Media as Social Force
The first myth is that the media do not
matter that much—that they merely reflect reality,
rather than shape it,” writes media expert Robert
W. McChesney in The Problem of the Media: U.S. Communication
Politics in the 21st Century. “In fact,” he
says, “media are a social force in their own right,
and not just a reflection of other forces.”
Milton graduates active in the world of national print media
use the force of their inquiry, writing and editing to shape
ideas. They work to influence how we think about government,
why we pay to see a movie, what we read, or who should become
a hero.
J. Peter Scoblic ’92,
Acting Editor
The New Republic
At
Brown University in the mid-’90s, Peter Scoblic helped
found the Brown Journal of World Affairs. Establishing a
student publication is not typically adequate training for
leading one of America’s most thoughtful weekly magazines,
except that the Brown Journal included contributors such
as Madeleine Albright, John Shalikashvili, Lawrence Eagleburger,
Al Haig and John Kerry—and it drew a national audience.
As acting editor of The New Republic (TNR) and former editor
of Arms Control Today, a magazine covering efforts to prevent
the spread of weapons of mass destruction, Peter speaks
about nuclear proliferation in Asia, international treaties,
and the danger of espionage among friendly nations with
the understated assurance that comes from deep competence.
Add to that an uncommon adherence to the truth—even
when it is awkward—and Peter’s mission and style
begin to emerge: “I’m not sure it’s my
‘best’ moment exactly, but I’m proud of
how I handled an embarrassing mistake I made in an interview
with John Bolton [former State Department under secretary
and President Bush’s appointee as U.S. Ambassador
to the United Nations] that I published in Arms Control
Today.
“We ran a direct transcript of the interview, warts
and all, and I had to write an editor’s note explaining
that I had gotten a fact wrong in a question. I still cringe
a little when I think about what readers may have thought,”
Peter says. “The good news is that the thrust of my
question was right, and Bolton’s answer revealed his
desire to change U.S. policy on whether we’d ever
nuke a non-nuclear country. The State Department was none
too happy about that, but it provided a useful window into
Bolton’s thinking.
“My priority is to put out the most intellectually
provocative, intellectually honest magazine possible,”
Peter says of his Washington, D.C.–based periodical,
The New Republic. “We look to provide smart arguments,
backed up by original reporting.”
This summer, Peter was in the midst of a nine-month stint
as acting editor of TNR—he’s usually the magazine’s
executive editor—when we talked with him: President
Bush announced the nomination of Judge John Roberts to the
Supreme Court on a Tuesday night, and TNR went to press
on Wednesday night—with a package of four stories
and an August 1 cover story dubbing Roberts, “The
Chosen One.”
Just as Roberts, the man that Sandra Day O’Connor
calls “perfect in every way, except that he’s
not a woman,” is hard to label confidently, so TNR
is a tough publication to categorize ideologically. “New
Republic readers are an interesting lot,” Peter says.
“Unlike many ‘media consumers,’ they either
defy easy political categorization or they enjoy having
their views challenged. They’re looking for a deeper
level of analysis than what they’ll get on the op-ed
pages or CNN or the blogs. We serve them by providing smart,
well-written, tightly argued articles that inform, surprise
and sometimes shock.”
For example, Peter wrote the August 8 cover story on the
relationship between conservatism and nuclear terrorism:
“The war on terrorism is, at some level, a war of
ideas: To the extent that we can substitute democracy and
liberal values for autocracy and Islamic fundamentalism,
we will probably improve our security—and we should
therefore try to do so. But freedom—as Richard Haass,
Bush’s former director of policy planning at the State
Department, has written—is not a doctrine.
“That is, the spread of freedom cannot be our guiding
principle [as President Bush has suggested] in the war on
terrorism, because the spread of freedom cannot protect
us from all terrorist threats, particularly the immediate
ones. In fact, in the short term, democratization appears
to exacerbate, rather than ameliorate, terrorism.”
Peter explains further that experts believe that the likelihood
of a successful nuclear terrorist attack on U.S. soil in
the next five to 10 years is between 30 and 50 percent or
higher. This kind of attack could truly “change everything,”
Peter writes, altering the economic and political landscape
of our country.
“The Weekly Standard and National Review have a clearly
conservative readership, The Nation a very liberal one.
TNR is different in this regard—we’re generally
considered left of center, but the magazine’s hawkish
foreign policy stands have alienated a lot of liberals.
We also publish a range of views. You might think this would
make us appealing to a broader range of folks, but it actually
makes us even more niche because the country’s political
polarization has left relatively few people who take seriously
opinions that dissent from their own.”
If Peter could change something about his readership, he
might add to its ranks. Many publications don’t reach
their potential level of public discourse because only “the
choir” read them. “[Don’t] confine your
reading habits to publications that reflect your ideology—branch
out,” Peter suggests.
The value in reading (or watching or listening) beyond your
comfort zone is learning something new, or deepening your
understanding. “The fact that, as of summer 2004,
more than half of Americans still thought Iraq had weapons
of mass destruction is indicative [of a knowledge deficit],”
Peter says. “And of course the further you get from
the events, countries, and phenomena that directly impact
Americans, the worse their understanding of those things
gets.
“Major changes have been less in what we consider
news than in how we consider it and how it’s delivered
to us. Obviously, there’s been an enormous acceleration
in coverage—first with the 24-hour news channels,
then with the Internet, and now, more specifically, with
blogs,” Peter says. “This means that the narrative
surrounding events develops very rapidly, as well as the
arguments that various political interests make about the
significance of those events. There are positive aspects
to this, but really thoughtful analysis and opinion has
definitely suffered for it. There’s less of what you
might call long-form thinking—and its relative influence
on the political discourse has declined.”
To get at what readers might want to know, TNR’s writers
and editors gather at editorial meetings to deliberate the
week’s news, Peter explains, and what the magazine
ought to say about it. “I tend to find arguments about
the magazine’s editorial position the most fun: we
had a very animated series of discussions last year about
whether the magazine had been wrong to support the Iraq
war.
“We’re not audience-driven at all, in the sense
that most magazines would use that term. We look for story
ideas that interest us, that have a fresh and clever take.
And, if they interest us, we think they’ll interest
our readers.”
The simplicity of that editorial mission plays out in the
magazine’s editorial rhetoric —naming what has
happened, regardless of party politics, as when Peter railed
against Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld: “Faced
with soldiers asking for the bare minimum from their leadership—the
tools with which to do their jobs [properly armored vehicles]—Rumsfeld
managed to be at once callous, self- deluding, and dishonest,”
Peter wrote in “Incorrect Answer,” a December
2004 TNR piece.
Peter’s work has appeared in the New York Times, the
Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Christian Science
Monitor and other publications. He says that Jim Connolly
(English department) “is one of very few teachers
he’s known who could teach writing, while J. C. Smith
cultivates the kind of smart analysis that TNR loves.”
Jeanne McCulloch ’75
Former Paris Review Managing Editor; Editorial Director
of Tin House Books; and Novelist
Cocktails with the Grateful Dead in George Plimpton’s
apartment sounds like the stuff of postmodern fantasy. For
native New Yorker and writer-editor Jeanne McCulloch, such
moments were familiar.
While at the Paris Review, Jeanne published the early stories
of many young writers of her generation, including Jeffrey
Eugenides, Susan Minot, Nancy Lemann, and Jay McInerny,
while enjoying the salon of George Plimpton at his height
of cultural importance.
Her path to the Paris Review and beyond is one that most
aspirant writers only dream of: honors at Brown University,
followed by an interview with former Vogue features editor
Leo Lerman (known for always wearing purple). “Leo
said to me, ‘I have a feeling about you,’”
Jeanne recalls and he handed her a job as a Condé
Nast rover—meaning that she helped out at whatever
publication needed it at the moment—organizing shoes
for a photo shoot at Self, for instance. Shortly after,
Lerman moved Jeanne to features assistant, which allowed
her to write short pieces as well as edit. Throughout her
career, she’s enjoyed the good fortune of great mentors,
she says.
Lerman also sent Jeanne to film screenings, to try out new
restaurants and to literary events, opening wide New York’s
cultural and social world to a 23-year-old young woman.
At 24, Jeanne’s next break came when Vogue editor
Amy Gross, now editor of O, The Oprah Winfrey Magazine,
asked her to write one in a series of women’s essays.
“I was 24, and suddenly I had clips,” Jeanne
says. After graduate school in English literature at Columbia,
Jeanne, who had long been interested in the more literary
side of publishing, interviewed with the late George Plimpton,
actor-writer, and editor and cofounder of the Paris Review,
which he devoted to finding unknown authors and running
interviews with authors such as Ernest Hemingway.
“During my interview, I told George that to me this
job would feel like being in a sandbox with all the best
toys.” Plimpton, noted for his sense of childlike
adventurousness, appreciated the sentiment, and Jeanne moved
from the world of glossy magazines to a new workspace: Plimpton’s
basement.
As managing editor at Paris Review for five years and editor
at large for another five, Jeanne calls those days working
at “a special place at a special time.” She
interviewed playwright Sam Shepard and became great friends
with novelist Mona Simpson. And Plimpton was always near,
helping the Paris Review staffers—and the world—look
at the world upside down and sideways.
“Crazy extracurricular events kept happening there.
When George was writing his novel on Sidd Finch, the fictional
baseball player, the plot called for someone to drop a ball
from a blimp to the ground to clock how fast Finch could
throw. George wanted to go up in a blimp and describe what
it felt like, what the dashboard looked like, how it landed,
et cetera. He invited us along,” Jeanne says. And
then there were the drinks with the Dead: “George
came in one day and said, ‘I met the Grateful Dead
backstage after their concert last night, and they are all
coming over for a drink.’” When Plimpton wanted
pieces from the “Writers at Work” series to
be online free of charge, he spoke of “the guy in
Bangladesh” who might want to read them. He asked
his editors to appreciate good writing even if it wasn’t
in their own style or voice.
Jeanne left the Paris Review to focus on writing rather
than intense editing work. She then began teaching fiction-writing
at the New School in New York. In 1998, publisher Win McCormack
called Jeanne from Portland, Oregon, wanting her advice
in how to start a literary magazine, Tin House. “I
wasn’t interested at that time in doing another lit
magazine; instead, Win hired one of my colleagues, Elissa
Schappell, and her husband, Rob Spillman, to do the job.
I went on as contributing editor to Tin House.”
A few years later, when Jeanne was on bed rest while pregnant
with her second child, she got a call from Tin House to
edit an especially tough 80-page interview with Edward Said,
after which she joined the staff more formally as a senior
editor.
Karen Rinaldi, editorial director of Bloomsbury Publishing
and a longtime friend, helped Jeanne establish a Tin House
book imprint at Bloomsbury. Under that imprint, Jeanne first
edited a full-length memoir by AJ Albany, daughter of Joe
Albany, jazz musician, a father of bebop and a drug addict.
Now, Jeanne has just finished a book of her own—a
novel—and she’s at work on an oral biography
of George Plimpton, whom she credits with teaching her to
edit an interview. He also taught her, she says, to be a
good listener and to get writers and others to talk about
their craft. “Fiction writers work in mysterious ways,”
she says, recalling that E.L. Doctorow conceived of Ragtime
as he stared intensely at the wall of a house, considering
the era when it had been built. On the opposite side of
the desk, Jeanne talks of editing as developing the ability
to see the sculpture within the big, rough block.
Jeanne’s favorite magazines are The New Yorker, Granta,
Tin House, Harper’s and the Paris Review. She thinks
that the big problem for small circulations, even though
the readership is generally committed, is that their publication
is often reliant on grants or university funding. “I
would call [literary magazines] a triumph of idealism over
commerce,” she says.
When Jeanne wrote the piece on success for Vogue shortly
after graduating from Brown, she contrasted her 24-year-old
self—toting manuscripts in her bag—with the
Jeanne of two years before, toting school books. She talked
about success as measured by enlightened women of the ‘80s:
friends, career and motherhood way down the road.
“I guess it was about how one little word could have
so much meaning, so many different meanings. What it really
means is that you’re fulfilling your dreams.”
That idea of success has shifted throughout Jeanne’s
career; her next possible moment of success will be hearing
what publishers might be interested in her just-completed
novel: “It’s about becoming an adult, about
reestablishing ‘home’ when you can’t go
home again, or, to paraphrase Elvis Costello, when home
isn’t where it used to be,” Jeanne says.
Ty Burr ’76
Film Critic
Boston Globe
Boston Globe film critic Ty Burr calls the late 1960s and
the 1970s the golden age of film. Directors took chances
and artistic vision was, of necessity, valued above special
effects. Remember that John Schlesinger’s Midnight
Cowboy won an Oscar for best picture, he says. Then along
came Jaws and Star Wars, and the blockbuster was born.
“On one level what I do is a service job,” Ty
says. “People want the market report. ‘Should
I spend my nine dollars to see this movie?’”
In July 2005 alone, Ty delivered more than 20 such “consumer
reports.” But thanks to former New Yorker film critic
Pauline Kael, who revolutionized the art, film criticism
now rivals literary criticism in its sophistication and
cultural significance.
“Movies don’t take place in a vacuum,”
Ty explains. “They’re informed by all sorts
of cultural assumptions, whether they’re brain-dead
Hollywood product or intellectual art house fare. In fact,
I’d argue that mainstream studio movies say more about
how our society views itself—socially, politically,
sexually—than independent movies do, if only because
studio films take such assumptions for granted and aren’t
aware of them. But I am: It’s my job, among others,
to pick apart the strands of movies and examine what they
say about the people who made them, about the audiences
that watch them. This is especially important given how
successful American movies are around the world.
“I think this country’s most effective import,
for better and for worse, is its popular culture. But what
does it say about us? That’s both fun and necessary
to figure out on a movie-by-movie basis,” Ty says.
Ty says that he learned to write and analyze at Milton—think
Kay Herzog, A. O. Smith and Paul Monette and, later, at
Dartmouth and New York University’s film school, he
continued his preparation for his role as cultural critic.
“It’s silly to compare a movie like Sideways
or Vera Drake to a big-budget entertainment like Wedding
Crashers or Batman Begins. I try to judge any movie against
the movie that it wants to be. This seems only fair: Is
Wedding Crashers as good a no-brainer fratboy farce as it
aspires to? (No, but mighty close.) Is Vera Drake effective
both as drama and pro-choice provocation? (Yes.) At the
same time, you have to indicate to the reader that while
honest entertainment tastes better, artistic and/or narrative
ambition is more filling.”
In a December 2004 column, Ty points to an interesting cultural
phenomenon: political polarization in choosing films. A
microcosm of the now well-noted polarization of the country
appears in audiences of Hollywood: He notes how anyone who
didn’t swallow The Passion of Christ was deemed godless,
while anyone who didn’t buy all of Fahrenheit 9/11
was considered hopelessly conservative. He argues that we’re
missing out by choosing sides.
“Not only did it become possible in 2004, even acceptable,
to avoid completely points of view other than your own,
the rise of partisan forms of media made it simpler to do
so. Real liberals don’t listen to talk radio; true
conservatives don’t go to the Coolidge [arts cinema
in Brookline, Massachusetts]. Religion, politics, what about
the eternal verities of the heart? Could we at least believe
in love?” That, too, is hard in movieland, but Ty
gives examples such as Million Dollar Baby as remarkable
attempts.
In a July 15, 2005, column, Ty goes well beyond his customary
700 or so words to praise Tim Burton’s Charlie and
the Chocolate Factory. His praise for films is far from
universal, however. He bashed 2003’s The Cat in the
Hat, lamenting that bad reviews don’t always kill
bad movies: The Cat in the Hat grossed over $100 million,
even after Ty deconstructed it: “At one point in The
Cat in the Hat, the Cat, played by Mike Myers, is mistaken
for a piñata by a group of children at a birthday
party. One by one, they line up to smack him, and the scene
culminates with a husky lad swinging a baseball bat directly
into the unfortunate feline’s cojónes.
“That’s a remarkably precise metaphor for what
this movie does to the memory of Dr. Seuss. If the producers
had dug up Ted Geisel’s body and hung it from a tree,
they couldn’t have desecrated the man more,”
Ty wrote.
“I can’t say that I have a favorite review—the
job is mostly a case of 20-20 hindsight. I’m extremely
glad when I’m able to get people to a movie they might
not otherwise see and that might challenge their ideas of
what movies and life are for, Broken Flowers, Before Sunset,
movies like that.
“I’m glad when I touch a nerve and get readers
to think twice about something—
I called out the recent Stealth for what I perceived as
an extremely callow portrayal of war during a time of war,
and got a pile of email in response. Half was positive,
half was negative, and the one that meant the most was from
an army intelligence officer saying I’d nailed it.
“In a sense, I’m most proud of an interview
I did for the New York Times with director Godfrey Reggio
about how much trouble he was having getting his final film
in his Koyaanisqatsi trilogy made. The article was read
by director Steven Soderbergh (sex, lies, and videotape,
Ocean’s 11), who immediately picked up the phone and
offered Reggio 100 percent funding. Having been the link
that got a film made is arguably more satisfying than writing
any review.”
The prominence and professionalism of criticism has risen
but, Ty wrote in a July 2005 column, the number of bodies
in seats at the cinema has dwindled. When considering why
Americans shun cinemas, Ty wonders what could replace the
experience: “How would movies make that necessary
mass-market splash before fragmenting onto DVD, cable, and
on-demand? More critically, what would we do as a society
without the shared narrative experience? Since before we
started taking notes and calling it history, human beings
have felt a yearning to sit in a crowd of ecstatic strangers
and be awed by the bigness of stories. DVDs and a $4 bag
of M&Ms aren’t going to make that need disappear.”
Before writing for the Globe, Ty wrote for HBO and Entertainment
Weekly. He began writing about the movies when he began
watching them: While at Milton, he filled his journal with
essays about his experience as a movie-watcher. Despite
his adoption of a critical language and his academic study
of Hollywood, Ty says, “I have to watch a movie the
way most people do. I can’t overthink it.”
Vick Boughton ’73
Senior Editor
People Magazine
In a trivia game, before becoming a senior editor at People
magazine, Vick Boughton was the only player to know that
Mia Farrow, as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Daisy Buchanan,
was on the inaugural 1974 cover of People. Vick’s
affinity for celebrity news, she says, began as a student
at Wellesley and continued at Oxford University, where she
scoured England for her favorite magazine and remembers
being “crushed” when People was no longer imported.
As a leader of the magazine’s “specials”
sections—she helps manage a staff of 25—Vick
is happily immersed in celebrity and America’s fascination
with it. Vick’s graduate work at Oxford was in ethnology,
and she says that that background has some bearing on her
current work.
“My sense is that readers think of the magazine’s
coverage of celebrity-studded events, fashion and even beauty
as entertainment. I hope so—it is entertaining. But,
of course, one hallmark of People is that along with the
glossy fun stuff, there are stories about real people going
through difficult or interesting or joyous times. Some aren’t
household names, but their stories resonate with us. They
educate us, infuriate us, inspire us. Who doesn’t
want to be involved with or feel a connection to the subject
they’re reading about? Other-wise, why bother?”
Life inside People is also engaging. Vick points to Oscar
night—during which staffers watch the broadcast and
work for at least 18 straight hours—as a highlight.
“You haven’t lived until you’ve experienced
Oscar night around here,” says Vick. “You have
all these smart, funny people in one room making hilarious
observations. It’s the ultimate Oscar party.”
Vick’s department, separate from but working in tandem
with the People staff who develop weekly news and human-interest
stories, produces the issues that focus on a special topic
(hence, “specials.”) While they might put out
an issue focused on anything from a hot television show
such as “Desperate Housewives” to a “how-to”
holiday entertaining guide, most magazine-buyers will recognize
“Sexiest Man Alive” and “50 Most Beautiful
People” or “Best and Worst Dressed” or
“50 Hottest Bachelors” as among the favorite
special issues. Orlando Bloom was last year’s hottest
bachelor, in case you missed that one.
Vick says that while many top picks are entertainers or
athletes of note—Johnny Damon, who Vick says has the
“best hair in baseball,” made the cut last year,
and having a recent notable project helps one’s chances—not
all of the men featured are rich and famous. (She says that
for someone to earn a “sexiest man alive” designation,
however, it really “has to be the guy’s moment.”)
The magazine also likes to introduce fresh faces, according
to Vick. She tells of one of the “regular guys”
who made the list recently. Last year, a top aide of Condoleezza
Rice was featured among the bachelors. The piece quoted
the now-Secretary of State as saying that her aide should
spend more time out of the office having a little fun.
“We think a lot about our audience—what we feel
we owe readers, what we think they should know about,”
says Vick. With a readership of nearly 40 million, which
surpasses that of Newsweek or Time, People’s audience
clearly likes the magazine’s mix of news, features
and celebrity tattle.
“Our celeb coverage offers readers a lot to chew over.
I think a lot of people can relate, say, to Jennifer Aniston’s
recent breakup with Brad Pitt. Theirs appeared to be the
perfect marriage, they seemed devoted to one another, they
were both huge stars with plenty of work on their plates.
And yet, things ultimately fell apart,” Vick says.
“They’re human—they go through crises
like the rest of us. Again, there’s that engagement,
that involvement along with the entertainment.”
Besides her tenure at People, Vick is a 13-year veteran
of Sports Illustrated, where she worked as a reporter and
senior editor. Later, she enjoyed stints at Working Woman
and Child magazines, all in preparation for her study of
celebrity and writing “the snappy, punchy, creative”
copy that makes it come alive.
“It’s particularly gratifying to be paid to
talk about the things people talk about anyway. We’re
also lucky in that we have the Time, Inc., reputation working
for us,” Vick says. “Readers trust that we have
our facts straight; what we print has been researched and
carefully checked for accuracy by fact-checkers as well
as by correspondents in any one of our eight news bureaus
here and abroad.” (Several of the larger Time, Inc.,
magazines rely on bureaus for research, reporting and interviews;
writers and editors in New York then pull stories together.)
When Vick was at Milton, she served as the co-editor of
Milton’s student paper. “I always enjoyed writing,”
she says. “As an editor, I get to shape ideas and
think about how best to package a story.”
Evan Hughes ’94
Assistant to the Editor
New York Review of Books
In conversation with Heather Sullivan, associate editor
of Milton Magazine.
HS How would you describe your job and
how you got there?
EH The two editors who founded The New
York Review of Books in 1963, Robert Silvers and Barbara
Epstein, are still at the top of the masthead, and I am
Barbara’s assistant. Because the editorial staff is
small—around 12—and jobs here are sought after,
mine is not really an entry-level position, as editorial
assistant jobs are at book publishers and some other magazines.
Prior to working here, I was an editor for two years at
The New Leader, a political magazine small enough that I
was given a considerable amount of experience editing and
working with writers. Now, in addition to handling Barbara’s
correspondence, faxing proofs to our writers and taking
corrections from them, ordering review copies of books,
etc., I edit some pieces (by writers you probably know about)
and play a large role in sorting through the many books
that come in to us—sometimes 100 a day—and deciding
what we ought to review and to whom we should assign it.
My job is an editorial one, not a writing one, but I have
just completed in off hours my first piece for the magazine,
which should be published this fall. It’s about a
novelization of the Patty Hearst saga, Christopher Sorrentino’s
Trance. Other recent work includes a review of James Frey’s
two memoirs of addiction and recovery and a piece about
the sexual politics of the lap dance. Seriously.
HS From whom have you learned the most
about your craft?
EH My boss at The New Leader, Mike Kolatch,
was a stern instructor, to put it rather mildly, but I learned
a great deal from him about the way sentences ought to work.
Much of what I know about writing, though, came from my
teachers in Milton’s English and creative writing
departments, more so than Yale’s. Many thanks are
owed, not just by me, to David Britton, Kay Herzog, Doug
Fricke, J. C. Smith, Rick Hardy and the creative writing
golden god, Jim Connolly. The man who hired most of them,
former English chair Guy Hughes, had some additional influence
on my life and education. He’s my dad.
HS My impression is that you’re a
writer first and editor second. Can you comment on the relationship
between those two selves?
EH I write and edit both, and hope to continue
to do so, but I’d like to add more writing to the
mix. Sometimes one finds the two roles battling. It’s
hard to write freely with a critic and editor staring over
your shoulder.
HS This issue of Milton Magazine focuses
on the media. Do you think that more literate periodicals
face pressures similar to those of mainstream media (e.g.,
consolidation, fewer resources, etc.), or are they outside
of that fray?
EH Most intellectual publications are money-losing
operations and face great pressure to improve the bottom
line, particularly when they are owned by larger (and publicly
held) corporations. The New York Review is independently
owned and, remarkably, is a profitable enterprise, from
what I understand. I’m not privy to the math, but
I think our success owes something to our crossover appeal
to the academic world. Many professors read it to keep up
with new work in their fields.
HS What are some of your favorite newspapers
or magazines, and what makes them valuable to you?
EH I’m addicted, despite reservations,
to the New York Times. I don’t know what I’d
do if they tripled the price. My other priorities are The
New Yorker, Harper’s, and The Atlantic, although employed
people who say they read them all every issue are lying.
HS Career highlights?
EH Highlights of my short career mostly
involve talking to people I’ve long admired from afar.
A few articles the NYRB has published since I’ve been
here (two years) have been particularly exciting for me,
though I played no role in editing them: Two of these were
Michael Massing’s “Now They Tell Us,”
about the press’s failures in Iraq, and Tony Judt’s
“Israel: The Alterna-tive.” The feisty letter
exchanges that followed each were a kick.
HS I’m reading The Moonstone by Wilkie
Collins. In it, a character always turns to the text of
Robinson Crusoe when he needs guidance or inspiration. Is
there a book, story or poem that functions that way for
you?
EH I don’t know about guidance, but
for inspiration: Joan Didion’s justly famous personal
essay about being young and in New York, “Goodbye
to All That.” Can I go on? Robert Lowell’s Collected
Poems. Then there’s David Foster Wallace’s essay
about going on a cruise, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll
Never Do Again.” In its sometimes cruel way, it is
probably the funniest thing I’ve ever read.
Heather Sullivan
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