What I do

(When I'm not blogging about old books, of course.)

I know I sound like a pretentious twit when I say this, but I kind of don't get people who aren't news junkies.

This is not new. But I was reminded of it tonight courtesy of a tweet from a friend who had been unaware that riots are currently happening in London and other English cities.

No matter how much I say I'm not judging her for that, you're free to start the name-calling now.

That's why I can't imagine having the experience my parents did two summers in a row:

We went on August road trips, to the Four Corners area in 1990 and Yosemite Lake Tahoe in 1991. Both lovely places, remote in parts, but hardly cut off from the world.

And both times, my parents (and the rest of us, but as I was still in the single digits I can't take too much credit) figured out that something big had happened during those trips when they stopped at a gas station and found the prices much higher than the last time they'd filled up.

Something big, August 1990: Iraq invaded Kuwait.
Something big, August 1991: A Soviet coup briefly deposed Gorbachev.

And somehow, when those events happened, we didn't have a newspaper. We hadn't turned on NPR. (I didn't grow up with TV news, so that one's not surprising. And yes, y'all, this was pre-Internet. I'm old.)

We were on vacation, and it didn't occur to my parents that some kind of news consumption was an essential part of our day. That's a choice I just don't see myself making.

I check news sites first thing in the morning. On a day like today, I had the NYT front page up in a tab all day. And let's not even talk about how often I check Twitter.

This isn't just a generational thing; the Internet is just the most current mode of information transfer. What I do -- what I want to do -- is know what's going on and tell other people about it.

It was, to some extent, what I did when I was at ABA. (That was the external side. The internal side involved a lot of me popping into my boss' office to share the latest industry nonsense developments, and it was a hit.)

If Andy Carvin didn't exist, I'd want his job. (Unfortunately, I was not hired when I said that, more elegantly, when I interviewed at NPR.)

This is what I do. In some form, it's what I will always do, whether or not it's part of my job description.

But if someone wants to pay me to do it, I wouldn't say no.

(Post pics are -- assuming I labeled them correctly -- from the 1991 Yosemite trip. Taken with a magenta flip-flash camera, baby!)

[Update, 8/9: So much for my steel-trap memory. A conversation with my mom tonight led to us determining that the August 1991 trip was, in fact, to Lake Tahoe. We spent a long weekend or something like that at Yosemite in the spring of that year. No breaking news during that vacation; it was mostly memorable for my first-ever coyote sighting. In addition to name-calling, you are also now free to mock.]

Convergence

Track one: Because there's just about no cell signal on the ground floor of the Javits Center, I ended up using my phone to take notes on the 2009 Day of Education keynote at BEA. (Instead of tweeting it, I mean -- that had been my intention.) A couple weeks ago, I discovered that the notes are still on my phone.

Track two: Jill Abramson was just named executive editor of the New York Times, becoming the first woman to hold that position.

Convergence: "jm was 29 when he became newsweek me - feelings of inadequacy..." Translating my notes into actual English, that refers to Jon Meacham's age when he became Newsweek's managing editor. Feelings of inadequacy speak for themselves.

(Post pic: That panel was better known for Sherman Alexie's highly quotable moments, particularly on the subject of e-readers. Not the best picture of me, but um, Sherman Alexie! In pinstripes!)

Because tonight's drive included Sylvia Poggioli's piece on Ratko Mladic...

(this one)... it seems an appropriate occasion for this piece I wrote a few years back.

Sylvia Poggioli doesn’t know it, but she helped me learn to drive.

Her voice, covering the war and peacekeeping in Kosovo, defined the spring of 1999. I was sixteen, a newly permitted driver, and NPR was the soundtrack to my driving lessons.

Although I took the more-or-less-required commercial driver’s ed class, my mother was my primary driving teacher. (My dad had given me a few lessons, but it didn’t take long for us all to decide that Mom’s temperament was better suited to the learning curve. Dad ended up with the college visits.) Initially, she decided that the radio wasn’t going to be on at all when I was behind the wheel. As I got the basics under control, NPR nudged its way into the speakers.

The UN peacekeeping mission was just getting underway as I got comfortable behind the wheel, and Sylvia was on almost every day.

Maybe that was what turned on my news junkie switch. Growing up I’d always paid attention to current events – friends like to remind me that when I was three or four years old, I explained to them that I read Newsweek “to get informed” – but not as much I did during the second half of high school. I tried not to admit that I usually listened to Morning Edition when I started driving to school – but I knew that the drive usually took 11 minutes, which generally meant that I was listening to the first story after the newscast when I pulled into the parking lot.

In my senior year, I had a free period every morning. Most days I spent the time in the library, keeping up with a news repertoire that included the New York Times, the Washington Post, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, the Miami Herald, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Yes, I was a nerd.

Sylvia Poggioli’s reports from Kosovo didn’t spark my interest in journalism, but they helped to shape it. Part of me wanted to be there with her, breaking the stories of the war and telling the world about a people’s fight to survive. (A more sensible part of me knew that I wouldn’t last long under foreign correspondent conditions, which is why I’m not writing this from Colombia.)

(Post pic: self-portrait at the wheel, many years after I learned to drive. And taken while the car was not in motion, obviously.)

Anna and Ellen

When Anna Quindlen hung up her keyboard earlier this year, I sighed and said, "At least Ellen Goodman hasn't retired yet."

So really, I should have seen it coming.

As of January 1, Ellen Goodman is retiring from her Boston Globe column.

(If you know anything about Gail Collins' career plans, I don't want to hear it. Let me keep my illusions a little longer.)

I grew up reading Anna Quindlen in Newsweek - she'd already left the New York Times by the time I discovered her - and Ellen Goodman in my local paper, which syndicated her column. And then I acquired some of the column collections they'd published - including some from before I was born, which I devoured.

I'm not the type to write fan mail - I just gush on Twitter, or something like that - but I do want to say a profound thank you to two women I never met, but learned a lot from.

The light side and the dark side

How the Washington Post headlined today's economic news: US Economy Grows at Solid Pace in 2nd Quarter

How the New York Times covered it: GDP Grows at Tepid 1.9% Despite Stimulus

On my Google page, the headlines are right on top of each other. Gotta love it.

More about that picture

I should have read more closely when I linked to Slate's slideshow on Stanley Forman's photo taken during one of the Boston busing confrontations. The slideshow was put together by Louis Masur, and if I'd made it all the way to the author bio (Slate, one of these days we're going to have a talk about your layout) I'd have seen that Masur has just written a book on the image.

Louis Bayard reviews The Soiling of Old Glory for Salon. The rest of Forman's roll of film apparently tells a more nuanced story.

Iconic photos

Slate has a photo-essay around one of Stanley Forman's images from the Boston school integration battles. There's a bit of backstory - how many people win a Pulitzer because they showed up late? - context, and comparison to other famous images.

(I love Google. I've just learned that Forman's third Pulitzer, shared with other staff photographers, was awarded for coverage of the blizzard of 1978. Sounds like the perfect complement to a review of My Latest Grievance.)