Only one of the rape victims in Krakauer’s book, “Cecilia Washburn,” is identified with a pseudonym. “And I didn’t interview her,” Krakauer said. (Krakauer says he discussed the possibility of an interview with Washburn’s attorney multiple times, but she replied each time that her client likely would not consent to an interview.) The rest of the victims identified in Missoula spoke with him and consented to having their names used. Krakauer offered each victim he interviewed an opportunity before publication to review each chapter in which she appeared. If a victim changed her mind about participating, then Krakauer promised to remove all mentions of her from the book—a way of giving victims the control over their stories that judicial systems sometimes deny.
Krakauer also described for each victim he interviewed some of his own reporting practices and boundaries. “I told each of them, very explicitly, that except for withdrawal or correcting errors that clearly needed to be corrected, they would have absolutely no right to determine what I wrote about them,” Krakauer wrote during a follow-up. “I explicitly told each of them that if I discovered they had not been truthful, I would report it in the book. I also made it explicitly clear that I would try to get each of their alleged assailants to tell me his side of the story, and I would be including both sides in the book.”
Asking how am I going to cover Black Twitter is like asking how I’m going to cover American culture. I’m never going to get all of it, but I’m going to pull what I find interesting.
—Dexter Thomas, as interviewed by Chava Gourarie in the Columbia Journalism Review. Earlier this week the Los Angeles Times hired Dexter Thomas to cover Black Twitter and other online communities.
Vice’s headquarters are a 30,000-square-foot amalgamation of converted warehouses in Williamsburg, Brooklyn—hipster capital of the US. [Vice co-founder Shane Smith], who was not made available for an interview with CJR despite repeated requests, has called his office of 425 workers “a sweatshop for trustafarians” and the culture “like an incestuous family.”
The interior matches Vice’s style: gritty yet polished. There’s the meeting room with a stuffed bear, a memento from a video shoot. When I visited in April, the famed office bar was temporarily gone in anticipation of Vice’s upcoming move to a space double the size.
Rings with the Vice logo are worn around the office. New employees sign a non-traditional workplace agreement, acknowledging that, among other things, “sexually provocative and other explicit images, videos and audio recordings are regularly present in VICE’s offices.” And the company throws events like a charity ping pong match in March between senior editor Benjamin Shapiro and Rolling Stone’s Gus Wenner, and last December’s 20th anniversary party, where rapper Lil’ Wayne performed. The event was preceded by Smith personally handing out envelopes of $1,500 in cash to employees at the staff holiday party.
King sat down for a series of interviews with the author Alex Haley shortly after he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. They were edited and compiled into one interview that ran in the magazine the next year, which—according to The Daily Beast—was the longest interview King ever gave any publication. Read more…
Emily Perper is word-writing human for hire. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker.
The student journalist, the Afghani mother, the elderly custodian, the Chinese orphan boy: each of these pieces forces the reader to stop and consider the extraordinary stories of seemingly ordinary people.
“We met when I was 15 and he was 7. Matthew was always ‘my little brother in China’ … But how can I pretend to really know what it was like to grow up in the situation he did?” Yellis tries to raise a troubled Chinese teen at his parents’ orphanage.
Delving into the daily lives of Afghani women, Chuang meets Amina, whose steadfastness saw her family through war, changing regimes and the disappearance of her youngest brother at the hands of KGB soldiers.
Picks from Emily Perper, a freelance editor and reporter who blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker. This week’s picks include stories from the The Tampa Bay Times, Columbia Journalism Review, Andrew Yellis, and Vela Magazine.
On the 1962-1963 printers strike in New York that effectively shut down the seven biggest newspapers in the city, killed four of them, and made names for writers like Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe and Nora Ephron:
A city without The New York Times inspired rage and scorn, ambivalence and relief. A ‘Talk of the Town’ item in The New Yorker lamented a weekend without the ‘fragrant, steamy deep-dish apple pie of the Sunday Times.’ James Reston—pillar of the Establishment, Washington bureau chief and columnist for the Times, and intimate of the Sulzberger family, to whom he directed a controversial entreaty to use non-union shops—was allowed to read his column on New York’s Channel 4 in early January 1963: ‘Striking the Times is like striking an old lady and deprives the community of all kinds of essential information. If some beautiful girl gets married this week, the television may let us see her gliding radiantly from the church. But what about all those ugly girls who get married every Sunday in the Times?’
A city without newspapers was a city in which civic activity was impeded, as two out-of-work Times reporters hired by the Columbia Journalism Review soon documented. Without the daily papers, the Health Department’s campaign against venereal disease was ‘seriously impaired.’ So was the fight against slumlords: ‘There’s a distinct difference,’ the city’s building commissioner said, ‘between a $500 fine and a $500 fine plus a story in the Times.’ The New York chapter of the Congress on Racial Equality discovered that, without newspaper attention, its boycott of the Sealtest Milk Company was considerably undermined. The newspaper strike, the C.J.R. study concluded, had ‘deprived the public of its watchdog.
On the 1962-1963 printers strike in New York City that effectively shut down the seven biggest newspapers in the city, killed four of them, and made names for writers like Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe and Nora Ephron:
“A city without The New York Times inspired rage and scorn, ambivalence and relief. A ‘Talk of the Town’ item in The New Yorker lamented a weekend without the ‘fragrant, steamy deep-dish apple pie of the Sunday Times.’ James Reston—pillar of the Establishment, Washington bureau chief and columnist for the Times, and intimate of the Sulzberger family, to whom he directed a controversial entreaty to use non-union shops—was allowed to read his column on New York’s Channel 4 in early January 1963: ‘Striking the Times is like striking an old lady and deprives the community of all kinds of essential information. If some beautiful girl gets married this week, the television may let us see her gliding radiantly from the church. But what about all those ugly girls who get married every Sunday in the Times?’
“A city without newspapers was a city in which civic activity was impeded, as two out-of-work Times reporters hired by the Columbia Journalism Review soon documented. Without the daily papers, the Health Department’s campaign against venereal disease was ‘seriously impaired.’ So was the fight against slumlords: ‘There’s a distinct difference,’ the city’s building commissioner said, ‘between a $500 fine and a $500 fine plus a story in the Times.’ The New York chapter of the Congress on Racial Equality discovered that, without newspaper attention, its boycott of the Sealtest Milk Company was considerably undermined. The newspaper strike, the C.J.R. study concluded, had ‘deprived the public of its watchdog.”
A look back at James Watson’s book The Double Helix and the controversy it stirred in the science community.
In telling the story, he produced a great work of literary nonfiction. Watson expanded the boundaries of science writing to include not only the formal, public face of Nobel-winning discoveries but also the day-to-day life of working scientists—both inside and outside the lab.The Double Helixrejuvenated a genre that had been largely academic or hagiographic. Its success showed that there was and is an appetite for thestoryof science; that the stories can be human and exciting; that scientists can be flawed characters; that the whole endeavor doesn’t collapse if you depict it with something less than reverence.
Although the book caused an international scandal that winter, I don’t think any word of the controversy reached me at Classical High School. As a freshman, I read The Double Helix as a story of pure triumph. Now, of course, I can see what I couldn’t then: an epic of the loss of innocence, writ small and large. And I can see the arc of Watson’s life since 1968, which has been another epic of triumph and hubris, ending with a fall. So now I see the darkness around the shining cup.
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