Silence, as usual, means a heavy workload. Closing an upcoming issue of the magazine, pushing along another large project with lots of moving parts, and helping corral our election coverage has been intense—that’s on top of the day to day business. Next up the election, which I suppose is my third or fourth time around, depending on how you count it. We moved to America shortly before the 2008 Obama victory, which I think skewed […]
Jiayang Fan’s story about her mother’s ALS, covid, and Chinese propaganda was very affecting. Somehow she found herself in the middle of this whirlwind that illustrated—graphically, confrontingly—two huge global stories: the coronavirus pandemic and Chinese politics. But I was utterly riveted by her interview on the Longform podcast, which seemed to add a whole set of extra layers.
Britain’s left is riddled with anti-trans views in a way that continues to disappoint me. This interview with Judith Butler in the New Statesman is a great example of that, and of how to think about representation and poisonous discourse. We see a journalist trying to prod a certain kind of answer out of a thinker, and the thinker responding by rejecting the premises of questioning in an artful and coherent way. I confess to […]
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For nearly as long as there has been newspapers and magazines, there have been people who use publications to launder their own reputations or advance their own agendas. Press barons were a real thing before fake news, and media ownership is still a great way for the powerful to access even more power. PR folks, meanwhile, take great pains to try and place op-eds by, or positive stories about, their clients in the pages of […]
SIX MONTHS OF LOCKDOWN. We passed the milestone without even realizing, it just kind of came and went. (It was the same when we hit 100 days back in week 26.) Of course, “lockdown” is not exactly lockdown. Sometimes when the word crosses my lips, I feel like a character from this McSweeney’s jab: “Another dull quarantine weekend at home, Target, Chipotle, Home Depot, and our niece’s graduation party.” Your lockdown might not look the […]
According to a Tina Brown essay I read recently, Vanity Fair‘s breakthrough editorial moment came when she published Dominick Dunne’s 1984 heartbreaker about the murder of his daughter and the trial of her killer. Since Conde Nast relaunched the magazine in 1983, it had been destroyed in the market, hadn’t found its footing, and had been lined up to get shut down. When Brown took the job at the start of 1984 it was almost […]
Been thinking a lot about the long view recently, both in work and in life. Everything’s awful and urgent and yet the past six months have felt so momentously slow that it’s creating a huge amount of internal dissonance: make-it-happen-now has to sleep in the same bed as when-this-is-all-over. And that’s presuming it will ever be over, of course. I’m placing high value on every little moment that breaks out of the immediate, every long […]
One of the problems that excites me most in journalism is what you do when you’re presented with a lack of information. It’s been the genesis of some of the most interesting projects I’ve worked on, including Ghost Boat (“how can you find people who disappeared?”) and the MITTR Covid Tracing Tracker (“who is doing what with digital contact tracing?”) So I was really interested by this Buzzfeed investigation that effectively asked “Where are China’s […]
TOUGH WEEK. Almost six months into lockdown, the wildfires encircle San Francisco and fill the skies with smoke. Suddenly even the limited ways we are able to go out into the world have become a bad idea. Some days are better than others, but the mornings are nearly always the worst; the smell of smoke invades everything, a blanket of smog sits in the sky and my chest stretches to grasp at the air. Combine […]
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