Friday, August 02, 2013. Last Update: Thu 2:56 PM EST

Second Read

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Clarion call

The future of the alternative press can be found in its past

Alt-media maven Stephen Mindich, longtime publisher of the Boston Phoenix, in 1976. (Peter Simon) I spent the morning of... More

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Home truths

For the essayist Albert Murray, the South was a state of mind

There is nothing quite so liberating for a journalist as failing to carry out an assignment. I'm not talking... More

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Gorky peek

The Second Russian Revolution gave viewers an unprecedented glimpse inside a rapidly liberalizing Soviet Union

In the spring of 1989, after decades of being kept out in the cold by Communist secrecy and propaganda,... More

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A beautiful mind

In Is There No Place on Earth for Me?, Susan Sheehan told the complete story of one woman’s struggles with schizophrenia

There were times when the lobby of The Village Voice seemed to be a magnet for crazy people. When... More

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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... More

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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... More

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Look back on anger

At his best, Ambrose Bierce used vicious satire to puncture the smug complacency of America’s Gilded Age

 s journalist, short-story writer, and poet Ambrose Bierce one of the biggest SOBs in American literature? He is certainly... More

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Laboratory confidential

The Double Helix’s warts-and-all portrayal of scientific pursuits shook up the formal world of science writing

 hen The Double Helix appeared in the winter of 1968, I reviewed it for The Laureate, the literary magazine... More

The Auteurs’ Caretaker

Penelope Gilliatt didn’t care about movies as much as she cared about the people who made them

n 1968, New Yorker editor William Shawn decided to start taking the movies seriously. Up to that point, the... More

The Road Book

Before Ernie Pyle went to war, he wrote about America

n the spring of 1932, Ernie Pyle took over as the new managing editor of The Washington Daily News,... More

How the Past Saw the Present

The future of journalism has always been on journalism’s mind

JR knew about the iPad a good fifteen years before there was an iPad to know about. In a... More

Among the Mongers

Henry Mayhew and the pursuit of history, from the bottom up

here is no place in any era more evocative of soot, steam, gruel, and misery than Victorian London. It... More

Punk’s Prophet

Greil Marcus’s seminal work Ranters and Crowd Pleasers: Punk in Pop Music, 1977-92

iscounting cash-in reunions, studio sessions with bank robber Ronnie Biggs, and the like, The Sex Pistols last played in... More

The Paper Chase

For tabloid king Emile Gauvreau, it took a lifetime to slow down

ears later, when he recounted the events that would lead to his becoming the most sensational, shameless, ambitious, and... More

Not for Laughs

A pathbreaking look at the dark comic genius behind “Skippy”

ll cartoonists are geniuses,” wrote John Updike in his introduction to a collection of cartoons by Arnold Roth, a... More

Barack Obama: ‘those old times aren’t coming back’

“It used to be there were local newspapers everywhere. If you wanted to be a journalist, you could really make a good living working for your hometown paper”

The Guardian’s editor opens up on Reddit

Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian, answered questions in an Ask Me Anything

The (almost) lost speech of Justice Anthony Kennedy

How his insightful remarks about the Constitution inadvertently make the case for a Supreme Court “media pool”

Fox News sues TVEyes for copyright infringement

Says subscription service sells access to its content without permission nor compensation

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