Words Weekly, Chapter 2:

Adventures in Criminal Justice…and Texas

Time to waste some digital ink on two of my favorite subjects. (Check out Chapter 1 for this blog post’s objective.)

The Word That Stayed With Me

the verb “city-slick”

This, which I haven’t seen anywhere else, comes courtesy of Gary Cartwright, who only entered my life about a year and a half ago. He started out in newspapers around and in Dallas, then became a staff writer at Texas Monthly. He’s an incredibly clever writer; his sentences just pop off the page like champagne corks. Anyway, this use of “city slick” is in his 1979 book, Blood Will Tell, about the richest man (at the time) ever tried for murder. How he uses it requires some context to have it make sense: The rich dude’s trial was moved from high society Fort Worth to podunk Amarillo, and his lawyers worried they’d come off as city-slickers the jury wouldn’t trust, so:

“They needed one well-known Amarillo lawyer present in the courtroom to dispel the image of themselves as a battery of high-priced outsiders come to city-slick the good folks of Potter County.”

I love it when words are used in interesting and different-than-expected ways, such as nouns transforming into verbs.

Also, I highly recommend that book, particularly Part 1.

The Words I Wish I’d Written

“On April 12, 1987, Michael Morton sat down to write a letter. ‘Your Honor,’ he began, ‘I’m sure you remember me. I was convicted of murder, in your court, in February of this year.'”

— “The Innocent Man, Part One” by Pamela Colloff, Texas Monthly

It’s not exactly the most scintillating word-play out there, but how fast it goes from 0 to 60 fascinates me. The first line is rather ho-hum: OK, so he wrote a letter, so what? Then he mentions being convicted of murder, and it’s like: Holy shit! Even better, the remaining 28,000 words or so don’t let that feeling up.

The Stories I Made Time For

“Is Texas Getting Ready to Kill an Innocent Man?” by Jordan Smith, The Intercept

After the “this is motherfucking atrocious” reaction I get whenever I see these kinds of stories, I quietly think this to myself: Seems like there could be one of these stories for every reporter there is in Texas. The state is so chockfull of them, it made reading this New Yorker story on an innocent-but-imprisoned man in Chicago rather strange — Wait, I found myself thinking, this didn’t take place in Texas? Anyway, David Grann’s story on the execution of a more-than-likely (read: totally) innocent man is required reading.

“9 Exits on America’s Football Highway” by Wright Thompson, ESPN The Magazine

Pretty, pretty sentences. The man writes pretty, pretty sentences. I also admire how he mixes up the length of his paragraphs, sometimes going long paragraph, one-sentence paragraph, long paragraph, one-sentence paragraph, with the one sentence as one of many kickers (or mic-drops) throughout the story. One more thing, I think this is a great observation about suburban life nowadays: “They came to New London to find oil, and they come to places like Allen, north of Dallas, to find affordable land within an ever-expanding definition of a reasonable drive to work.”

The Older Story I Made Time For

“Free to Kill” by Gary Cartwright, Texas Monthly

Cartwright details legendary Texas killer Kenneth McDuff’s two sprees in horrific detail. It’s hard to read. I’m sure that’s the point.

The Article That Got Me Thinking

“Bill Keller Knows Why the Oxpecker Sings” by Matt Negrin, Bloomberg Politics

Keller is the former editor of The New York Times and recently started The Marshall Project that will cover criminal justice (in case you hadn’t heard). The interviewer asked whether the venture was advocacy journalism, to which Keller replied:

Was Watergate advocacy? Woodward and Bernstein and The Washington Post understood there was something really rotten going on in the Nixon administration. And that didn’t make them Democrats or Libertarians or left-wingers or right-wingers. It just made them journalists. … When you look at a system that is not living up to its own standards, and you report on that, that’s not partisan or ideological. That’s just journalism.

This reminds me a bit of what the authors The Race Beat called the “cult of objectivity”: Reporters covering the Civil Rights Era struggled with whether to put denials from racists that they were racists in their stories. They finally decided, essentially, What’s the point? If a racist is a racist, he’s a racist. Being “objective” — and issuing denials — served no purpose, and really was a disservice to readers.

Keller also said this to Vox about the Project:

I like the idea of we’re doing journalism because that’s what I do, but I like the idea of journalism with a sense of mission, a kind of focus, a sense of purpose. Which is not an agenda of specific reforms we want to enact, or people we want to elect, but problems that we want people to think clearly about and understand. And we’ll also write some about solutions and whether or not they stand up to scrutiny.

And this:

I have never believed that impartial journalism — which is the word I prefer to objectivity, just because objectivity sounds like a state of being that doesn’t really exist — I’ve never believed that impartial journalism meant that you didn’t reach conclusions, that you gave equal ink to every point of view, even the preposterous points of view. Impartial journalism doesn’t mean you have to pretend that evolution doesn’t exist, or that climate change is a myth. What it means is that you go into your reporting with an open mind. You’re led by the facts. Sometimes those facts lead to a conclusion; sometimes they lead to a disagreement.

So, fairness > objectivity. Sometimes a story, and the truth, is one-sided.

(OK, I guess that was technically two articles that made me think.)

— h/t American Press Institute

What’s Burning a Hole in my Pocket App

Sometimes I scroll through my Pocket app like it’s a Netflix queue: What do I want to entertain me right now? I’ll pass a title and think, that would be a good film to watch, but I just don’t have the mental stamina to engage with something of substance right now. Same with some articles in that app: I know, at some point, I’ll want to read them, but I want to savor the moment. Needless to say, some stories get stuck in there a while.

This week: “The Endless Odyssey of Patrick Henry Polk” by Gary Cartwright, Texas Monthly

The Book I’m Engrossed In Right Now

The Powers That Be by David Halberstam

Still deep in it but making progress. One thing I didn’t know was that Time was essentially a Republican mouth piece when it started. Its creator and editor-in-chief, Henry Luce, changed copy to make Republicans awesome and Democrats vile and also to reflect how he wanted the world to be, not how it was. And, boy, were (some of) his reporters pissed. Another thing I didn’t know: the founders of the Los Angeles Times thought Time was too far to the left.

Thanks for reading!

Bonus Vid

Words Weekly, Chapter 1:

Ode. What A Great Word. Simple, full of meaning.

Since I was little, I’ve loved the written word. I struggled with it at first, but I overcame it, and I think that’s why I’ve picked my career path. I love how letters form words, how words form phrases, how phrases form sentences, which then form paragraphs, which then form sections in stories and chapters in books. This is my ode to these formations — with a dash of reporting talk mixed in. It’s going to be esoteric, and probably will interest only me. I do what I’ve done below in my head anyway, so I might as well put it in writing.

(I’m going to try to do something like this regularly [once a week], just because I’m obsessed with email newsletters right now and I think having one of my own would be fun; doing a blog post is a semi-slide into that world. I’ll h/t where I get stuff, unless of course I find it on my own, which in that case, uh, I won’t. And if someone comes up with a better name, please let me know.)

The Word That Stayed With Me

perquisite

It’s not the coolest sounding word in the world, but I like it’s definition. It can mean, simply, a perk. But it’s more like an unwarranted reward based on someone’s position. So, like, big Wall Street banks not getting destroyed after destroying people’s livelihoods is a perquisite. This past week was the first time I came across it, in David Halberstam’s The Powers That Be (more on that later). Surprised it isn’t used more often.

The Words I Wish I’d Written

This requires some context. James Kilpatrick, a staunch segregationist (and the subject of these words not the writer), was the editor of the Richmond News Leader, a Virginia newspaper in the 1950s and ’60s whose copy reflected that of its editor. He firmly believed the country wasn’t a unit, but a “collection of individual, sovereign states”:

“Consequently, Kilpatrick frequently noted, readers would never see the term ‘United States’ take the singular in his editorials. Awkward as it was stylistically, the United States was not mentioned in his editorials. But the United States were. Though a stickler on such things, Kilpatrick was not a prude about editorial humor.”

— The Race Beat by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff

Obviously meta, but the writers don’t dwell on how clever it is, just get back to the narrative, and I think that’s so slick.

The Stories I Made Time For

“Double Jeopardy” by Paige Williams, The New Yorker

On judicial override in Alabama. I have a soft spot in my heart for that state because I have family there, but you can’t defend most of the shit that happens in there. A cool note: The “nut graf” comes about halfway through it.

— h/t about every long-form or “best links” thing I follow or subscribe to

“The Long Way Home” by Eli Saslow, ESPN The Magazine

Saslow is my favorite writer, and this story only makes me love his writing more (even though it’s about a Denver Bronco, and I still can’t forgive that team for beating my Packers in the 1997 Super Bowl; I know I was 6, but still).

The Older Story I Made Time For

“Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream” by Joan Didion

C’mon, it’s Joan Didion.

The Article That Got Me Thinking

“‘Serial’ and White Reporter Privilege” by Jay Caspian Kang, The Awl

Like many people, I love “Serial” (more for how it details great reporting, and what I can learn from it, more than for its storytelling). Unlike many people, I don’t like Kang’s writing, but he is an incredibly smart dude and he makes a great point here. I’m a white male, so I have a lot of built-in privilege already, so this article is about me.

When reporting on police shootings in Dallas, I think about the dynamic between white and minority communities a lot because I’m covering a community that’s essentially foreign to me. The balance of power seems so skewed in my favor; I’m surprised people talk to me. Good to be aware of that dynamic, but I haven’t found a way around it yet: Usually I just acknowledge that I know I’m white and can’t ever understand what you’re going through, but I’ll listen carefully as you describe it. (This topic deserves way more words than I’ve written here.)

What’s Burning a Hole in my Pocket App

Sometimes I scroll through my Pocket app like it’s a Netflix queue: What do I want to entertain me right now? I’ll pass a title and think, that would be a good film to watch, but I just don’t have the mental stamina to engage with something of substance right now. Same with some articles in that app: I know, at some point, I’ll want to read them, but I want to savor the moment. Needless to say, some stories get stuck in there a while.

This week: “The Ripples From Little Lake Nellie” by Gary Smith, Sports Illustrated

The Book I’m Engrossed In Right Now

The Powers That Be by David Halberstam

He has this tendency to start a paragraph with only a name, then a short or incomplete sentence to describe its owner. It’s pretty awesome, even though sometimes I feel he overuses it.

Examples:

• “Henry Robinson Luce. Harry. Everyone called him Harry, it was a sign of terrible ignorance to call him Henry, though he was not a good old boy, he was not easily approachable, and he did not grant intimacy easily.” Then, later in the book, Halberstam starts another graf about Luce like this: “A curious blend of a man. Part sophisticate and part hick. At once shy and incredibly arrogant.”
• “Chambers. His name is stamped indelibly on that era.”
• “It had started with Harrison Gray Otis. General Otis. General in title, but even more in spirit. A fierce man.”

Plus, the book is about journalism, and who doesn’t love talking ad nauseam about that? It’s really long; it might be here a while…maybe this wasn’t the best idea for a section.

Thanks for reading!

Writing Weight Room

I know it’s kind of corny, but I’m a fan of inspirational phrases. No, not Joel Osteen-like or The Secret-type inspirational phrases, but blue-collar ones that remind me of my high school’s weight room. Please, bear with me here.

During the summer, before the football season started, I spent several hours a week pushing weights with my hamstrings, quads, chest, biceps, triceps and stomach. (I also dragged monster truck tires 30 yards, but who’s keeping track?)

I must say, I got pretty good at lifting — second highest bench max on the team senior year [looks at nails]. I left so much sweat in that room. But there were days when the grind got to me. A third set? Are you kidding me? (Because it was high school and I hung out with football players, I may have added the gerundive form of a certain four-letter word to that phrase, between the “you” and the “kidding.”)

On days like that, I’d look to the south wall. A mirror the length of the wall and maybe 10 feet high adorned that wall. (OK, I admit it: I checked myself out a few … dozen times during each workout — I was in high school!) Above the mirror was a white, rectangular sign with blue lettering. It read, and I’ll never forget this, “The more you sweat in times of peace, the less you bleed in times of war.”

(If you search the Internet, variations of this saying abound. It’s credited to Gen. George S. Patton and Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, among others. My football coach always said Geronimo uttered it. Anyway.)

Obviously, war was a game or a season; peace was those summer workouts. I still think back to it in my everyday life, though. Instead of lifting weights for football games, I prep for interviews by researching as much as I can, writing down questions and practicing saying them, and sometimes playing out scenarios for certain questions in my head.

The saying holds true. I was reminded of this today, actually. A source called me back when I wasn’t prepared for the phone call. The stick of lead in my mechanical pencil had been whittled down so much that, near the end of the interview, I had to write with the pencil perpendicular to my notepad. I had to cut the interview short because I couldn’t write anymore.

I was bleeding, bad. When I hung up, I wondered why my workout clothes still smelled good.

Another favorite phrase of mine came, not from football, but from my J2100 teacher, Judd Slivka. In one of the third-floor computer labs in the Neff Annex, on either the first or second day of class, he told us to “embrace the suck.” (I’m sure I giggled because, as a sophomore, sophomoric humor, intentional or not, was a favorite past time.)

He said it after a rather lengthy preamble about dealing with the stress, or the sucky-ness, of the class. If journalism is what you want to do, I remember him saying, embrace the suck. The class did suck, in a good way. I learned a ton.

That phrase is now on my wall, on a sheet of paper, written in sharpie. Next to it, in the same format, is a phrase my editor, Liz, emailed me in the last few weeks of my Missourian reporting semester. “Keep going.” I take that as “don’t quit working hard to accomplish your goals,” only in a more positive way because it doesn’t have the word “quit” in it.

A new favorite inspirational phrase, though, came from an unlikely source.

Chris Jones, the Esquire and ESPN the Magazine writer, tweeted a link the other day to some dude’s blog, saying it was rules for freelance writers. So I clicked, you know, just in case I’m ever in that position. I read through them, then read through them again. And once more.

The dude (he actually seems pretty successful, based on the list of books on his blog) has 15 ways to survive as a freelancer. All of them are worth looking at, but the one that stuck with me the most was number three.

“Ass in chair.”

Yep, get your ass in a chair and write. Just do it. Don’t make excuses. Ass in chair. That’s just so gerundive brilliant.

I’ve already went back to this phrase this week. I had some writer’s block, and I just pushed through it because I sat in a chair and just wrote something. It’s not great, but now I have something to work off of. (Liz would call it a sh*tty first draft.)

The list, as you might have guessed, is on my wall, next to the other two. I printed it out though.

Embrace The Suck. Keep Going. Ass In Chair.

The phrases make my bedroom (or any room, I guess) my weight room.

Of Donkeys and Men

I rolled up to the yellow-brick house. I kept going over the questions I’d written down at my apartment but didn’t bring because, I’d decided, that would have been weird. I did, however, bring a notebook and pen so that, upon leaving, I could hurriedly scribble down everything I could remember. I also hoped I had read enough of his stories in the past 48 hours to not sound like an idiot.

I walked up the concrete path and knocked on the ornately-carved wooden door, and Lawrence Wright opened the door. The New Yorker staff writer, the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Looming Tower” and the pain in the side of Scientologists everywhere opened the door and welcomed me inside.

I was interning in Austin this past summer and, after learning he lived in town, emailed him wondering if he had time to meet with an aspiring reporter. Graciously, he agreed to meet on a Sunday.

We went upstairs to his office, which a colleague once called “Writer Porn,” a statement with which I’d have to agree after seeing it. I fumbled through some small talk before finally getting to what I was there for: to talk some shop.

We talked, really, about some pretty nerdy writing stuff, with him providing examples from some of his work. But the thing that stuck with me the most was our discussion of donkeys.

(When I say “discussion,” I mean he preached from the mountaintop and I sat with eyes wide and mouth open, trying to absorb every word he said.)

Wright calls his central characters donkeys, because they carry a lot of weight. (Clever.) He’s said this many times in interviews about his writing, including the one I link to above. But it’s one thing to read it on The Daily Beast and quite another to hear it from the horse’s mouth.

Anyway, for Wright, in order for people to care about a story, there needs to be a figure they empathize with. This character is also the guide for the reader. If it’s a story a lot of readers aren’t familiar with, that character is the beast of burden that carries them down the path.

I’ve been mulling this part of our conversation for a while now, and I’m trying to apply it to an article I’m working on now. In my opinion, readers will care more about an issue if it has a face.

And, yes, as soon as I got back to my car, I jotted everything down I could remember.

Mr. Hiaasen’s Postcard

I have a bit of a problem.

And the only two possible solutions for this problem, in my opinion, involve time. Either there needs to be more hours in the day, or I need some time-stopping device like in that movie Clockstoppers¹.

The problem, of course (and this is when you accuse me of being an elitist a-hole), is not having enough time in the day to read all I want to read. There are magazines to read and lengthy online features² to read, and that doesn’t even count the actual news I try to stay on top of.

Right now, I have print subscriptions to Rolling Stone, Sports Illustrated, Harper’s and, recently, The Oxford American. I’m usually reading the last issue of Rolling Stone when the new one arrives, usually just about finishing one edition of Harper’s when the next comes in the mail, and failed to finish the first edition of The Oxford American I received before the next one came today — and that magazine comes quarterly!

That’s just the print stuff. I subscribe to The Best of Journalism, a service that sends the six best pieces of journalism on the Internet to my inbox every week, which is curated by an editor at The Atlantic. Another best-of email I get is from Longreads every Friday. I have the website Longform in my RSS app. There’s a lot of good stuff out there.

Obviously, these are supposed to augment the sites I visit regularly, plus articles or stories I find on Facebook or Twitter. So far, I haven’t found a good system to read everything with the time I have. Does such a system even exist? I haven’t found one yet in all my years of reading.

Since I was a kid, I loved to read. And since I was a kid, I loved to write. Sometimes, when I rummage through old stuff at my parents’ house, I find folders of my writing from when I was 6, 9, 13. It was during one of these campaigns this past summer that I found one of my most prized possessions: a postcard from Carl Hiaasen.

Hiaasen, if you don’t know, started out as a reporter for The Miami Herald and eventually started writing a weekly column for the paper. He also writes novels and is best known for being a very adept satirist. My dad is a big fan of his novels.

In the fall of 2004, when I was in 6th grade in Boulder City, Nev., my English teacher gave us a very cool assignment. We had to write a letter to a favorite celebrity. I wanted to write mine to a writer (obviously), and, because I had just finished Hiaasen’s YA novel Hoot, I chose him.

I don’t remember specifically what I wrote to him, but, based on his answer, I must have asked for advice. Most likely on how to be a better writer.

In his cursive scrawl, he wrote the following in black ink on the back of a postcard:

Dear Sky —

I’m so glad you enjoyed Hoot.³ I started writing when I was very young, and I haven’t stopped. The best way to learn about language usage is to read, read and read some more! Good luck with your writing!

Carl Hiaasen

I took his advice to heart, and that’s why I’m in this wonderful predicament I’m in now, having so many great things to read and not enough time. Thank you, Mr. Hiaasen, I won’t forget it.

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1. Isn’t that movie awesome? …I mean, like, wasn’t it awesome when we were twelve?

2. You know I like long form journalism, right?

3. Hoot was actually underlined.

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Grammar Proper

I recently came across this article on the Smithsonian’s website: Most of What You Think You Know About Grammar is Wrong: And ending sentences with a preposition is nothing worth worrying about.

The article claims, yes, that ending sentences with prepositions is A-OK, starting sentences with conjunctions is NOT a mortal sin, and splitting infinitives (i.e., “to run”) with an adverb (i.e., “badly”) is perfectly acceptable.

…WHAT?! YOU MEAN ALL THESE RULES I’VE BEEN LEARNING MY WHOLE LIFE ARE FALSE! WHAT?!

OK, now that that‘s out of my system, I can break this down a little better. The article’s authors, Patricia T. O’Conner and Stewart Kellarman, the curators of Grammarphobia.com, state:

[W]e can blame misguided Latinists who tried to impose the rules of their favorite language on English. Anglican bishop Robert Lowth popularized the prohibition against ending a sentence with a preposition in his 1762 book, A Short Introduction to English Grammar; while Henry Alford, a dean of Canterbury Cathedral, was principally responsible for the infinitive taboo, with his publication of A Plea for the Queen’s English in 1864.

Confusion over which way is right and which way is wrong may have developed because Latin-based and Germanic-based languages are so different. Trying to apply Latin rules to Germanic structure just doesn’t make sense.

Because I took three semesters of Latin in college¹ (no joke), I am now ordaining myself the best person to provide an explanation of why that’s so.

The best example, I think, is that Latin nouns have cases for their different functions in a sentence. For example, there’s a case for direct objects and a case for indirect objects.

In English, when we want to use a direct object in a sentence, we don’t change the spelling of the noun. “I hit the ball.” The “ball,” the direct object, would be spelled the same if it was used as the subject.

In Latin, forget that. There’s a case for subjects and a different case for direct objects. And the words would have the same root but with different additions, causing different spellings.

Having cases determine a word’s function instead of its place in a sentence is actually pretty cool because, if you want to show a connection between two nouns, you can have them next to each other in the sentence without affecting the meaning of that sentence.

So, if you want to show a close bond between a brother and a sister, in Latin you would write, “Frater sororem eius amat.”

In English, that translates to “The brother loves his sister.” “Amat” is the verb “loves.” “Sister” is a direct object; in English, the word goes after the verb, but in Latin the case of “sister” identifies it as the object receiving the action.

Written directly into English, that Latin sentence would look like this: “The brother his sister loves.” See? You can show that close connection (in an almost meta way) with the actual, physical² words. Isn’t that cool? Yes, yes it is.

Jesus, how did I get so far off base? Anyway, about the article and its claims: the authors state one linguist thinks the conjunction rule began because English teachers didn’t want students starting every sentence with “and.” And, really, why would you want to? That’s boring.

Sometimes ending sentences with prepositions is unavoidable (“Who were you with?” — as opposed to the snobbish “With whom were you?”), and sometimes it’s just annoying (“Where you at?” — where the hell is the verb?) Splitting infinitives is common, and I didn’t even know that was a supposed rule until senior year of high school.

I don’t think these “rules” really bother people. Many people still start a sentence here and there with conjunctions, end them with prepositions when they don’t want to sound stuck-up, split infinitives without a second thought.

The lesson here? People like to break rules, even if those rules, I guess, technically, don’t exist.

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1. I can’t believe how pretentious that sounds.

2. Well, not really physical, but you get the point.

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A Journalist’s “Brand”

Journalism is about telling people’s stories, but most times I remember the journalist more than I do the stories.

The famous journalists, (I guess I’ll name my favorites) such as Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion and Charles Bowden (you can throw John Jeremiah Sullivan, Mac McClelland and Susan Orlean in there), get to have their names remembered. For their reporting, for their writing, for their enterprising nature. But, as an example, Wolfe has become bigger than his story about acid-trippers (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test) and his tome about the space race (The Right Stuff) is really just another notch on his belt.

And that is why I have a bit of a problem with this article on Gawker that puts, oh so eloquently, that journalism is not about the journalist (me). It is about the people we cover:

The good news, young writers, is that your life does not have to be extraordinarily interesting, because there are billions of people in the world who do have interesting lives, and you have the privilege of telling their stories.

Telling those stories is a privilege, and the stories we write about the people we cover really are about them and not us. But I do think having a particular writer’s name at the top of a story can’t hurt, and will most likely help, like, a lot when it comes to getting eyeballs to a page.

Stories have a particular bent based on who writes them (Duh! I know, but stick with me). Say Tom Wolfe and I¹ are sent out to cover the same story, say a school board meeting. We’ll hand in different stories just because we’re different people and different writers.

But people would remember Wolfe’s story because of all the playful punctuation, masterful visual imagery and the way he captured what the people in attendance thought of the prattling of the board members. People would remember mine (for about a day or so, maybe) because the Blah-Blah School Board approved blah-blah by a vote of X to Y.

And that’s the point: people who have no interest in the dealings of the school board in Blah-Blah would read it because they love Wolfe’s style. They would read mine (or some other faceless reporter with no writerly flair) because they wanted to know what went down during that meeting.

This is where the “personal brand” thing comes in. Recently, Andrew Sullivan of the Daily Dish announced he was starting his own website and will charge 20 bucks a year for people to read his stuff. And (some) people will probably pay if they like the guy. In a blog post, Ann Friedman, a columnist for NYmag.com, had this to say about him:

The really modern thing about Sullivan is that he is a brand unto himself, a journalist who transcends the outlets that have employed him. There is a particular Andrew Sullivan tone, a particular Andrew Sullivan perspective on the world.

She’s arguing people will cough up the money to get his perspective, how his personal experiences shaped that perspective. A writer’s perspective does play a factor into whether I like him or her or not. But, more importantly, for me anyways, is this “tone” of which Friedman speaks. I keep coming back to certain writers because of the way, yes, they write.

Some writers are instantly recognizable (and enjoyable) because of the way they write. Tom Wolfe is instantly recognizable, so is Andrew Ben Cramer, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Charles Bowden. I follow these writers because of their own, distinct “tone” — it doesn’t matter where they are published.

On the flip side, I don’t know any writers at The New Yorker. I read it because it’s The New Yorker, not because of the writers it employs (even though those writers are very good). I’ve heard it has a house style, and that’s fine and great, but a single writer’s voice doesn’t keep me from coming back.

I think it’s cool though when I become invested in a writer. I keep coming back to him or her. For me nowadays, that writer is Tom Bissell. More than once I’ve scoured the Internet (from The Virginia Quarterly Review to Grantland to The Believer) for everything he’s written, voraciously trying to find his words until relenting and finally buying Magic Hours, a collection of his essays. I’m committed to him, and many other fans of many other writers have the same feeling.

So I read the stories about other people because of the writers, but I’m glad I do — sometimes those stories are, if not memorable, incredible.

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1. OMG! Wolfe and me mentioned in the same sentence!

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J4450: My Dream Job

I hope my professors don’t see this post.

I’ve had somewhat of a personality crisis the last several weeks. I’ve always been the kid who liked school. Since an early age, I committed myself to caring about homework. And, even though high school popularity depended on the indifference, or perceived indifference, of school work, I continued to care about it. For better or worse, I tended to define myself by this fact.

However, I don’t really look forward to sitting in lecture halls anymore. I don’t really look forward to reading academic papers anymore. And I don’t look forward to writing essays anymore.

I just want to read and write news.

Really! I’m kind of fed up with school work at this point. I don’t want to do it anymore — OK, I’m going to backtrack a bit: I still am going to sit in lecture halls, read academic papers and write essays. I’m just really only looking forward to being in the Missourian newsroom, interviewing people and writing stories.

This weekend, I signed up for a newsletter from Conor Friedersdorf, a staff writer at The Atlantic, called The Best of Journalism. Superlatives aside, it’s pretty cool. Friedersdorf sends you six stories a week that he thinks are some of the best examples of journalism on the web.

Maybe you’re thinking, “Why can’t you find those on your own?” Well, he’s already found me two pieces I loved that I wouldn’t have found otherwise:

• Graeme Wood’s “Outrageous Freedom” at aeonmagazine.com, and
• Vanessa Veselka’s “The Truck Stop Killer” at gq.com.

I think that would be an awesome job: writing for one media outlet and reading the content of others.

J4450: Rebuttal?

Scott Thurman, a documentary film-maker, stopped by our lecture today to discuss his film, “The Revisionaries,” a look into some far-right members of the Texas Board of Education. (It’s a really interesting film – you should check it out.)

Anyway, I don’t really want to get into issues raised in the film. I want to discuss an interesting point Thurman made in his presentation to us about finding truth in nonfiction media.

(I’ve been on this “Truth” rag ever since I read that James Pogue piece I linked to on Monday; Pogue called what Thurman was talking about “big-T-truths.”)

He said that a lie could potentially get at the “Truth.”

The director gave an example of someone being terrified of jumping off a high dive. He said through documentary filming you could show a 30-step climb to look like a a 50-step ordeal because that’s how the scared diver feels going up. It’s a lie, but it gets at the “Truth” of the situation because the diver is feeling terrified at the prospect of diving.

He said this quote-end-quote lie can be a good, creative way to get at the “Truth” in documentary film-making. That got me to thinking about how you could do that with writing…and then I remembered my post yesterday about smudging facts to get at the big-T-truths.

I don’t want to be a hypocrite, so I’m going to stick with my position I had then. For the type of writing I’m interested in, I guess I don’t need to smudge facts in order to get at some artistic “Truth.”

The facts will create the story and context will provide the truth.