Not Dead Yet →

Columbia Journalism Review

Back in the 1970s, under the leadership of Ben Bradlee and Katharine Graham, The Washington Post was ambitious, influential, and profitable. Thanks to its Watergate coverage—and to Hollywood’s cloak-and-dagger rendering of that reportage in All the President’s Men—the paper enjoyed renown far beyond the confines of the industry.  By 2007, however, when Dave Kindred began to write what he first envisioned as a “valentine to journalism,” this golden age had long since come to an end.

Show And Tell →

Columbia Journalism Review 

Many Americans will remember the Danish cartoon controversy of 2006, which prompted violent riots, consumer boycotts, and death threats. Few will remember the cartoons themselves, and with good reason. In the United States, only a handful of magazines and newspapers reprinted the notorious drawings.

"The Protest Singer" By Alec Wilkinson →

Los Angeles Times 

In “The Protest Singer: An Intimate Portrait of Pete Seeger,” Alec Wilkinson outlines Seeger’s life in spare prose. The book, which began as a profile in the New Yorker, is not a biography. It is, in Wilkinson’s words, “a factual novella,” which centers on a series of recent interviews conducted at Seeger’s home in upstate New York.

ZZ Packer's Edition Of Southern Stories Straddles Old And New Dixie →

Independent Weekly 

In her introduction to ”New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, 2008,” ZZ Packer, co-editor of the collection, calls the American South “a land of contrasts.”  “There’s the sweet tea, and the bourbon, and the mint juleps,” she writes. “But there’s also the low-brow Rally’s and Checkers and White Castles.” Indeed, it’s true that Dixie contains multitudes: The South, which includes the Ozarks and the Outer Banks, the Pisgah and the Piedmont, has given us Ralph Stanley and R.E.M., Ludacris and Little Richard.

Yearning To Study War No More →

The New York Times

It is on Thursday evenings that Henrietta Yurchenco, a 90-year-old former City College professor and radio producer, collects a few of her students to sing the same protest songs she sang and taught 40 years ago. The war on their minds is a new one, but many of the songs they sing, like “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” and “Study War No More,” were the product of wars long past.