Thursday, June 20, 2013. Last Update: Thu 6:50 AM EST

Second Read

The Devil’s Football

H. L. Mencken airs his unexpurgated Prejudices

s we all know, serious criticism of the arts is leaving the pages of mainstream newspapers and magazines. Shrinking under... More

What It Was Like

Dispatches told why kids from Ohio came back so ‘eerily old’

n the fall of 1978, I was racing through Kent State University’s campus bookstore when a thin book, propped in... More

The Ordinary Jungle

A not-so-awed explorer who was unafraid to say so

n April 1925, a fifty-seven-year-old British explorer named Percy Harrison Fawcett trooped into the Brazilian jungle for the last time.... More

The Reporter Whom Time Forgot

How Cornelius Ryan’s The Longest Day changed journalism

n 1957, an expatriate Irish newspaperman struggling to make a buck after his most recent employer went under began making... More

What Happened Here?

Joan Didion’s forty-year-old cautionary tale still fits America

t was my mother, of all people, who introduced me to Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem. This was in the... More

The Hack

The journalistic education of Gabriel García Márquez

n 1955, eight crew members of a Colombian naval destroyer in the Caribbean were swept overboard by a giant wave.... More

A Failure of Skepticism

Stolen Valor and the effort to expose bogus battlefield heroics

wo years ago, a weekly paper in suburban Chicago profiled an elderly character who had been asked to lead the... More

Of Heroes and Humans

Jim Brosnan wrote about himself, and sports writing evolved

ed Smith, who wrote as well as anyone about athletes and the games they play, called the sports section the... More

‘The Greatest Liar’

Is Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year a work of journalism?

I first read Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year on a train from Boston to New York. That’s... More

Dead Reckoning

Manchester’s flawed, essential chronicle of the JFK assassination

The first printing of William Manchester’s The Death of a President ran to a half million copies and reached stores... More

Citizen Mailer

In his finest work, Norman Mailer applied subjective journalism to the powerful, and to himself

arly in Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History, the poet Robert... More

The pace of modern life

Things have always been getting worse

Yes, women’s magazines can do serious journalism

In fact, we’ve been doing it for a while

Persuading David Simon

The people who run the American security apparatus are in the overwhelming majority diligent people with a deep concern for civil liberties. But their job is to find creative ways to collect information. And they work within an institution that, because of its secrecy, is fundamentally inimical to democracy and to a free society

Rachel Maddow’s tribute to Michael Hastings

“Michael was angry … he was angry about things that weren’t right in the world. He was angry with war and with loss, and that drove his reporting.”

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Who Owns What

The Business of Digital Journalism

A report from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism

Study Guides

Questions and exercises for journalism students.