What are animals to us?
What are animals to us? They are our friends, our families: they are threats, they are resources.
All posts tagged: covid-19
The publisher’s dilemma
The great gear shift in digital music took little more than a decade. But distributing music is different to funding media.
I’ll never complain about somebody filing long again
“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 […]
A prayer for life
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 […]
Arundhati Roy on the pandemic
Only just found this extremely salient piece from April: Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can […]
Starting from scratch
In March, a couple of weeks before we were due to ship the May/June issue of Technology Review, something became extremely clear: we needed to throw it away. We’d already cleared a portion of the magazine for coronavirus coverage, but as the pandemic kicked in, everything seemed irrelevant. Nobody would want to read what we’d prepared for them, at least not now, not when all they could think of was covid-19. Everybody got behind the […]
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