Review
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May 23, 2012 06:50 AM
A master’s missteps
Fixated on Kapuscinski’s flaws, a new biography misses the point
Celebrated for his reportage about world-changing events and leaders of his day—the Iranian Revolution, Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution, Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia—the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski has remained in the headlines since his death in 2007 largely due to questions about his veracity: How accurate was his reporting? How truthfully did he describe his own life?...
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May 21, 2012 06:50 AM
The re-entry problem
America’s tough-on-crime policies didn’t work. Now what?
Over the course of eight days in 1978, a 15-year-old terror named Willie Bosket managed to satisfy his curiosity about what it felt like to kill someone. He did this by purchasing a .22 handgun from his mother’s boyfriend, paid for with funds obtained from robbing sleeping passengers in New York City’s subway system, and shooting his next two...
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May 15, 2012 06:50 AM
The astroturf Cassandra
Why hacks like Andrew Keen really fear the social Web
Long before Facebook or Foursquare, men like the late management consultant Martin Jay Levitt were connoisseurs of social networks. At the beginning of each new gig Levitt would have a client’s human resources director create detailed diagrams mapping the relationships between all employees, accounting for gossip, date of hire and pay, even details of his sex life, if any...
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April 9, 2012 06:00 AM
Brief Encounters
Short reviews of Ghost of the Ozarks, News for All the People and After the Fall
Ghost of the Ozarks: Murder and Memory in the Upland South | By Brooks Blevins | University of Illinois Press | 304 pages, $29.95
The “quirky crime” story was an inescapable aspect of newspaper culture in the 1920s. Publications hundreds of miles distant, scanning for news that would entertain, would dispatch reporters to cover a trial in some forsaken crossroads,...
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April 5, 2012 06:00 AM
Reading Room
An illustrated review of the New York Post's app
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March 14, 2012 12:12 PM
Your Black Muslim History
A new book tackles issues larger than one murdered reporter
Killing the Messenger: A Story of Radical Faith, Racism's Backlash, and the Assassination of a Journalist | By Thomas Peele | The Crown Publishing Group | 441 pages, $26.00
It’s said that the devil is in the details, and experienced writers would agree that the tiniest details can make or break a story. This may tempt authors to emphasize...
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March 8, 2012 07:28 PM
Heap of Trouble
Katherine Boo chronicles life inside a Mumbai slum
Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity | By Katherine Boo | Random House | 256 pages | $27
Long known as one of America’s most astute chroniclers of domestic poverty, New Yorker writer Katherine Boo chose to report her first book elsewhere: in Annawadi, a slum at the edge of Mumbai’s international airport. This...
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February 1, 2012 06:00 AM
Brief Encounters
Reviewing anthologies on food in wartime reporting and the best of Wolcott Gibbs
Eating Mud Crabs in Kandahar: Stories of Food During Wartime by the World’s Leading Correspondents Edited by Matt McAllester | California Studies in Food and Culture, No. 31 | University of California Press | 214 pages | $27.50
Nearly forty years ago, the New York Times book division published a volume called Correspondents’ Choice, in which the newspaper’s then...
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January 19, 2012 06:00 AM
Reading Room
An illustrated review of The Occupied Wall Street Journal
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January 11, 2012 06:00 AM
The Tea Party Paradox
A democratic movement that is anti-democratic at heart
It remains one of the mysteries of our political age: How did a Wall Street-spawned meltdown and the worst recession in decades spark a populist reaction against government? In the 1930s, the failure of a Republican administration and laissez-faire economics led to a leftward swing and the New Deal. In our time, the financial crisis seemed poised to catalyze...
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Fall 1961
On Looking into Chapman’s News
"Newspapers are not waifs. They reflect their source."
A. J. Liebling, the twentieth century’s foremost press critic, wrote only one piece for the Columbia Journalism Review. (He died shortly after the publication of CJR’s sixth issue.) His review of a history of the New York Daily News provides ample glimpses of the wit and vigor he deployed under The New Yorker’s “The Wayward Press” banner. The below paragraph...
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November 3, 2011 12:09 AM
A Reading List for Future Journalists
We asked some of our favorite journalists, scholars, and critics to recommend books and other works that could help the next generation of reporters become better observers, storytellers, and thinkers. Here is an edited list of the titles they suggested. For full lists from each recommender, click here.
Nicholas Lemann
Dean, Columbia University Graduate School of... Continue reading -
September 29, 2011 11:56 AM
What a Country
Two new efforts to make sense of America’s struggles
In the midst of a cross-country pilgrimage, Iraq war veteran Colby Buzzell finds himself transfixed by an “old dusty American flag” in the hallway of a shabby residential hotel in Cheyenne, Wyoming. “As I approached, it kind of woke me up,” he writes in Lost in America: A Dead-End Journey, “reminding me again what it is like to...
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September 27, 2011 06:00 AM
The Cheap Seats
Joe Bageant told uncomfortable truths about class in America
In the last decade of his life, Joe Bageant came full circle. He and his third wife, Barbara, were renting a small, wooden house in Winchester, Virginia, the town where he grew up and from which he had fled repeatedly over the years—always returning, though never long enough to stay....
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Desks
The Audit Business
- Sorkin’s Glass-Steagall straw man Of course its repeal contributed, directly and indirectly, to the financial crisis
- Audit notes: Buffett on newspapers, Times-Picayune, SEC lets Lehman go A vow to invest in newspapers and protect them from interference
The Observatory Science
- Reparative journalism Reporter sinks a controversial paper on “ex-gay” therapy
- The western frontier KQED Quest, Pacific Standard keep their eyes on the other coast
Campaign Desk Politics & Policy
- Herald’s Caputo dives deep on diverging polls Do other news organizations undermine their credibility when they don’t do the same?
- Many stations don’t factcheck super PAC ads: survey Conference highlights difference in attitudes between industry, watchdog groups
Behind the News The Media
Blog
The Kicker last updated: Fri 11:09 AM
- David Simon, creator of The Wire and Treme, on the Times-Picayune cuts
- The Times-Picayune cuts staff and print runs
- Broadcasters sue to keep political ad buy data offline
- The Pulitzer Prize luncheon, storified
- A game of telephone fools the Times
