Author
Editor’s Notebook: Goodbye, Mike. There are no words.
Mike Pride, the longtime editor-in-chief of the Concord Monitor, passed away on Monday at 76. I encourage you to read the panoramic obituary written by Mark Travis, another longtime Monitor editor, as well as a thoughtful appreciation written by my States Newsroom colleague Clay Wirestone, of the Kansas Reflector. Maybe it’s impossible to convey exactly […]
Editor’s Notebook: A universe of big pictures
Last week, Politico posted a story that not too many years ago would have dominated the news cycle: “Alien motherships: Pentagon official floats a theory for unexplained sightings.” The headline is not the handiwork of a clickbait-minded copy editor either. Here is the lead paragraph of the story, as reported by Lara Seligman: “The official […]
Editor’s Notebook: No direction home
I get lost a lot – lost in thought, lost in the past, lost in my work. And sometimes I get lost in the woods. It’s that last one that freaks me out a little bit. The feeling of being physically lost, even for just a few seconds, is deeply unpleasant. In fact, it’s one […]
Editor’s Notebook: Stumbling in the wake of tragedy
The American flag is low on the pole. Again. And the words return: “… children will still die unjustly even in a perfect society. Even by his greatest effort man can only propose to diminish arithmetically the sufferings of the world.” That’s from “The Rebel,” Albert Camus’ 1951 book-length essay on “man in revolt.” It’s […]
Editor’s Notebook: The structure of time
Over the past month or so, I’ve spent a big chunk of my leisure time watching documentaries about “free solo” rock climbing and YouTube videos about hiking. I am not, nor will I ever be, a free soloist, but I’m absolutely in awe of what they do. Every move they make is literally a matter […]
Editor’s Notebook: The way of the woods
I woke up early on Wednesday morning – and not in a carpe diem kind of way. Two hours before the alarm was set to go off, I started dreaming up things to worry about – work and the world, my family’s well-being and our future paths. I worried about worrying. By sunrise, before my […]
Editor’s Notebook: All eyes on the big balloons
Rain fell off and on Wednesday morning – fat, biting drops that seemed forged by July but tempered in mid-November. You could hear it land on sad patches of leftover January snow, gray and crusted. A low, silver sheet of sky blocked not only the warming sun but the probing eyes of spy balloons. Spy […]
Editor’s Notebook: A child of the first-in-the-nation primary
For those of us who have spent our lives in New Hampshire, running into famous politicians is old hat. One day in late 1987 or early ‘88, when I was a day student at Proctor Academy in Andover, a classmate came into the computer lab and said Paul Simon was walking around upstairs. I knew […]
Editor’s Notebook: Are things normal yet?
“When did the pandemic end, Grandpa?” I might get that question one day, and I’m not sure how I’ll answer it. Was it over when I and my loved ones became fully vaccinated? When I stopped losing sleep over toilet paper supply chains? When I went grocery shopping without a mask for the first time […]
Editor’s Notebook: Postcards and dispatches as the clock ticks
The Doomsday Clock is now set at 90 seconds until midnight, and I’m running out of room for the shoveled snow. Problems come in all sizes. According to the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the clock has never been so close to “global catastrophe.” Climate change, biological threats, and […]
Editor’s Notebook: If you’ve already bailed on that New Year’s resolution, this one’s for you
For a guy who doesn’t make New Year’s resolutions, I sure think about them a lot. Last year around this time I summoned the late Alan Watts to help explain why resolutions are doomed to fail, and then offered a counterpoint by way of an essay by Ann Patchett titled “My Year of No Shopping.” […]
Editor’s Notebook: The lottery of a lifetime
For a few minutes on Tuesday morning, I considered buying a lottery ticket for the $1.1 billion Mega Millions drawing. January can be a tough month mentally, and spending a couple bucks to add sprinkles of absurd hope to a cold winter day isn’t a bad deal. But then I remembered that the last time […]