Critical Eye
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November 6, 2012 06:50 AM
Q&A: Caitlin Moran tells it like it is
The foul-mouthed feminist's new book comes out on Tuesday
British columnist Caitlin Moran exploded onto the US scene this past July when her feminist memoir/manifesto, How to Be a Woman, became an instant bestseller. In honor of the American release of Moranthology (Harper Perennial, $14.99)—her follow-up collection of personal essays, celebrity interviews, and social commentary originally published in the Times of London—Moran talked about her unconventional start in...
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November 1, 2012 12:00 AM
Brief Encounters
Short reviews of Out of the News, The Way the World Works: Essays, and The Stammering Century
Out of the News: Former Journalists Discuss a Profession in Crisis | By Celia Viggo Wexler | McFarland & Company | 195 pages | $40 paperbound
Celia Viggo Wexler left newspaper journalism in the 1980s for an unfashionable reason, motherhood. She did not return, but instead found compelling new ways to employ a journalist’s skills, becoming a writer/lobbyist for Common...
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November 1, 2012 12:00 AM
The future’s so bright …
How to save the world while paying people with beer and hugs
In early 2012, a musician named Amanda Palmer took to Kickstarter to ask her fans for $100,000. Palmer, a veteran of the major-label system, was raising money to independently release her new album. “since [sic] i’m now without a giant label to front the gazillions of dollars that it always takes to manufacture and promote a record this big,...
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November 1, 2012 12:00 AM
Color blind
When white men and three networks ruled the media, coverage of race was ... better? Damn you, Internet!
Last summer, Gawker asked veteran news anchor Dan Rather to review Aaron Sorkin’s new television series The Newsroom. It was an inspired choice. In The Newsroom, Sorkin feeds on nostalgia for newsmen like Rather—the mythical authoritative anchor who delivered objective facts to the American people in a simpler time, before blogs.
Perhaps predictably, Rather loved the show, giving it...
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October 26, 2012 06:50 AM
When McGovern met Mailer
Revisiting an unjustly forgotten account of the 1972 political conventions
When former U.S. Senator George McGovern died in late October, he was valorized as the rare decent man working in a business of crooks, liars, and frauds. But this wasn’t just the usual whitewashing process that accompanies eulogies of a once-hated figure. Even while he was alive, indeed at the height of his prominence in American politics as Democratic presidential...
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October 23, 2012 06:50 AM
Fact-checking at The New Yorker
An excerpt from The Art of Making Magazines
Last month, Columbia Journalism Review Books and Columbia University Press released The Art of Making Magazines: On Being an Editor and Other Views from the Industry, an anthology of insights and reminiscences from top magazine editors. The book is based on talks given to students as part of the Delacorte Lecture Series at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism....
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October 8, 2012 06:50 AM
New Yorker writers dish about their craft
An event with The Moth saw writers telling "tales out of school"
The New Yorker Festival brought back its collaboration with The Moth again on Friday for “Tales out of School 4,” an adaptation of The Moth's popular and portable storytelling machine. This time it produced stories about writing for The New Yorker, as told by its by writers. Needless to say, New Yorker devotees packed the room at $50 a head...
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August 23, 2012 03:05 PM
Review: Dennis Drabelle’s The Great American Railroad War
How Frank Norris and Ambrose Bierce helped keep a crooked railroad honest
The Great American Railroad War: How Ambrose Bierce and Frank Norris Took on the Notorious Central Pacific Railroad | By Dennis Drabelle | St. Martin’s Press | 293 pages, $26.99
Though many of today’s American writers are politically aware and active, their modes of engagement tend to be indirect, their campaigns waged through personal essays, polemics, and oblique fiction. It...
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August 16, 2012 03:32 PM
Review: The Year of the Gadfly
A teenage journalist finds herself in Jennifer Miller’s resonant first novel
The Year of the Gadfly | By Jennifer Miller | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt | 384 pages, $24.00
“Even Edward R. Murrow sometimes spoke in clichés, which only proves how ubiquitous and insidious they are,” quips Iris Dupont, intrepid teenage reporter, near the beginning of Jennifer Miller’s promising debut novel, The Year of the Gadfly. Iris, a winning and vulnerable teen...
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August 6, 2012 11:00 AM
Behind Big Oil, the original big business
A review of Steve Coll’s Private Empire
Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power | By Steve Coll | Penguin Press HC | 704 pages, $36
When the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded off the Gulf of Mexico in April of 2010, reporters were thrown into the deep end of the oil and gas industry—again. Twenty-two years earlier, another catastrophic spill shocked the country and changed the industry:...
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August 3, 2012 06:50 AM
Required skimming: literary criticism
Keep abreast of what the bookish thinkers are thinking
This month, CJR presents “Required Skimming,” a daily miniguide to our staffers' beats and obsessions, ranging from finance to food. If we overlooked any of your must-read destinations, please tell us in the comments.
• Arts and Letters Daily: One of the oldest—and still one of the best—hand-curated aggregators of smart cultural essays and book reviews.
• Publishers Weekly:...
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July 2, 2012 03:02 PM
Q&A: Confront and Conceal author David Sanger
“There’s nothing ‘childish’ about raising issues of great public import”
Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power | By David E. Sanger | Crown | 476 pages, $28.00
Every White House keeps secrets, especially when it comes to national security. It’s the job of the press to learn those secrets and reveal them, unless—and it’s a big unless—the press is convinced that doing so will...
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June 29, 2012 06:50 AM
How the US captured the real 9/11 mastermind
Terry McDermott and Josh Meyer take us deep inside the hunt for KSM
The Hunt for KSM: Inside the Pursuit and Takedown of the Real 9/11 Mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed | By Terry McDermott and Josh Meyer | Little, Brown and Company | 368 pages, $27.99
Terry McDermott’s Perfect Soldiers, released in 2005, did not get the attention it deserved. At the time, it was the most complete biography available of the 9/11...
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June 28, 2012 06:50 AM
Edward Luce charts America’s decline
Is the United States past its prime?
Time to Start Thinking: America in the Age of Descent | By Edward Luce | Atlantic Monthly Press | 291 pages, $26.00
Is America in decline? Almost since America established its hegemony over the rest of the world in the aftermath of World War II we’ve been worried about this question. The recent proliferation of books about the diminution of...
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- Dull news from Doha UN climate summit a ho-hum affair for the press
- Highway to the danger zone Following Sandy, HuffPo and NYT dig into the folly of coastal development
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- NBC News sets good example for Medicare reporting People perspective leads to clear explanation of impact of proposed changes
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