• Laura Hazard Owen’s Nieman Lab piece on what journalism will lose if Twitter goes away brought many of the costs of the current drama together in one place. I’ve downloaded my data and mothballed my account. • Sorrow compounded when I finished reading Lincoln in the Bardo. I’d picked it up after hearing George Saunders interviewed by Alexis Madrigal on KQED radio, having enjoyed A Swim in the Pond in the Rain last year […]
• Jonathan Katz has the best piece I’ve seen about the current attempts to rewrite the history of the New York Times op-ed controversy in 2020. (You remember, the one that engulfed the paper when it published Tom Cotton’s call for federal troops to end Black Lives Matter protests? The one currently undergoing a revisionist reconstruction project which is being laundered by Semafor as a way to get attention?) • Some people dredged up a […]
• Facing life: Eight people discuss life after incarceration in this beautifully simple, extremely touching project from Pen and Brandon. • New York Times is killing it with clear interactives at the moment—here’s one about the soundtrack to the AIDS crisis: I was sold as soon as they showed me a bunch of pictures of mixtapes. • How police interfere with public spaces. • I get the ethical stance of Ogilvy saying it won’t work […]
What to think about Ukraine? What to do about Ukraine? Timothy Snyder is building a list of ways to help. Lots of great, often worrying, information in this story on IKEA’s insatiable appetites. It’s the world’s largest consumer of wood; it’s the largest private landholder in Romania. I also learned the word “edacity”. (trees, passim) The NYT’s David Leonhardt, who has consistently argued for a kind of liberal’s relaxation of covid restrictions, has been a […]
Longform is saying goodbye. Or at least the reading service, which has listed thousands of great articles over the last decade, is coming to an end. (The podcast continues.) The site came up a lot when we were starting Matter, as a kind of guiding light for a journalism renaissance that started in the 2010s. Folks were challenging the notion that writing on the web had to be short and informational, pushing back on the […]
There’s something so intricate and mysterious about the whys of another person, wanting to understand what makes them tick, what made them what they are. It’s an instinct that’s so human. Biographies, documentaries, magazine profiles, obituaries are all part of this drive we have to get inside somebody else’s head. One of my first jobs, as a researcher for the Royal Shakespeare Company, was to build dossiers on interesting and notable people that might make […]
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 […]
“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 […]
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 […]
I harbor a mild but ongoing fascination with the wild, out of the way places that British people have decided they should inhabit; the far-flung islands, the unnavigable boggy moors, the places where there’s one house every few miles and people choose lonely, hard existence for whatever reason. St Helena, Dartmoor, the Hebrides, Pitcairn and so on. Larissa MacFarquhar—one of the New Yorker writers I most enjoy—crystallizes what draws people to one of these places, […]
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