Second Read
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November 1, 2012 12:00 AM
Human capital
In O Albany!, William Kennedy pays homage to the hard-to-love city that is his novels' greatest hero
On January 16, 1928, William Joseph Kennedy suffered a misfortune of birth only slightly preferable to bastardy. Having drawn his first breath, he studied his surroundings and found himself a newly minted Son of Albany. The gravity of his situation may have been lost on him, but not for long. By the age of reason, in the Catholic sense,...
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September 17, 2012 10:50 AM
Rocky Mountain fever
Gene Fowler's Timber Line celebrates the chicanery and showmanship of the original Denver Post
In the winter of 1907, Denver showed the rest of the nation how to fight a newspaper war. The Rocky Mountain News published an editorial alleging that Frederick Bonfils, the co-owner of The Denver Post, was a blackmailing rogue who used his paper to smear those merchants with the temerity to advertise in rival publications. Bonfils, gravely offended, decided...
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July 30, 2012 11:10 AM
Look back on anger
At his best, Ambrose Bierce used vicious satire to puncture the smug complacency of America’s Gilded Age
I s journalist, short-story writer, and poet Ambrose Bierce one of the biggest SOBs in American literature? He is certainly among the most successful at raising hell: The bilious bravado of his newspaper writing and his once shockingly realistic war fiction earned him such nicknames as “Bitter Bierce” and “The Devil’s Topographer.” A spirit of aggressive disdain runs through his...
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May 10, 2012 06:50 AM
Laboratory confidential
The Double Helix’s warts-and-all portrayal of scientific pursuits shook up the formal world of science writing
W hen The Double Helix appeared in the winter of 1968, I reviewed it for The Laureate, the literary magazine at Classical High School, in Providence, Rhode Island. I was a freshman.
It was my first effort as a science writer, and now, after four decades, I feel lucky to have started there. The Double Helix: A Personal Account of...
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March 22, 2012 06:00 AM
The Auteurs’ Caretaker
Penelope Gilliatt didn't care about movies as much as she cared about the people who made them
In 1968, New Yorker editor William Shawn decided to start taking the movies seriously. Up to that point, the magazine’s film critics, men like Brendan Gill and John McNulty, had always thought themselves better than their beat; their work evincing amused detachment from the vulgar entertainments that sated the grubby masses. In a 1946 essay called “The Country of...
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January 18, 2012 06:00 AM
The Road Book
Before Ernie Pyle went to war, he wrote about America
In the spring of 1932, Ernie Pyle took over as the new managing editor of The Washington Daily News, an afternoon tabloid whose rackety little newsroom occupied the third floor of a narrow building a few blocks from the White House. His desk was near the city editor and the telegraph editor, and among the headaches he inherited was...
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November 11, 2011 06:00 AM
How the Past Saw the Present
The future of journalism has always been on journalism’s mind
CJR knew about the iPad a good fifteen years before there was an iPad to know about. In a 1995 column, Stephen Isaacs reported on “the tablet,” a notional device dreamed up by the Knight Ridder innovation guru Roger Fidler and based on the recognition that, with the coming of the web, “ordinary folks now have the exciting capability...
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August 24, 2011 02:44 PM
Among the Mongers
Henry Mayhew and the pursuit of history, from the bottom up
There is no place in any era more evocative of soot, steam, gruel, and misery than Victorian London. It is one of the great landscapes of the imagination. This is probably because the mid-century London we know best is the literary London of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, a teeming metropolis plagued by poverty and grime and peopled...
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July 25, 2011 06:00 AM
Punk’s Prophet
Greil Marcus's seminal work Ranters and Crowd Pleasers: Punk in Pop Music, 1977-92
Discounting cash-in reunions, studio sessions with bank robber Ronnie Biggs, and the like, The Sex Pistols last played in January 1978 at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco. Their useful life ended unimprovably, with singer Johnny Rotten asking the crowd, “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” and then stalking off the stage.
Among the crowd that night...
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May 6, 2011 09:00 AM
The Paper Chase
For tabloid king Emile Gauvreau, it took a lifetime to slow down
Years later, when he recounted the events that would lead to his becoming the most sensational, shameless, ambitious, and tortured newspaper editor of his time, Emile Gauvreau would return to the day in 1924 when, without a job but with a letter of reference in his pocket, he stood before the desk of Carr Van Anda, the legendary and...
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March 15, 2011 06:00 AM
Not for Laughs
A pathbreaking look at the dark comic genius behind "Skippy"
“All cartoonists are geniuses,” wrote John Updike in his introduction to a collection of cartoons by Arnold Roth, a specialist in zany quasi-doodles popular in the late fifties and early sixties. Updike, who had wanted to be a cartoonist before he thought of writing, declined to mollify non-believers by explaining the comment. He knew it to be true from...
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January 20, 2011 10:00 AM
Her Great Depression
Re-reading Betty MacDonald's Anybody Can Do Anything, on the Northwest's bust years
From the time I was nine or ten, I carried a spiral-bound Mead notebook with me at all times. I wanted to be a writer, felt I probably already was a writer, and feared I would never be a writer. I was constantly looking for clues that would tell me that someone like me, someone from Seattle, someone who was...
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December 1, 2010 04:26 PM
The Devil’s Football
H. L. Mencken airs his unexpurgated Prejudices
As we all know, serious criticism of the arts is leaving the pages of mainstream newspapers and magazines. Shrinking under the pressures of new-media innovation and the triumph of Zagat-inspired populism, the once potent prerogatives of cultural tastemakers are fading fast. For some prominent reviewers, including major American writers such as Joyce Carol Oates, criticism has become so marginalized that...
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September 9, 2010 08:00 AM
What It Was Like
Dispatches told why kids from Ohio came back so 'eerily old'
In the fall of 1978, I was racing through Kent State University’s campus bookstore when a thin book, propped in a section where it didn’t belong, stopped me in my tracks. The cover was the color of a brown paper bag, with a one-word title in headline type at the top: Dispatches. A single blurb, by John le Carré, appeared...
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