The future of journalism as a business is looking worse by the day, the practice of journalism less so. In the New York Review of Books, Michael Massing says that “the practice of journalism, far from being leeched by the Web, is being reinvented there, with a variety of fascinating experiments in the gathering, presentation, and delivery of news.” It’s mostly true.

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This image of the Internet as parasite has some foundation. Without the vital news-gathering performed by established institutions, many Web sites would sputter and die. In their sweep and scorn, however, such statements seem as outdated as they are defensive. Over the past few months alone, a remarkable amount of original, exciting, and creative (if also chaotic and maddening) material has appeared on the Internet.

Sorority dvdrip Massing cites the reporting done by the likes of Josh Marshall and his staff at Talking Points Memo, the relentless fact-checking and analysis of the blogosphere, and the fact that some websites are actually a better source for information than your daily paper – for the protests in Iran, the best place to go wasn’t The New York Times but Andrew Sullivan’s blog, The Daily Dish.

“The idea that our work is parasitical is farcical,” [blogger Marcy] Wheeler told me by phone. “There’s a lot of good, original work in the blogosphere. Half of all journalists look at the blogosphere when working on a story.” At the same time, she said, “I’m happy to admit I’m still utterly reliant on journalists…We ought to be talking about a symbiotic rather than a parasitical relationship,” she told me.

The problem is money: it’s extremely difficult to make any on the internet. And the content that bloggers consume and filter and analyze comes mainly from newspapers, which have to make money. Massing’s own examples bear this problem out. John Marshall of Talking Points Memo was a reporter before he started his website; he brought his contacts with him. ProPublica, a successful online reporting service, has received millions in grants. Blogger Philip Weiss made a reporting trip to Israel, but on $8000 in reader donations. It’s going to be difficult to get people to pay for what they already get for free. Andrew Sullivan, for one, is optimistic about the future of journalism and thinks the complacent, consensus-driven world of traditional news is getting what it deserves. He’s surely right about its failures and its cowardice, but he’s popular enough to merit a salary. Ask Marcy Wheeler or Philip Weiss how much they make.

-Greg Waldmann

If only more people read book reviews! It’s not just self-interest talking here; if everyone read the New York Review of Books, or say, Open Letters Monthly, they might avoid the chaff and spend their valuable time on something…valuable. Suppose you wanted to read about the most successful people in the world. What are the factors that make them so? Millions who want an answer to this question turn to Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, who seems to think that scientists are wasting their time with things like sample size and error control. As Sue M. Halpern of the NYRB Sicko dvdrip puts it

any statistician will tell you, you can’t learn anything about populations from an n of 1. It’s not a sample, it’s an amusement.

OLM’s Peter A. Coclanis has a middle initial too, and he comes to a similar conclusion:

Auden was on to something with his admonition in “Under Which Lyre” that “Thou shalt not sit with statisticians nor commit a social science,” but he never had to deal with Malcolm Gladwell. And even Auden, I think, would have appreciated the general concept of representativeness and understood that data is not the plural of anecdote.

Now, let’s say you want to learn about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If you wanted an overall history, and you happened to be asking, my vote would be for Benny Morris’ Righteous Victims. But maybe you want something more specific. It just so happens that Professor Morris has a more recent book about the first Arab-Israeli war, called, appropriately enough, 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War. Gershom Gorenberg reviews it in the NYRB Evan Almighty move :

The conflagration of 1948 was the war that began all Arab–Israeli wars. This will not be the last history of it, and not only because new papers will come to light, perhaps from still-sealed Arab archives. If the story is retold after peace—by Benny Morris or someone else—the facts and the motives will necessarily look different. It might be easier to see both Jews and Arabs with greater sympathy, as human beings caught in a storm. In the meantime, Morris has Karas: The Prophecy full movie indeed served the purpose of reconciliation, by making a fuller picture of what happened in 1948 part of Israeli memory. For that he deserves gratitude.

I wrote much the same thing last year:

Eden Log film Benny Morris’ greatest success in this book is in challenging the conventional mythology of both sides and laying out a mostly even-handed account of the first Arab-Israeli war, but a definitive history of Israel’s founding has still not been written. Such a history would include documents that are presumably still locked up somewhere in the capitals of Israel’s neighbors. That history’s narrative would give equal attention to both sides of the story. But that history hasn’t been written yet because the conflict is still ongoing, and the feelings are still are too intense. In the meantime, Morris’ books, including this one, are among the best we have.

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Most people who read don’t read book reviews, or they get them from (shudder) the Amazon.com comments field. They shouldn’t! I don’t mean to say that we critics are infallible, but we are here to help. We read books and we write about them. In fact, we don’t do much else with our time. So take advantage! Or, to take a cue from Mr. Gladwell, NYRB + OLM = good book recommendation.

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Today, Russia only uses violence to suppress political dissent as a last resort, though when it comes down to it they’re not squeamish about doing so. The preferred methods are much more Orwellian. Television is almost entirely state-owned or state-approved. It’s the same with newspapers. Bureaucracy, surveillance and arrests stymie human rights organizations and political parties. If murder is necessary (and as a result of the state’s overwhelming reach, it rarely is), the job is left to third parties.

Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev plan to make obedience even less of a question for their successors. In the April 30 New York Review of Books, Orlando Figes details the newest focus of their efforts – school textbooks. The newest school textbook on Russian history was commissioned by former-President Putin himself, and he issued instructions that give a good idea of how he sees himself and his country:

Stalin—good (strengthened vertical power but no private property); Khrushchev—bad (weakened vertical power); Brezhnev—good (for the same reasons as Stalin); Gorbachev and Yeltsin—bad (destroyed the country but under Yeltsin there was private property); Putin—the best ruler (strengthened vertical power and private property.

Russian foreign and domestic policy is vastly different from the Soviet Union, but in an effort to legitimize its power monopoly, the government is re-glorifying its authoritarian past (aside from the 1990s, what else is there, really?). The Russian population seems to be buying it. I review Edward Lucas’ The New Cold War in our forthcoming issue, and here’s a snippet:

Russian nationalism cannot be underestimated, and Putin milks and moulds this pride with a sickeningly nostalgiac official mythology. Putin infamously called the collapse of the USSR the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century,” and Russia’s government – through state-controlled TV broadcasts, newpapers, textbooks, and creepy Nazi youth-like organizations – is reglorifying its Soviet and czarist past. Here… the Russian people are mostly in agreement: recent polls placed Stalin and several of the more brutal czars in the pantheon of Russia’s greatest leaders.

-Greg Waldmann

In February of 2007 the Internatinal Committee of the Red Cross delivered a secret report on the torture of CIA prisoners to the Bush Administration – the very government that was practicing it. Excerpts have trickled out, but now the full report has been published by The New York Review of Books, along with an excellent dissection by Mark Danner, the reporter who obtained it. Here’s a key section of the ICRC’s conclusion:

This regime was clearly designed to undermine human dignity and to create a sense of futility by inducing, in many cases, severe physical and mental pain and suffering, with the aim of obtaining compliance and extracting information, resulting in exhaustion, depersonalization and dehumanization.

The allegations of ill-treatment of the detainees indicate that, in many cases, the ill-treatment to which they were subjected while held in the CIA program, either singly or in combination, constituted torture. In addition, many other elements of the ill-treatment, either singly or in combination, constituted cruel inhuman or degrading treatment.

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The alleged participation of health personnel in the interrogation process and…in the infliction of ill-treatment constituted a gross breach and, in some cases, amounted to participation in torture and/or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.

In other words, the Bush Administration created a detention regime that prescribed torture, and did so in a bureaucratized and systematic fashion – as is shown by (among other things) the participation of medical personnel. The facts seem beyond dispute, and not one torture apologist can verify a single instance where abuse produced useful information (here, the evidence is to the contrary). Few people, online or otherwise, have beat the drum for disclosure as consistantly as The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan. For some excellent background and analysis, turn to these posts: here Adam’s Wall on dvd , here

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Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side in our December 2008 issue; it’s by far the best introduction to the subject, but it’s not for the faint of heart. 

-Greg Waldmann

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Turner & Hooch release Despite being one of the most formidable literary journals currently in publication, The New York Review of Books also engages in an encouraging amount of truly superb straight-up journalism, the kind of lengthy and often searing watchdog investigating of which Pulitzer Prizes are made. The 9 April issue features just such an article, by Mark Danner, in which he probes the darkest chapter of what he calls “the dark moral epic of the Bush administration”: torture.

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The International Committee of the Red Cross has issued a very short pamphlet reporting on the United States’ treatment of fourteen “high value” prisoners captured in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks and held incommunicado for years. The report makes it clear these men were routinely tortured, and the outrage in Danner’s essay is all the more palpable for being so tightly controlled:

Guided by the President and his closest advisers, the United States transformed itself from a country that, officially at least, condemned torture to a country that practiced it. And this fateful decision, however much we may want it to, will not go away, any more than the fourteen “high-value detainees,” tortured and thus unprosecutable, will go away.

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In December of 2008 Open Letters Political Editor Greg Waldmann faced this same topic in a review of Jane Meyer’s The Dark Side The Brothers Bloom . Needless to say, the CIA featured prominently in that essay as well:

The CIA dusted off its own body of research on torture, much of which came straight from Stalin’s Russia; during the Cold War their researchers had been fascinated by the KGB’s ability to produce false confessions. The irony never dawned on them.

The two natural visceral impulses associated with all this are contradictory. On the one hand, it’s natural to want to forget all about it – stop the abuses, close the “black sites” that feature so malevolently in Danner’s piece and Waldmann’s, put the whole dark matter behind us all as a nation. On the other hand, it’s natural to want a punitive and very public redress for the government officials who did these things and claimed to do them in our name. Information will be they key in either case. Read Danner’s article; read Waldmann’s – then decide in your own heart.

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At least one-third of the reason Open Letters was created in the first place (the other two-thirds being gambling debts and incriminating Polaroids) was to provide a kind of book criticism that’s in short supply elsewhere  – shorter and shorter supply, in fact, as in-depth book coverage goes the way of the dodo (and the lynx, the polar bear, the African elephant, and every single living thing in the sea). The book criticism readers find here is deeply, detailedly concerned with books – which you’d think wouldn’t be a great distinction as far as book criticism goes, but oh, it is! Most book reviews available to readers today act as if the actual task of, you know, reviewing the books was a tedious little formality to be shunted aside and got through as quickly and superficially as possible.

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Traditionally, the New York Times Book Review has been the leader in this rather dubious field, but occasionally another journal will put forth a contender. That happens in the latest New York Review of Books, where Mark Ford (whose essays are usually extremely perceptive) turns in a piece of roughly 3500 words that doesn’t get around to talking about either of the books it’s purporting to review until roughly the 3200 mark. One of those books is Paul Mariani’s Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life, which gets mentioned about three-fourths of the way into the piece – only to be dismissed in one paragraph:

The one-time eccentric [Hopkins] is now of course the Society of Jesus’s chief literary glory, though his sexual leanings still present an obstacle to the hagiographical impulses of some of his latter-day Catholic admirers. Paul Mariani, in his quite dreadful biography, ignores the issue altogether, and even furnishes that most confirmed of bachelors, Walter Pater, with a wife. His knowledge of the Victorian culture from which Hopkins emerged is no more than sketchy, and his approach to the topography of England cavalier in the extreme – Horsham, for instance, is reported to be a hundred miles south of London, which puts it deep in the English Channel. All is written in a breathless present tense that grows more irritating with each page. Mariani has discovered no new facts to add to those presented in the excellent early 1990s biographies of Hopkins by Norman White and Robert Bernard Martin, and one can only hope, for the sake of the poet he would glorify, that his book sinks without a trace.

To which the teen response would no doubt be: really?

You’re commissioned by the New York Review of Books Masters of the Universe movies to write a long piece on two Gerard Manley Hopkins books, and this is all you can manage to say about one of them? The aggrieved tone makes it seem like Ford caught Mariani stuffing kittens into a blender, but what’s the offense? Getting a map-detail wrong?

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(Ford’s even less helpful – hard to believe, but true – with his second book, the novel Exiles by the great, criminally underrated Ron Hansen. This is the sum total of what Hansen gets for his trouble: “Hansen’s cross-cutting technique works, on the whole, pretty well”)

There are some entertaining chunks of Hopkins-trivia in Ford’s essay, but the thing is supposed to be a book review, isn’t it? It’s billed that way, and ‘review’ and ‘books’ are rather prominent in the publication’s title, but readers who might want more than 200 words on a book it took Mariani years to write will have to look elsewhere for something more trenchant than “quite dreadful” and a couple of pratfalls.

Fortunately, they won’t need to look far! The January Poetry Issue of Open Letters features a review by our own Steve Donoghue of that same Mariani book, and it’s quite a bit more detailed than 200 words.  And it doesn’t get overly worked up about where Horsham is, nor should you.

Politics galore in the latest New Yorker. Elizabeth Drew has a very saavy piece about Barack Obama’s style of governance (deliberative and pragmatic) and the potential meaning of his victory. Obama will certainly be free to make fewer sops to interest groups. Drew notes that

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On election night, the most perceptive of the television analysts this year, Chuck Todd, NBC’s political director, said that Obama owed his victory to no particular segment of the population, that “no one group put him over the top.” Todd added that Obama could have won without a single vote of young people, Hispanics, or blacks.

And he ran a cleaner campaign, to boot. Does this mean the end of the so-called Rove era? Drew thinks so, and she goes even further:

The 2008 election may mark the end of Rovian politics, the strategy of dividing the country over cultural issues, such as abortion; of trying to scare voters into fearing for their security if the opposition candidate won. It may also mark the end of the culture wars that had been with us since the Sixties. Obama, the first post-baby-boomer presidential candidate, made those issues irrelevant.

A bit too hopeful perhaps, though the very thought must make bipartisanship fetishists like Ronald Brownstein salivate. In the same issue Michael Tomasky, one of the more astute political observers, is more cautious:

We must consider the question of realignment in light of the current financial crisis and the structural economic problems with which the new president must grapple….Whether Democrats will still be running successfully against George W. Bush in 2028 will depend very directly, it seems to me, on how Obama and the Democrats in Congress respond to the moment. With the current world situation fraught on so many fronts, certainly President Obama will have a singular opportunity to move his party beyond its post-Vietnam image of soft incoherence and show that a less bellicose foreign policy than Bush’s…But the economy will clearly occupy the center of the stage.

And we here in the literary corner can certainly second Joan Didion, celebrating the fact that

For the first time in the memory of most of us a major political party was moving in the direction of nominating a demonstrably superior candidate – a genuinely literate man in a culture that does not prize literacy, an actually cosmopolitan man in an arena that deems tolerance of the world suspect by definition.

We make no endorsements (though turn here for an OLM primer on Obama), but we heartily second the idea of a President that reads for pleasure.

Ah, the interweavings of synergy! No sooner do I note how every Tom, Dick, and Harriet in the land at some point feels compelled to write Tudor fiction than the latest New York Review of Books appears, in which novelist and critic Hilary Mantel provides an excerpt from, you guessed it, her upcoming Tudor novel!

Her focus is Henry VIII’s scheming henchman Thomas Cromwell, whom she follows throughout the course of his murky background, right up to the pinnacle of his career, as the crowbar Henry used to pry England from the Catholic Church, no matter who is destroyed in the process. The book will be called Wolf Hall, and if this excerpt is any indication, it may well be the best piece of Tudor fiction in recent memory.

Mantel is bold, that at least can be said with certainty. The finest Tudor confection of the 20th century, Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, features one indelible scene after another, including a tense, danger-haunted interview in which an exhausted prisoner Thomas More crosses rhetorical swords with Lord Norfolk, Archbishop Cranmer, and Mantel’s subject, the bulldog Cromwell. The words snap on the page:

Cromwell (quickly): You do have objections to the Act?

Norfolk (happily): Well, we know that, Cromwell!

More: You don’t, my lord. You may suppose I have objections. All you know is that I will not swear to it. From shear delight to give you trouble it might be.

Norfolk: Is it material why you won’t?

More: It’s most material. For refusing to swear, my goods are forfeit and I am condemned to life imprisonment. You cannot lawfully harm me further. But if you were right in supposing I had reasons for refusing and right again in supposing my reasons to be treasonable, the law would let you cut off my head.

Norfolk (he has followed with some difficulty): Oh yes.

Cromwell (an admiring murmur): Oh, well done, Sir Thomas. I’ve been trying to make that clear to His Grace for some time.

It takes a writer of singular confidence – or foolhardiness – to plop her own fiction squarely down in that same conference room, to imagine that same interview in full knowledge not only of Bolt’s magisterial words but of the subsequent brilliant performances given by Leo McKern and Paul Scofield in the play’s movie adaptation. Yet Mantel in this excerpt does exactly that, and damn if she doesn’t do herself proud. The scene seethes with life, and the dialogue is the best Mantel has ever written. Take, for instance, her Cromwell’s aria of contempt for More’s refusal to knuckle under to the king’s will – it’s just note-perfect:

Cromwell swears under his breath, turns from the window: “We know his reasons. All Europe knows them. He is against the divorce. He does not believe the King can be head of the Church. But will he say that? Not he. I know him. Do you know what I hate? I hate to be part of this play, which is entirely devised by him. I hate the time it will take that could be better spent, I hate it that minds could be better employed, I hate to see our lives going by, because depend on it, we will all be feeling our age before this pageant is played out. And what I hate most of all is that Master More sits in the audience and sniggers when I trip over my lines, for he has written all the parts. And written them these many years.”

It almost succeeds in dethroning the blessed Saint Thomas, doesn’t it? And the rest of the excerpt is equally assured, and another excerpt is promised. Mantel has obviously caught the peculiar bug I was attempting to diagnose this month in “A Year with the Tudors” – the bug that causes so many Tudor fiction practitioners to up their game considerably. Even this brief passage is yards better fiction than anything Mantel has yet written, and who knows how much better the whole of Wolf Hall will be. I’m sorry it’ll appear after my “Year with the Tudors” has come to a close, but I’ll be reading it eagerly and no doubt presenting my findings when the time comes. In any case, it’s happy and instructive to see the burly river of Tudor fiction surging onward, ever onward!

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Peter Fritzsche, author of Life and Death in the Third Reich, may have had a moment, reading Richard Evans’ review of his book in the current New York Review of Books Warriors of Virtue dvdrip

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, where his spirits lifted and he began to smile. After all, Evans begins his review by writing that Fritzsche “writes with his customary flair and verve, and packs an enormous amount into a relatively short volume.” Evans goes on to call the book “immensely readable and intelligent,” and Fritzsche might have felt pretty secure at that point.

Alas, such security proves to be as fleeting as that of 1938 Poland.

Evans invokes the “voluntarist return” school of Nazi historians that tends to minimize the complicity of the ordinary German on the street in the crimes of the ruling regime – invokes it only to damn it and Fritzsche just about as thoroughly as he’s likely to get damned in the popular press, for short-sightedness and a willful soft-pedaling of the facts. It’s a sobering sight:

Thus for example Fritzsche alludes, like other exponents of the “voluntarist return,” to the fact that only three thousand or so prisoners remained in concentration camps by the mid-1930s . But like them he fails to realize that a major reason for the low number was the fact that the task of repression had been taken over by the regular courts and judicial system, which had put more than 23,000 political prisoners behind bars in Germany’s state prisons and penitentiaries by this time.

Blood on Satan’s Claw trailer Fritzsche can at least be grateful to our own Steve Donoghue, who in his much shorter review of Life and Death in the Third Reich stopped where Evans was only getting warmed up, with the generous praise of a powerful, intelligent work. It’s Fritzsche’s slight misfortune (it could have been worse, after all – they could have ignored him) that the NYRB chose to enlist the greatest living Nazi historian to examine his work; that’s an exam few indeed could pass unscathed.

Other highlights of this issue include a stimulating (though mostly wrong) essay by Christopher Benfey on the poetry of Herman Melville, another rock-solid entry from the always-trenchant American Revolution historian Edmund S. Morgan, and an amiable piece by John Updike on those two Boston painting prodigies, John Singleton Copley and Winslow Homer, to which only one or two small corrections might be added, foremost that when Copley painted Samuel Adams in 1772, he was hardly a “rising firebrand” anymore. Edmund White on Marguerite Duras is also a hoot, just about the most polite

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