to “hype” a terrorist threat that fizzled. (With no apparent sense of sarcasm, Skinner repeats praise for their restraint from Media Matters and Think Progress, as if those explicitly liberal websites are nonideological arbiters of Edward R. Murrow’s legacy.) And what are the important issues “News Night” covers instead of the piffle of Faisal Shahzad, a homegrown terrorist funded and trained by the Pakistani Taliban? McAvoy instead devotes at least a week of his broadcast to showcasing what a horribly inept and dangerous bunch Tea Party Republicans are as they—gasp!—defeat establishment Republicans in free and fair primaries and elections. It’s all well and good to follow the Koch brothers’ money, but at a time when Democrats controlled the White House and both houses of Congress, it’s telling that McAvoy and Sorkin aim their sights at conservatives seeking power—not moderates and liberals wielding it.
In a later episode, McAvoy dismantles the preposterously under-sourced claim that President Obama’s trip to India cost $200 million per day. This was a story that was widely discredited at the time, but McAvoy is not content to merely debunk it. Instead, he works himself into a fervor connecting the dots of the now-familiar path of bogus-source-to-obscure-website-to-Drudge-to-Limbaugh-to-the-zeitgeist. It is as if he had discovered the lost city of Atlantis. And when McAvoy goes after a National Rifle Association campaign to portray Obama as anti-gun, he insists on depicting it as a moral crusade in defense of the public good. But he never feels the need to question whether—in the midst of crises in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the international economy—it’s really so noble after all to devote one’s limited resources to fact-checking relatively unimportant political attacks. As such, it’s hard not to judge the resulting segment as falling short of McAvoy’s newly idealistic raison d’être—though Sorkin clearly seems to think otherwise.
SCENE: INTERIOR. TNR Office, Washington, D.C.
EDITOR: Butwhatabout the thing?
TAPPER: Thething?
EDITOR: ThatSORKINthing whentwo charactersarewalkingdownahallway oronthestreet and thedialogue EXPLODESlikePOPCORN fastandsalty and-it’s ... stylizedandfun.
TAPPER: Oh. THATthing.
EDITOR: Yes. Thething.
Of Sorkin’s signature style of dialogue, there is little to be said other than you either love it or hate it. (I happen to enjoy it when it’s cooking, but left this meal unsated.) The cast, for its part, is stellar, but in the spectrum of Sorkin-esque characters, with their outbreaks of fevered romances and boxes of bons mots, the journalists of “News Night” regrettably lean more to the “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” than the “Sports Night” side of the scale. Underused assets include Olivia Munn as a gorgeous economic reporter, Slumdog Millionaire’s Dev Patel as the office blogger with a tiresome belief in Big Foot, and the always-great Chris Messina as the corporate heavy.
It also must be said that Daniels has made a bold, but admirable, decision to portray McAvoy, credibly, as a very talented jerk. It’s telling that one of the ways that Sorkin prepared himself for “The Newsroom” was by embedding himself with Keith Olbermann’s (since-canceled) “Countdown” on MSNBC. McAvoy shares many weaknesses of other cable news stars—most notably, a blindness to his own ideology. This is the disconnect that allows them to proclaim a commitment to Truth and Beauty right before launching a ten-minute broadside against an opponent’s petty foibles or to make a plea for civility right before releasing a sneering explosion of disdain. For members of the media who watch the show, McAvoy will be entirely recognizable, if not for his idealistic na?veté, then for his childish egoism.
An HBO executive once told me that, since so much artistic freedom is given to its shows’ creators, new series often take a few episodes before they find their rhythm. I hope that proves to be true here. The cast is too good, Sorkin too skilled, and the subject matter too rich. There are too many fields to plow—a sub-plot involving one branch of the corporate empire plotting against another branch seems promising, as do the commercial pressures on the show to be first with information, its accuracy notwithstanding. But “The Newsroom” had me contemplating that which is so feared in my industry: changing the channel. And I was watching it on DVD.
Jake Tapper is the senior White House correspondent for ABC News. This article appears in the July 12, 2012 issue of the magazine.
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Signed up!Jake Olzen / Waging Nonviolence - People-Powered News and Analysis
Jake Olzen
Jake Olzen is a farmer, activist/organizer and journalist. He lives and farms at the Lake City Catholic Worker in Southeast Minnesota.
In the past year, two separate creative works have told the incredible story of perhaps the most powerful act of nonviolent resistance in American history.
Diane Wilson — who had been on hunger strike for 58 days — brought her message to shut down Guantánamo directly to the president's front yard.
Deemed too dangerous for broadcast 45 years ago today, the iconic footage of nine Catholic activists burning draft files might have been lost forever if not for a dogged and sympathetic reporter.
Current and former prisoners, activists, lawyers, journalists and guards have all played significant roles in getting Guantánamo back into the mainstream consciousness and, hopefully, back on the political agenda.
With polls showing that a majority of the public is war-weary and supports cutting defense spending, the peace movement finds itself in a rare moment of opportunity.
As coffee growers across the Americas face one of the greatest production crises in decades, they are organizing collective action to demand alternatives.
As immigration-reform legislation begins to take shape, immigrant-rights activists insist that any legislation that divides their communities will not work.
Walmart UNI conference in Los Angeles, October 3, 2012. (OUR Walmart Facebook page)
“Workers of the world unite!” says the traditional slogan of the Industrial Workers of the World.
On January 11, Witness Against Torture activists pose in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, which is covered in a false facade for repairs.
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