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November 12, 2009 03:13 PM
Bomb Squad
The explosive rise (and final fizzle) of Ramparts
A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America | By Peter Richardson | The New Press | 272 pages, $25.95
It only took a few years for Ramparts to evolve from an earnest Catholic lay magazine published in the suburbs of San Mateo County to a high-spending, scoop-breaking, muckraking journal whose San Francisco...
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November 04, 2009 01:27 PM
Picture Perfect
A DVD reissue of Scandal Sheet is good news indeed
I don’t know any newspaper people who don’t like a good newspaper movie. I'm not sure why this is so--do cops like cop movies? I guess we all like to see what the filmmakers get right, and what they get wrong. And I don’t mean movies where one of the lead characters happens to work at a newspaper (like Marley...
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October 01, 2009 11:55 AM
Throw the Rascals In!
Joe Flaherty's classic account of Mailer and Breslin on the hustings
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In this season of a perfectly dull mayoral election, and in this year that is the fortieth anniversary not only of Woodstock, Chappaquiddick, the moon landing, the Manson murders, and the Miracle Mets but also the celebrated Mailer-Breslin campaign of 1969, let us pause for a couple hours to dust off and read Managing Mailer. In this half-great... -
September 24, 2009 12:00 PM
California Dreaming
An era of "strange quietude" in the Golden State
Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance | By Kevin Starr | Oxford University Press | 576 pages, $34.95
All is not well in California. As has been widely noted, our state is broke--and perpetually on fire. Its legendary thirst for water is looking risky as the West dries up, and the U.C. system, a flagship of public education,...
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September 16, 2009 10:50 AM
Out of Africa
The raw and redemptive odyssey of a Burundian refugee
Strength in What Remains | By Tracy Kidder | Random House | 304 pages, $26
“The world is full of miserable places,” Tracy Kidder wrote in Mountains Beyond Mountains, his 2003 chronicle of Paul Farmer, a Boston doctor who worked to bring adequate health care to ill and desperately poor people in Haiti. “One way of living comfortably is not...
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August 27, 2009 01:54 PM
Core Competencies
Alex Jones on why we must maintain the "iron core of news"
Losing the News: The Future of the News That Feeds Democracy | By Alex S. Jones | Oxford University Press | 256 pages, $24.95
Having passed my fortieth year as a professional journalist, with an emphasis on investigative reporting, perhaps I am crotchety. Perhaps you should stop reading at the close of this paragraph. Or, alternately, perhaps I am justified...
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August 19, 2009 01:07 PM
Asphalt Jungle
A fresh look at a monumental smackdown over urban renewal
Wrestling With Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took on New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City | By Anthony Flint | Random House | 256 pages, $27
All city dwellers, and especially New Yorkers, owe a debt to Jane Jacobs. More than anyone else in the mid-twentieth century, she made the argument in favor of humane cities: which...
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July 30, 2009 01:35 PM
“Malaise” Maligned
A look back at Jimmy Carter's ill-fated speech
'What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President?': Jimmy Carter, America's 'Malaise,' and the Speech that Should Have Changed the Country
By Kevin Mattson | Bloomsbury USA | 272 pages, $25
If there is such thing as a national mood, then 1979 found the United States engaged in a prolonged national gloom. Vietnam had crushed our belief...
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July 22, 2009 10:35 AM
The Art of Listening
Pete Hamill chats about the joys of A.J. Liebling
With his phenomenal ear and rococo prose--not to mention the sort of wit that can still leave a reader helpless with laughter and delight--A.J. Liebling (1904-1963) captivated an entire generation of readers. His mandarin style was more or less impossible to imitate. But he offered a good many subliminal lessons to the aspiring journalist, as Pete Hamill recounts in the...
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July 16, 2009 10:35 AM
A Lapdog in Wolffe’s Clothing
One journalist's fawning account of Barack Obama's presidential campaign
Renegade: The Making of a President | By Richard Wolffe | Crown | $26, 368 pages
Last month, Politico’s Ben Smith served up a juicy story about the controversy surrounding Renegade, former Newsweek correspondent Richard Wolffe’s book about the Obama campaign. There seemed to be no shortage of staffers at the magazine willing to speak ill of...
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July 02, 2009 08:00 AM
Pilgrims or Progress?
A Harper's editor's stint as a cultural virologist
And Then There's This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture | By Bill Wasik | Viking Press | $25.95, 208 pages
Without a doubt, Bill Wasik’s And Then There’s This is something of a pilgrimage. But readers intent on reaching the Celestial City will be sorely disappointed. The author, a senior editor at Harper’s, skips the sort...
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June 17, 2009 12:12 PM
Where Credit Is Due
A Financial Times reporter explores how a JP Morgan invention spurred the financial crisis
Fool's Gold: How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at J.P. Morgan Was Corrupted by Wall Street Greed and Unleashed a Catastrophe
By Gillian Tett | Free Press | $26, 304 pages
I can't imagine there's a better vehicle to tell the story of credit derivatives—the financial instruments that laid the groundwork for the financial...
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June 10, 2009 06:00 AM
Hand Crafted
Can a return to manual labor fix our ailing economy?
Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work | By Matthew B. Crawford | The Penguin Press | $25.95, 246 pages
These are hard economic times, and the recovery, whenever it comes, may also transform the way we think about free markets, and about the nature of work itself. After all, we've just watched the global...
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June 03, 2009 10:34 AM
With God On Our Side
Reza Aslan redraws the line in the sand
How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and the End of the War on Terror
By Reza Aslan | Random House | 256 pages, $26
How to Win a Cosmic War is a work whose apocalyptic title belies its sensitivity and seriousness. In his second book, Iranian-American scholar Reza Aslan draws on history, scripture, and sociological literature...
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Desks
The Audit Business
The Observatory Science
- Saving Corwin’s Creatures MSNBC wades into new territory with environmental documentary 100 Heartbeats
- Trains, Planes, and Carbon Offsets Times keeps a needed eye on green premiums
Campaign Desk Politics & Policy
- Greg Craig and Transparency
- Not For All the News in China, Part I Former NYT Shanghai bureau chief Howard French on the coverage of Obama’s trip to Asia
