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, […]
Generating Ideas in Advanced Feature Writing
Many believe the hardest part of longform feature writing is generating story ideas that will sell to publications. What is a feature story idea? At its most basic, it identifies something that’s happening in the world (involving a person, an event, a trend, a place, an unfolding situation…) and puts it into perspective for readers. […]
The Gritty Lowdown on Success
I began teaching feature writing in the late 1980s and finally began to notice a pattern about a decade later. Students who were naturals, who could write with tremendous flair seemingly without much effort, didn’t necessarily go on to become great writers. Others who weren’t the obvious literary stars, whose writing could be ponderous, perhaps […]
Always Take Notes
I’ve listened to every one of the more than 300 Longform podcasts, those interviews with nonfiction writers that the Longform site has been running for the past six years. More recently, a British variation, Always Take Notes (Always Take Notes podcast) has materialized. Co-hosts Simon Akam and Eleanor Halls (or Kassia St. Clair) have candid conversations with […]
Meet-&-Greet, MFA in Creative Nonfiction, MON, NOV. 12, 2018
Do you have a book you’ve wanted to write? Does the task seem daunting, there just isn’t enough time? If the answer is yes, or even maybe, come to the meet-and-greet on Monday, November 12 for the University of King’s College MFA in Creative Nonfiction. Here is a link to information about it: Meet-&-Greet, MFA in […]