When Elizabeth Cochran was 16 years old, she lived with her family in Pittsburgh. The year was 1880, and Elizabeth was intelligent and precocious. The Pittsburgh Dispatch ran an article titled “What Girls are Good For,” and the author concluded the girls were good for having babies and keeping house. It was not an unpopular • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,392) on Friday, March 12, 2021. One of the writing roles that I have never pictured myself fulfilling is that of a memoirist. Tell other people’s stories, I would say to my journalism students, not your own. Your job is to write about other people, not yourself. I • Read More »
Maxine Cheshire was a reporter who knew how to get under people’s skin. She irritated Frank Sinatra into a drunken, expletive-ridden rant that was witnessed by dozens of people. She made Jacqueline Kennedy cry and provoked a presidential call to her publisher. She exposed the Nixon family’s greed in keeping gifts from foreign leaders. More • Read More »
Gordon Parks bought his first camera in 1938 when he was 25 years old and living in Seattle, Washington. Up to that time, Parks did not have much of a life. Born in Kansas in 1912, Parks was one of 15 children and experienced the cruelties of racism when some white kids pitched him into • Read More »
Theodore Weld, his wife Angelina Grimké, and her sister Sarah Grimké were tired of the spin — although they didn’t use that term back in 1838. They were tired of people saying that black was white, up was down, and night was day. And they were tired of people believing the spin because that’s what • Read More »
Malcolm Gladwell (The Outliers, The Tipping Point, David and Goliath) is an author who has achieved fame — and a good bit of success — by examining parts of society that don’t often get attention or by casting a new light on things we thought were familiar. He’s just published a new book titled Talking to • Read More »
Bob Considine, who achieved international fame for his World War II reporting was the consummate journalist: he loved traveling, he loved talking to people, he loved finding information, and — most of all — he loved writing. In his late 60s, he was still working and still writing — mostly on a nationally syndicated column • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,866) on Friday, March 22, 2019. The tractor came out of the barn and had a pretty good workout this week. We had a string of dry days that allowed me — finally! — to get into the garden with some much-needed sub-soiling and • Read More »
Tags: Alan Krueger, big-brand university, college admissions scandal, Dan Jenkins, elite college, elite university, Maddie podcast, Marie Owens, police detective, Rick Barrett, Sally Jenkins, Semi-Tough
What has practically every story you’ve read or heard during the last couple of weeks about the college admissions scandal had in common? The journalists and commentators have consistently used the terms elite colleges or elite universities. They have done without any critical assessment of the terms themselves, and therein lies a problem — possibly The Problem. We • Read More »
Tags: big-brand university, college admission scandal, elite college, elite university
Back in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, if you had a sacred cow — particularly if it had to do with sports or anything connected — Dan Jenkins would come along and push it over. And make you laugh while he was doing it. Jenkins was one of an elite group of sportswriters who worked • Read More »
When it comes to paying a lasting tribute to veterans, few people can match the work of Josephine Herrick. Herrick was a professional photographer in the 1930s and 40s with a successful studio in New York City when the United States went to war in 1941. She organized a group of 35 fellow-photographers to take • Read More »
Tags: Howard Rusk, Josephine Herrick, Manhattan project, photography
Before he became famous for his wild tales of the then New West, Bret Harte was a journalist and had broken one of the biggest stories of the era in pre-Civil War California. Born in 1836 in Albany, New York, Harte moved to California with his family when he was a teenager. He worked at • Read More »
Tags: Axel Nissen, Bret Harte, Wiyot Indians
After a scathing two-part documentary by Public Broadcasting Service’s Frontline in October (The Facebook Dilemma, discussed in a JPROF.com post a couple of weeks ago), Facebook’s reputation as an idealist company that wants to change the world and do go continues to deteriorate. Here’s the lead paragraph from a New York Times story (Facebook Used • Read More »
Tags: Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg
Caricature is fairly common today (even amateurs like me try their hand at it), but in the late 18th century, it was a newly developing form of art, as well as social and political communication. And no one was better at it — a set a higher standard for others of his and those who • Read More »
Tags: James Gillray, Jim Sherry, Matthew Crowther
In so many ways, Gilbert Keith (G.K.) Chesterton (1874-1936) was an enormous man. — Physically, he was massive: 6 feet 4 inches tall, he weighed more than 250 pounds. He had a shock of hair that on many days looked like it had exploded out of the right side of his head. — His writing production almost • Read More »
Tags: C.S. Lewis, Charles Dickens, George Bernard Shaw, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Mahatma Gandi, Michael Collins
You’re accused of a crime. You didn’t do it. The prosecutor is aggressive; she says there’s ample evidence to convict you. You and an Orlando Drug Trafficking Defense Lawyer go over the evidence. He says there are procedural errors in the way the evidence has been acquired, and all in all, he doesn’t believe the case • Read More »
Tags: jury trial, National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, The Crime Report
If you were an African-American in the 1940s and you wanted to participate in state and local politics, rural Georgia was not a kind or forgiving place. In fact, it could be very dangerous. That’s the story told by Hank Klibanoff, a journalist and now faculty member at Emory University in Atlanta, in the Buried • Read More »
Tags: Buried Truths, Dover Carter, Hank Klibanoff, Isiah Nixon
Good journalism saves lives. In this Age of Hyperbole, that’s no exaggeration. A couple of weeks ago in the newsletter, I mentioned John Carreyrou, investigative reporter for the Wall Street Journal, and the book he has written title Bad Blood. The book tells the story of Elizabeth Holmes. the wunderkind of Silicon Valley, and her • Read More »
Tags: Bad Blood, Elizabeth Holmes, John Carreyrou, journalistic narrative, Theranos, Wall Street Journal
Good journalism is hard to do — I have said this many times — and when I find some, I tend to pay some attention. A couple of examples of excellent long-form journalism that I have come across lately are American Fire by Monica Hesse and Bad Blood by John Carreyrou. American Fire: Love, Arson • Read More »
Tags: Accomack County, American Fire: Love, Arson and Life in a Vanishing Land, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, Eastern Shore, Elizabeth Holmes, John Carreyrou, Monica Hesse, Theranos
The book summed up many of the frustrations that middle-class women had experienced, especially if they had set aside ambitions and careers to become suburban housewives and mothers. From the day it was published, it sparked criticism from many quarters (and continues to do so today), but it struck a chord with many women and became a phenomenal best-seller over the following two years.
Tags: Betty Friedan, Maxine Wayman, National Organization for Women, Point Spread, Smith College, The Feminine Mystique, women's movement of the 1960s