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Patrick Radden Keefe on the slippery questions raised by “In Cold Blood” and the obsessive interest in its making: “For years, Alvin Dewey insisted that ‘In Cold Blood’ was factual, and the humble lawman’s stamp of approval was evinced, by those who were inclined to believe the book, as a badge of its accuracy. He had furnished Capote with the access and materials to tell the true parts of his story, and had permitted the author to stretch the truth, in making, of Dewey, a hero. He was, in this subtle sense, a co-conspirator.” Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/Xv4xH9
Photograph by Bruce Davidson/Magnum.
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The Iraq War in The New Yorker→
Click-through for a look back at ten years of Iraq coverage in The New Yorker: http://nyr.kr/16K4PRo
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"A common complaint then among Time writers who found themselves stuck on a story was “this story just won’t write”—as if the story had a will of its own and was using it to resist being shaped into a coherent narrative. I may have used the phrase from time to time myself. The problem was mostly space. There on my desk was the raw material for one of the three or four stories in my section: a fifteen-page file from the main reporter on the story, a five-page file from the Washington bureau on the federal angle, three books that the researcher thought I might find useful, a fistful of previous Time files, and, of course, some clippings from the Times. From this, I was to produce a seventy-line piece that had the arc of a story rather than the “inverted pyramid” structure that was then the template for newspaper articles. (Since the news sometimes failed to conform to Time’s printing schedule, the paragraph containing the denouement of the story often began “At week’s end.”) Given the density of the seventy lines and the imperative to keep the story moving, there often seemed to be at least one highly relevant fact that simply didn’t fit. I pictured that left-out fact darting around to find an opening and being rebuffed by every paragraph it tried to squeeze into—like someone trying door after door in a desperate effort to board a thoroughly stuffed rush-hour subway. Sometimes, if I had until the next day to turn the story in, I’d head home, finding that the knot in the narrative came loose with the rhythmic clacking of the subway train."
— Calvin Trillin reflects on his experience working as a floater at TIME magazine in the early 1960s: http://nyr.kr/WIA50k -
ATTACK!
The controversial journalist Oriana Fallaci inspired both admiration and fear with her aggressive style of interviewing. In a new play opening at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre this month, Lawrence Wright wrestles with her legacy, and since I work part-time at the theatre’s box office I decided to interrupt his schedule for a brief chat. Here it goes:
Continue reading Tom Toro’s illustrated conversation with Lawrence Wright: http://nyr.kr/XjczZp
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Requiem for a Dream
Aaron Swartz was brilliant and beloved. But the people who knew him best saw a darker side.
In this week’s issue, Larissa MacFarquhar looks at the various events that led to Internet activist Aaron Swartz’s suicide earlier this year, through interviews with those closest to Swartz, including his parents and girlfriend at the time. Since his death, “his family and closest friends have tried to hone his story into a message, in order to direct the public sadness and anger aroused by his suicide to political purposes,” MacFarquhar writes. “They have done this because it is what he would have wanted.” Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/YEO7ei
(Source: newyorker.com)
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"Going forward, perhaps [Bob Woodward] should stick to news stories and books, which presumably get edited and fact-checked, and leave the op-eds and interviews with Politico to the subjects of his stories."
— John Cassidy. Continue reading Cassidy on “Woodward-Gate”: http://nyr.kr/13rdsjJ(Source: newyorker.com)
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Is there something that you always wanted to ask our writers?→
Tomorrow at 4 PM ET, David Grann and Patrick Radden Keefe will discuss non-fiction crime writing in a Google+ hangout. Have questions for the writers? Leave them here, and they’ll get to as many as they can during their hangout: http://bit.ly/11OqjwP
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Podcast: Killer Narratives→
This week in the magazine, Patrick Radden Keefe investigates the Amy Bishop case. In 2010 Bishop shot and killed several colleagues at the University of Alabama. In the aftermath of that crime, it was revealed that Bishop had shot and killed her brother in 1986, which Bishop and her parents have always claimed was an accident. Here Keefe and New Yorker staff writer David Grann talk with their editor Daniel Zalewski about the Amy Bishop story, non-fiction crime writing more generally, and how to approach the truth when certainty is impossible. Also, Kelefa Sanneh on drinking Scotch. Listen now, and click-through for more: http://nyr.kr/VJIXQi
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“The blackout lasted thirty-four minutes. During that time, CBS acted as if it possessed no news division… there were an estimated one hundred and eight million Americans watching the broadcast. The network’s obligations to such a vast viewership should have led it to privilege the imperatives of journalism over those of commerce.”
Steve Coll on CBS’s failure to appropriately report on the Super Bowl blackout: http://nyr.kr/WMCyp0
