Sublime

“My notebook is the microbial fungus of ideas and images I draw on when I’m writing,” he said when we first spoke.

In May 1941, Arthur Hays Sulzberger had spoken words to affirm that he and the American journalism establishment could not “turn our heads away from those who suffer.” He spoke of a need to confront the horrors of other people’s suffering in order to keep alive “spiritual values” to be once again embraced “when all this nightmare is over.” And yet,

The New York Times was built with a very different standard in mind than the one embraced by the creators of The 1619 Project, who look at truth as a malleable substance, a “construct,”

But despite the epic nature of the story and the prominent identity of its author, the New York Times decided to downplay—one more time—the story of the Holocaust and placed the story on page twelve.

In light of how Sulzberger’s newspaper covered the Holocaust, sweeping stories of the deaths of 1,000,000 of his own people under the rug of mundane stories like tests on coal and the deaths of individual Icelanders, the statement is devastatingly hypocritical.

the journalistic errors examined in this book—the misreporting, fabrications, and distortions—were never the product of simple error. Nor were they solely the result of rogue reporters who took their journalistic fates into their own hands. Rather, they were the byproduct of a particular kind of system, a truth-producing machine that though built t

its part, the New York Times seemed equally aware of this debt of gratitude—even if it was less than eager to share this fact. An article that appeared in the Times on April 22, 1959 reported that a meeting had indeed taken place between Castro and Times management. But it left out one important detail: the newly installed ruler of Cuba had “profus

the notebooks do provide a pretty good snapshot of a creative brain moving very fast, while serving as an instrument of grounding and refinement.