Post Tagged with: "elizabeth gilbert"

Another day, another dollar, another installment of #JournoReads.

This week was another big one. There were several important football games (don’t ask me who won any of them), reporters swarmed New Hampshire (check out this humorous description of the primary from the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank) and Google launched its new, personalized searches.

What the what?

But my top reads of the week involve none of those. Instead you’re getting a little bit of journo news, some pretty pictures and three long-form articles that read like novels. Enjoy!

—

A little industry talk:

1.) The New York Times’s Nick Kristof On Journalism in a Digital World and the Age of Activism, Fast Company

Disclaimer: Anyone that helped usher the Grey Lady into the digital world is okay in my book.

Nick Kristof, New York Times columnist and first blogger, talks social media, gamification and the “wandering line between advocacy and activist” journalism. On the latter, he says:

When it feels like there are an awful lot of lives at stake, it’s hard not to want to do everything that you can to save those lives. There are real difficulties in trying to figure out when it’s appropriate for journalists to dive into the arena. But sometimes that’s what you have to do.

Right on.

—

At Boston College, I took an American History class that focused on photography. What could have been a dry, survey class, came to life through graphic Civil War, child labor and dustbowl photographs. Included on the syllabus was Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives, a photojournalistic work that stays with me today.

2.) Building an Archive from the Rubble, New York Times Lens Blog

This photo gallery is like the How the Other Half Lives, almost a hundred years later. Larry Racioppo captures poverty in New York, from decaying housing projects to graffiti-laden walls.

A picture says a thousand words (but for those who prefer to read, there’s an interesting look at Racioppo’s life with the photo gallery).

—

Grocery shopping, California style.

#Longreads time! Here’s three great ones I unearthed from the internet this week:

3.) Long Day’s Journey, GQ

Elizabeth Gilbert (author of Eat, Pray, Love) and her Brazilian lover spend two weeks traipsing through Provence. They eat a lot of bread and cheese, drink a lot of wine and have an overall romantic excursion. When in France.

After reading this, I started planning my trip to France. A girl can dream, right?

4.) Enchanted Aisles, Los Angeles Magazine

I first went into a Trader Joe’s not for its ethnic frozen food or its organic produce but for its cheap, cheap wine. In fact, my college roommates and I used to combine 2-buck-Chuck by the case. When I moved to LA, TJ’s became my go-to grocery store. This profile in LA Mag provides a look at two of the eccentric grocery chains owners, a brief history of American food shopping and a look at the future of the store known for its Hawaiian shirts, frozen gnocchi dinners and brightly packaged food.

5.) Insider Baseball, The New York Review of Books

Joan Didion covers the politics, the drama and the journalists of the 1988 election. Nuf said.

A sneak peak:

“I didn’t realize you were a political junkie,” Marty Kaplan, the former Washington Post reporter and Mondale speechwriter who is now married to Susan Estrich, the manager of the Dukakis campaign, said when I mentioned that I planned to write about the campaign; the assumption here, that the narrative should be not just written only by its own specialists but also legible only to its own specialists, is why, finally, an American presidential campaign raises questions that go so vertiginously to the heart of the structure.

—

There you have it. Feel free to shoot me your comments, questions and favorite reads of the week.

Photos courtesy of Google and Los Angeles Magazine.