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Mary Tyler Moore and Ted Knight meet with Walter Cronkite as he makes an appearance at the "Mary Tyler Moore Show" in 1974.
Just in time for the weekend, here’s a little list of some of the things I’ve been listening to and reading this week, some of it online — Storyboard included, natch — and some of it on vinyl or actual ink and paper.
Two of my biggest loves are narrative journalism and music, and I’m lucky that my days are filled with both. When reading stories, I get inspired by songs I think fit the article’s theme — a soundtrack. To start out, here are a couple of this week’s Storyboard articles, and their soundtracks:
Annotation Tuesday! Chris Hamby and “The Court that Rules the World.” In this week that George Orwell’s “1984” hit the bestseller charts 68 years after it was published, it seemed apt to run an annotation about this story that “reads like dystopian fiction.” In reporting stories like this one, about a global “super court” that most have never heard of, Chris Hamby says: “When I see an area that interests me and there’s some strange terminology that has the ring of an Orwellian term, that sets off red flags with me, and I try to figure out what that is. I would encourage people not to be intimidated. It’s also not as intimidating as it seems a lot of times. When you actually look into it, it’s just people in this little clique assigning a fancy term to a common-sense notion that we all understand.”
The soundtrack: “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” by Tears for Fears. Yes, this is the sound of the ’80s. (Too bad it wasn’t released in 1984. It came out a year later instead.) This is a totally unhip band, but I’ll always have a soft spot for “Shout.”
One Great Sentence:
“A big pair of garden shears sat on the counter, as foreboding as Chekhov’s gun on the mantel.”
By Christopher Solomon, “The Detective of Northern Oddities,” Outside magazine. Click here to read why we think it’s great.
Henry David Thoreau, the original slacker?
5 Questions: Julie Beck and “When Are You Really an Adult?” One of the best things about our series “Tomorrow’s journalists exploring the masters of today” is the different perspectives they offer. For instance, I hadn’t read this Atlantic piece, probably because I haven’t been on that cusp of adulthood for longer than I care to think about. In the piece, Beck explains why she led with a slacker (named Henry David Thoreau): “I think a lot of the articles about adulthood that have been written recently are about how people are taking longer to become adults and that today’s young people are so aimless…. One of the main points of the piece is that this sort of stumbling path to adulthood is not an anomaly; it’s very common in the grand scheme of the history of our country.”
The soundtrack: “Welcome to Your Life,” by Grouplove. Such a perfect-pop chorus: “Welcome to your life/It could be your fantasy/Welcome to your world/Let it be your fantasy.”
What I’m reading online: “Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich.” This New Yorker story by Evan Osnos has it all: a timely topic in this moment of dystopian dread; characters you love to hate; surreal scenes at a “Survival Condo Project”; and, best of all, the most amazing quotes. Here’s one of my favorites: “All these dudes think that one guy alone could somehow withstand the roving mob. No, you’re going to need to form a local militia. You just need so many things to actually ride out the apocalypse.” Oh, and this one too: “I don’t have guns, but I have a lot of other weaponry. I took classes in archery.”
“For female journalists, Mary Tyler Moore showed us the life we wanted.” My all-time favorite television show is “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” Ditto for the theme song. (Love this cover by Husker Du.) Her death Wednesday shook me almost as much as David Bowie’s, another touchstone in my life. In The Washington Post, the reliably great Margaret Sullivan writes, “A generation of journalists credits The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein for drawing them into the news business. I’m in that number. But maybe just as important, if far less credited, was Mary Tyler Moore.” Amen. And RIP.
What’s on my bedside table: Those of us who have experienced the loss of a spouse are always seeking out writers who can somehow articulate that loss. Someone we can read and go, yes, that is exactly what I felt. For many, Joan Didion did that with “The Year of Magical Thinking.” For me, it was Julian Barnes and “Levels of Life.” For many others, it is “The Light of the World,” by the poet Elizabeth Alexander. She writes: “I could not have kept Ficre’s death from happening, and from happening to us. It happened; it is part of who we are; it is our beauty and our terror. We must be gleaners from what life has set before us.”
What’s on my turntable: Although I spend most of my time listening to music on Spotify, sometimes I want to hear the needle touching down on vinyl. This week’s vinyl: “Stan Getz & Bill Evans.” I’m very cheap when it comes to buying vinyl. For vintage, a few dollars is usually my limit. And for new, I buy only the few I just can’t do without. But I made an exception for this album, which has three amazing things going for it: 1) Bill Evans, my favorite pianist. 2) Stan Getz, his musical soulmate. 3) a classic Verve cover.
If you want to chat about storytelling (or music), you can reach me at editor@niemanstoryboard.org. Or you can find me at @karihow on Twitter. Oh, and this column is now going direct to your inbox in newsletter form! Sign up here.