How She Became a Staff Writer at the New Yorker

The "New Yorkistan" cover of The New Yorker (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Talk about determination

.... and I was like, “How do you like your assistant job at New York magazine?” She got me an interview to be an intern there for the gossip column, the Intelligencer. And I got that.

My first day, Beth Landman, who was a columnist, says, "Call Alexis Stewart, Martha's daughter, and ask how she feels about the fact that her father is about to have a baby with another woman." And I'm 21 and I'm like, "Are you serious?" It was lots of figures who are now meaningless, except, of course, for the orange monster running the free world. It was people like that, people that low. I cried in the bathroom every day — it was just a big departure from anything I'd ever experienced. But it was a great first job for a reporter because it was just terrifying, hideous things and you had to do it.

I was clawing like a rabid cat — I was always clawing. I was like, I'm going to get a job where I write for a living if it kills me.

Fright Death Murder Etc. - The Halloween Assignment

English: HALLOWEEN PENNYWISE COSTUME Español: DISFRAZ PENNYWISE HALLOWEEN (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Assignment: Interview at least one person in a "death" costume. One might be enough - if that person has plenty to say in an interesting way. If not, you will have to interview several people.

Can you be in the story? Sure. But the ratio of you to your sources better be 1:3 and up. (Yes, of course, you can do this assignment in costume.) Take photos.

Here are some possible questions:

1. Why are you wearing that costume? Is that the real you?
2. Have you used your costume to frighten anyone? Do you intend to? Should I be afraid of you?
3. What other costumes did you consider?
4. What are your own greatest fears?
5. Movies that frighten you?
6. People that frighten you?
7. Is it healthy to be frightened of movies, people, things, etc.? Why?

Here are some other sources of information that might suggest provocative questions. Story is due by class time Thursday.


 25 frightening halloween costumes

Halloween is that time of year where people put on scary costumes and scare the guts out of their friends. We’re talking about scary ghouls, demons, zombies, mummies, and a host of other bizarre creature-like things! Are you thinking about which Halloween costume you will wear this year? If so, you should check out our list. From the living dead to bizarre demons, these are 25 most terrifying Halloween costumes.

The worst ways to die

The worst ways to die, as voted on by the Ranker Community. Sure, it's a little morbid, but who doesn't think about death every once in a while?

Vote on the worst ways to kick the bucket, and see how your fears stack up against everyone else's. Just don't tell that Grim Reaper dude about any of this...

If you had to choose your own means of execution, what would you choose?


From the wikipedia page:

"The Euthanasia Coaster would kill its passengers through prolonged cerebral hypoxia, or insufficient supply of oxygen to the brain. The ride's seven inversions would inflict 10 g on its passengers for 60 seconds – causing g-force related symptoms starting with gray out through tunnel vision to black out and eventually g-LOC (g-force induced loss of consciousness). Depending on the tolerance of an individual passenger to g-forces, the first or second inversion would cause cerebral anoxia, rendering the passengers brain dead.[citation needed] Subsequent inversions would serve as insurance against unintentional survival of particularly robust passengers."

Also supposed to cause hallucinations due to lack of oxygen. Execution by a deadly roller-coaster version of Mr. Toad's Wild Ride?


Sign me up.

By the way, who would you kill?

We’re not saying you want to kill anyone, necessarily. But let’s say there’s a circumstance where you could just totally get away with it, and no one would ever know, and maybe there’s even additional circumstances where you need to kill them. Like what if you’re on a lifeboat with no supplies and you need to murder and eat the other survivor before hunger makes you weak and/or they get the same idea as you? Or maybe your rich uncle is taking a little too long to die? Or perhaps you're just a bored aristocrat who craves the thrill of flying homeless people to your private island and hunting them for sport? Whatever the case, who would you kill?

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Maddow and Malcolm

Talk show host and commentator Rachel Maddow. All of the am 1090 Progressive Talk (am1090seattle.com) hosts (from Air America and Nova M Radio) held a 3 hour town meeting in Seattle. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

From Vanity Fair:

Janet Malcolm’s most famous (notorious?) work involved journalist Joe McGinniss, the author of Fatal Vision, his account of Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald, convicted of killing his wife and daughters. There will be no sense of trust betrayed in a very solid Rachel Maddow profile in The New Yorker.

It’s inescapably engaging and offers a sense of a self-constructed high-wire that Maddow labors on with great intellectual honesty each evening via a long opening monologue that makes Sean Hannity’s opening a virtual tweet. Maddow is refreshingly candid about the perils of it all, as well as her own personal demons, such as depression. She’s reached the point where celebrity, and her likely encirclement by admirers and sycophants, can bring a distinct homogeneity to interview responses and a self-indulgence to one’s work. But even if you’re not a fan, take a look and you might be won over.

BongReads: Janet Malcolm Editon

There is not a writer out there who's better at producing work that simultaneously elucidates its subject and interrogates its own form than Janet Malcolm, the reporter and critic who writes primarily for The New Yorker and happens to be my favorite writer in the universe.

Malcolm literally wrote the book on journalism — The Journalist and the Murderer, which since its 1990 release, has become a staple of Journalism 101 syllabi — by slyly scoffing at its conventions, breaking the rules so that she may point out the artificiality of the form. Her prose is acerbic, able to cut her subjects (often overeducated egotistical man-babies who more than probably deserve whatever snark's coming to them) down to size in half a line. She inserts herself into her stories, discussing her processes and impressions in a way that makes each piece about its own construction as much as it's about the actual subject. And, unlike many of the journalists who take her to task for her contradictions, she's uninterested in befriending her subjects, instead using their foibles to point out the weaknesses and outright failures of the institutions that her subjects represent. All of this is to say that she's everything a journalist ought to strive to be — honest, discursive, fearless, and fair in her own unique ways.

So without further adieu, here's a selection of my favorite pieces Janet Malcolm has written for The New Yorker. They are all long, and together they will break your brain.

Rachel Maddow: Trump's TV Nemesis (2017)

To paraphrase Biggie, Malcolm dropped unexpectedly like bird shit on Monday with a new piece in tow, a profile of Rachel Maddow which on its surface seems to fawn over the MSNBC star but that, when we peel back a layer or two, becomes something much more complicated. As Malcolm sees it, Maddow is less a commentator and more of a rhetorical magician. By unsuccessfully mimicking Maddow's methods in an unexpected left turn towards the piece's conclusion, she both exposes her trick as something specious and only tangentially tied to the truth while praising the skill required to pull it off.


Somebody not so happy:

"Her performance and those of the actors in the commercials merge into one delicious experience of TV."

Dearest darlings, it's delicious! Delicious all the way down! 

Be honest just this once! Doesn't that sound exactly like the type of experience we liberals have mocked, for many decades, as the quintessentially dumbnified "Amerikan" TV experience? Doesn't it seem that something is odd, off, peculiar, wrong when we find this peculiar experience lauded in our brainiest high-end magazine?

We aren't quite finished with our account of what our best writer said in that third paragraph. In that third paragraph, she makes statements about the Maddow Show which echo the things we ourselves have long said—but she's praising the show as she makes these remarks, while we have long offered these assessments as condemnations....

The Canister Apology

Reminder: Submit Your Restaurant Review

The restaurant in The Palace Hotel (37.7880° -122.4019°) in San Francisco, California, United States. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Chris:

Tara:

Sarah:

Greta:

Nick:

Jeremy:

Quin:

Lonny: 

Excerpts from Village Voice Article on 2nd Malcolm-Masson Trial

Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis, smoking cigar. Español: Sigmund Freud, fundador del psicoanálisis, fumando. Česky: Zakladatel psychoanalýzy Sigmund Freud kouří doutník. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Malcolm lost the first trial badly, and it was only the jury's inability to agree on the damages Masson had suffered-their proposed awards spanned from $1 to several million-that forced a
mistrial. In answering a detailed questionnaire, the jury found that all five quotes were false, and that two of them fulfilled the additional requirements needed to find that Masson had been
libeled (those requirements being that the quotes defamed him and were published with "reckless disregard for the truth"). Malcolm was shocked by the outcome, since going to the trial she had the confidence (some would say arrogance) to believe that her journalistic
methods and general credibility were beyond question. After all, she wrote for The New Yorker-the citadel of American journalism, whose reputation for factual accuracy was virtually unassailable. Much to her surprise, she found that the jury was extremely skeptical about many aspects of her defense: they doubted the accuracy of the four typed pages, on which three of the five disputed quotes appeared; they believed that the quotes had been
deliberately altered; and, in the end, they couldn't come up with a reason why Masson would have said the damaging things he had denied saying.

                                                                            ***

Borrowing a strategy from Bostwick's own playbook, Masson used the theme of "a friend
betrayed" to press his case. In Jeffrey MacDonald's suit against Joe McGinniss, Bostwick had
made a lot of the fact of McGinniss's blatant dishonesty in pretending to be MacDonald's friend
long after he believed he was a crazed killer. Now it was Masson's turn to play the role of
betrayed intimate, as he complained that he had never expected Malcolm actually to use much
of the unflattering personal information he had shared with her. Although a huge portion of
their interviews centered on his sex life, Masson claimed he had believed Malcolm's article
would confine itself to his scholarly work, and that his personal revelations had been little
more than friendly, off-the-record chitchat. He was shocked, shocked, that she went ahead
and printed them.

                                                                           ***

Examining the three massive, unedited volumes of transcripts made from the taped
interviews, it seems obvious that their relationship was fated to end tragically. Their
expectations were tremendous: In Masson, Malcolm thought she had found the perfect,
completely uninhibited subject; in Malcolm, Masson believed he had an all-forgiving confessor.
"You are the absolute, the most open person I've ever met in my life," Malcolm gushes
gleefully of the suicidally compromising material Masson so obligingly offers. "I'm perfectly
prepared to say anything - including my sexual feelings for you," he responds. "I really feel
that I've committed myself to you," he adds.

                                                                    ***

The third, and most effective, part of  Bostwick (her lawyer's) plan required that he trick Masson into
opening up a line of inquiry Masson would just as soon have avoided. Since Masson was
complaining that Malcolm had made him look foolish by taking only the most unflattering
information from their interviews, Bostwick wanted to show that she had used some of the
really damaging information Masson had told her, the article could have been much, much
worse. The notion that Malcolm had actually spared Masson's feelings will come as a surprise
to anyone who has read "Trouble in the Archives," but this is precisely what Bostwick set out
to prove.

                                                                   ***

For Malcolm, whose practice of "compressing" quotes and rearranging scenes has been
questioned, The Silent Woman (her book published just before the second trial)  sometimes reads like a response to her critics. As if to reassure suspicious readers that no scenes were concocted she tells us exactly where everything happens–"on a train to Cornwall, "in the Indian restaurant," - documenting each step of her journey. In a finale of stupendous literary circularity, Malcolm concludes with a scene that shows her taking the notes she will later use to write the book. "I would want evidence that Ihad not merely conjured it up for the purposes of my plot but had seen it as well," are the book's final words.

The fact that Masson agreed to be interviewed and talked so freely fails to alleviate Malcolm's
dilemma. In her uncompromising moral universe, the moment the tape started to record, so
too began the betrayal. Her legal vindication, while significant, does nothing to resolve the
murky ethical quandary that is at the heart of all journalism. Her refusal to flinch in the face of
our moral chaos is unnerving. "The freedom to be cruel," she reminds us in The Silent Woman,
"is one of journalism's uncontested privileges."

Downside of 'Storytelling'

The Art of Storytelling (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

From Salon

We Americans have always loved stories, and we’re going completely overboard for storytelling at the moment. I’m not surprised. Telling stories is not a value-free strategy. They are, in my read, a way of avoiding authentic history. You can say they are history privatized, if you want to put the point another way. In the final episode, the narrator mentions guilt and “lessons learned and not to be forgotten,” moving straight past what these might be and continuing, “but meaning can be found in the individual stories of those who lived through it, stories of courage and comradeship and perseverance, of understanding and forgiveness, and, ultimately, reconciliation.” A Purple Star there for Geoffrey Ward’s writing, I have to say.

This is almost perfectly upside down, if you ask me. In all these stories, we find precisely an evasion of guilt and understanding. And this givenness to stories goes back very far. All of the “great” historians of the 19th century — Parkman, Bancroft, the other big names — took great pride in turning history into a long line of stories. I object strenuously to stories. You have a clear example of why in this film. They’re a way of avoiding all kinds of things: causality, responsibility, human agency. 

I don’t agree entirely. I do like stories. I wrote a whole long oral history of the war that was based on 135 stories. But it’s in the way they are used. I agree with you that they don’t clarify history in the way they are summed up at the end as stories of perseverance and courage. I don’t know what any of that means, really.


Within the stories that are told, there are some moments that do reveal important things about the history of the war. For example, there are a number of American soldiers who speak to the insanity of American military strategy: They’d be ordered to seize some hilltop, to try to kill as many people as possible, and then abandon it. So those soldiers were really, I think, effectively trying to tell us that this war was not to be determined by force of arms, that there were other factors involved.

Anatomy of a Pitch

Nieman will do a series on how to pitch a story

Magazine pitches are an elusive species. You hear talk of them at journalism conferences and in freelancer forums. You see evidence of their existence in the stories they beget. But it’s rare to catch a glimpse of a specimen in the wild.

Writing Exercises for a Nonfiction Class

Some of these are useful.

21. What event in your life has angered you the most? Write the scene where it happened, and tell us what you would do if it happened again.

New York Times suggestions on how to "prompt" personal writing.

3. Narrate a photo: find a picture that intrigues you from the Times, perhaps from the Lens blog, the ongoing feature One in 8 Million or the Multimedia/Photo archive. Then try writing about what the photo reminds you of or makes you feel or think about.

Rubenstein Finished Story

English: Red Arrow Park ice skating rink in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Example of manipulating film exposure time to emphasise movement in a 'still' shot. Français : Patinoire de Red Arrow Park à Milwaukee, dans le Wisconsin. Exemple d'utilisation du temps d'exposition pour metter en valeur le mouvement dans une image. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

One of the world's greatest ice skaters was gliding through Union Square the other afternoon, watching the mere mortals topple like tenpins.

Whomp. Thump. Plop. These are the sounds of the holidays in Union Square. Ice skating may be a lovely thing, every four years on television. In the real world, it looks a lot like tag-team wrestling.

The great skater, otherwise known as San Francisco's own Brian Boitano, had secret knowledge to impart to the wobblers. That's one reason he drops by the Union Square holiday ice rink. He seeks to buck up newbie skaters and avoid bloodletting, which is every bit as bad for the sport as whacking your opponent's legs with a club.

"If you start to lose your balance, lean forward and grab your knees," he said, softly, to the fresh troops. "That way you don't fall backward and hit your head on the ice. Beginners who hit their head on the ice never want to go ice skating again."

Boitano glided over to 8-year-old Lyndi Minniti, who was wobbling less than most and who had no idea that she was about to get a free lesson from the former Olympic champ. He got her to plant one toe, kick to the left and try a spin.

"You're a natural," Boitano said. "Pretend you're throwing a ball from one hand into your glove in the other hand," he said, and Lyndi tried it and, all of a sudden, she found herself going all the way around, and when it was over she was smiling about the whole thing. Lyndi's mother was at the rail, snapping pictures like the paparazzi.

Hardly anyone else recognized him. Partly it was his attire - old jeans with rips in them, and no spangles or spandex. (And he was skating in his crummy, $500 pair of skates - the good skates he had just sent by overnight mail to his official skate sharpener in Boston, the only person he trusts to do the job right.) And partly it was because Boitano won his Olympic gold medal in 1988, which is 22 Christmas shopping seasons ago, or forever in the celebrity business. These days he hosts a cooking show on the Food Network, to keep his hand in. "Hey, look," said one skater. "It's the chef on TV."

And then Boitano did some stuff in the middle of the rink that few TV chefs can do, such as the one-legged flamingo move and the "Swan Lake" leap and a frantic spin that could have passed for a smoothie in the Jamba Juice machine. A lot of people who were looking at the Union Square Christmas tree and at the colored lights and at a couple of girls in short skirts started looking at him instead.

Nearby, a big guy in a plaid shirt had just fallen, for the second time. The whomp could be felt from Geary Street to Grenoble. Boitano gave him a friendly smile and headed over to help another fellow, Raul Ramirez, who was ice skating for the very first time in his 23 years.

"You're a natural," Boitano said, and he got Ramirez to try to turn around, which he did, but not before losing his balance and falling like a Food Network souffle. "That's great," Boitano said, as cheerful and bouncy as a Labrador puppy. "You only lose eight-tenths of a point for touching the ice."

Along the edge of the rink, shutterbugs began clicking away and fans began to gather. One of them, a fellow named Vadim Shabenko, was no ordinary fan. He was a former member of the Russian skate team who told Boitano he once tried to copy Boitano's classic triple-Lutz-with-extended-arm jump, and wound up landing awkwardly with one skate cutting into the other foot, and blood all over the ice. Boitano said that had happened to him, too, and the two skaters compared horror stories and numbers of stitches. Boitano's knack for comforting lesser skaters was boundless.

"My boot gushed with blood," Boitano said, trying to cheer up his new friend. The two skaters shook hands, happy as could be. And then Boitano set eyes on this wobbling reporter and proclaimed him to be a natural as well, and there was nowhere to turn for cover. A rotation was attempted, slower than Saturn's. One of us found himself grabbing his knees.

Boitano graciously declared it to be all the fault of the second-string rental skates and then, just as graciously, said they were actually splendid rental skates, for rental skates, because Boitano wants everyone to feel good about skating, including people who rent second-string skates.

It was then the guy in the plaid shirt fell, for the third time. Boitano said he could feel the ice shake, but he didn't say it very loud. The fellow got back up and gamely kept at it, because a guy will do a lot of things before admitting he had blown a $9.50 skating fee, plus $4 for the rental.

"It's a real honor to fall on the same ice as Brian Boitano," the fellow said. He was 17-year-old student Frederik Schjaerff, who had traveled all the way from Copenhagen to find himself prostrate in Union Square. "Those were great falls I made. Some of my best. What an incredible experience to fall next to him."

Here's a Trend Story

From Vox

Consider a few recent poll results:

• A Reuters poll released on October 3 “found that the percentage of adults who said they had a ‘great deal’ or ‘some’ confidence in the press rose to 48 percent in September from 39 percent last November.”
• On October 2 USA Today poll found that previously unpopular NFL player protests are now seen as appropriate by a 51 to 42 percent margin.
• A Fox News poll in late September found the number of people who favor deporting illegal immigrants working in the United States had halved since the summer of 2015, with a staggering 83 to 14 margin in favor of a path to citizenship.
• Gallup found on October 2 that support for more government action to solve national problems has risen to 45 percent, the highest it’s been in decades outside of a brief post-9/11 spike.
• ABC News found on September 28 that “more than half of Americans now see climate change as responsible for the severity of recent hurricanes — an about-face from 12 years ago, when most attributed it to happenstance.”

You should always take issue polling with several grains of salt. Most people don’t have strongly held views on most subjects, and poll results on these kinds of questions are normally highly sensitive to question wording. But opinion trends on identically phrased questions do tell a story, and the story they are telling is that on issue after issue the tides of opinion are shifting against Trump. That’s true on big, slow-moving policy topics like climate change, it’s true on hot-button controversies like the NFL protests, and we’ve seen that it’s true on big congressional controversies.

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