Tag: Steve Coll

Best Books of 2024

On By chrisbarsantiIn BooksLeave a comment

The year-end best books of 2024 feature just launched from PopMatters. I contributed the introduction and a few selections of my own:

Industry consolidation or not, publishers of all sizes and tastes kept publishing more fascinating books than anybody could come close to reading in a year. However, the indomitable critics here at PopMatters did our level best throughout 2024 to keep up. As usual, we paid special attention to the exhilarating number of books on music that came our way. Questlove just keeps knocking out books along with 50 quintillion other projects (is that workaholism or just passion?). There were also new volumes on R.E.M., the black roots of country, Jesus and Mary Chain, 2 Tone Records, Beatlemania, and more. Here and there, generalists that we are, we dipped into a broad range of nonfictional reading, from Greil Marcus on creativity to Steve Coll on why the Iraq War happened…

Nota Bene: What They Have Done Right

On By chrisbarsantiIn Nota Bene, WritingLeave a comment

As a riposte to all the post-Mueller hand-wringing about “the media” (some justified, most not a bit), Steve Coll provides in the current New Yorker a handy reminder of what it is that journalists do all day and how it impacts real life:

  • “While covering the Administration’s “zero tolerance” policy of removing immigrant kids from their parents, Ginger Thompson, of ProPublica, obtained and released a recording of young children crying in a holding facility. Her work provoked a public outcry, and the Administration reversed its policy.”
  • “Reporting by the Indianapolis Star helped bring to justice the child molester Larry Nassar, of USA Gymnastics.”
  • “A series of stories in the Baton Rouge Advocate found that a Jim Crow-era law, which allowed defendants accused of felonies such as murder to be convicted by a split-jury verdict, fostered racism and mass incarceration. Louisiana’s Republican-led state legislature approved a referendum to reconsider the law, and, in November, voters chose to require unanimous verdicts in trials involving felonies.”