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The Politics of Poetry

David Orr | Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry | HarperCollins | 2011 | 18 minutes (4,527 words)

The essay below is excerpted from David Orr’s 2011 book Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry. Orr writes the On Poetry column for The New York Times, and an earlier version of this essay appeared in Poetry Magazine. Read more…

Tech Companies Are Racing to Create Family Friendly Policies — Amazon Is Not One of Them

Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld report in the New York Times this weekend about the cut-throat work culture at Amazon. Jokes one former employee, “The joke in the office was that when it came to work/life balance, work came first, life came second, and trying to find the balance came last.” Many tech companies like Google, Netflix and Facebook are creating family friendly benefits to retain employees, but Amazon is not one of them:

Amazon retains new workers in part by requiring them to repay a part of their signing bonus if they leave within a year, and a portion of their hefty relocation fees if they leave within two years. Several fathers said they left or were considering quitting because of pressure from bosses or peers to spend less time with their families. (Many tech companies are racing to top one another’s family leave policies — Netflix just began offering up to a year of paid parental leave. Amazon, though, offers no paid paternity leave.)

In interviews, 40-year-old men were convinced Amazon would replace them with 30-year-olds who could put in more hours, and 30-year-olds were sure that the company preferred to hire 20-somethings who would outwork them. After Max Shipley, a father of two young children, left this spring, he wondered if Amazon would “bring in college kids who have fewer commitments, who are single, who have more time to focus on work.” Mr. Shipley is 25.

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Say Her Name: Roxane Gay on Sandra Bland

Because Sandra Bland was driving while black, because she was not subservient in the manner this trooper preferred, a routine traffic stop became a death sentence. Even if Ms. Bland did commit suicide, there is an entire system of injustice whose fingerprints left bruises on her throat.

–At the New York Times, Roxane Gay indicts a society built on systemic racism for the death of 28-year-old Sandra Bland and dozens of other innocent, murdered Black people.

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Getting Reacquainted With the World After Decades in Prison

Photo: Liz West

In the New York Times Magazine, Jon Mooallem follows two ex-convicts who pick up inmates the day they are released and help then navigate through their first day of freedom, which can be unnerving if they’ve been behind bars for more than a decade:

‘‘The first day is everything,’’ Carlos says — a barrage of insignificant-seeming experiences with potentially big consequences. Consider, for example, a friend of his and Roby’s: Julio Acosta, who was paroled in 2013 after 23 years inside. Acosta describes stopping for breakfast near the prison that first morning as if it were a horrifying fever dream: He kept looking around the restaurant for a sniper, as in the chow hall in prison, and couldn’t stop gawking at the metal knives and forks, ‘‘like an Aztec looking at Cortez’s helmet,’’ he says. It wasn’t until he got up from the booth and walked to the men’s room, and a man came out the door and said, ‘‘How you doin’?’’ and Acosta said, ‘‘Fine,’’ that Acosta began to feel, even slightly, like a legitimate part of the environment around him. He’d accomplished something. He’d made a treacherous trip across an International House of Pancakes. He’d peed.

But what if Acosta had accidentally bumped into a waitress, knocking over her tray and shattering dishes? What if that man had glared at him, instead of greeting him, or snapped at him to get the hell out of the way? Ann Jacobs, director of the Prisoner Re-entry Institute at New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told me that even the smallest bungled interactions on the outside leave recently incarcerated people feeling ‘‘like they’re being exposed, like they’re incompetent. It’s feeding into their worst fear, their perception of themselves as an impostor who’s incapable of living a normal life.’’ Carlos and Roby have learned to steer their guys through that perilous newness — and to be nonchalant about it, to make the sudden enormity of life feel unthreatening, even fun. On one ride home earlier this year, I watched a third-striker venture inside a convenience store, alone, to buy a candy bar while Roby pumped gas. The man seemed emboldened after a few hours of freedom, actually hopping a bit as he walked. But then he tripped over the curb and tumbled forward, arms thrashing, nearly face-planting in front of the door. Roby just shrugged and said, ‘‘Well, you’ve got to get that one out of the way.’’

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Judy Blume, on the Age that Defined Her for Life

Blume does think that she turned toward children’s fiction because she was still living a relatively sheltered life. “I didn’t have any adult experience when I started to write,” she said. “So I identified more with kids.” Her own fate felt sealed, airless. “I felt, I made this decision. This is it. It’s not all open for me anymore.” To her, it was only natural that she look backward, to the age when she felt most powerful and adulthood still promised the adventures her father wanted for her. She had been a fierce and creative child; on the page, at least, she still was. Blume likes the idea that everybody has an age that defines them for life. For her, she said, that age is 12.

— From a profile of beloved author Judy Blume in The New York Times Magazine.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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The 2015 Pulitzer Prize Winners

The Pulitzer Prizes winners have been announced: Bloomberg News’s Zachary R. Mider was awarded a prize for explanatory reporting on corporate tax dodgers. Carol D. Leonnig of The Washington Post was awarded a national reporting award for her coverage of security lapses in the Secret Service. The New York Times won an international reporting award for its coverage of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. Lisa Falkenberg of the Houston Chronicle was given the award for commentary for her columns about grand jury abuses. Mary McNamara, a TV critic for the Los Angeles Times, was awarded a prize for criticism. A list of the all the winners and finalists can be found here. Below is a short list of other books and features that were honored.

Public Service: “Till Death Do Us Part” (The Post and Courier)

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Breaking News Reporting: “Snohomish County Landslide” (The Seattle Times)

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Feature Writing: “Scenes from California’s Dust Bowl” (Diana Marcum, Los Angeles Times)

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Investigative Reporting: “Courting Favor” (Eric Lipton, New York Times) and “Medicare Unmasked” (The Wall Street Journal)

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Local Reporting: “Centinela Valley Union High School District Investigation” (Daily Breeze)

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Fiction: All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr

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Nonfiction: The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, Elizabeth Kolbert

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Biography: The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe, David I. Kertzer

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History: Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People, Elizabeth A. Fenn

How ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ Got Its Name

John Steinbeck—who would have been 113 today—wrote more than thirty books, and The Grapes of Wrath, which you were most likely assigned to read in high school, is widely considered to be his best work. The novel was published in 1939 to great acclaim, both critically and commercially; it “was a phenomenon on the scale of a national event. It was publicly banned and burned by citizens, it was debated on national talk radio; but above all, it was read.” It was also the New York Times’ bestselling book of 1939, and won both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award.

As for the title, where did the phrase “The Grapes of Wrath” come from? As David Greetham notes  in his 1998 book Textual Transgressions: Essays Toward the Construction of a Bibliography:

As is well-known, it was Carol Henning, Steinbeck’s wife, who provided the almost-finished novel with its title, drawn, of course, from Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” As Steinbeck reported in his journal for September 3, 1938, “Carol got the title last night…The book has being at last.” But what was the “being” the novel had achieved…? The story proceeds: because Steinbeck had already destroyed a 70,000-word draft of an earlier version in which California growers were polemically attacked, he was very sensitive to the political meaning of the new version and decided that one way to avoid the charge of radicalism, foreign-inspired propaganda was (almost literally) to wrap the book in the flag by insisting that the words and music of “Battle Hymn of the Republic” be printed in the endpapers. In fact, when the first proof was returned by his editor with only one verse [of the song] as prologue, Steinbeck wrote back “I meant to print all, all, all the verses of the Battle Hymn. They’re all pertinent and they’re all exciting. And the music too.”

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.

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Read more…

Where Does the Term “Spin Doctor” Come From?

A Google Ngram graph illustrating the usage of the term "spin doctor" over the last three decades.

The term “spin doctor” is ubiquitous in contemporary politics—but what exactly does it mean? And when did it enter the common vernacular?

The Oxford English Dictionary added the term in their 1993 draft addition, and defines it as such: “a political press agent or publicist employed to promote a favourable interpretation of events to journalists.” But that’s just when it entered the dictionary—surely people were using it before then. For it’s full etymology, we must turn to the late William Safire’s “On Language” column for the New York Times Magazine, specifically his August 31, 1986 column entitled “Calling Dr. Spin.” An excerpt is below:

Spin doctor is a locution we must keep our eyes on for 1988. It is based on the slang meaning of the verb to spin, which in the 1950’s meant ”to deceive,” perhaps influenced by ”to spin a yarn.” More recently, as a noun, spin has come to mean ”twist,” or ”interpretation”; when a pitcher puts a spin on a baseball, he causes it to curve, and when we put our own spin on a story, we angle it to suit our predilections or interests.

The phrase spin doctor was coined on the analogy of play doctor, one who fixes up a limping second act, and gains from the larcenous connotation of the verb doctor, to fix a product the way a crooked bookkeeper ”cooks” books.

Its earliest citation in the Nexis computer files is from an editorial in The New York Times on Oct. 21, 1984, about the Reagan-Mondale televised debates. ”Tonight at about 9:30,” wrote the editorialist, ”seconds after the Reagan-Mondale debate ends, a bazaar will suddenly materialize in the press room. . . . A dozen men in good suits and women in silk dresses will circulate smoothly among the reporters, spouting confident opinions. They won’t be just press agents trying to impart a favorable spin to a routine release. They’ll be the Spin Doctors, senior advisers to the candidates. . . .”

…Four days later, Elisabeth Bumiller of The Washington Post picked up the phrase, defining spin doctors – no longer capitalized – as ”the advisers who talk to reporters and try to put their own spin, or analysis, on the story.” The term was thus sealed into the new political vocabulary, and will be trotted out by pundits in the coming campaign to prove that their opinions cannot be influenced.

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