The Con Man and True Crime Writer
Nothing like a nonfiction writer who is also a convicted fraudster. Matthew Cox is a former mortgage broker who created fake documents to prove he owned properties then obtained mortgages on them for several times their real value. Authorities estimate he made somewhere between $5-million and $25-million US. He was convicted of fraud in 2002 […]
The Last Stone (left unturned)
I’m fascinated by reconstructions. I’ve done many of them myself — in books and magazine feature stories — and love the challenge of bringing alive events in the past so vividly that readers feel as though they were there. U.S. journalist Mark Bowden’s most recent book, The Last Stone, is a fine example of this. A […]
If Books Could Kill – An Essay
My essay-review in The National Post on how a phenomenon of mid-1800s Britain kicked off generations of blaming popular entertainment for influencing young people to commit crimes. If books could kill: The brutal history behind using popular entertainment as a scapegoat for heinous acts. By David Hayes, The National Post, May 19, 2019 […]
The Comma Queen and Me
I recently discovered that someone borrowed my copy (highlighted and annotated) of Mary Norris’ Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen and not returned it. I keep a large file card in my living room to record when people borrow books or DVDs, but my system failed me this time and, thinking of Marie […]
Weegee the Famous
I’m reading Christopher Bonanos’ biography of Arthur (Usher) Fellig, aka Weegee. A brash immigrant kid, he started working joe jobs in photography studios at 14 and eventually became a celebrated photojournalist specializing in gangland crime and the seedy street world of New York. He often got to the scene of crimes before the police, especially […]
The Art of Business: Fortune covers of the ’30s
When Henry Luce launched Fortune in 1929, just as a stock market crash triggered the Great Depression, it was meant to be an upbeat celebration of American capitalism. It was that, but it also advocated social responsibility and featured stunning modernist art on its covers. In his 2004 book, An Economy of Abundant Beauty: Fortune Magazine and […]
Typist & Telephone Torment – Jean Dubuffet
Jean Dubuffet studied art in the late teens (of the 20th century) and worked as an artist into the ’20s before he gave it up to become an industrial designer and later work in his family’s wine business. He decided to re-commit himself to art in 1942 and studied with master lithographer Fernand Mourlot. He […]
Merchants of Truth
My ESSAY in The National Post on Jill Abramson’s new book, Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts, which looks at the state of journalism today. In the pre-internet world, journalism and advertising were strictly separated. (The term “church and state” was often invoked). Digital sites, however, grew rich through the use […]
The Library Book
As a child, I went regularly to the George H. Locke Public Library, on the southeast corner of Yonge Street and Lawrence Avenue in Toronto, usually with my mother. Years later, my mother told me that it was the place I most loved to go. (And not only because it involved a stop on the […]
Claas Relotius is an Outlier
Claas Relotius, an award-winning German journalist working for Der Spiegel, has joined an undistinguished group of fellow nonfiction hoax artists (see selected list below) at a most unfortunate time. Over several years, the more than two dozen stories in question — in which Relotius doctored or made up quotes and created composite, or entirely fictional, […]