“If you are counting full-time critic jobs at newspapers, you may as well count tombstones.” That was the response of Johanna Keller, director of the Goldring Arts Journalism Program at Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, to a Nieman Reports query about the number of professional critics employed at dailies around the country. The figures on newspaper critics (News flash: they're not good) are one indication of the state of criticism today, but they are not the only one. Read more … Read more
The stench seeps through the walls of the morgue. It wafts through schools, businesses and homes, impregnates clothing, sticks in throats and noses, provokes nausea, obliges one to walk faster. In the white building where the smell originates there are … Read more
For more than 30 years, author Barbara Ehrenreich has been trying to engage and enrage the public about the devastating impact of poverty in the United States. She’s had some success—2001’s “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in … Read more
Rock criticism was not a profession, much less an art, when Robert Christgau returned to New York after graduating from Dartmouth College in 1962, at the age of 20. The son of a Queens fireman would go on to … Read more
Brett Anderson: We’re here with Robert Christgau, the dean of American rock critics. Robert Christgau: Got it right. Brett: …who has been writing about popular music professionally for closing in on 50 years. Is that accurate? Robert: No, … Read more
In his State of the Union speech, President Barack Obama stated that, in the Middle East, the United States "will stand with citizens as they demand their universal rights and support stable transitions to democracy." He said that the process … Read more
They died the same weekend, one 26, a prodigy of the Internet age who took his own life, the other an 89-year-old whose moral battles were waged on newsprint and whose final assignment was editing the Old Testament. It is … Read more