Last year the Chicago-based Poetry Foundation received an extraordinary donation: $100 million over the next 30 years from pharmaceutical heiress and philanthropist Ruth Lilly. The gift is perhaps the largest literary endowment in history, and the fact that it was aimed at poetry, a notoriously underfunded art, left the foundation’s executives a bit flummoxed. They immediately changed their name from the Modern Poetry Association, but it was clear that more radical changes would be necessary to create a innovative home for American poetry. In order to manage all that money and still retain the artistic integrity of the company, which publishes the tiny but prestigious Poetry magazine, they needed someone well-versed in the currency of both money and meter.

John Barr, who was named president of the Poetry Foundation early last month, seems a perfect match. Over the past three decades, Barr has pursued parallel careers as an investment banker and a poet. The founder of the successful public-utilities firm SG Barr Devlin and the author of six collections of lyric, long-form poetry, Barr has won acclaim as a financial expert and a gifted wordsmith, and he has etched out a career similar to fellow businessman-poets Wallace Stevens and T.S. Eliot. Barr, his speech occasionally laced with similes and metaphors, recently spoke to mediabistro.com about his new job, his unlikely career path, and the current state of American poetry.

Birthdate: January 28, 1943
Hometown: Born in Omaha, Nebraska; grew up in Lisle, Illinois.
First section of the Sunday Times: Book Review

So the news, of course, is that you were recently chosen to be the new president of the Poetry Foundation. How did this come about? Why do you think they chose you?
I think they were looking for somebody who had enough business experience to manage the responsibility of a very large endowment that, in effect, came out of nowhere. The 30 years or so I spent on Wall Street probably gave me the experience that they were looking for. The second part was that they wanted somebody that was passionately interested in poetry and knew something about the poetry world. And, I’ve served a lot of years on not-for-profit organizations. For five years, I was president of the Poetry Society of America. I have served and continue to serve on the board of Yaddo, which is one of the oldest artists’ colonies in the country. I’ve also been on the board of Bennington College for almost 20 years, and chairman of the board for 12 years. So that gave me a window into the arts world from a number of different points of view. Not only that, I’ve got a life as a writer, and that was important to them.

What do you see happening with the endowment?
Our objective will be to discover some of the greater unmet or undermet needs of poetry in America. We’ll develop programs either on our own or in conjunction with other organizations in the poetry world to meet those needs. One example is audience development. We want to get people who are not currently poetry readers—they might be commuters, travelers in hotel rooms who would love to see an anthology at night, airplane travelers, people outside of the traditional home for poetry, the academic world—in touch with good poetry, and grow that audience and see more poets selling more books. That’s one example. There are other ideas that we’re kicking around.

You’ve had this fascinating career: You’ve been an investment banker, you’ve been a poet, and you’ve also been a teacher at Sarah Lawrence College. How did you get to this point? Walk me through your career.
I’ve been in the business world for over 30 years—on Wall Street, but not as a stockbroker. I was 18 years at Morgan Stanley, a wonderful firm, but the firm went public in the mid-1980s and a few years later I retired. I wanted to be part of something smaller and more intimate, just because I love small companies and the special kind of relationship they can have with clients. So I started my own firm, called Barr Devlin—Hugh Devlin was my partner and friend of many years on Wall Street and at Morgan Stanley—and we just kept doing what we had been doing.

I ran the public-utility group at MS for 10 years, and the business of our new shop was to provide advice to public utilities around the country. We caught the wave of all of the utility mergers that occurred in the 1990s—better lucky than smart, I guess. We had no idea that all that was going to happen when we started the shop in 1990. We were fortunate to be the investment banker of record on a lot of the largest utility mergers in the 1990s. We were acquired by Societe Generale in 1998, and we became a part of that global organization, which enabled us to take our specialties overseas. We continue as a part of their organization—we’re still based in New York, and I still carry titles there—but I have some wonderful younger partners who run the business day-to-day.

How did you pursue a business career at the same time you were writing and publishing poetry? What was your day like? Did you write in the morning? Take summers?

It tended to be concurrent—on airplanes, in hotel rooms, in the back of a taxicab. If I was very actively involved in a book, sometimes I’d wake up at three or four in the morning. I find that’s a wonderful time to write, because when you wake up, the sounds that have come through your head as conversation and noise have all abated from the night before. To me, the quality of sound or silence at 3 a.m. is like new snow with no footprints on it. The ear is more attuned and you can do the sound work of writing a poem very well early in the morning. I tend to keep journals and 3-by-5 cards, and I write lines on the edges of train schedules and whatever I can. So my method of writing is like other poets that I know. I would tend to write lines wherever I was, and then periodically transfer those in the journals. At this point, I probably have 5,000 pages of journals that are the raw material for a lot of what I write.

I think that very often, poets who have these left-brain day jobs tend to inform their art with the details of them. William Carlos Williams certainly had a lot of poems that meditated on hospitals and sickness. Do you find that happening in your poetry at all?
That’s a good question. It took a long time for my business-world experience to come into my poems in an explicit way. I think everything a poet does comes into the work implicitly. But the book that came out in 1999, called Grace, actually had a section in it that was a parody of a typical New York businessman. The protagonist speaking in the book is a black Caribbean gardener who has been tried unjustly for a crime he witnessed but did not commit. While he’s awaiting execution, he’s got a cellmate, and the cellmate is a halfwit. This fellow is explaining the world as he sees it, including New York, to his cellmate, and it’s my opportunity to take a fresh look at everything I wanted to talk about when I was approaching the age of 50.

Former U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins has been quoted saying that he gets two conflicting questions all the time: How do you account for the poetry renaissance in America right now, and, why does no one read poetry anymore? Which do you think is the more accurate perception?
Oh, he is a master at capturing issues like that. That’s a wonderful way to put it. Here’s my take on it: A decade ago, there was a debate going on in the intellectual press and the poetry community. One point of view was that nobody that writes poetry sells any books. The other point of view is that we’ve got this growing number of poetry readings and they occasionally sell out big auditoriums. So which is it? Is poetry, in fact, enjoying a renaissance or is it the black art that it has been in the past? My own view is that that’s the wrong question.

Poetry needs to get in touch with the audiences of its time. The golden age of any art is when that art is in touch with the general audience of its time. Think of the drama in Shakespeare’s day, think of the novel in the 20th century, and think of the movie today. It’s where people go because they want to see the art, not because they’re supposed to. They’re drawn to it. The art happens at the same time as the entertainment in the art.

And I think poetry for the last 10 or 15 years has been succeeding in reaching out to the general public. You have a handful of poets—I’m thinking of Billy, I’m thinking of Mary Oliver, I’m thinking of Seamus Heaney—who, I don’t know what their book sales are, but I’ve got to believe that it’s real money, that they are at or approaching that point where a poet can actually support himself or herself through book sales, and the reason for that is they are writing in ways that the audience finds such deep sustenance that they will buy the book.

You mention those contemporary poets, and I know that Poetry magazine published the first poems of Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens. Is there anyone who’s been published lately who has the chops to be considered in the same breath with those names?
I think that if I had been a subscriber to Poetry magazine in 1912, when it was founded, and when Harriet Monroe picked poems by the unknown poets, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and others, I would not have understood them, and I wouldn’t have known that they were to become known, a century later, as the great modern poets. I am a little bit humble about recognizing the next great talent when it shows up. I do think that poetry today is doing two things very well. The first thing it’s doing is writing well in a tradition that has existed for hundreds of years that I would call the poetry of the rational or the didactic, where you can read the poem and actually parse it—poems you can read and go from A to B to C. Among those poets today I would put Seamus Heaney, Galway Kinnell, and many others.

But that’s only one thing that I think is being done well in American poetry today. The other thing that’s going on is that other poets are pushing the envelope on what poetry can be. You cannot read a language poem and do what I just said about the first category. You cannot parse it and say, “This poem is about a man walking alone under a full moon.” It’s about something else. I think the surrealist poets, James Tate and others, often with great humor, are denying us the ability to read it as a rational line of discussion on purpose and are in fact trying to wake us up and push us in other directions. Poetry’s being used as an element of exploration as well as communication and I think that’s great. I think that both of those things have not always happened at the same time in the history of English and American poetry.

As long as we are on this literary bent, I’m going to remind you of that quote from Fitzgerald, where he talks about how difficult it is to hold two opposed ideas in your mind and still retain the ability to function. In light of your career choices, what do you think that says about you?
That my left and my right brain fused at birth? The way I think of what a businessman does as opposed to what a poet does is as follows: A businessperson, what they care about is making something happen, making something better in a world of external activities and affairs. That could be making a merger happen, selling a new product, or building a plant. A businessperson is trying to make sense of things in the external world, that’s where things get settled. The business of the poet is to make sense of things in the internal world. For a poet, nothing has happened unless they’ve made sense of that in the context of a poem. They’re different arenas, but they both have the same end. I view a businessperson and a poet as a response of the self to the chaotic universe. It’s a way to establish order in a disorderly universe. That’s where I think the two converge.

Tali and Ophira Edut—better known as The Astrotwins—have been dishing up astrological advice since long before their current gig as astrologers for Teen People and AOL’s Teen Channel. Identical twins and Sagittarians, the Detroit-born duo started their, er, meteoric rise when they created the multicultural women’s magazine Hues while still undergraduates at the University of Michigan. Taking a women’s-studies class project and turning it into a national magazine, the pair proved their editorial skills early on; they’ve since passed through roles at Sassy and Ms., and they edited the book Body Outlaws: Young Women Write About Body Image and Identity.

Their latest book, AstroStyle: Star-Studded Advice for Love, Life and Looking Good, has further branded them as the astrological go-to girls, landing them TV appearances everywhere from MTV’s Total Request Live to the Fox News Channel. They’ve dished out personal readings to Jessica Simpson, Beyonce, Sting, and Paris Hilton (can you imagine what hers predicted?), among a host of other celebrities, and they’ve done it all before the age of 31. The self-branding pros have also formed their own consulting and design company, Mediarology, specializing in youth, multicultural, and women’s media. The fast-track twins spoke to mediabistro.com from their home in Manhattan, finishing each other’s sentences on branding, the teen market, and making the zodiac work for you.

Hometown: Detroit
Birthdate: December 2, 1972
First section of the Sunday Times? “The fun stuff. Sunday Styles, the magazine,” says Ophira. “We’ve fought over a crossword or two in our day,” adds Tali.

You both went to art school, so how did the interest in journalism come about?

Ophira: We were always into both writing and art. Publishing brings both design and writing together in a way that really appeals to us.

Tali: And it’s supposedly one of the best careers for our sign, Sagittarius.

How did you get into astrology?

Ophira: About 10 years ago, a co-worker gave me some chart-making software, and we started doing all of our friends’ charts. We began to notice trends and patterns, and we couldn’t believe how accurate the readings were. It was straight-up addiction from there.

Tali: We would watch TV shows and have to find out every actor’s sign. We literally know hundreds of celebrities’ signs by heart now. It’s a sickness.

How did the gig at Teen People come about? Was it something you’d ever considered before it was offered, or was it just something you did on the side for fun?

Ophira: An old coworker ended up as a Teen People editor, and she remembered my astrology obsession from our time working together at Ms. She told us Teen People was looking for new astrologers.

Tali: The editor-in-chief had about 20 framed Teen People covers in her office. At our interview, we named the sign of every celebrity on them. That pretty much convinced them that we could do the job.

You’ve really made your name in the teen market, but I’ve read pieces by you in the past that are much racier. Have you run into problems with trying to keep things tame enough for the audience that feeds you and fulfilling your desire to express your more “adult” side?

Tali: We don’t censor ourselves when we write for older audiences.

Ophira: No problems keeping it tame for the teens. Astrology is just a different package for giving the same advice we might say in blunter terms to the grown folks.

With reading Musiq’s birth chart on BET.com and reading the stars for celebs at the Billboard music awards, you two have become sort of the astrologers to the stars—pardon the pun. How do you like working with celebrities?

Tali: It’s quite the dream, we must admit. We’re pop-culture junkies, and it was a blast advising people like Beyonce, OutKast, and Jessica Simpson on what they should do in 2004.

Ophira: Being able to influence the influencers—love that! We also got to give political year-ahead predictions on Fox News this New Year‘s Eve. We speculated on the fates of Saddam and Dubya. We’ll see if our predictions come true.

Yeah, you guys have very successfully branded yourselves as astrological experts. How much of this brand was your idea, versus what Teen People planned? And how important do you think branding has been to your success?

Ophira: Branding is essential. There are so many concepts in the market today, you’ve got to anchor yours to a big vision with lots of “tentacles” and manifestations. To make money off of an idea, you can’t just have a vague concept; you have to imagine all the ways something can be turned into a tangible product or different form of media.

Tali: We’ve been able to begin branding ourselves as the Astrotwins, since the book is something we wrote on our own. Teen People has been very supportive of everything we do outside of the column.

How did the latest book idea emerge? And how do you go about figuring out who does what—writing, editing, et cetera?

Ophira: A friend—love those friends!—was working at a literary agency and suggested that we write a teen astrology book.

Tali: Fortunately, Ophi prefers writing about relationships, and I like to cover style and individual horoscopes. We divided up the book just like that.

So once you had the idea, how did you go about landing a book deal? What’s the best advice you can give aspiring authors?

Ophira: The publishing industry is almost like the stock market—everyone’s following a trend or a hot lead, but interest cools quickly. There are no guarantees that you’ll get a deal, even after spending months writing a book proposal—and we know this from several of our own experiences. Study the market, and tie your idea to as many big news stories as you can. Even if an agent or editor loves your idea, the marketing and sales departments always seem to have the last say. And it always comes down to numbers.

Tali: Also, writers get very attached to their ideas, and the way they think their book should be written. Definitely protect your artistic integrity, but be flexible and open to input, too. Writing is a business as much as it is an art, so if you want to make a living at it, you may have to let go of a little control.

In the end, unless you’re a megastar like John Grisham, you as the writer have to be the marketing force behind a book. You have to think of creative ways to get the word out there. Build a website, hold a reading series, lead a seminar—generate some buzz or hype or credentials for yourself first.

Ophira: Always make them think you’re bigger than you actually are.

Do you follow your own astrological advice? Is it a battle to not write yourself a great horoscope every time?

Ophira: Of course we’d love to have a great horoscope every day, but it doesn’t work like that.

Tali: We look at the movement of the planets every day and the energy their motions bring up. There’s always a range of both positive and negative possible outcomes. That’s what we base our advice on.

A study was published a few months ago disproving, supposedly once and for all, astrology. Does that affect you?

Tali: Hell, no. There will always be skeptics, and we welcome them. We don’t have hard-and-fast scientific evidence that astrology works. But it has for us.

Ophira: Anyway, science doesn’t account for things like intuition and spirituality. There’s a great guy named Bob Marks on Manhattan cable access, a former chemistry professor who set out to disprove astrology and ended up becoming a full-time professional astrologer.

Working as a team, how do you collaborate? Do you work on each horoscope together or split them up?

Tali: We split up the work.

Ophira: It would take too long otherwise!

Do you ever disagree? And how do you handle it when you do?

Tali: Definitely. It’s fun.

Ophira: One of us threatens to kick the other’s ass into the next galaxy, and the winner gets to determine the day’s horoscope. Just kidding.

Has your career affected your personal lives? Are friends constantly hitting you up for astrological advice?

Tali: Our career is pretty much an extension of our personal lives now. We’re constantly giving astrology advice to friends—we’ve joked about opening a 900 number hotline.

Ophira: We compulsively try to guess people’s signs within a couple minutes of meeting them. Sometimes we’re dead-on, and it freaks them out.

Kelly Nicole Lee, a true-to-form Aries, is a fashion editor, horoscope writer, and handbag designer living in Detroit. You can learn more about the Astrotwins at their website, and you can buy AstroStyle at Amazon.com.

These days, when bolder, brasher headlines spill across magazine covers in a split-second strugglbe to capture our Schadenfreude-tinted fancy, it’s rare that a picture catches the public’s eye the way the low-angled “crotch shot” of Bill Clinton did back in December 2000, when it appeared on the cover of Esquire. The photographer behind that notorious shot—the British-born and mono-monikered Platon—was granted only a few minutes with the then-president, in which he covered his assignment bases and then boldly asked: “Mr. President, can you show me the love?” The photograph was immediately dissected and discussed by Larry King, Bob Woodward, and a host of other media pundits and scribes. The reaction the photo received, Platon says, “said more about the media than it did about me and Clinton. It was a contemporary portrait of a contemporary president. I wasn’t going to photograph him as a stuffy old guy who doesn’t relate to the young people.”

That playful attitude towards politics was primarily shaped by John F. Kennedy Jr.—who originally lured Platon to the United States to work on the now-defunct George—and it is stamped all over his forthcoming photography collection, Platon’s Republic, due out in April from Phaidon Press. [CORRECTION: The book is now expected in June.] Part personal scrapbook, part cultural documentary, the book features the best of Platon’s work, including, of course, the infamous Clinton portrait. Platon recently met with mb at his studio in lower Manhattan to discuss the culture of celebrity, the architecture of people, and the loneliness of the portrait photographer.

Birthdate: 1968
Hometown: London, England

Here in the studio, your book is spread out, taped up, on the wall. You have Al Pacino here and Manchester United there and George W. over there. Tell me about the arrangement you’ve created.
I call it channel surfing through contemporary culture. In America, there are so many channels and they’re so terrible. One minute you have Pamela Anderson gossip, the next something on September 11th, the next you have the president, but it’s all leveled out and one thing doesn’t get more attention than the other. So this book is, as an Englishman in America, my experience of that, my regurgitation of that. I wanted to recreate that same feeling, that one isn’t more important than the other. It’s all mixed up because that’s what it’s like.

In a sense, are you asking readers to read the book as a story rather than looking at it as individual photos?
It’s the way I saw the world, but I didn’t want it to be shoved in your face as a statement. I wanted it to have a random quality, but once in a while I have built a little sequence of stories that, if someone’s interested, they can read through. At the end of the book, there’s this huge section of my memories of each shoot, what the people are like, and sometimes the sequence is explained. For instance, you have two mayors, Mayor Giuliani and Mayor Bloomberg, contrasting against each other and then the next page is Billy’s Topless, a bar that Giuliani’s administration shut down. So it’s both extremes of Manhattan.

I wanted to show what it’s like to meet these people, what happens behind the scene. Like when you meet the President, what does it feel like? What’s it like to come into contact with the sense of power, what do they talk about with their aides? What are the fashion people like, the neo-Nazi skinheads I spent a week with in North Carolina? I’ve photographed Giuliani about four times, so I’ve gotten to know him now. But when I was just beginning, I had no experience with someone very powerful. I remember he came out the first time with this huge grin on his face—his media grin—and I made the mistake of saying, “Mr. Mayor, are you sure you want to keep this grin? I think you’d look a lot more dignified if you looked a bit more serious.” And he snapped back at me really quickly and said, “Listen, sonny, this is the way I am, this is me.” So I shot him and then I realized that this is him, and it’s wrong of me to push him into something he doesn’t want to be. And the photo turned out to be very Giuliani.

The shot of Mayor Bloomberg, on the other hand, is of him yawning. He was uninterested in the shot and he was yawning all the way through it. I caught him yawning by accident, but that’s what he was like on that day. He’s not really interested in the media; he’s interested in getting his job done. He’s a businessman, he’s not a showbiz personality. By putting him opposite Giuliani, it says a lot about the times we’re in and it shows the differences in their personalities.

In an interview with Texas Monthly, you said, “As soon as you put people in a clinical environment, in a studio with one light and a white background, they tend to become very conservative.”
They do. It’s like going to the dentist. You sit there and there’s this camera pointed in your face. People are at their best when they can be natural. And that’s the hardest thing as a photographer. It’s nothing really special, it’s not important in terms of world events, but it is a big challenge to get the magic of someone. Normally there’s this wall, so it’s my job to break it down. I try to push that, but only where the person’s prepared to play back.
Some people are very playful, like Paul Smith. That shot was inspired by Yves Klein, who used to get his subjects to press their bodies up against the canvas, to get the subjects to make direct contact with the art. I wanted to break down the barrier between me and the sitter, so I got Paul Smith to hold onto the edge of the camera lens, so we’re connecting physically.

In more difficult photos, like the ones of neo-Nazis, why would you put yourself in a potentially dangerous situation like that?
I owe a huge debt to John F. Kennedy Jr. for that. When I graduated from college, I was working for gritty magazines with no budget and we were reacting against the gloss of the American photographers, where everything was very glamorous and everything was perfectly retouched. Growing up in London, it was always raining, we were very poor, we never saw any celebrities. So I started shooting that way, and I became punchier with portraits. And Kennedy had this vision to show politics and media in a different way. He wanted to make it accessible, entertaining, less stuffy, less elitist—much more gritty and in your face.

Do you think George was a successful magazine in its day?
I don’t think it was always successful. The magazine was criticized a lot and it wasn’t always a creatively successful magazine, but it was an unusual one. It had a message that it’s not just politics as usual. There are not many magazines that are playful with politics, there’s a void there.

As a photographer, it was an amazing magazine. It gave me commissions that you very rarely get now. The first job I did was one where they sent me on a whirlwind tour around America documenting the 20 most fascinating men in America. I photographed Larry King, Mayor Giuliani, Marilyn Manson, and, because I was working for John, I got instant access. It was like a passport to the heart of American culture. As a young English guy, I was ignorant to a lot of it, so it was a great education.

Do you see any change in recent years in how the public views photography as the world becomes, arguably, more visual?
Well, they’re confronted with more. There are so many magazines now it’s overkill. It almost doesn’t matter what magazine you read. They all put out the same information. The same celebrity is blitzed on five different covers every month. So you essentially buy one magazine and there’s no reason to read the other four. I think we’re all getting a bit punch drunk. The more you’re bombarded with something, the less it means. There’s so much pressure on art directors to put so much information down that a sense of good design has changed. It’s more about practical design—how much information can you fit on the cover. It’s not so much about whether the cover is a work of art. It’s about have you gotten as many cover lines as possible. Now, in magazines, I have to compete with so many headlines. And that’s fine, I’m very aware that it’s not going on a gallery wall, it’s serving a practical purpose. In the book, I had a chance to go back to that and to let the photography breathe.

Some of your photographs seem more like iconic symbols of the subject than like portraits, particularly the ones of George H.W. Bush and Clinton.
It’s very intimidating to be photographed, but if I kneel down and chat with you, so you’re looking down at me, it makes you feel less threatened. My father is an architect, so I often think like a designer or an architect. I remember when I was admiring buildings, I would look up at them and see this perspective and this awesome power of the monument in front of me. I guess it’s natural to see these icons in the same way, the architecture of people.

Do art directors try to influence you, to make the portrait fit with their aesthetic or to make this or that person look like a celebrity?
I’ve reached a point where they know my work, so they know they’re going to get a Platon photo. I understand the magazine wants some guarantee that it ‘s going to look a little bit like this or that. But to be honest, it’s very difficult to go in with a preconceived idea. My best pictures are the ones where I had no idea it would look like this—just some magical moment where we were reacting against each other or with each other and we reached some middle ground. It’s very difficult to control it without it looking very staged.

Isn’t the fashion photography designed to look staged?
No. I’ve become very political with my fashion stuff, in the sense that I’m very aware of the damage the fashion industry has done to society, this idea of creating a dream that doesn’t really exist. So I’ve started creating this new set of cultural heroes. My fashion pictures are a cross-section of everyday people—deliverymen, girl skateboarders. My idea is that when you look at a fashion story, you’re presented with society’s ideal. But wouldn’t it be nice if you could look at a fashion story and say, “I know someone who looks just like that” or “I look just like that”? I can’t do very much with photography, but where I can make a difference, I really try. It’s wonderful to see some of my friends or people I’ve gotten to know in a giant 16-page story in Esquire. I’m trying to put a mirror up to society instead of holding up a picture that depresses us all.

You’re a bit of a celebrity yourself, aren’t you? Is it hard for you to reconcile that with this idea of the everyman?
I always wanted to be the underdog. For me, as a portrait photographer, it’s the kiss of death to become well known. I did my best work when no one knew who I was. People weren’t threatened by me because they didn’t think I was a big deal. This book has started to change things. But you always want to leave your ego at the door.

Is that possible?
Sure. From the first shoot I did to the shoot I did a week ago with Jude Law, there’s always this moment where it’s all down to me. The bullshit goes out the window, the glamour goes out the window, and I’ve got to deliver. I’ve got to push myself to confront this person and confront them in a very truthful way. I go to this lonely place where I pace up and down, getting my head straight, checking that I’m focused on all my technical stuff, and opening my mind to be ready for anything this person’s going to throw at me. After it’s over, then the bullshit comes back and you can brag about it. But at the time, there’s no room for that and [my subjects] would pick up on that. Why would they give me something, if I’m not giving anything to them? It’s quite a painful thing to face each time.

You’ve photographed so many famous, accomplished people. What kind of advice have you gotten from them?
When I was shooting Karl Rove, I said to him, “Mr. Rove, I’m just a guy from England trying to make it in America. Can you give me any advice?” and he said to me, “Sonny, if you’re shooting me, you’ve already made it.”

Chris Gage, a production editor at John Wiley & Sons, is a frequent contributor to mediabistro.com.

When Michael Bloomberg was elected New York City’s 108th mayor two years ago, one of his very first appointments—and one he was so sure of he didn’t even use a search committee to select—was his press secretary, a 28-year-old kid named Edward Skyler. Skyler is a New York City native, and he’d worked for Parks Commissioner Henry Stern and then as a press aide in Rudy Giuliani’s administration before going to work in the communications department of Bloomberg L.P. He then worked as press secretary on Bloomberg’s mayoral campaign, in 2001, before becoming the youngest press secretary in New York City’s history. He took time out recently from his usual routine of staunchly and vociferously defending the mayor from the press’s inquiries and spoke to mediabistro.com about getting his job, balancing the media’s constant quest for information with the Mayor’s desire for privacy, and his recent mash note from the New York Post.

Birthdate: April 11, 1973
Hometown: New York City
First section of the Sunday Times: Metro, then Week in Review

How did you get your start in politics? Was it always your dream to be working in City Hall?
I had interned for a city council member in high school, and when I graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, I was majoring in history and wanted to enter government. It’s hard at the entry level to find politically interesting jobs. You can get basic civil-service jobs, but I was trying to find a way to get into City Hall. The only city agency I found open was the Parks Department, this was about seven years ago, and $22,000 was my starting salary, but it was a great opportunity to see government up close. They matched me with the commissioner, and I had wanted to go to law school, but I changed my application to Fordham from day to night. The commissioner offered me the position of deputy chief of staff.

Henry Stern was famous for his nicknames. Did you get one?
Skylark was my nickname. Then I went to the press office for two years. In my last year of going to law school at night, I joined the press office for Giuliani. So after four years, I got a job in City Hall. It was rewarding to work my way into that goal. When Giuliani decided not to run for Senate, I was looking for another opportunity, and was interested in Bloomberg Media, not knowing he was going to run.

You didn’t have any idea Bloomberg would end up running for mayor?
I knew little of him at the time. Most New Yorkers not in finance didn’t know a lot about the company back then. I had some friends who heard he was going to run, but I had no idea he would run. Turns out, I got to know him and, when I heard he was going to run, joined the campaign in mid-2000.

Is it more challenging being so young in this job?
Age is a challenge, in that the press is always going to find fault with you in some way. Although the press secretary’s job is to serve as a liaison with the press and be the intermediary with the mayor, they view you more as an obstacle than as a help. I think they resent, in a sense, having to call the press secretary to get information. We try to be useful and I think we truly are and provide a lot of information to make their lives and jobs easier, but there’s always resentment from some of them, especially from some of them being around for a while, there’s a certain tension.

You say you’re a liaison, which suggests striking a balance. But New York is an aggressive media town and the mayor is extremely private; do you feel like it’s hard to balance reporters’ desire for openness with your role as protecting Bloomberg’s privacy?
Some politicians want the press to share their holiday meals with them. Mayor Bloomberg isn’t like that; when he asks for private time, he doesn’t want to share it with the media. The press demands to know where he is on a Saturday in late December with no events scheduled. It’s one thing to miss the St. Patrick’s Day parade, but a weekend day is different.

What is a typical day like for you?
I start off most days with checking my email, seeing what news has broken over night. I get into work at about 7:30 a.m., and there’s usually a senior staff meeting around 8 or 9 a.m. My job in the first couple of hours is oriented toward the press conference for the day, making sure the right remarks are there, making sure the location for the event is good. We also find out what the mayor will be asked about and make sure he’s prepared. The next stage of the day is preparing for what is happening the next day and week. The last few weeks were especially focused on the state of the city, but we also want to respond with statements from the Mayor on X, Y, and Z. It’s a juggling act.

One article I read described you as Mayor Bloomberg’s “pit bull press secretary.” Is that a fair description?
When I have to be, I am. You need to defend your boss aggressively. Press work can be quite aggressive. You have to draw the line, and when you first come into office, you have to be clear at the get-go where that line is. That may make me a target for criticism, but I’m just protecting my boss, it’s what I’m paid to do. I’m not paid to be loved by the press. I am paid to be respected. I’m not paid to be their friend.

Now that you’ve been there for two years, has it gotten any easier for you?
You get better at managing the level of stress. It’s not necessarily easier, but you get better at dealing with it. The first year is tough, there are crises and challenges. Now that we’re halfway through, we’re taking stock of our accomplishments and helping to prove that the mayor deserves the people’s vote again.

What’s next? Will you continue to work as the mayor’s press secretary through the next election?
I will stay and help him get re-elected.

Last thing: How does it feel to be one of the New York Post‘s most eligible bachelors?
I don’t have a lot of time to take advantage of that.

Melissa P. McNamara is a freelance writer living in New York.

Remember when Geraldo Rivera was thrown out of Iraq for revealing information about troop locations and movements? Journalism scolds everywhere condemned his actions, but they all did so with a repetitive sameness. One reporter whose criticism stood out was The Daily Show‘s Stephen Colbert.

The Daily Show airs on Comedy Central, of course, and it’s not a real newscast but rather an Onion-like parody of one. Colbert—one of the show’s earliest correspondents—comes from the world of comedy, not journalism. But his segment on Geraldo, “Cry Me a Rivera,” was somehow more spot-on than any other coverage of the Fox News reporter‘s snafu. Colbert didn’t just make fun of the easy-to-make-fun of Rivera; he lampooned the weirdly patriotic but simultaneously self-interested motivations of all the embedding reporters. Which is what The Daily Show does regularly: It makes jokes about the news, but it also makes pointed—if subtle—social commentaries about the news and those who cover it. The New York Times recently described the show as “taking the facts of a news story more seriously than real TV journalists sometimes do,” and, since the 2000 president election, the show’s been garnering more and more praise for its coverage and commentary—including an Emmy and a Peabody Award. Colbert spoke to mediabistro.com last week about his own transition from Second City comedian to faux-news correspondent and the show’s evolution since its creation.

Born: May 13, 1964
Hometown: Charleston, South Carolina
First section of the Sunday Times: The food column in the magazine

You started out with Second City, but I recently read that you’d briefly been on Good Morning America before you came to The Daily Show. How did that happen?
I desperately needed a job. I had been working for ABC Entertainment at The Dana Carvey Show in 1996. That show got canceled, my wife wasn’t working, and we had a baby. Someone from entertainment division recommended to the news division that if they were looking for somebody who was funny but looked really straight, for a correspondent for Good Morning America, that they should consider me. So I had a meeting with the head of ABC News—whoever it was at the time, in 1996, I wasn’t that cognizant of the news. They asked me if I could do it, I said yes, and they hired me. I did exactly two reports.

Only two?
Only one of which ever made it to air.

How did you then end up at The Daily Show?
After those two reports, I pitched 20 stories in a row that got shot down. At the same time, my agent, who also represented the executive producer of The Daily Show, Madeline Smithberg, said, “You should meet with Madeline. She’s doing this other show and I bet that they would do those stories.” And I went and met Madeline and the people at the show at the time, and they liked my ideas. They had me on for a trial basis, and for the next nine months I worked here occasionally. But it was totally a day job. I never expected to stay here because I did sketch comedy and I wrote, and I really didn’t think that this show was going to go anyplace.

That was when Craig Kilborn was the host?
He was still there. It was right before the first anniversary; Craig was gone a year and a half later. And so I worked with Craig as the host for about a year and a half, and didn’t do that many pieces because I was also working in California at the time. Anyway, I just didn’t think the show was going to be sticking around, until I started working there for a while. And then I found out that it was full of these incredibly nice, talented people, and I couldn’t wait to get there in the morning. It was a complete happy accident that I ended up being here.

There’s been so much news coverage recently about The Daily Show, having won the awards and the CNN Global Edition. You’ve been around to see the changes in the show, so I wondered if you could talk a little bit about that.
Well, in the old days—and it’s funny to say that sentence, in the old days—it was much more like a local newscast. Craig was reading some national headlines, and then the field pieces that we did were all human interest-y—you know, squirrel-on-waterskis kind of stuff. Freak shows, Big Foot stories, alien abductions, stuff like that. But we treated it like hard news. We took a ridiculous thing and we elevated it. But now, thanks to sort of the editorial vision of Jon and Ben Karlin and now D.J. Javerbaum, our new head writer, the show has a far more political bent, which obviously started during the political campaign. As soon as the campaign started off in 2000, you could see the show begin to shift.

Right, “Indecision 2000.”
At the end of that campaign, I put a hundred dollars down on the table and I said to the field producers, “if you can get us a Big Foot story, I’ll give you the hundred-dollar bill.” Because I knew that none of that shit was going to get past Jon anymore. Everything has to be grounded in reality, in something that’s happening in the world, so we can use our field pieces as an addition to the satirical take that’s happening at the desk. It’s great. I mean, I did enjoy occasionally flying to Portland to talk to a Big Foot expert. But I’ll take stories that have more of a satirical bite to them, any day.

Have any non-parody news shows approached you with positions? Have you even thought about doing serious news?
We’ve all been invited to comment on the cable channels like CNN or Fox or MSNBC, to be part of a panel talking about some social issue or political issue. But, an actual job? No. I’ve never been offered an actual job.

Would you consider doing an actual news show?
Hell, yeah. Absolutely. I would love it—if anybody at the networks is calling.

Part of the reason I ask is because for so many people The Daily Show is a primary source of news. How you feel about that?
I don’t buy it, necessarily. For two reasons. I think you have to have some handle on what’s happening in the world to get our jokes. Because we only do the most cursory explanation of what the issue is in order to set up our punch lines. We don’t talk in depth about any stories. I suppose you could watch our show and sort of get a sense of what’s going on in the world, but you’d also be missing half of our joke. Half of our joke is the way news is reported, not just what the news is.

I think, nonetheless…
That what you said is true? I weep for our nation.

But one of the good things, and an article in The New York Times talked about this a little bit, is that The Daily Show gets away with critiquing the government and the news in ways entertainers can’t.
I think the reason for that is simple. We’re making jokes, and the entertainers who were attacked were not making jokes. They were not doing what they’re good at, which is entertaining. They’re not good at having policy positions. They’re not good at playing political games. They are good at entertaining. I admire all of them for trying. I think they might have been more effective—I don’t know if anything would have stopped the juggernaut of that war, but certainly not using the thing that you’re best at doesn’t help your cause.

Is there a piece from The Daily Show that you are most proud of?
Um, no. I mean there are things that I have fond memories of. I have a piece that I think captures the kernel of what I try to do as a correspondent. It’s a piece called “Death and Taxes.” And in Saratoga Springs, New York, on the annual tax forms for the county employees, the printer put the X in the wrong box on all of the tax forms and the 1040s said that everyone was deceased. They checked deceased for everyone, three hundred people—dead—in one fell swoop. So we went up there and we covered it as if there had been a disaster, three hundred people had died. We were there to cover the grief and the rage about it. And what I liked about it was that it highlights the reporter as single-minded idiot. The reporter desperately needs the story to be what he thinks it is. The story is written before you leave; you’re just going there to verify what you already want it to be. In this case, the reporter gets there and it is not what he thought it was but he won’t let it go. He cannot let go the idea of this tragedy and that the people there are filled with rage, and I actually eventually got people to say that they were sad and that they were filled with rage. And it was a great triumph for me as a fake reporter to get them to buy into my idiocy. I like that piece because no one in town looks like a fool. I look like a fool. You know, we’re not shooting fish in a barrel like with alien enthusiasts or Big Foot hunters; this is really spoofing the self-important, hyperbolic, vulture-like quality of tragedy news.

Compared to the other comedy writing you’ve done, what’s it like writing for The Daily Show?
Well, there’s sketch, there’s narrative, and then there’s The Daily Show. Writing for The Daily Show is wonderful because as a correspondent you have to come up with a particular take on a specific issue. There is an actual event in reality that you’re spoofing or an actual event in reality that you’re talking about, you come up with a wrong headed view of it, and you explore that wrong-headed view through the lens of your newsman, and it’s easier to turn out a lot of material that way. Which is good because we’ve got to do it every night. And I think one of the reasons that it is a little easier to turn out material in that way is that you can’t feel precious about it. Because you know there’s another one tomorrow and we’ve got to get this damn thing on by five o’clock It has got to be written by three, and the story just broke this morning. So, you can’t be like egotistical about it and be precious about your words. Which is probably one of the reasons why it’s most liberating. Because you’re like, you know if I fuck up, then I fuck up, there’s another Kleenex in the box. That’s sort of how I feel about it. It’s Kleenex comedy, just pull another one out tomorrow. It doesn’t mean that we don’t try our hardest, or that it can’t be really hard to do this work, but of the three things I’ve done this is the most immediately enjoyable.

Jacqueline Schneider is an editorial intern at mediabistro.com

MTV has done a lot of things since its inception two decades ago, and one of the biggest is to regularly fly in the face of tradition. Which is why it’s so fitting that, ever since the network’s TRL studio opened its windows onto Times Square, MTV has staged its own New Year‘s Eve special to counter that most stalwart of shows down the block, Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve. Tomorrow night, MTV looks back on the year that was—the Punks, the platypus, the pop icons’ liplock—and recruits pop darling Hilary Duff and a slew of other performers to help ring in 2004 at the nighttime bash. We recently spoke to executive producer Mike Powers, the man behind the scenes of all this rock ‘n’ roll revelry, about his role in staging the last MTV party of the year.

Let’s start by talking a bit about the show. How many years has it been running now? What’s on deck for this year?
We’ve been doing New Year’s since we moved into our studio, which was ’97 or something like that. This is my first year doing the show. Simple Plan is going to do a medley of their own songs, and then they have a special surprise performance at midnight. Hilary Duff is doing two songs, she’s also co-hosting. Clay Aiken is doing two songs. And Ludacris is doing two songs at the ABC building. At ABC’s studios across the street, about six flights up, there’s a roof space, and Ludacris is going to be up there performing out to the masses in Times Square, which is going to look really cool.

A couple of years ago, you guys premiered the ‘N Sync “Girlfriend” video just after midnight. Do you have anything like that planned?
We don’t have any video premieres, but one really cool thing we’re doing is an MC Battle of the Champions—two guys going head to head, rhyming, and we pick a big winner. We did two MC battles this year, one in the spring, one in the fall, and we have two great champs so far, Reign Man and Wrekonize. So now we’re going to pit the two champs together and have them battle it out for MC supremacy.

So this being your first year, it’s basically a trial by fire for you. What’s your role in all this?
My role is to oversee the production and the logistics of the show. And, you know, it’s equally challenging on both the creative level and the logistics level. This is one of our hairiest shows when it comes to dealing with not just the city and the police, but dealing with the Times Square Business Improvement Department. The BID basically puts on this giant party out in Times Square, and we try to coordinate with them, figure out ways for us to keep that crowd entertained. They in turn put some of our programming on all the screens in Times Square, and they pump our audio out to those people, so it really feels like we’re at the center of everything for the night, which is great.

But you share the spotlight with an American icon. What’s it like going up against the Dick Clark special?
We feel like our show is definitely the most exciting and fresh and live. I’m not sure if Dick Clark is live the entire night—maybe some stuff is pre-taped, I don’t even know, I can’t speak to that—but we’re live the whole night, and all of our acts are performing in Times Square. So we feel like we own the evening, in a way, and give people the best programming from the center of it all.

Do you feel it’s ironic that the Dick Clark special is called New Year’s Rockin’ Eve and then you guys have this huge, and very rockin’, show going on?
Well, certainly Dick Clark’s not going to do an MC battle.

What’s it like putting this on in Times Square? Obviously it’s more exciting, but is it also a lot harder? Do you hire big thugs to keep the crowd controlled?
No, the cops are in charge of all the crowd control. I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced it, but they do the most amazing job. They have everyone divided into pens, so if there’s trouble in the crowd, it’s isolated to that one particular pen, and it’s a more manageable group of people. So the cops are really great. They have it down to a science. We work with them, and they help us out as far as getting all of our talent into the building. All the streets are closed around Times Square, but it’s actually not that difficult to get around once the crowd is in their pens. It’s really well-organized. And it’s exciting. I mean, it’s so great to have a view of the ball and to be in the middle of this party, but to be inside where it’s warm and toasty. It’s such a wonderful experience.

How do kids get into the studio, for people who are attending these performances?

Well, we pre-select all of our crowd. We don’t pick people out of the crowd that night and bring them in.

So it’s not like TRL?
No, logistically that would be a nightmare. We do casting, and we have people out there looking for kids who are really excited to come to the show, and they arrive separately from the rest of the Times Square crowd. They go to a specific point with their special passes and they get to come inside, and they love it. It’s so fun to be in Times Square, but not freezing to death really helps. And we have such a great view of everything. When midnight strikes, it’s just ridiculous looking, it’s so cool.

How many people besides you are involved in this? When does the planning start for such a big event?
The planning starts around September. There’s probably a staff of about 30 people, give or take, for a while, some not necessarily full-time. But then once we get into November, then everyone’s pretty much full-time on it. We have one group of people working on the creative and the format: How are we going to position our performances? What else are we doing that evening? So we come up with things like OK, we’re going to team up with People magazine, and we’re going to look at the best and worst celebrity makeovers for the year, and the best and worst celebrity styles, that type of thing. We come up with fun segment ideas, like the MC Battle. We know we’re going to have performances, we’re going to interview various celebrities who come by for the party. There’s a lot of things we know, but then we just try to add as much content as possible for the rest of the evening.

I know that because the studios are right in the middle of everything, celebrities tend to just stop by these MTV events. Do you allow that kind of ad lib thing to happen on New Year’s Eve? Is there that element of surprise or is everything planned out?
Well, we pretty much have to know they’re coming or they’ll never get in. People start trickling in late October and through November, and then even this month we keep getting people confirmed. Erika Christensen is going to come by, and the cast of One Tree Hill, and there’s still a couple offers pending.

You have a ton of newly minted MTV stars this year. Do they have any part in this?
Nick and Jessica are doing something for the open of our show. And then, really, our VJs—folks that are getting more and more recognition for what they do every day on TRL—they’re going to be huge stars for us this night, too. We’re doing kind of an ensemble hosting crew, so it’s Damien and La La, Vanessa Manilo, and Hilarie Burton, and Quddus, and then Hilary Duff.

Obviously this is a big event for the people who come down to Times Square. But everyone is reporting that people are itching to go out this year. How do you get people to stay at home and watch the show? Who is the show aimed at?
It’s aimed at a fairly broad audience, like a lot of our programming. We have such a great mix of performers—with Ludacris and Hilary Duff and Clay and Simple Plan—that I think is appealing to a broad range of folks. Hell, if people who live in the New York area or wherever want to come be a part of it live down at Times Square, more power to ’em. It’s a once in a lifetime opportunity. But for folks who don’t want to stand all day and freeze their butts off, we’ll pretty much give them the entire vibe at home—everything they need to see and feel and experience on New Year’s Eve in Times Square. But it’s really just so exciting to be here—for the people working it, too—it’s definitely a once in a lifetime experience.

Jill Singer is deputy editor of mediabistro.com. Image courtesy of MTV.

Five years ago, writer Will Leitch was publicly humiliated on national television. Leitch, now an editor at the culture website The Black Table, was dumped by his fiancée the night before he was set to be a contestant on Win Ben Stein’s Money, and Jimmy Kimmel announced the break-up to America as a hapless Leitch looked on in confusion. But Leitch managed to turn embarrassment into inspiration—”Consolation Prize,” the essay he wrote about that particular heartbreak, became the first in a string of Internet columns that Leitch published in various forums under the name “Life As a Loser.” The columns mostly chronicle Leitch’s itinerant early twenties, as he rode the late-nineties Internet boom from small-town Illinois to New York City, only to be laid off after five months and forced to move back home. Leitch has gathered the best of these columns in a new collection, also called Life As a Loser, released earlier this week by Arriviste Press. Taken together, the collection forms a familiar tale of “early promise squandered and hard lessons learned,” as author Tom Perrotta writes in the book’s foreword. Leitch recently spoke to mediabistro about idiots, luck, and the role of both in Internet journalism.

Let’s start with the obvious question: Do you really think you’re a loser?
I have a lot of stories where I’m the idiot, and the columns started with a couple of those. As it went along, it evolved from being less about me and more about how we’ve all been in situations like this, which is good. It’s not an online diary. That’s always been my fear, that it would be perceived as just about me, me, glorious me. Particularly in the book, I tried not to make it too one note, where it’s all like, “And at the end, Will gets kicked in the groin!” It’s supposed to be, you know, we’ve all been the guy who’s picked last in kickball, we’ve all been laid off, we’ve all been the one who doesn’t get the girl. In that way, it evolved to where it became, by the end, very easy for people to relate to.

But there is a lot of self-deprecation, this “Will gets kicked in the groin” thing. In the intro to the book, you basically say, “I’m a totally uninteresting guy,” which doesn’t seem like the best marketing ploy. But is that what you wanted your hook to be—sort of “I am the common man”?
The thing is—I mean, “Life As a Loser” is a really good title. It’s snappy, it’s catchy. But when I first started doing the column, it wasn’t, like, a gimmick. It was legitimately like—”Okay, seriously, I suck.” And it’s not that I don’t still suck, but after 10 or 15 columns, I ran out of stories where I completely humiliate myself. We kept the title, which is a hook, it is a catch, but the moral of the book is not: “Boy, look how much of a dork this guy is. I’m glad I’m not him.”

The book’s premise is this classic “small-town boy tries to make it in the big city” set-up. Do you ever play that up for fictional purposes or is it all relatively genuine?
It’s funny, I was talking to a friend of mine the other day—who’s also from small-town Illinois—about how when he got out here, he was just going to completely reinvent himself. He did not want to have anything to do with where he was from. And he said, “Will, you’re like living in the permanent Midwest embassy.” And I like that idea that I’m still a small-town kid. I’ve been out of Mattoon for 11, 12 years, but it’s so ingrained in me, and I think in a lot of people who come here. Even now, in terms of people who have only known me out here, when I’ve been here longer than they have—they know me as the midwestern guy. And I’m not walking around going, “Oh, wow! There are no sheep here—I’m confused!” But there’s a certain vibe you give off and that’s just what you are. Some people are really uncomfortable with that, like my friend, who is so determined to be taken seriously and never be labeled like that. I really think if you asked him if he’s from the Midwest, he would lie. I can’t imagine living like that. To me, the most important part of keeping that midwestern part is knowing that no matter what, you’re just a dumb idiot from nowhere, so don’t take yourself too seriously. It’s part of the idea of the book, too, being comfortable with who you are, and not trying to be something you’re not—particularly when you’ve been laid off a thousand times, and everyone’s telling you: “We don’t want you around. Go away.” The job market hasn’t been too great in the last few years, and we were all bouncing around. I’m sure a lot of mediabistro readers have been bounced around. At a certain point, you have to realize: “I’m okay. I believe in what in what I’m doing.”

Well, obviously you’re doing pretty well for yourself. Most self-described “dumb idiots” don’t parlay their Internet diaries into a book deal—
Not a diary!

Okay, your Internet musings. So tell me how the deal came about. In the book, you allude to a manuscript and a deal with a big-shot publisher. Was that this book?
Yeah, that was back in 2000, when I’d been out here for, like, five months. Someone approached me and signed me up to do something a little different from this, with more of a narrative running through the whole thing. But then we all got laid off, and I started to realize I love this little book project I’m doing, but I might want to worry about getting a job first. And the book ended up getting put on the back burner. Frankly, I just wasn’t ready yet. I was a kid! I hadn’t been here at all, I hadn’t struggled, I hadn’t gone through any of it. It’s just a chance that I blew. But I kind of had to—if I’d have written something then, it would have been so self-important. I’d been working for dot-com jobs, thinking this is the easiest place in the world—like I’d suckered these people into letting me do anything. You came to New York, you were making more money than your parents, getting off work at 3, and drinking with everyone you worked with. In that mindset, in that kind of environment—it’s no way to write a book.

So the publisher put it on the back burner—but you were glad for it?
Yeah. In retrospect, I’m happy about it. I’m actually ending the “Loser” column in March once I hit 200, and this book is a good way to cap it off. A lot that was in the original book is in this, but I’ve been able to take it and do it the way I wanted to, rather than try to force it into something it’s not. I have another deal going on with another publisher for something after this, which is good, because I’m not stupid—well, I’m still stupid—but I’m not as stupid anymore. For a time, everyone I talked to, I’d be like, “Hi, I’m Will. I have a book deal—did I mention that?” I was an asshole. And it’s just because I didn’t know. And now, I recognize that it’s just work, just like everything else is work, and I’m in a much better position now to put stuff together than I was then.

How did you find your new publisher?
They contacted me through The Black Table. Actually, a lot of stuff has happened like that. I was contacted a few months ago to write a story for The New York Times Magazine, simply because of something I’d written for The Black Table that was linked off of Gawker.

Oh, that’s great.
Yeah, it ended up getting killed. But I still have contacts over there, and I’m still working on stuff with them. That’s one of the reasons we did The Black Table in the first place—we publish a lot of stuff that’s been killed in other magazines. The notion of writing on the Internet as online diaries—that’s something we’ve tried to change with The Black Table. We try to do real journalism, just on the web. Mind you, there are more copyediting mistakes, and it’s harder to read on the subway.

You actually mention something in the intro to your book about how you’re afraid that people think the Internet lessens the import of journalism. Do you really think that’s the general perception?
Yeah. There is just a stigma. You saw it when the big gossip item came out about how Jodi Kantor was doing a terrible job as the Times‘ Arts & Leisure editor because she was hiring all these web writers. The worst insult that could be given to her was that she was out hiring web writers at the great New York Times. But the fact is, that’s where they are now. Not to get Marxist, but the workers do have the means of production now. But the term “web writer” freaks people out. They think it’s some guy in the basement, sending out screeds about Star Trek. You and I know that’s ridiculous, but most people don’t. I go back to the Midwest, I tell them I write on the Internet—and half of my family still thinks I’m doing a porn site.

I’ve been writing on the web for five years, and finally, there are people who are like, “Oh, he has a book out. I guess he’s a real writer now!” It’s strange. Even web editors have this idea: “Well, someday we’d love to get into print!” Like it’s like the holy grail. But I guarantee you that something on The Black Table, or The Morning News, or Haypenny, or Flak is far better than most of the stuff you’re going to get in newspapers and magazines—and we’re doing it for free. I think people are starting to realize that good writers are going to the web. Why wouldn’t they? You have absolute freedom to do whatever you want, and if you’re talented, that’s gonna shine through.

In the book, you say that growing up, your heroes were small ones—in one essay you devote whole paragraphs to a contestant on Press Your Luck. But did you have any sort of literary heroes in mind when you were writing these essays?
There are certain writers I really admire, but frankly, most of my heroes are not big literary names. I’ve read every single one of Andy Rooney’s books. The man’s a genius. I’m telling you, if we can get anything across to the readers of mediabistro, it’s how much of a genius Andy Rooney is. I know, he’s just the old guy on 60 Minutes, but I like his kind of no-nonsense writing. And sure, I love Jonathan Letham, I love Dave Eggers, I’m into David Foster Wallace, I’m into those sort of people—I’ve got my smart street cred. But the people I really admire aren’t trying to show off to anybody and are simply just writing stories. I wouldn’t say Andy Rooney is my biggest hero, but he’s probably my most indicative hero.

You also talk about your relationship with Roger Ebert. How did that come about?

He worked for The Daily Illini, as I did. Ebert was someone, who, as a kid, I looked up to. He doesn’t have to write full-length reviews of all this stuff, plus do the “Movie Answer Man,” plus do the “Great Movies,” plus do the TV stuff, but he does. You have to admire that. There’s a website called Professor Barnhart’s Journal, run by a man in Boston named Bob Sassone, and he sent something out to a bunch of writers called “Why I Write.” I wrote some goofy, self-involved thing, and Ebert wrote in: “This is my job.” To me, that’s the only way you can do it—he doesn’t have to do this, but he does have to do this. The fact that he has that much good perspective on who he is, and what his place in all this is, is pretty impressive.

Is that how you feel too, that you’re just compelled to do this?
Yeah. I’m still in the, “Wow, I can’t believe I can actually call this work” mindset. With the Internet stuff, I can write something and have it fact-checked and up in like six hours. I don’t have to worry about pitching it, I can just do it. And yeah, the process of pitching is very important, and obviously more magazines pay than websites pay, so that’s a factor. But to me, the idea of not writing on the web would be like not writing.

Jill Singer is deputy editor of mediabistro.com. You can buy Life as a Loser here.

Photographer Jason Fulford has contributed to Harper’s, Life, and The New York Times Magazine, but when it comes to putting out collections of his work, he’s only been published by one person: himself. Together with his partner Leanne Shapton, he runs J&L Books, a small press that publishes collections of art and photography. Like tiny publishing philanthropists, their intention is to put out quality books that wouldn’t necessarily get published by traditional venues. Their choices are somewhat idiosyncratic, highly individual affairs. There’s a buoyancy about their work—maybe it’s just their excitement about getting people to see the photographs they love. Followers of Fulford’s own work tend to put faith in J&L’s releases because they know the work has been refined and vetted by a voice they trust and count on for certain tones or styles.

Fulford’s photos—of empty motel-room doorways, street signs, and, most famously, people dancing—cast ordinary objects in an extraordinary, almost haunting light. His pictures come across like an accidental documentary, like you’re seeing something you maybe shouldn’t. J&L is releasing two new books today, and each one has an otherworldly quality all its own: Beautiful Ecstasy, a collection of photos from the ’70s by Michael Northrup, and Chart Sensation, a collection of PowerPoint charts-made-art by Michael Lewy. Fulford spoke to mediabistro.com about reading photography, editing photography, and dancing for the camera.

The name you’ve made for yourself is often the reason people buy the books you publish by other photographers. Who’s buying J&L’s books? Do you know these people?

It’s a bookish crowd, but one that is young and energetic. We did an event at Housing Works Used Book Cafe, here in New York. We didn’t have anything with text coming out, and Housing Works does mostly readings, but I wanted to do an event there. So we just decided to do a variety show and to bring in people we knew. We had a slide show, a rock band, a short film screening, keyboard players. Housing Works gets a specific crowd that works for us. People laugh at poetry there. Our audience seems to be people like that—slightly bookish, but photographers, graphic designers, illustrators, writers. It seems to be book people as opposed to artists.

The first thing one notices about your own work is that, aside from Dancing Pictures, your book of black-and-white photos that are just that, people dancing, you rarely shoot people. The hotel rooms, the landscapes—they’re all empty. Any reason for this?
My pictures aren’t really directed. When you’re shooting people, you’re directing it and creating something, and I think my pictures are more like things you’ve found. Sometimes people can energize a place or add a quality, but it’s never really about those people.

So what compelled you to do Dancing Pictures?
The dancing thing was kind of a hybrid project. Truthfully, I didn’t like that book very much. It started because Leanne and I used to dance and take pictures of each other in front of a black backdrop. We’d double expose the film so we’d both be in the shot. It was kind of narcissistic, but also fun. We thought it’d be more fun to shoot other people and have them bring music they wanted to dance to. Doing that was a fun two weeks. We danced a lot.

But there were two reasons I didn’t like the finished product. First, it felt a little too easy as an idea. I kept wanting to add another concept, and Leanne was fighting me on that. I never figured out a good enough concept to juxtapose, though. That was one reason. The other reason is that the image quality is in some strange, mediocre place. It wasn’t great production quality on the shooting and printing, and it wasn’t totally crappy, and I felt it should be one or the other. But maybe people looking at the book don’t even think of that. We made a thousand copies, and I wanted to drive across the country and put them in public bathrooms and Salvation Armys. People love that book.

We want to make a bunch of different kinds of books, but, usually, the packaging and the title tell you how seriously to take the book. Dancing Pictures, that’s what it is: It’s this paperback you put in your bathroom.

Of course, you also publish other people’s books. How do you decide what to publish?
We’ve been getting so many submissions these days. Most of the books we’ve published in the past have been people we sought out. If I can’t see anyone else publishing this great photographer, then we’ll go after them. For example, Mike Slack’s book of Polaroids, OK OK OK, he emailed to me. His wife had bought my book Sunbird, because she thought he’d like the pictures. So originally, we started emailing just about photography, and then eventually he sent me a bunch of Polaroids. He wasn’t even pitching a book. But when I saw all these Polaroids he had done, I decided to do it. It’s been a big seller. That book is a little more accessible to a broader audience. The pictures have a candy quality. They have other layers too, but you don’t have to go deep into it. You can totally appreciate it on a graphic level.

OK OK OK is a fairly accessible book; people look at it and think, “Oh, it’s Polaroids, I could do that”—whether they could or not. But not all your releases are like that. Some of the books you publish are much less accessible, even difficult, if you will.

Yeah, Jubilee, by Ted Fair, we knew was going to be different. I edited that selection from 400 or something prints, and it’s a hard one for people to read because it’s a book that needs to be read in a specific way. People often don’t read photo books like a story or a poem. And that book is a poem; each page is like a word in the poem. You have to read them all, and you get a sense or a feeling from that, from the four different motifs that go throughout, repeating themselves.

On a book like that, would you ever consider putting in an introduction or explanatory text?

No, we’re pretty minimal with that, although we did it for Gus Powell’s book, The Company of Strangers. He put a long quote in the beginning that serves as an introduction, and then he wrote an afterword. There’s a forthcoming book where we might have to do something with more text. It’s a Chinese photographer, and the work is very Chinese, but I want people here to see it. I think there might need to be some writing, just to give you supplemental information so that some of the subject matter will make more sense.

It’s easy for people to understand what editors do for books or magazines, but when you edit something like Jubilee, what are you doing? How do you edit? It’s not as if there’s a clear right and wrong, like grammar, which is editing in its most simple and basic sense.

The way I usually do it is I’ll take a box of photos and go through them. At some point, I’ll start to feel something—and this sounds real new-agey, doesn’t it—I’ll start to feel some narrative or idea that ties certain pictures together, so I’ll pull those out. Then I’ll go through the whole stack again 10 times, and at some point there’s one stack that’s out and one stack that starts to feel like something. Then I show the photographer, and we talk about it. As the process goes on, it’s totally refined.

Some photographers can’t edit their own work. All they can do is produce it, and they’ll admit it. They may be fixed in the moment of each image and they can’t see a bigger package or a bigger context for them. Or they’ll have a hard time not using pictures that they’re personally attached to. I don’t think a lot of photographers think about editing, and it’s so important. But schools don’t have classes about it and there’s no place to learn it.

When you get edited by a magazine that’s publishing your photos, do you get more involved with the whole process than most photographers, because you are an editor yourself as well as the photographer?
I work with the art director. Usually, we both work on it and then pass it back and forth. It’s different because you’re already given a story to work from. A lot of jobs end up about half from my archives and half pictures I shot after reading the article.

Do you take direction from the art departments, or do you not care and take the photos you want to take?
I try to get as much direction as I can. I try to separate the pictures I take into different categories: editorial, personal, and advertising. It helps me deal with it. There are certain jobs, like ad jobs, where I’ll just consider myself a tool. I understand that these people have something they’re trying to do, and I’m the hired help, I’m the plumber. I’ve done some ad jobs where you would never be able to tell it was me who shot it. Some of them are pretty big productions—there’ll be a van, assistants, caterers, props people, and stylists. Those are really fun. I enjoy those jobs. You’re running around making sure everyone is doing their thing. I’ve gotten kind of relaxed about it. I don’t know if that’s good or bad, but it all has your name on it in the end.

Chris Gage, a production editor at John Wiley & Sons, is a frequent contributor to mediabistro.com. Photo stolen from www.jasonfulford.com, which presumably stole it from a contributor’s column somewhere else.

As publisher and editorial director of The Nation, America’s oldest weekly magazine, Victor Navasky has had the peculiar challenge of turning a liberal journal of political opinion into a profitable enterprise, and now he’s doing it at a time when dissent is a dirty word. Of course, this isn’t the first time Navasky has guided The Nation through an uncomfortable political era; he started as editor of the magazine in 1978. But this has been an interesting time: In September of last year, Navasky watched Christopher Hitchens, one of The Nation‘s longtime columnists, depart the magazine amid very public allegations that its stance on Iraq was morally reprehensible. Navasky, for his part, places less importance on star power and more emphasis on the power of ideas. The former New York Times editor sat down with mediabistro.com to discuss liberal bias in the media, the role of opinion journals in politics, and why he prefers not to counsel the Democratic party on the personality it should seek in a candidate.

Birthdate: July 5, 1932
Hometown: New York City
First section of Sunday Times: The front section

You started out a long time ago working in magazines and then at the Times. Would you talk a little bit about how you went from there to The Nation?
Well, I founded my own magazine when I was at the Yale Law School, called Monocle. Its motto was, “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” When we graduated, we took the magazine with us, and we tried to make a go of it as a business. While we were putting it out, we all started freelancing for other places. I ended up freelancing mostly for The New York Times Book Review and the Sunday magazine. Eventually, they asked me to work there as an editor, which I didn’t do at first. I left the Times to write what became Naming Names, which is a book about the blacklist during the McCarthy years. In order to write that, I had to read through all the magazines that were being published in this country during the ’40s and ’50s. I concluded that The Nation got it in a way that no other magazine did, in the sense that it understood what was going on in this country during what we call the domestic cold war.

And then I took a vacation from journalism and my book, and for a year I was Ramsey Clark’s campaign mismanager when he ran for the Senate from New York. During that period I got to know Ham Fish. Two things happened. One was that The Nation, it was reported in the papers, was for sale. I thought it was a great thing, and I spoke to a number of people about acquiring it. Part of me thought it would be great at some point down the road, but I really was dedicated to finishing this book that I quit the Times for, and I had a long way to go. Ham came back and said, “I’m interested in helping to do this on one condition.” I said, “What’s that?” And he said, “That you would be the editor.” I agreed to do it provided Ham still had an option to go forward and be the person who bought it when the time came. That’s essentially how I got there. I also got a call from The New Republic asking whether I was interested in resuming what I used to do at the Times, but by this time I was involved in the conversations with Ham and The Nation, so I told them it probably wasn’t a good idea.

You brought up The New Republic, and I wanted to ask you about the recent L.A. Times article, in which the publisher of TNR said that The Nation is a magazine that carries a banner for a certain set of people with political beliefs. I was curious to know what your response to that is, because that’s been a criticism that people have against The Nation.
I’m not going to respond to that, because I haven’t read the article, but I will respond to the general criticism. If you said to me, “What do you say if people say The Nation carries a banner for X or Y?” I say, “Yeah, at different points in time the magazine takes positions that are generally in opposition to the prevailing political culture from a set of values which go back a long time, certainly for the last 50 or 75 years.” It changed a lot over the years, but nevertheless, it’s been pretty steady in its court of civil rights and civil liberties and in its preference for non-military solutions to political problems. We are a dissenting publication, which doesn’t mean we do it because it’s the thing to do.

Having said all of that, there is a great deal of dispute within our pages and among our people, especially our regular contributors. Hitchens quit, which I thought was too bad, but nevertheless, for the last 10 years of his affiliation with the magazine, he’d been carrying on interesting arguments with our regulars. I don’t accept this idea that there’s a party line or that it’s dogmatic. On the other hand, it certainly is true that—we had a bad joke for many years, “If it’s bad for the country, it’s good for The Nation.” And people ask me how we’re doing now, and I say, “Better than ever.” However, it would be a big mistake to attribute all of the good things that have happened to this magazine in terms of circulation exclusively to the war. The war is certainly a significant part of it, but you have to give some credit to the editors of this place and the writers of this place. If it weren’t doing its job, it could be anti-war and people wouldn’t look forward to reading the magazine. That, to me, is a critical part of it.

You mentioned the editors and writers. About the time Hitchens left, Naomi Klein was added as a columnist, Adam Shatz joined as the literary editor, and Katrina started writing on the web a lot more frequently. Do you think those additions in the past year have—
I think Adam is going to be a great force in the magazine. The Naomi thing had been in the works before we knew that Hitch wanted to move on. The web is interesting. I’m not a web person. I was sort of astonished to discover that about four years ago we got 2,500 new subscribers over the web for the hard copy magazine. That could dramatically alter the way magazines like this work. Or maybe it’s like Howard Dean, it works for some and not for other magazines; you need a passionate issue that people are going to rally around to come to it. And certainly Katrina’s contribution to that can’t be underestimated. So that’s an element. Even if there were no war, that’s an element. She is a voice of sanity from a political perspective that was so marginalized earlier in the life of political culture that they wouldn’t let it get on television.

There’s a lot of talk about how there aren’t enough outlets for liberal media. What do you think of those criticisms?
I think Eric Alterman is right in his basic thesis in his book What Liberal Media? It’s a myth that the left dominated the media all these years. It didn’t and it doesn’t. The places that Katrina and David Corn get invited on, the places that are hospitable to them, for the most part tend to be cable networks. You have these shows like Hardball, which are shouting matches. They have very low audience rating compared to the non-cable networks, compared to the Sunday morning shows. How does that translate into magazine circulation or visibility, it’s hard to say. Bill Kristol is on television virtually every week on behalf of The Weekly Standard. Circulation of the Standard, again I haven’t read this, but my impression is that it would be under 50,000, or it’s in that neighborhood—and they have Murdoch’s distribution at their disposal. So television by itself doesn’t translate into sales for a journal of opinion.

With the 2004 election approaching, is there any idea of whom The Nation might endorse for president? Do you think that candidates who are perceived as middle-of-the-road have a better shot?
First of all, I don’t have a candidate. Number two, I don’t particularly feel qualified or interested in advising the Democrats on what qualities a candidate should have. I do feel interested in talking about issues of policy and evaluating candidates by where they stand on issues of policy. Magazines like The Nation, The New Republic, National Review, it seems to me, their least important contribution is who they support for president of the United States. Their most important contribution is their ability to influence the intellectual culture and currents of the time through their analysis of issues and struggles that go on among classes and interests, and that’s different from the horse race.

One last question about the role of The Nation and its influence on culture. Is that going to be a struggle to maintain in the future?
I think that it’s a struggle to maintain. I think that E.L. Godkin, the founder of this magazine, came up with a formula that has endured since 1865, partly because it’s a very low budget formula. We don’t have slick paper; I hope we never do. We have color, which we didn’t used to have. We don’t want the magazine to ever be hostage to production costs, and yet you want to make it as accessible to as many people as possible, especially the next generation that isn’t used to publications like this. It’s going to have ups and downs, but if you take the position that the ultimate test of the success of a magazine is survival, and then you look around and see that publications like Life, Saturday Evening Post, Colliers, Look, with circulations in the millions have gone under, and this little thing, and The New Republic, which is half our age, and National Review which is a third our age, are still around, that’s the best answer to your question.

Rebecca Ruiz, a former mediabistro.com editorial intern and former Nation intern, is a freelance writer in New York. She currently works as an executive assistant at Demos, a think tank and advocacy group. Photo courtesy of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University.

The first female editor of the New York Times editorial page does not seem, at first blush, a natural author for a history of American women in the home. But Gail Collins—who earlier this year was frequently mentioned in media columns as a candidate for the job Howell Raines left vacant—has a story to tell that’s as much about other famous firsts as it is about “the tension between the yearning to create a home and the urge to get out of it.” Collins’ first book, Scorpion Tongues, was a snappy history of gossip and politics in America. Book magazine recently called America’s Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines “a remarkable history, which unites the efforts of female sharp-shooters and channel swimmers, novelists and abolitionists, immigrants and defense workers to create a triumphant, kaleidoscopic self-definition of American women through their actions and achievements.” mediabistro.com talked to Collins recently about late-night writing, very large women, and—of course—Jayson Blair.

I’m going to ask the most obvious question first—why this book?
You always write the book that you want to read. I’d always wanted a book about what happened to women throughout our history that could have all the big moments that you needed to have in it, but would be told from the ground up instead of from the great heroine down. I’m one of those people who always wants to know, when something great happens, where they went to the bathroom.

Were you a history major in college?
No; I’ve always been journalist. There are an enormous number of really great women historians out there, but most of the stuff they write tends to either be really narrow—you know, like midwives in the 16th century—or else it’s academic; it speaks to great theories. My theory was that if my researchers and I could read as much of that stuff as we could get our hands on, I could write the story, then give the readers the trail that I took if they wanted to go back and find out more.

Who is the reader for this that you see?
I had two people in mind, actually. One was my niece, who’s in high school, and I threw in a lot of stuff that, maybe if I’d been writing for my friends, I would have figured they already knew. But I wanted to put in everything so that someone like Becka would really be able to see the whole story. And also for my mother, who’s just a traditional housewife, and I wanted it to be a book that didn’t denigrate what they did, and that understood how much sense it made through most of our history to want to be in the house—that that was the place where you had the most power and control.

How do you find time to work on something like this—do you get up at 5?
It’s funny, because my deputy is a very well-disciplined, morning guy, and he would get up at 4 or 5, go running first, then do his book and come in. I come home at night, stay up until 2 or 3 in the morning, then come crawling in half-dead—that’s my kind of thing. It took me awhile to get adjusted to not doing it—I would go home at night and stare at the computer and play Free Cell or something.

What were some of your favorite stories from the book?
I was really taken by the Gilded Age, which was morally a very bad period. It really gave me a kick that that was one period in American history where the ideal beauty type was a very large woman. There’s one letter I have from a guy out West who reports back that he was watching this woman tight-rope walker in Virginia City, and he says, “She had the most beautiful shape of anyone I ever saw—enormous thighs!”

I was also really taken with the early part of the 19th century, which was probably the most repressive period for the society’s vision of what women were supposed to be. What gave me such a charge is how many women figured out ways to work around all these rules without appearing to be breaking any of them—either by saying, “Well, I’m a woman and therefore not interested in politics, but as a mother…,” or by traveling around the country giving speeches about how a woman’s place is in the home.

Your name was floated as a possible dark horse candidate for the executive editor position…
Well, it was a lovely thought, although, given the fact that I haven’t been in anyone’s newsroom for about 20 years, the idea that I would be the right person to run the newsroom didn’t make any sense at all. But I thought it was really sweet that people mentioned me.

Do you miss the newsroom?
No, I’ve always been an opinion person for virtually my entire career, and most regular civilian people don’t understand how carefully we divide this world between the news side and the opinion side. If you’re in it, it’s not the same thing, and I’ve always been an opinion person.

I was so amazed when I realized that Jayson Blair was only in June—it seems now like much longer ago.
When I got this job two years ago, my thought was, “Well, I may be a reasonable person to have picked to be the editorial-page editor, because I’m very good at taking boring issues and making them interesting, and we’re at a really boring point in American history.” Since I’ve been editor, we’ve had the terrorist attack, we’ve had two wars, we had the entire roiling of our own shop here with the Jayson Blair thing, we had a blackout, a few weeks ago a worm got into our system and was sending letters out to the whole world saying, “Thank you for your Op-Ed contribution.” It’s hard to believe that I’ve only been doing this particular job for two years, because, gosh, it seems like we’ve had enough adventures to last a lifetime.

Has that changed the editorial page?
The things that happen downstairs didn’t really—except that we’re all part of the paper, so of course everybody was taking everything to heart. I mean, I’ve worked for many papers where a reporter went rogue and started making stuff up, but normally they just fire the reporter and move on. The degree to which everybody here went into trauma over the Jayson Blair thing does really tell you how incredibly seriously they take their jobs here. But we’re seven floors away from the news operation, and we really don’t interact that much with the people downstairs. Howell Raines had been my predecessor here, and he was just a stupendous editorial-page editor, so we all loved him—but we weren’t really in the loop.

And in terms of the major events—what changes have those wrought?
Well, gee, we talked a lot more about foreign policy than I had really planned on. When the Afghan war began, I was horrified until I realized I had two people on the board who had covered wars in Afghanistan. There’s almost always this incredible depth you can rely on when stuff happens.

Has the tenor of reader submissions changed at all?
Right after 9/11 we were just getting so much stuff—the poor letters people were getting, I think it was, 500 emails an hour.

You mention in all of your bios that you’re the first woman editor of the editorial page—is there any defensive aspect to the book, or is it more of a celebration?
It’s absolutely a celebration, I hope. When I was growing up, we looked at women’s history in particular, I think, as a great struggle, because that’s where we were. Looking at it right now, the thing that really knocks you out is how canny women were. It makes you feel like you’re sitting on the shoulders of these funky women who are always playing by the rules, but managing to wiggle around them in very smart ways.

I have talked to various female journalists—never at the Times—about hitting various glass ceilings. Do you have any stories that you’re willing to share?
I was at a panel last weekend, and a woman in the audience basically asked me a glass-ceiling question about how women still, after all this struggle, cannot get the very best jobs. Walter Isaacson was sitting next to me and I could hear him mumbling, “Hell of a person to ask why women can’t get good jobs—she’s got the best job in American journalism.”

There wasn’t much talk about this during the Jayson Blair thing, but do you feel like you’ve been the beneficiary of affirmative action for women at any point?
Sure. I think that there were undoubtedly times when I got stuff, especially when I was just starting out as a columnist. But the other thing I’ve learned is that there’s always something when anybody gets any job, so you can’t really break your heart over the fact that your combination worked for you at that particular point.

Lizzie Skurnick is a writer and editor in Baltimore and a frequent contributor to mediabistro.com. You can buy America’s Women at Amazon.com. Photo credit: The New York Times.