SELECT WRITING
Politics & Media
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On a chilly Saturday late this past March, I drove up to Salem to meet Moulton for lunch at an Indian restaurant a few short blocks from his district office. As he made his way through an order of chicken korma, our conversation inevitably turned to the topic of Pelosi and the failed coup. Moulton was quick to correct me: The coup hadn’t targeted only Pelosi, but the entire Democratic leadership in the House. As far as he was concerned, there were no hard feelings. “It’s nothing against any of these leaders personally,” he told me between bites. “I think Speaker Pelosi is a remarkable politician. But as a Marine in my platoon put it to me when we were talking about the changing economy and the future of work, ’Seth, everybody in Washington trying to figure this out are the same folks that had 12 a.m. flashing on their VCRs for 30 years.’ And there’s some truth to that. And the good news is that there’s a new generation of people who helped their parents program those VCRs . . . And I think that this new generation is ready to lead.“
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Despite my cheekiness and the senator’s peculiar take on whom to fault for the Congressional standoff, I came away from the encounter liking Brown. Talking to him had been like arguing with some guy in a bar. There wasn’t a hint of stuffiness in him, unlike what one might expect from the moneyed Ivy Leaguers the commonwealth has a habit of sending to the Senate.
In any case, by the next day, Brown had apparently changed his mind about where blame for the impasse lay. “The House Republicans’ plan to scuttle the deal to help middle-class families is irresponsible and wrong,” he said in a statement. So why fault the Democrats the night before?
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Baron's mood changes noticeably when he's asked about the difficulty inherent in coming to his job as an outsider, and he bristles when the Boylston Street wisecrack gets repeated.
“I know how to find my way to Boylston Street,” Baron retorts. “Look, it was a difficult decision for me coming here because I wasn't from Boston. I couldn't claim to know Boston and the issues in Boston. But it's not an insurmountable challenge. And I think that there is some benefit in coming from the outside and bringing a fresh perspective to what we do.”
That perspective, staffers say, is built on a no-nonsense approach to newspapering. “More, faster, better” is said to be Baron's mantra. He demands that his reporters cover the city better than the competition — and by competition, he does not mean only the Boston Herald.
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West fancies himself in the Du Bois mold. “Present-day black scholars,” he writes in Race Matters, “tend to be mere academicians, narrowly confined to specialized disciplines with little sense of the broader life of the mind and hardly any engagement with battles in the streets.”
But Patterson thinks his one-time student is misdirecting his energies with his political work and CD. West has “chosen the path of the religious preacher, something which is already well done [by others],” he explains. “There's still a great big, yawning hole there in Afro-American thought for doing what he's qualified to do. Cornel certainly had it in him to write a couple of major books, and he's clearly decided not to do that. I'm personally a little saddened by that.”
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The Monthly’s low-paid editors have a habit of going on to much bigger things. Some of the brighter stars among the alumni include Michael Kinsley, editor of the New Republic; James Fallows, who served as chief speechwriter for President Carter before becoming Washington editor of the Atlantic and writing the books National Defense and More Like Us; and Taylor Branch, a contributing editor for Esquire and author of Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63, which shared the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for history with James M. McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom. But the Monthly’s biggest achievement could be its emergence as a leading voice of “neoliberalism.”
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Whatever discomfort his family background caused, Hearst nonetheless took a job at the Examiner after graduation. He started out driving a truck and selling ads, switched to general-assignment reporting and eventually became assistant city editor. In 1976, Hearst decided to test his mettle outside the Hearst Corp. Jann Wenner, editor and publisher of Rolling Stone, which was then based in San Francisco, persuaded Hearst to help him launch an outdoor magazine aimed at baby-boomer backpackers and devotees of adventure travel. Hearst and Wenner are said to have chosen the magazine’s name, Outside, while strolling the grounds of the Hearst castle at San Simeon.
Hearst was signed on as managing editor of Outside partly because of his name (as was “assistant to the publisher” Jack Ford, son of President Gerald Ford) and partly because of his experience as an adventurer (Hearst was a motorcyclist, a pilot, a horseman, a cross-country skier, and a rock climber). His next-in-command, senior editor Terry McDonell, helped offset Hearst’s lack of magazine-editing experience. The two remain friends and business associates: Hearst is a contributing editor of Smart, a sort of thinking-man’s magazine that McDonell launched a year ago (it takes its name from the H.L. Mencken aphorism “One smart reader is worth a thousand boneheads”); McDonell has been brought to San Francisco a couple of times by Hearst as a consultant to the Examiner.Read more . . .