Author: Bobbie Johnson

Five things I thought about when reading that gigantic New Yorker piece on Covid-19

January 6, 2021
by Bobbie Johnson
Leave a comment
Media

Beyond “this thing is long.” Even though things have been shit, we got really, really lucky.The story doesn’t just detail the many things that went wrong as the virus emerged and various countries struggled to deal with it—including China’s reticence to admit anything was wrong, the WHO’s complete miss, the CDC’s testing debacle, failed leadership from the White House and so on. What came through to me was how there have also been a set […]

I’ll never complain about somebody filing long again

December 30, 2020
by Bobbie Johnson
Leave a comment
Link / Media

“At roughly 31,000 words, the article is as long as a novella, roughly five times the length of a typical major magazine article.” “Mr. Wright, a staff writer at The New Yorker for nearly three decades, initially turned in 76,000 words. “I have an appetite to go into depth,” he said in an interview. (He added, with a laugh: “I get paid by the word.”)” —From the New York Times’ short note about the Lawrence […]

Books I read in 2020

December 30, 2020
by Bobbie Johnson
Leave a comment
Media

A lot of things were hard this year. We had it better than many, better than most. No serious illnesses here, mainly just sadness and loneliness and tedium stitched together with moments of dread and panic. But those are all things that you can cope with. In my head, they were circumstances you could adapt to, even if you didn’t like them. People are capable of a lot. But the change that probably surprised me […]

Hunger

December 21, 2020
by Bobbie Johnson
Leave a comment
Work

A few months ago, in a session to generate ideas for our upcoming Food issue of Technology Review, I asked a question that was troubling me: Why do people still starve? Starvation, hunger and food insecurity seem to me the most troubling symptom of our inability to actually make societal progress. For 100 years or more we have seen widespread revolutions in almost every part of the food system, and we’re generations into trying to […]

Jokers de luxe

December 14, 2020
by Bobbie Johnson
Leave a comment
Uncategorized

I learned about them this week: They’re called the the joker de luxe in France, the expensive players brought into a football match as a late substitute to try and change the game. There doesn’t quite seem to be an English language equivalent: they’re a super-sub but they’re costly; your aging star who gets paid a packet but can’t hack the whole game. We probably have them in workplaces outside football too. Great phrase.

Handmade and hygge

December 10, 2020
by Bobbie Johnson
Leave a comment
Things my friends have made

Loved this John Willshire talk about a way of conceptualizing and mapping projects that he uses. The content is interesting to me (planning projects is really something I could get 1000% better) but I enjoyed it most for its presentation. It struck me as a great example of what making an effort can feel like in this era of Zoom presentations and conferences. So many events really haven’t changed their approach—just ported it online—and those […]

Period pieces

December 6, 2020
by Bobbie Johnson
Leave a comment
Media

We’re all spending too much time at home watching TV at precisely the moment that the billions spent on original content in the streaming wars kicks in, and so every week there’s a new must-watch binge show that’s being hailed all around and dissected from all angles (The Crown), or a not-very-secret secret that appears out of nowhere (Ted Lasso). I’m not sure how many of them we’ll remember in a few weeks, let alone […]

You’re interviewing somebody, not dating them

November 24, 2020
by Bobbie Johnson
Leave a comment
Media / Workbook

Interviewing people is hard. It’s not easy to talk to someone to try and understand who they are and what they’re about. In journalism, you’re trying to get interviewees to say interesting things too—things that hold up on the page, sound good to the reader, that get the subject to provide a kind of forensic self-examination. The result is that the best interviews are elevated to an art form. But interviewing is also a skill […]

Mo Willems on pandemic parenting

November 23, 2020
by Bobbie Johnson
comment 1
Media

Marchese: When I was first putting together my questions for you, I realized that a lot of them had to do with things like how we can help kids with the ambient stress of parents’ worrying about the pandemic or politics. But maybe it’s wrong for me to assume that a successful children’s-book author has unique ideas about kids’ emotions. So let me ask you: Do you think you have special insights about kids? Willems: […]

Weeks 41-43

October 26, 2020
by Bobbie Johnson
Leave a comment
weeknotes

They make no sense, deserts. They are an affront to comprehension. I’ve never been anywhere so empty than these alien landscapes, scarred and parched, impossible for me to comprehend. And then you have the preposterous oasis, the cities carved out of rubble, the green valleys hidden between folds in the mountains. They are inventions. Deserts make no sense, unless you are a snake or tumbleweed or a cactus. We escaped for a change of scenery, […]