Review
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February 1, 2012 06:00 AM
Brief Encounters
Reviewing anthologies on food in wartime reporting and the best of Wolcott Gibbs
Eating Mud Crabs in Kandahar: Stories of Food During Wartime by the World’s Leading Correspondents Edited by Matt McAllester | California Studies in Food and Culture, No. 31 | University of California Press | 214 pages | $27.50
Nearly forty years ago, the New York Times book division published a volume called Correspondents’ Choice, in which the newspaper’s then...
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January 19, 2012 06:00 AM
Reading Room
An illustrated review of The Occupied Wall Street Journal
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January 11, 2012 06:00 AM
The Tea Party Paradox
A democratic movement that is anti-democratic at heart
It remains one of the mysteries of our political age: How did a Wall Street-spawned meltdown and the worst recession in decades spark a populist reaction against government? In the 1930s, the failure of a Republican administration and laissez-faire economics led to a leftward swing and the New Deal. In our time, the financial crisis seemed poised to catalyze...
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Fall 1961
On Looking into Chapman’s News
"Newspapers are not waifs. They reflect their source."
A. J. Liebling, the twentieth century’s foremost press critic, wrote only one piece for the Columbia Journalism Review. (He died shortly after the publication of CJR’s sixth issue.) His review of a history of the New York Daily News provides ample glimpses of the wit and vigor he deployed under The New Yorker’s “The Wayward Press” banner. The below paragraph...
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November 3, 2011 12:09 AM
A Reading List for Future Journalists
We asked some of our favorite journalists, scholars, and critics to recommend books and other works that could help the next generation of reporters become better observers, storytellers, and thinkers. Here is an edited list of the titles they suggested. For full lists from each recommender, click here.
Nicholas Lemann
Dean, Columbia University Graduate School of... Continue reading -
September 29, 2011 11:56 AM
What a Country
Two new efforts to make sense of America’s struggles
In the midst of a cross-country pilgrimage, Iraq war veteran Colby Buzzell finds himself transfixed by an “old dusty American flag” in the hallway of a shabby residential hotel in Cheyenne, Wyoming. “As I approached, it kind of woke me up,” he writes in Lost in America: A Dead-End Journey, “reminding me again what it is like to...
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September 27, 2011 06:00 AM
The Cheap Seats
Joe Bageant told uncomfortable truths about class in America
In the last decade of his life, Joe Bageant came full circle. He and his third wife, Barbara, were renting a small, wooden house in Winchester, Virginia, the town where he grew up and from which he had fled repeatedly over the years—always returning, though never long enough to stay....
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September 1, 2011 03:04 PM
They Killed Classifieds, Didn’t They?
Consider TimeOut New York, in comic format
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August 27, 2011 05:04 PM
Brief Encounters
Short reviews of books on newspaper publishers
The Magnificent Medills: The McCormick-Patterson Dynasty: America’s Royal Family of Journalism During a Century of Turbulent Splendor By Megan McKinney |
Harper | 464 pages | $27.99Newspaper Titan: The Infamous Life and Monumental Times of Cissy Patterson
By Amanda Smith | Alfred A. Knopf | 720 pages | $35There is a bit of hype...
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July 21, 2011 06:00 AM
The New Newsweek
Reviewed in comic format
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July 14, 2011 06:00 AM
The Hatchet’s Tale
James O'Shea, Tribune's one-time man in Los Angeles, tells all in his new book
The Deal From Hell: How Moguls and Wall Street Plundered Great American Newspapers by James O’Shea | Public Affairs | 395 pages, $28.99
Many in the journalism craft have watched the decade-long struggles of Chicago’s Tribune Company with bewilderment, incredulity, and occasional gasps of horror. The story begins with Tribune, solidly profitable and staidly Midwestern in its values, swooping...
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July 5, 2011 07:38 PM
Brief Encounters
Short reviews of books on journalists William L. Shirer and E.J. Edwards, plus the documentary Page One
The Long Night: William L. Shirer and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by Steve Wick | Palgrave Macmillan | 288 pages, $27
In 1941, William L. Shirer, one of Edward R. Murrow’s team of CBS correspondents in Europe, wrote Berlin Diary, an account of his nearly seven years covering the Nazi regime, which he loathed not...
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July 5, 2011 07:30 PM
Let’s Do the Time Warp Again
A review of Simon Reynolds's Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past
Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past by Simon Reynolds | Faber and Faber, Inc. | 458 pages, $16
I grew up in the 1970s and ’80s, surrounded by living monuments to a past I didn’t yet understand. I ate at chain restaurants where the walls were plastered with vintage 45s, and the tables covered with reproductions of...
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July 5, 2011 12:31 PM
Bang Bang Off Target
Hollywood gets war reporters wrong again
The Bang Bang Club, written and directed by Steven Silver; starring Ryan Phillippe, Taylor Kitsch, Malin Akerman, Frank Rautenbach, and Neels Van Jaarsveld | Tribeca Film | 106 minutes
In a key moment in the recent film The Bang Bang Club, South African war photographer Greg Marinovich, complaining of thirst, dashes past snipers to fetch Cokes across...
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Desks
The Audit Business
- Audit Notes: Off the Hamster Wheel, The Dumb Money, iPad Newspapers
- Mostly Skimpy Coverage of JPMorgan’s Overdraft Settlement
The Observatory Science
- What Drives Public Opinion About Climate Change? Politicians, economy more influential than media coverage, study says
- The Presidential Energy Narrative Campaign coverage takes on a green hue
Campaign Desk Politics & Policy
- Some Mistakes at MoneyWatch A little more homework needed on Social Security, please
- It’s Caucus Day in Colorado: Where’s the Content? Campaign presented as theater in the Denver Post
