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Editor’s Notebook: Endless summer reading
My summer reading tastes vary from month to month and year to year. Sometimes it’s a combination of Carl Hiaasen and John D. MacDonald – those masterly Floridians whose novels may as well be sold with a cold beer and a dozen oysters. Other years, I desperately try to fill the yawning gaps in my […]
Editor’s Notebook: Fighting over cucumbers on Twitter
Anybody who spends even a little bit of time on social media, which as far as I can tell is just about all of us, knows how toxic it can be. The question is: Why? Consider, for a moment, Market Basket. It’s often crowded with a lot of people you don’t know, a handful you […]
Editor’s Notebook: Into the blurry ‘after’
“With the coronavirus still spreading rapidly in much of the world and mass vaccination campaigns slow and unequal, experts say the illness will most likely become an ever-present threat.” So reported the New York Times on May 10. The day before, a Mother’s Day framed by soft sunshine and budding life, I hugged my mom. […]
Editor’s Notebook: Zen and the art of fire pit assembly
Organizational psychologist Adam Grant took to the New York Times last month to diagnose my problem – and maybe yours. “It wasn’t burnout – we still had energy. It wasn’t depression – we didn’t feel hopeless. We just felt somewhat joyless and aimless. It turns out there’s a name for that: languishing,” he wrote. Languishing. […]
Editor’s Notebook: A way forward for ‘The Sum of Us’
I once exchanged emails with a newspaper reader who had submitted a letter to the editor that I rejected for some reason. Maybe he had made unverified claims or perhaps he was responding to someone else’s letter in a way that violated our policy – I can’t remember exactly. What I do recall is that […]
Editor’s Notebook: Life in 100 canvases
For her senior project, my daughter poured out her generation’s childhood onto 100 5-by-5 canvases, which were then organized in a 10-by-10 grid and mounted on sturdy Elmer’s foam board. Some panels are instantly recognizable to parents of my generation, like the classic McDonald’s Happy Meal box, the PBS Kids logo, and a waving Dora […]
Editor’s Notebook: Welcome to the New Hampshire Bulletin
Mike Pride, the longtime editor of the Concord Monitor, took a chance in the fall of 1995. He hired a recent college graduate with no worthwhile journalism experience but loads of unwarranted confidence to be . . . the news clerk. What were the responsibilities of a mid-1990s Monitor news clerk? He typed up obituaries […]