We Maka A Good Pasta!
Making homemade pasta is like reading good literature: time-consuming, heavy, savory, frustrating and, ultimately, rewarding. We made our own pasta last night. Today we are happy, plump, and ready to work off some of the excess butter we dripped into our sauce. Let’s get started. Harold Evans recounts the glory years of newspaper reporting, a hotshot journalist is throned at Harper’s Magazine, and Dan Brown, though his books sell millions, sees his narrative formula replicated by an algorithmic push button in Slate. The poetry chapbook The First Risk is discussed in The Collagist, while the good old fuddies at Editor and Publisher try to figure out our current media mess. William Hoffman is remembered in Richmond and eco-documentaries are given new life in Salon. It is a hard, complicated world. And things don’t always turn out right. But a positive attitude and hard work often yield delicious results. Enjoy your pasta. — Kevin Murphy
– Max Blumenthal launched his journalistic career with an award-winning exposé of the deaths of hundreds of young women in the Mexican border city of Juárez. More recently, he has specialized in studying and reporting on the religious right and their relationship with the Republican Party. His newly released best-selling book, Republican Gomorrah, is a thorough study of the figures who populate the religious right and who have developed its powerful influence on Republican politics. I put six questions to Max Blumenthal about his new book. — Max Blumenthal in Harpers
Harold Evans: Hungry For The Lede
– Ten years ago, writing about Harold Evans, I wrote: “The book Harry should write now is the story of his own life, from St Mary’s Road Central School in Manchester to the Sunday Times to the conquest of corporate America and rubbing shoulders with the Washington elite.” This is it, well, sort of. — Harold Evans in The Observer
– For those of you who can’t wait another moment for Dan Brown’s next blockbuster, Slate has your fix: an interactive Dan Brown plot generator that takes a city and a shadowy organization and spits out the plot of the next volume in the Robert Langdon chronicles. You can either select a specific city and/or group from the dropdown menus at the top of the tool or leave it on “random” and let the computer decide. Make sure to hit “refresh”—even the same city and group have multiple story lines. — Dan Brown in Slate
– While I was the book review editor for NewPages, I reviewed “The Strange Case of Maribel Dixon,” which is included in The First Risk and which remains one of the best chapbooks I’ve ever read, if not the very best–I’ve certainly thought about it longer than any other chapbook, and returned to it more times. I would recommend The First Risk for that section alone, even if I didn’t know how good the rest of the book was going to be. — The First Risk in The Collagist
– The big danger for newspapers in starting to charge for some content online is where to set the line. If it’s 98% free and 2% paid, there’s probably not much to worry about in terms of loss of advertising revenue and user traffic. Set it more aggressively — say, 60% free and 40% paid — and you’re probably slitting your own throat. We’ll see the industry experiment in the coming year on where to set the line for paid. — New Media in Editor and Publisher
Hoffman Don't Mess With Exactness
– William Hoffman lived quietly and well, and wrote with excellence. His novels and stories earned critical acclaim but did not attract a mass audience. They appealed instead to readers in love with gripping narratives conveyed in lyrical prose. Hoffman never succumbed to celebrity. His audience was intelligent, yet, in part because of that, not numerous. — William Hoffman in the Richmond Times-Dispatch
– I say this from the bottom of my heart, with deep conviction: “An Inconvenient Truth” changed the world. Did the Davis Guggenheim-Al Gore PowerPoint-based Oscar winner mark a turning point in global climate change, and the beginning of a carbon-neutral future? Oh, that. I have no idea about that. — Eco-documentaries in Salon
Video: Earth Days, an Eco-Documentary
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