The folks at Vol. 1 Brooklyn were kind enough to feature my recent PopMatters post on Gay Talese over at their website. Back in March I wrote about Talese’s South Jersey roots and that crazy outline for his famous Esquire story.
Vol. 1 Brooklyn produces original fiction, literary-minded events, blogging, features, and thoughtful criticism. Check ‘em out.
James Burke, New York City, 1960 | Via Days Gone By
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.
New evidence from the Kansas Bureau of Investigation calls into question some of the claims made in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. From the Wall Street Journal:
In researching “In Cold Blood,” Truman Capote received first-class service from the KBI and Mr. Dewey, its lead detective on the case. Mr. Dewey gave the author access to the diary of 16-year-old Nancy Clutter—her final entry logged only moments before two strangers invaded her home in late 1959 and murdered her, her brother and her parents. Mr. Dewey opened the KBI’s case file to Mr. Capote. He pressured press-shy locals to cooperate with the author and granted him extraordinary access to the killers. Mr. Dewey even helped Mr. Capote, a New Yorker with no home in Kansas, obtain a Kansas driver’s license.
For a 1966 Esquire story called “Mr. Bad News,” Gay Talese profiled New York Times obituary writer Alden Whitman. When the writer follows Whitman to a Carnegie Hall concert, attention is averted from the orchestra pit to a distinguished concertgoer’s facial features and more, a momentary occupational hindrance. “Whitman made notes on such details,” reported Talese, “knowing that someday they would help bring life to his work, knowing that masterful obituaries, like fine funerals, must be planned well in advance.”
Read my PopMatters post on obituary writing and audacious Eisner Award winner Daytripper, an official selection at The Angoulême International Comics Festival this year.
At Mother Jones, David Corn writes about a new documentary film called Hubris — it’s hosted by Rachel Maddow and based on a book by Corn and Michael Isikoff that offers “a behind-the-scenes account of how Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and their lieutenants deployed false claims, iffy intelligence, and unsupported hyperbole to win popular backing for the invasion (of Iraq).”
The film airs tonight on MSNBC, a network with leadership that has traditionally been all too eager to bow to the demands of American conservatives near and far.
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)
In 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.
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.
