About Editing and Writing

Clandestine newspapers were a way to counter German propaganda.

It was the first large anti-German demonstration in France, and the enemy was determined to make it the last. German police and troops charged into the crowd and shot several students—a response that shocked the country and discouraged any future acts of mass defiance.

Nonetheless, unnoticed by almost everyone, the embers of rebellion began to smolder. The Scottish writer Janet Teissier du Cros, who lived in France throughout the war, put it another way; French resistance “grew as naturally as a mushroom grows among dead leaves,” she wrote.

Frank Bruni writes in the New York Times that “Politics Isn’t Pretty. But Politicians Are.”  The opening grafs:

At a Beto O’Rourke rally near Dallas shortly before the midterms, Sonia Qutob, 41, turned to her friend and asked what was clearly the most pressing question about the candidate.

“Do you think,” she said, “that he needs a second wife?”

O’Rourke seems to me plenty happy with the first. But a fangirl can dream. And I got the sense that many fangirls and no small number of fanboys did precisely that. At the rally immediately preceding the one where Qutob swooned, dozens of them mobbed O’Rourke and clamored for selfies. The passions that animated them were clearly more than political.

11/19/18 update:

Fortune, for years the top of its class business magazine, once sold subscriptions for premium prices—many of its readers were CEOs and didn’t think twice about paying $50 or more a year to read it. Time Inc., which founded the magazine almost 90 years ago, sold it to Meredith a year ago. Meredith has sold Fortune to Thai billionaire Chatchaval Jiaravanon for $150 million. 

The current Fortune subscription offer? Three years (42 issues) for $20. New territory for magazine sub prices. 

Gene Roberts was honored this week by his home state of North Carolina with an award for public service. The citation:

Gene Roberts is considered the finest newspaper editor of his generation and one of the best journalists of the 20th century. From 1956 at the Goldsboro News-Argus to leadership positions at the Philadelphia Inquirer and New York Times, he held fast to a reporter’s duty to seek truth in all places and at all times. Roberts covered the South during the civil rights era and national unrest during the Vietnam War. He turned the Philadelphia Inquirer into a Pulitzer Prize winning newspaper 17 times in 18 years. Along with co-author Hank Klibanoff, he won the Pulitzer Prize for the book, “The Race Beat: The Press, The Civil Rights Struggle and the Awakening of a Nation.”

It snowed in Washington today with some ice on the sidewalks so when I got ready to go outside this morning to pick up the Washington Post I worried about slipping and falling. When I opened the front door, I found that a neighbor dog-walker had picked up the Post that the delivery truck had tossed out on the lawn and put it inside our storm door so I didn’t have to go outside.

The virtue of living in a real neighborhood.

Herman Wouk as a naval officer during World War Two.

Once upon a time, before 9/11 closed the skies above the city, the Washingtonian ran a lot of aerial pictures of Washington—it’s surprising how different a city looks from the air—and also lots of pictures of the homes of important people.

The home photos were part of a regular feature called Map of the Stars. We’d take a picture of a VIP’s home from the sidewalk or street, give readers the general location but not the street address, and include its purchase price and year it was bought, its current value, and its assessed value. The assessed value was a reason to do it other than voyeurism—if a DC politician lived in a house worth $900,000 and the house was assessed at $400,000, it seemed a public service to point that out.

Dan Crenshaw and Pete Davidson on Saturday Night Live.

At least 16 new members of Congress elected on Tuesday are military veterans. That is out of 150 veterans who ran as candidates. Now, that didn’t used to be so notable. Thirty years ago, half of all members of Congress were military veterans. That number has shrunk, and some observers link that decline to a decline in civil discourse and bipartisan compromise.

—Mary Louise Kelly, NPR’s All Things Considered, November 9, 2018

This weekend’s Washington Post Magazine has a moving story about how a small village in the Netherlands continues to honor eight United States airmen whose plane was shot down and crashed there during World War Two. The story is by Richard B. Woodward, a New York  art critic. The lede:

The village of Opijnen (oh-PIE-nin) in the Netherlands is a farming community where grazing sheep, cows and goats outnumber people (population around 1,200), and cars have to move to the side of the narrow roads for tractors coming in the opposite direction. There are no stores and one church, which discreetly tolls the hour. It’s therefore hard to imagine how shocking it must have been 75 years ago when the town’s slow, ancient, chthonic rhythms were surreally interrupted by a thunderous explosion.