Sublime

«THE JOURNALIST AND THE MURDERER», DI JANET MALCOLM

She became a reporter: she went to see people, talked to them, recorded what they said, and then skilfully composed the story which reflected the knowledge she had gained. This method lay behind her book, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession, published in 1981, in which, over several conversations with one particular analyst, she drew out the

In our society, the journalist ranks with the philanthropist as a person who has something extremely valuable to dispense (his currency is the strangely intoxicating substance called publicity), and who is consequently treated with a deference quite out of proportion to his merits as a person. There are very few people in this country who do not re

In some ways, the distinction between normalcy and pathology is arbitrarily defined—as well as hard to measure.

Journalism that succeeds as art usually does not appear to be art in its presentation. The surface appearance of a work of journalism is humbler, more routine, more daily, as per the etymology of the word “journalism.” Such works do not announce themselves as belonging to any capitalized arts category, like Sculpture or Painting or the Novel or the

In the fall of 1990, the fourth and fifth of the six defendants in the Central Park attack, Kevin Richardson and Kharey Wise, went on trial. Since this particular narrative had achieved full resolution, or catharsis, with the conviction of the first three defendants, the city’s interest in the case had by then largely waned. Those “charlatans” who