Showing posts tagged journalism
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At night we and our neighbors showed up at one another’s doors, drank beer and whiskey and tequila and talked about art and poetry and traded Harpers for Mother Jones and learned more about psychedelic music; we developed a fondness for Erik Satie together. We scoped out dollar-beer nights on Bedford and free gallery openings on Kent and Wythe or in West Chelsea.
This was Williamsburg. Tom McGeveran, Capital New York

Comics journalism from the Congo

After a six-week trip to the Congo in 2010, reporter David Axe developed a long magazine article that would eventually serve as a script for Army of God: Joseph Kony’s War in Central Africa, a work of graphic journalism. Illustrated by Brooklyn, New York-based comics artist Tim Hamilton, Army of God tells the story of the Lord’s Resistance Army rebel group, a morally corrupt militia that has moved into northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo and has terrorized the people of the region after having been chased out of Uganda by the Ugandan army in 2005. Read my feature on Army of God at PopMatters.

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One reason why LeDuff alienates some journalists is that he gets involved with his stories, like a pissed-off George Plimpton reporting from hell. From the opening pages, it’s clear Detroit will be no different. It opens with a story about LeDuff being robbed at a downtown gas station. He ends up pulling a gun: “I bent into the car, reaching for the glove box latch. There was a 9mm inside. Not mine. It belonged to a reporter who had forgotten to store it in his desk on his way to a press conference. He had asked me in the parking lot to hold on to it and I laughed about a journalist carrying a concealed weapon. Correspondents don’t do that even in war zones, I told him.
“Motor City Madman (on journalist Charlie LeDuff’s memoir.” Bill Shea, Columbia Journalism Review.
At Symbolia’s website, reporter Susie Cagle explains how she put together her story on California’s Salton Sea. Symbolia is a new tablet magazine of illustrated journalism. Find out more. (H/T Josh Stearns) View high resolution

At Symbolia’s website, reporter Susie Cagle explains how she put together her story on California’s Salton Sea. Symbolia is a new tablet magazine of illustrated journalism. Find out more.

(H/T Josh Stearns)

Journalist Peter Maass in The Atlantic on Zero Dark Thirty: I agree that the movie’s depiction of the CIA is regrettably uncritical; let’s remember, the CIA provided false evidence for going to war against Iraq, it tortured prisoners in secret jails and sent others to third countries where they would be tortured (and covered up as much of this as possible), and it is now engaged in a covert program using aerial drones to kill people who have not been convicted of any crime—and in these attacks women and children are often killed. The film fails to consider the notion that the CIA and the intelligence industry as a whole, rather than being solutions to what threatens us, might be part of the problem. Jane Mayer writing about the film for The New Yorker: “Zero Dark Thirty,” which opens across the country next month, is a pulse-quickening film that spends its first half hour or so depicting a fictionalized version of the Bush Administration’s secret U.S. interrogation program. In reality, the C.I.A.’s program of calibrated cruelty was deemed so illegal, and so immoral, that the director of the F.B.I. withdrew his personnel rather than have them collaborate with it, and the top lawyer at the Pentagon laid his career on the line in an effort to stop a version of the program from spreading to the armed forces.

Journalist Peter Maass in The Atlantic on Zero Dark Thirty:

I agree that the movie’s depiction of the CIA is regrettably uncritical; let’s remember, the CIA provided false evidence for going to war against Iraq, it tortured prisoners in secret jails and sent others to third countries where they would be tortured (and covered up as much of this as possible), and it is now engaged in a covert program using aerial drones to kill people who have not been convicted of any crime—and in these attacks women and children are often killed. The film fails to consider the notion that the CIA and the intelligence industry as a whole, rather than being solutions to what threatens us, might be part of the problem.

Jane Mayer writing about the film for The New Yorker:

“Zero Dark Thirty,” which opens across the country next month, is a pulse-quickening film that spends its first half hour or so depicting a fictionalized version of the Bush Administration’s secret U.S. interrogation program. In reality, the C.I.A.’s program of calibrated cruelty was deemed so illegal, and so immoral, that the director of the F.B.I. withdrew his personnel rather than have them collaborate with it, and the top lawyer at the Pentagon laid his career on the line in an effort to stop a version of the program from spreading to the armed forces.

Truman Capote, a “human tape recorder” in Brando’s hotel room

imageIn the new issue of Columbia Journalism Review, Douglas McCollam writes about a night in January of 1957, when The New Yorker sent Truman Capote to profile Marlon Brando.

Two nights after arriving in Japan, Capote showed up at Brando’s door wearing a tan cardigan and carrying a bottle of vodka for what in Brando’s estimation was to be a quick dinner and an early night (indeed, Brando instructed his assistant to call in an hour so he’d have an excuse to get rid of Capote). Instead, when Capote left Brando’s room six hours later, he was convinced that he had the raw material for a groundbreaking profile of the reclusive star.

What transpired between Brando and Capote over the course of their hours alone together in that hotel room has long been a subject of historical curiosity. Read more.

Politico’s “highly toxic, incestuous variant of access journalism”

Alex Pareene discusses Politico’s disdain for substance or investigative journalism in The Baffler:

Nevertheless, there is a specific Politico ethos, a worldview, and a style of writing and reporting that sets the Harris-VandeHei collaboration apart from the institutions the paper grew out of. It’s a product of the worst of Washington in a particularly awful era for Washington. In this abject little tip sheet, a moment of profound elite self-regard and complete disconnect from the rest of the nation has found its outlet.

Strong recommendation here: Matt Flegenheimer’s New York Times story on the MTA repairs of the New York City subway after Hurricane Sandy. Great reporting, really well-structured piece. View high resolution

Strong recommendation here: Matt Flegenheimer’s New York Times story on the MTA repairs of the New York City subway after Hurricane Sandy. Great reporting, really well-structured piece.

Joe Sacco at The Millions

The Millions has an extensive interview with award-winning artist and comics journalist Joe Sacco. My short preview of his new book with reporter Chris Hedges is at PopMatters. Comics critic Bill Kartalopoulos has a typically smart piece about Sacco’s new works in The Brooklyn Rail.

“Next, Stearn visits an apartment on Central Park, in a ‘very respectable building’ where the management thinks the girls are models in the Garment District. Here, high-end call girl Jane sits chain-smoking and stroking a Pekingese in her lap, telling of her days making $1,000 a week. She fell in love with one of her Johns, a boy who ‘sent me so many flowers the place smelled like a funeral parlor.’ But that didn’t last. ‘Love, schmove,’ she says, ‘who knows about love?’”

“Sisters of the Night,” Jeremiah Moss on a “grassy, musty” 1956-era reporting-driven book on NYC prostitution, The Paris Review