Journalist
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The News Business Really Is Cratering January 29, 2024
Journalists across the country burst into flames of panic this week, as bad news for the news business crested and erupted everywhere all at once.Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire publisher of the Los Angeles Times, laid off 20 percent of his news...
The Anti-Woke Case for Saving Local News January 29, 2024
There is a certain type of person who cheers on the collapse of the mainstream media. They revile establishment institutions. They are Trump-curious and have inherited his open hatred of the media, though they are usually unaware the former president...
A Los Angeles Massacre January 25, 2024
Yesterday was another miserable day for a storied media institution. The Los Angeles Times, unlike Sports Illustrated, will continue to employ a bevy of well-regarded journalists, but the newsroom has been radically cut down. About 115 people, a quar...
Ava DuVernay Wants to Build a New System January 24, 2024
Richard Brody, whose writing about movies runs under the rubric The Front Row, never ceases to surprise me, and enlighten me, with his critical judgment. Like another colleague, Anthony Lane, he has introduced me to the work of more classic filmmaker...
War is Boyish and Fought by Boys January 22, 2024
Author Robert Kaplan once shared with me what he believes is the military's greatest weakness: “The general officer corps is sometimes asked to be strategic and understand the world beyond their capability. They are creatures of systems and lack the ...
On Fernanda Melchor’s “This Is Not Miami” January 19, 2024
There is an established tradition of Latin American novelists who started off as journalists. Before breaking out with One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez made a living writing columns, film criticism, and political commentary. Carl...
Against Political Clichés January 12, 2024
The late, great radio commentator Rush Limbaugh regularly played soundbites from mainstream media before offering his opinion on any given political situation. His intent was to show the sameness of what passes for political analysis by demonstrating...
The Lessons I Learned from Journalism January 11, 2024
Last year, a couple readers asked me how my career in journalism informed and/or helped my career in fiction. It’s an excellent question, and something I’ve been excited to write about since. But first, some necessary background info. Before I ever w...
The Biggest Takeaways From the 2024 Golden Globes January 09, 2024
Sunday night was intended to mark a new era for the Golden Globes. The Globes have long been positioned as the chaotic, boozier cousin of the Oscars—the former hasn’t always been a useful precursor for the rest of awards season, but it tends to make ...
'The Iron Claw' Doesn’t Quite Take Hold January 08, 2024
Given a long enough timeline, everybody of note winds up redeemed. So it goes with Texas’ star-crossed Von Erich family of wrestlers, which serves as the “inspiration” for director Sean Durkin’s The Iron Claw, a gorgeously-shot film that aims for epi...
Facts Do Care About Your Feelings January 08, 2024
By the time the documentary film called Athlete A came out in 2020, the story of Larry Nassar’s abuse of hundreds of young athletes was well known. There had easily been hundreds if not thousands of journalistic stories written. These stories were ev...
The Poverty of Anti-Wokeness January 01, 2024
Ten years ago, Ta-Nehisi Coates, then a rising writer at The Atlantic, attended a gathering of liberal journalists at the White House. On his blog, Coates had taken a dim view of the post-racial era that had supposedly dawned in 2008, but in a previo...
