“I never read introductions,” says Rose, the younger of my two daughters. She thinks it over for a second, frowns; the statement doesn’t quite ring true. She amends it: “Well, I’ve read two,” she says. One turns out to be Jack Kerouac’s introduction to Robert Frank’s The Americans, required reading for a photography class: “But it was fine because I like his style.” The other is Sherman Alexie’s introduction to his own The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (a favorite book, and author, of Rose’s), because “it felt like it would be rude not to.”
I suspect that my daughter’s antipathy toward introductions (we did not discuss postscripts) is fairly common among avid readers. People who never bother to read what is more properly styled as a foreword (in which one writer presents the work of another) or a preface (in which the writer herself, often retrospectively, reflects on her own work) are likely as numerous as people who don’t bother with user manuals before launching the software application or powering up the widget.
Criticism of the liberal mainstream has been a part of New Atheism’s identity since it first appeared nearly two decades ago. Yet in presenting themselves as the defenders of reasoned argument against the various forces of ideological conviction, the New Atheists also unwittingly reflect some of elite liberalism’s deepest instincts. The movement’s rightward journey from the cutting edge of anti-Bush liberalism to the fringes of today’s “intellectual dark web,” moreover, reveals a striking divergence over the meaning of liberalism itself. Is “true” liberalism grounded on reason alone, or can it be, as some on the liberal left have insisted in recent years, made consistent with a politics of conviction?
It’s not a route for the faint of heart. But I did it. And my fuel was the one thing that unites the disparate communities along the way — chile.
Chile peppers are the Southwest’s most famous gastronomic expression: grown and packed and used for decoration, grilled and dried and frozen, and eaten all year in the region. On I-25, however, “chile” is as varied as the land and people. It’s the pepper, for sure, but also a salsa that can be as thick as gravy or as thin as water, mellow or scorching. “Chile” also appears as a cheeseburger, a snack, a meat rub. A full meal or an appetizer. A bowl or a plate. A soup or chicken-fried steak or burrito drowned (“smothered” in local parlance) in it. Red or green chile or both, a style called “Christmas.” Dessert. Heritage. Life.
For a newspaper editor heading into the new news century, deathwatch beetles were everywhere, but so was possibility. Rusbridger wants us to know what it felt like to work inside a news organization during this era, and his painstaking account is fascinating, even for those of us who lived both the peril and the promise. The rapid technology changes, collapsing business model, 9/11, media convergence, paywall wars, dawn of social media, rise of the “citizen journalist” and more are here valuably detailed by a gifted reporter focused on the story of his own profession. All around him was shiny invention but it wielded a double-edged sword. In discovering Google News, one of his colleagues “self-mockingly responded by slumping across his desk in a pose that suggested there was little point in carrying on,” Rusbridger writes. “How could one compete with this all-seeing eye on the world, hoovering up anything that happens, anywhere on the planet and alerting users within minutes in a remorseless perpetuum mobile of breaking information?”
It is part of the human experience to slowly realize we are each an isolated mind in a sea of other isolated minds, and then to spend our lives trying to cross the mighty gulfs between ourselves and others, striving to make a connection. Everybody wants to be found. So it’s natural, as our science has progressed, that the human race should project its collective hopes onto the cosmos and see if anyone else is reaching out to us. The last century is permeated with science fiction of alien visitors, and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (or SETI) is the manifestation of our hopes that someone out there is trying to find us. So great is our desire for contact, we instinctually see aliens in emissions of radiation, in planetary landscapes, and in comets on hyperbolic trajectories. In a sense, we anthropomorphize the universe.
If Merchants of Truth had focused on the Times and the Post alone, it would have been an excellent contribution to the history of journalism. So why did Abramson step out of her zone of expertise to profile digital media? It’s tempting to see the answer in the circumstances of her own career. If the younger generation suffers from a lack of traditional newsroom training in fairness and ethics and reporting, then the loss of Jill Abramson means something.
Of course, losing her did mean something to many people at the Times. But Abramson’s narrative insists on a meeting of the personal and the historical, when her ouster could more easily be chalked up to factors that are as timeless as they are petty: the machinations of an underling, say, who wants to be king. What we’re left with is half of a great book, and half of a book that recommends to other late-career journalists that they take their inheritors seriously. The digital natives now have loud voices, magnified by the authority of their political convictions. You have to meet change on its level—especially if you’re trying to sell the truth.
Fannie wanted her family to make full and forthright use of the opportunities that her profits made possible, but the source of those profits had to stay hidden. She taught her five children to keep their heads up and their mouths shut.
“The World According to Fannie Davis” is a daughter’s gesture of loving defiance, an act of reclamation, an absorbing portrait of her mother in full. “The fact that Mama gave us an unapologetically good life by taking others’ bets on three-digit numbers,” Davis writes, “is the secret I’ve carried with me.” Blending memoir and social history, she recounts her mother’s extraordinary story alongside the larger context of Motor City’s rise and fall.
I watch the flood splash & truck
by my first-floor window
before I see Gawd strut by
with Her iron & forty ounce.