It’s not news that equal representation in the media has a long way to go. As Nicole Soojung Callahan put it, “I wanted to know what this lack of representation — and the slow but (one hopes) steady ascent to better representation — looks like to someone inside the industry.”
Quotes
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Quotes
A Business Journalism Classic: Inside the Multibillion-Dollar Takeover Battle for RJR Nabisco
Everyone in the room knew about leveraged buyouts, often called LBOs. In an LBO, a small group of senior executives, usually working with a Wall Street partner, proposes to buy its company from public shareholders, using massive amounts of borrowed money. Critics of this procedure called it stealing the company from its owners and fretted […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Trouble in the Bloomberg Solar System
The Bloomberg was often seen inside the company it built as a sort of heavenly body. Dan Doctoroff likened it to the sun, a “life-giving force” that sustains its orbiting planets of business and media ventures. The CEO kept a model of the solar system near his desk, with a tiny replica of The Bloomberg […]
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Does Ty Segall Ever Sleep?
Another factor zooming Segall into the here-and-now is his prodigious streak, which has been an unintentional but fortuitous adaptation to the era of social media, where music arrives and vanishes from the cultural consciousness in the space of mere days, if not hours. It’s tough to forget him, because he always has a release on […]
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Argentina’s Stolen Children
It sounds like something out of a bestselling dystopian novel, but it’s horribly real: in the 1970s, tens of thousands of so-called subversives were murdered by a despotic Argentinian government.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Fancy Dogs and Empty Bank Accounts
How do our desires shape our identity? Poet Amanda Williams is facing this question head-on: she is a graduate student with limited finances, but all she wants is a purebred French Bulldog.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Lightnin’ Hopkins Gets Your Head Tore Up
In the summer of 1960, Dallas, Texas journalist Grover Lewis went to Houston’s Third Ward in search of Bluesman Lightnin’ Hopkins. Lewis found him in an old ’54 Dodge. The resulting essay, published in the Village Voice in 1968, is a small masterpiece of personal music writing, offering a snapshot of artistic endurance, 1960s race […]
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The Three Immutable Rules of Chicken Tenders
A true connoisseur of the chicken tender knows that there are three immutable rules. The first is the rule of physical integrity. A tender has a proper shape: flattish, oblong, and gradually tapering from a wide front to a narrow end. Unlike nuggets, which are largely made from processed, re-formed scraps, the chicken tender takes […]
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Reinventing One of Scotland’s Most Unpronounceable Whiskies
No one knows why Bruichladdich whisky tastes the way it does, but plenty of people think they do. In Reynier’s view, the distillery’s proximity to a shallow bay makes a difference. (Bruichladdich is Gaelic for “raised beach.”) When the tide goes out, across the road, algae are exposed to the air, which influences the spirit […]
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Corruption–and Copulation–in the Baltimore City Detention Center
Joyce Mitchell, alleged accomplice to two murderers on the loose from Clinton-Dannemora correctional facility in New York, is hardly the only prison employee to ever have allegedly aided—and had sex with—detainees. From Jeffrey Toobin’s “This Is My Jail” in the April 14, 2014 issue of The New Yorker: Many relationships between guards and inmates appear to have […]