About Editing and Writing

From an essay, “Wisdom in the Age of Information,” by Maria Popova on the website brainpickings.org:

We live in a world awash with information, but we seem to face a growing scarcity of wisdom. And what’s worse, we confuse the two. We believe that having access to more information produces more knowledge, which results in more wisdom. But, if anything, the opposite is true. . . .

At its base is a piece of information, which simply tells us some basic fact about the world. Above that is knowledge—the understanding of how different bits of information fit together to reveal some truth about the world. Knowledge hinges on an act of correlation and interpretation. At the top is wisdom, which has a moral component. . . .

From a mashable.com story about the Westminster Dog Show:

The 144th Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show crowned its Best in Show on Tuesday night, bestowing the honour upon a black standard poodle named Siba. . . .The internet exploded with vocal support for Daniel the golden retriever, winner of the Sporting category. . . .

Daniel instantly charmed everyone with his joyful smile, sweet demeanour, and undeniable fluffiness. Carrying his bright blue Sporting ribbon off in his mouth, it seemed impossible to conceive there could be a gooder dog in the competition.

From a New York Times story, by Katherine Rosman, headlined “The Chaos at Conde Nast”:

It’s a high-class but increasingly common problem: being a former magazine editor in a digitized world that cares little about whose name used to be on top of a defunct masthead. . .

At 48, Dan Peres is already an old hand at being a former magazine editor. Condé Nast shut down Details, the men’s glossy that he had been editor of for 15 years, in 2015. Overnight Mr. Peres went from two decades spent as a coveted presence at fashion shows and parties in the world’s capitals to a divorced dad adrift in the ’burbs.

From a Wall Street Journal story, by Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, headlined “Magazine Publisher Bonnier Explores Possible Sale of Main Media Unit”:

Bonnier Corp., publisher of such magazines as Field & Stream, Saveur and Yachting, has been meeting with bankers to explore its options, including the possible sale of the unit that holds most of its magazines, according to people familiar with the situation. . . .

Bonnier today boasts 24 titles, including 14 that are in print, such as Boating, Sailing World and Outdoor Life. Digital properties include motorcyclistonline.com and islands.com. The company is profitable, the person said.

The Washington Post Health&Science section has a nice piece by Bob Brody headlined “I’ve been playing basketball for 59 years. Let me tell you why.”

The opening grafs:

The Oscars rarely celebrate good journalism but two newspapers—the Boston Globe and Washington Post–had moments of Hollywood fame, the Post in 1977 for “All the President’s Men” and the Globe in 2016 for “Spotlight.”

In 1977, the Oscar for Best Actor in a Supporting Role went to Jason Robards, who played Post executive editor Ben Bradlee. But neither Robert Redford nor Dustin Hoffman, who played Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, were finalists. Winner of the Best Actor Oscar that year was Peter Finch from “Network.”

Bob Greene’s story, “When Magazine Editors Broke the Rules,” in the Wall Street Journal:

On top of a box of garbage awaiting pickup on a Florida curb, I spotted a tattered copy of an old novel: John P. Marquand’s “Melville Goodwin, USA” (1951). Seeing it suddenly took me back to one of the most tender love stories, and quietly thoughtful acts of kindness, I’ve ever come across. I once knew the family at the center of it.

Dudley Chamberlain had been a newspaperman in the small Ohio town of Marietta. In 1951 his wife, Julia, was dying of cancer and in intense pain. The Chamberlains spent each day and night together, he sitting at her bedside.

From an interview with British novelist John Fowles, author of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, in the Paris Review. The novel was made into a movie of the same name starring Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons—it received five Oscar nominations, including best actress and best screenplay based on material from another medium.

I have a kind of love-hate relationship with the cinema. I admire it at its best, as an art, but I am increasingly hostile to the way it has invaded literature. I hate the way some silly people (often those who think themselves intellectuals) suppose we writers can know no greater glory than to have been filmed; almost as if we would never have written in the first place but for the prospect of being translated into the cinema.

The reason Biden doesn’t throw haymakers in these debates, particularly in the direction of Pete, is obvious: He’s not nimble enough to avoid counterpunches.

—Tim Alberta, chief political correspondent at Politico.

Thinking, Fast and Slow provides a comprehensive and integrated treatment of the role that two different cognitive systems play in explaining our judgments and decisions, adopting Stanovich and West’s System 1 and System 2 distinction. Daniel Kahneman explains that System 1 thinking, or the intuitive reactions and quick judgments that we rely on for most decisions, is also the process that leads to far greater biases in judgment. He also documents recent advances in how System 2, our more deliberative thought processes, can be used to dampen the negative effects of our intuitive judgments. In doing so, Kahneman clarifies a structure for understanding the processes and mechanisms that can explain when biases are most likely to appear and when we need to apply our System 2 processes to the problem at hand.