Second Read
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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,...
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July 8, 2010 08:00 AM
The Ordinary Jungle
A not-so-awed explorer who was unafraid to say so
In April 1925, a fifty-seven-year-old British explorer named Percy Harrison Fawcett trooped into the Brazilian jungle for the last time. Fawcett had spent much of his adult life under mosquito netting there, and he had become convinced that the region held the remnants of a great lost city—the stronghold of a vanished civilization. Hobbled by age and by poverty,...
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May 13, 2010 08:00 AM
The Reporter Whom Time Forgot
How Cornelius Ryan’s The Longest Day changed journalism
In 1957, an expatriate Irish newspaperman struggling to make a buck after his most recent employer went under began making the rounds of magazine editors and book publishers, hoping to get someone to help foot the bill for a hazily formed idea about a fifteenth-anniversary retelling of the events of June 6, 1944: D-Day. Here was the true, humble,...
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February 25, 2010 03:05 PM
What Happened Here?
Joan Didion’s forty-year-old cautionary tale still fits America
It was my mother, of all people, who introduced me to Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem. This was in the early summer of 1980, when I was not quite nineteen and living, first with two friends and later by myself, in a studio apartment on Haight Street in San Francisco. My next-door neighbor was a jovial ex-biker turned dope...
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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
