On the rogues’ gallery of American journalism scandals.
juliawick
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
What It’s Like to Be an FBI Agent in a Border Town
Lawson moved out of his extended-stay hotel and into a house in Laredo, not far from some of the Treviños’ extended family, he says. He came to appreciate the camaraderie of working the border, a destination so low on agents’ wish lists that the bureau lets them transfer wherever they want after five years. Most of the […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Understanding the ‘Swiss Cheese Model’ of Error
The human lapses that occurred after the computerized ordering system and pill-dispensing robots did their jobs perfectly well is a textbook case of English psychologist James Reason’s “Swiss cheese model” of error. Reason’s model holds that all complex organizations harbor many “latent errors,” unsafe conditions that are, in essence, mistakes waiting to happen. They’re like a forest […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The 1944 Court Decision That Changed Hollywood
The showbiz press has been abuzz all day with news of a surprise shake-up (a group of high-powered talent agents defected en masse from one top agency to another). Most of the coverage has been inside baseball, but an analysis in The Hollywood Reporter by Matthew Belloni provides some interesting insight into Hollywood history: Consider the case of the late legendary agent, who […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Tom Wolfe on the Birth of the ‘New Journalism’
In 1973, Tom Wolfe published The New Journalism; the seminal book was part manifesto for a new style of nonfiction writing and part anthology of its early greatest hits. It contained work by Wolfe, Gay Talese, Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, Truman Capote, and Norman Mailer, among others. Below is a short excerpt from the book’s first chapter, where […]
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How McLovin Was Cast From a Camera Phone Headshot
[Allison] Jones began her career with the two-beats-and-a-punch-line sitcoms of the nineteen-eighties, but, in working with Feig and the director Judd Apatow, she was required to try something revolutionary: find comedic actors who, more than just delivering jokes, could improvise and riff on their lines, creating something altogether different from what was on the page. […]
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Why We Dream About Our Childhood Homes
Sigmund Freud called dreams ”the royal road to the unconscious” and theorized that they reflected highly individual unconscious wishes. His student Carl Jung, who later broke with him, thought the recurring use of enduring symbols in dreams, like mazes, mirrors and snakes, reflected something more collective and universal. *** Many people interviewed said they dreamed […]
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McDonald’s and the Science of Drive-Through Lane Wait Times
Ten years ago, customers placing orders in the drive-through lane at McDonald’s would have their food in about two and a half minutes (or 152 seconds, if you want to get precise). Today, the same order takes a bit over three minutes (or 189.5 seconds) on average, according to analyst research from Janney Montgomery Scott. […]
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Why Certain Workers Are More Vulnerable to Wage Theft
The problem of wage theft is not confined to any one industry, ethnicity, size of business, or corporate structure, says Labor Commissioner Julie Su. Each year, California loses approximately $8 billion in tax revenues to wage theft, and Su’s office has investigated millions of dollars’ worth of violations committed by, among others, a hospital, assisted living […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Shut-Ins and the Sharing Economy
With Alfred, you no longer have to open the door for the Instacart delivery: A worker comes into your apartment and stocks food in your fridge. You don’t hand off your dirty undies to a Washio messenger; Alfred puts the laundered undies in the drawer. This all happens by paying your Alfred $99 a month, […]