The Grey Lady at the Helm

This article is a project that has arbitrarily consumed hours and hours of the past week. Credit goes to all the reporters and anonymous Wikipedia contributors whose work I have aggregated. I hope the self-conscious attempt at being journalistic isn't too mined with jargon and other characteristic flaws to be readable or fit into a personal blog; and I tried to answer all of my own questions. What is left out is a closer look at the New York Times's editorial approach to the Bush years, since I had neither the strength, curiosity, nor ready sources to have hoped to do justice to it.

On June 2nd, Bill Keller, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., Dean Baquet, and Jill Abramson gathered for an 11 a.m. address to the New York Times newsroom and announced that Abramson will replace Keller, who is resigning to pursue writing, as the executive editor on September 6th. This is the first time in its 160-year history that a woman will head the newspaper, and for the second time or so the dignified New York Times made a stir in internautical wilds like Twitter.

Jill Abramson, born in New York City and alumna of Harvard University, had worked as a journalist until 2003; after the Jayson Blair news fabrication scandal she was appointed as co-managing editor for the news.

The tasks of a managing editor are to "[oversee] and [coordinate] the publication's editorial activities" and at the Times it is the second-highest post. (Based on pure surmise this presumably means that if the arts editor wants to know whether to publish a contentious story, as is, or with changes, (s)he would refer it to the managing editor; and it would be at Abramson's discretion to consult the paper's lawyers or the top editor or even the publisher, etc., if she can't satisfactorily settle the question herself.) Baquet, now the assistant managing editor and an employee who is highly regarded by his colleagues at the New York and formerly at the Los Angeles Times,* will assume this post.

THE history of women reporters in the Times is venerable but chequered, and it begins with Jane Grant. She was stuck writing articles on "women's issues" and struggled through a rude environment for fifteen years in all. (In 1925 she co-founded the magazine New Yorker with her husband Harold Ross.)

Later women have held high positions in the Times, like the columnists Anna Quindlen and Maureen Dowd, and more recently Gail Collins; Carlotta Gall is charged with the reporting from Afghanistan and Pakistan after a similarly tough post for a different paper in Chechnya; and bylines from Ligaya Mishan through Elaine Sciolino to Janet Maslin appear throughout. Dowd won a Pulitzer in 1999 for her columns about the Monica Lewinsky affair, but she has ten predecessors (Ada Louise Huxtable in 1970 for architecture reporting, Nan C. Robertson in 1983 for a medicine feature, Sheryl WuDunn in a shared laurel in 1990, Natalie Angier in 1991, Anna Quindlen in 1992, Isabel Wilkerson in 1994, Margo Jefferson in 1995, Linda Greenhouse and Michiko Kakutani in 1998 ) all the way down to Anne O'Hare McCormick, who in 1937 was honoured for her foreign correspondence. (Since then there have been five others: Gretchen Morgenson, Andrea Elliott, Amy Harmon, Sheri Fink, and Ellen Barry.) There are three women — Lynn G. Dolnick, Susan W. Dryfoos, and Cathy J. Sulzberger — on the Ochs-Sulzberger Trust board, too. Judith Miller certainly left her mark as well.

AS for other American publications, women have already held leading posts. Tina Brown edited Vanity Fair from 1984 to 1992 and The New Yorker from 1992 to 1998, Katharine Graham was the moving spirit behind the Washington Post as its publisher, Anne Marie Lipinski was the editor of the Chicago Tribune from 2001 to 2008, others have headed the Portland Oregonian (Sandra Rowe starting in 1993) and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (Julia Wallace starting in 2002). Nancy Hicks Maynard was the first African-American woman to own a large newspaper, the Oakland Tribune, in 1983. In the online press Arianna Huffington and more recently Brown have become formidable figures.

The response of these colleagues, also in the television milieu, has been enthusiastic; PBS's Gwen Ifill, Katie Couric of ABC News, Time's Kate Pickert, CNN's Christiane Amanpour, and Tina Brown joined employees in the Times in expressing their congratulations and appreciation for the shattering of another glass ceiling.

***

Jill Abramson has co-written among other books a weighty rebuttal to the defamation of Anita Hill by David Brock in his book The Real Anita Hill, by political allies, and by the media who uncritically repeated the libel. Hill had endangered the confirmation of Supreme Court appointee Clarence Thomas by accusing him of harassment. Jane Mayer (then a colleague at the Wall Street Journal and now a contributor to the magazine New Yorker) was the co-author, and it came out on the bookshelves as Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas in 1994. Since then it has become the final word on the matter. In October Puppy Diaries, a nonpolitical compendium of her series of personal blogs on the Times's website in 2009, will appear in Times Books.

In terms of the press, she worked for Time magazine (1973-1976), NBC News, The American Lawyer during the eighties, and the Legal Times as editor-in-chief from 1986-1988. In 1988 she started her stint at the Wall Street Journal's Washington bureau, and when Maureen Dowd nudged her to the Times in 1997 she became Washington bureau chief. While she was with the Times she and Don Van Natta Jr. uncovered part of the network of lawyers and enemies of the Clintons who ferreted out and nudged into press circulation reports of fiscal and amorous impropriety in the 1990s (praised in ex-editor Joseph Lelyveld's 2003 article, "In Clinton's Court," for the New York Review of Books).

Since 1988 she has appeared on television often: 39 times on the political affairs channel C-SPAN and 2 times on Charlie Rose's highly civilized talkshow on PBS. Her voice has a New York edge, and it is a continuous flow of words that stretch into each other, presumably as a way to avoid stumbles or filler like "um," though "you know" presents an island of punctuation intermittently. In short, her speaking style is Harvard-educated Sarah Palin with superior syntax, brain, and no conscious folk vernacular. On television her clothing seems a little stuffy, her tone occasionally patronizing, her emotions and reactions detached by superego, and despite the geniality toward the interviewer her air is a billboard declaring Keep Away. Relative to the rank and file of commentators, she is neither defensive nor aggressive, nor needily impelled to prove herself; she seems as willing to listen and think as to talk and think. She gives a careful interview. When someone challenges the Times's golden calf, viz. the belief in its own immaculate objectivity, her sense of responsibility to the New York Times seems to declare red alert as her autopilot reiterates nuanceless assurances of the Times's impeccable neutrality.

JILL Abramson has been seen as the potential heir to Bill Keller for years, though as she put it to Gabriel Sherman in 2010

"I don’t dwell on it," [. . .] "I think it would be a healthy, nice thing for the country. It is meaningful to have women in positions of leadership at important institutions in society. But, you know, there are wonderful male editors in this place who are just as capable as I am, and they could run this place exquisitely well. If it happens, it happens, if it doesn’t, it doesn’t."

She has a relatively benign example to follow. Before Keller became the executive editor he had been passed over for the position in favour of Howell Raines. When Raines was fired two years later in connection with the Blair scandal — nominally; he also raised animosity by insisting on reforms which frankly the Times might need, but perhaps more aggressively than the Times needs — the publisher decided abruptly that he wanted Keller after all.

BESIDES Keller's dispiriting consciousness of being Sulzberger's second-best, his heart lies in the writing which earned him his Pulitzer (though why he would use the lofty writerly skills, which to garner the prize must have rendered the decline and fall of the Soviet Union in vivid colour, to battle the Twitter windmill is beyond me) rather than in editing, particularly when freighted with a high burden of business decisions.

Keller's current employee David Carr characterizes him with excellent conciseness in a recent interview with Baristanet:

He has accomplished amazing things in the job and is probably one of the most talented journalists of our time. Remember, he was not the first choice, and it was an accident of history. And the crown with him never exactly fit. He never was the imperial executive editor of the New York Times, and he turned out to be a fabulous one.

Keller himself has surmised,

I think Howell’s view of leadership is martial [. . .]. And mine is more paterfamilias, I guess. You are dependent on this huge reservoir of talent, and your job is to create the circumstances under which they can do their best work, to reward them when they do well, correct them when they do wrong, set some guidelines, and spur their ambitions. But it’s not about me.

SO Keller soothed the savage malcontent among the Times reporters. Even if the outrage is not entirely laid (Abramson herself has been gloomily cast as having Raines moments), Sulzberger is fully behind her — even in 2003 he was hoping that she would become the first female executive editor — and despite the controversies over the delay of the National Security Agency wiretap story in 2005 and over the free imaginative rein which Judith Miller held over her reporting on Iraq's putative weapons of mass destruction, etc., she appears to have emerged happily from the froth like a Venus.

***

Her father, Norman L. Abramson, is a New Yorker like her mother and "retired president of Irish Looms Associates, New York textile importers." (This is the information in her wedding announcement in the Times. Despite the section's habit of adorning occupations which have an insufficiently patrician air, in this instance embellishment is clearly not required.)

The household were newspaper-readers who harboured a Virginia O'Hanlon faith in the Times's dictates — "In my house growing up, The Times substituted for religion. If The Times said it, it was the absolute truth," Jill Abramson told the newsroom on Thursday — and it could afford to send her to Ethical Culture Fieldston School, a NYC school and member of the Ivy Preparatory School League.** The school's list of prominent alumni is a fragmentary Who's Who of the American elite, among them Sofia Coppola, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Howard Wolfson, David Denby, Jane Mayer (whom Abramson seems to have met and become friends with at the school), Sheryl WuDunn and, coincidentally, Gil Scott-Heron.

At Harvard she pursued undergraduate studies in History and Literature, and emerged magna cum laude in 1976, to dive straight away into the journalist profession.

Along the road she picked up an interest in fashion — in pursuit of his profile Gabriel Sherman caught her before a Narciso Rodriguez runway show — and in music in the form of Arcade Fire; feminism appears a passion if her early book on the first graduating class of Harvard Law School where women had represented over 10% of the freshman class, the photo of the Times's third female reporter on her office wall, and her paean to her predecessors during her newsroom speech on Thursday are an indication; so, clearly, is raising dogs. She broke her wrist last year during a hike, so corpore sano is evidently not neglected either (except for the wrist).

In 1981 she married fellow New Yorker and Harvard graduate Henry Little Griggs 3rd. As the son of an NBC News producer and employee with a political PR company he was not new to the halls of the Ivy League, journalism, or politics either. They have two children and the hero of the puppy diaries, Scout, and alternate geographically between New York City and Connecticut.

***

"Good for one fare only"

Subway token inscription / philosophical metaphor for a human life (presumably it implies carpe diem/dum vivimus vivamus) / part of Jill Abramson's tattoo

*

"Jill Abramson" [Wikipedia] (read)
"Carlotta Gall" [Wikipedia] (read June 6, 2011)
"Elaine Sciolino" [Wikipedia] (read June 6, 2011)
"Jane Grant" [Wikipedia] (read June 6, 2011)
"Tina Brown" [Wikipedia] (read June 6, 2011 UTC+2)

"Jill Abramson: 'I'm a battle-scarred veteran'" [Guardian] by Ed Pilkington (June 7, 2011)
"Jill Abramson, Just-Named New York Times Editor, Ready To 'Seize The Future'" [Huffington Post], by Michael Calderone (June 2, 2011)
"New York Times shakes up its masthead" [Politico], by Keach Hagey (June 2, 2011)
"Jill E. Abramson Is Bride Of Henry Little Griggs 3d" [New York Times] (March 15, 1981)
"Ethical Culture Fieldston School" [Wikipedia] Read June 3, 2011
"The New York Times" [Wikipedia] (read June 6, 2011)
"Times Two" [New York Magazine], by Gabriel Sherman (September 26, 2010) [and Page 2]
"New York Times names Jill Abramson as first female executive editor" [Guardian], by Jason Deans (June 2, 2011)
"Coffee With . . . David Carr" [Baristanet] by Debbie Galant (June 5, 2011)
"The United States of America vs. Bill Keller" (p. 2) [New York Magazine], by Joe Hagan (Sept. 10, 2006) [and Pages 4, 7 and 10]
Interview: "Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson in Current Affairs" [Charlierose.com] (Nov. 7, 1994)

*

* From Politico's article: "Dean Baquet, the paper’s assistant managing editor and Washington bureau chief who became a kind of journalistic folk hero when he refused to cut staff as editor of the Los Angeles Times, will replace Abramson as managing editor."
** To be honest, though the Ivy Preparatory School League sounds prestigious and likely is, even after reading the relevant Wikipedia article the practical ramifications of this affiliation remain obscure.

Lycurgus, the Obnoxious Tyrant

Back during one of my depressed years, maybe Grade 11, when I was worried about being underread, I kept our old brown copy of Plutarch's Lives (in the Dryden translation, and my grandmother's I believe) at the bedside and strove to make inroads.

One of the lives did strike a chord, since it recapitulated what I learned about Spartan education in history class during an otherwise mostly unedifying year in German school. Under the impression that Lycurgus's biography was the one in question, I found it this morning in a different translation online and read it, keeping on expecting to find the nice passages. The further it went the clearer it was that this is the incomprehensible hagiography of a tremendous jerk, and a paean to totalitarianism.

As I thought it out, Plutarch is likely an originator of the neoclassical and later Christian model of finding a historical figure who can be elevated as a man worthy of emulation, who never does anything wrong and whose enemies are wicked envious ones, or whose faults (for whom a nebulous and inexorable fate is to blame) are a dignified caution to his historical successors. (Probably a harebrained idea, but it seems to me after reading lots of retellings that Homer's heroes for example don't strive so hard after perfection and everyone meets a sticky end whether they're impressive human beings or middling ones — their paths of glory lead but to the grave, etc.) The taxation on the truth and the realities of the human character is too high to be redeemed by the potential benefit. In short it appears profoundly unsound. The air of moral eventemperedness and conservative yearnings are taken as signs of health and practicability, but in fact they often appear to conceal narrow experience, feeble imagination about human nature and the world, and an egotistical need to order the cosmos to one's physical and spiritual comfort that neither recognizes the rights and differences of others, nor is fundamentally good.

Anyway, that is a tangent which it is practically impossible to defend objectively, so to return to "Lycurgus" here is one passage that encapsulates a little of the pleasant experience his rule must have been:

the Laconian cup, we are told by Kritias, was especially valued for its use in the field. Its colour prevented the drinker being disgusted by the look of the dirty water which it is sometimes necessary to drink, and it was contrived that the dirt was deposited inside the cup and stuck to the bottom, so as to make the drink cleaner than it would otherwise have been.

From the modern perspective, water taken from dirty sources would have borne fecal bacteria and parasites, and drinking a broth is not more pleasant even if the silt has settled and the vessel it's served in is a tasteful chalky grey. Besides I am pretty sure that Lycurgus would have drunk (if that grammatical tense is correct) from a slightly different cup. Skim over the dry passages and there are many more gems like this one.

Anyway, I don't follow Plutarch's thoughts. Would he have liked to live in a dual kingdom with lousy furniture, communal dinners, discontent rich people throwing stones, servants presumably living in worse circumstances as the wealth declined, a mediocre democracy where Lycurgus was ruling through the young second king after a military coup (though bloodless), no "useless tradesmen" and no merchant relations with foreign towns since these couldn't do much with the new iron (as opposed to gold and silver) coins?

Unless he was living on the street and was infested with a horrible disease, in contrast to which this Sparta might sound like the Elysian Fields, I doubt Plutarch would have found this lifestyle much fun to put in practice. Sparta may have been truly awful before Lycurgus improved it and so he is a model of making the best of a bad lot. Or, since I didn't finish the Life (too disgruntled), perhaps it has a splendid surprise ending.

Maybe he should be excused on the grounds that most of us who read the Little House on the Prairie series when we were little also thought that, with the exception perhaps of the Long Winter, it sounded rather cozy and nice. The idea of austerity can be charming, the reality of it unthinkable.

What also annoyed me was the praise which the Oracle at Delphi accorded to Lycurgus, twice. Either the oracle accepted arrant bribery, Lycurgus was misrepresenting its findings or never went there, or the oracle did inspire herself through now-controlled substances and had partaken of particularly happy ones whenever he came to visit. I don't think any proper god would accord a follower unalloyed praise, because 'tis human to err, etc. The tale of Croesus is far more instructive and real, I think, and I would think more of Plutarch's or Lycurgus' psychology if one of them had thought that the praise must be a particularly mean trick of the Olympians.

But, to end on a more cheerful note, the Laconian cup puts me in mind of Aunt Adelaide Stitch's education and boarding programme in Nurse Matilda:

"Her own suite of rooms, decorated in chocolate brown
A new wardrobe of clothing in colours that wouldn't show the dirt"

The Audience of Wooden Seats

Though I have watched pieces only of the least artistically obscure of his films, besides ignorant of the craft in general, and therefore am ill qualified to judge his actorly stature, I've had a mild crush on Peter O'Toole after Lawrence of Arabia, Goodbye Mr. Chips, The Lion in Winter and the one with Audrey Hepburn whose name I can't recall; so here is a link to an interview — "Peter O’Toole Has a Few Words for Directors" — by Dave Itzkoff of the New York Times (June 26).

Chirpy Update on "Uni," Etc.

On June 2nd I sent the electronic application to the Freie Universität and on the 4th I sent the corroborating documents (or, rather, my mother kindly dropped the envelope into the box for me on her way out), and now I am waiting. Since July 15th is the deadline for applications and responses come in September, I am not worried about being too much on tenterhooks, and instead am focusing — at least these days — on researching the news and revisiting Mozart sonatas on our piano and tending the bookshop.

After much dithering I decided to apply for Modern Greek, as promised, Near Eastern Studies (culture and languages), and Classical Studies: Latin. Russian wasn't an option in combination with other courses, as I found after studying the charts lengthwise and crosswise several times, though eventually I want to take a language course in it outside of studies. Realistically I don't think my chances of getting in are terribly good; however with Modern Greek I do happen to have an extra "in" if I've learned another modern language; since English is evidently one, and French in university and Spanish in high school are there, I hope that will help, and fortunately I did rather well in my Ancient Greek course.

In the meantime I've tried to acquire a little modern Greek; fortunately a vague recollection led me to the BBC website, which has a modest collection of resources including MP3 files to supplement the pronunciation guide I found in the dictionary in our bookshelves. I've done other things too but won't go into too much detail. Fortunately the pronunciation doesn't appear too abstruse, though it has certainly changed in 2000 years and it's a minor disappointment to pronounce "ph" as such and not as a strong "p," the loss of "eta" as a long e as opposed to ee is also sad, and so on and so forth. These changes do align the sound of Greek words more closely with the pronunciation of similar words in different languages, however, just taking "philosophy" as an example, and I admit I'm hardly distraught that the accents now indicate simple emphasis and not convoluted changes in pitch.

So . . . otherwise I'm reading through UNAIDS's report on AIDS after 30 years, though I am too ignorant about the issue to be properly informed even after the perusal, and at some point I may wrap up a blog post about the incoming executive editor of the New York Times. For the latter I've gone through our physical archive of New York Review of Bookses, and since Jill Abramson did important political reporting the contributions where she shows up have been a bundle of nostalgia. Her television appearances on Charlie Rose are also preserved, so I watched those. When was the last time I'd heard about Zell Miller, Jesse Helms, etc.? But I don't feel nostalgic about Whitewater, etc., and while the confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas must have taken place while I was already reading the newspaper I don't remember anything about them. The combination of scandalmongering and of libelling victims of harassment makes it seem like it would have been a lacklustre use of time and attention anyway. Speaking of Rose, I found his show tremendously boring the last time I tried to watch it, but it has apparently really grown on me.

Less importantly, it has been a very warm day, not miserable precisely and my brain is reasonably active because of the aforementioned mental exercises, but my physical reflexes are presumably terribly slow and let's say I feel a little sticky. Garbage Day (Friday? — I've forgotten.) was the pits, and still a balmy air is very pleasant when it emanates from the flowers and particularly roses which are blossoming in panoply. Yesterday morning I realized that dehydration might be a minor issue, so I am taking "doses" of water with a couple drops of lime juice, teaspoon of sugar, and pinch of salt. It feels pleasingly unspartan particularly when I reach the bottom, i.e. the delicious deposit of saccharine grains.