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Journalists question police work, sure. But they don’t investigate open murder cases, he said, no matter how compelled I felt to do exactly that.

Susan Clare Zalkind • The Waltham Murders: One Woman’s Pursuit to Expose the Truth Behind a Murder and a National Tragedy

those who “consume” the news can be corrected. There are powerful, almost incontrovertible, codes of decorum maintained by and for people who are thought of as White, or who have been invited to participate in Whiteness. The racial disparity in published photographs of traumatized bodies is by now a recurring, and almost tedious, question.

Teju Cole • Black Paper: Writing in a Dark Time (Berlin Family Lectures)

writing has become almost a celebrity thing in the sense that people don't want to write; they want to be authors. And that's quite different.

In Her Own Words: Toni Morrison on Writing, Editing, and Teaching

write a memoir that was “defiantly self-incriminating”—and the result was a messy jumble of conflicting impulses, part provocation, part self-critique. Western readers rode roughshod over this paradox and made of Chua a kind of Asian minstrel figure. But more than anything else, Battle Hymn is a very American project—one no traditional Chinese... See more

Although Leo Manning respected Kelly, even liked her personally, he felt that twenty-two days wasn’t enough. Given the bad PR the LAPD had been suffering of late, it seemed wiser to send this to the Board of Rights. After all, Kelly had broken a prisoner’s neck and then said a few choice things to the press that she shouldn’t have.

Scott Frank • Shaker: A novel

It was left, then, to cast Sharpton, and for Sharpton to cast himself, as the Outrageous Nigger, the familiar role—assigned sixty years ago to Father Divine and thirty years later to Adam Clayton Powell—of the essentially manageable fraud whose first concern is his own well-being.

Joan Didion • After Henry: Essays

In 2013 Marilynne Robinson was the subject of one of the New York Times’s one-page “By the Book” interviews. They asked one of their stock questions: “If you could meet any author, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you want to know?” She answered:

A wonderful writer has given the best of herself or himself in the work. I think many of them

The ultimate indignity, however, is when people insist that I’ve called myself an empty image, that I’ve proclaimed it, simply because I spoke the line in a commercial. They treat this ridiculous throwaway slogan as if it’s my Confession, which makes as much sense as arresting Marlon Brando for murder because of a line he uttered in The Godfather.

Andre Agassi • Open

This experience and others like it have taught me that when an interviewee clams up, it’s sometimes out of fear that the journalist he’s speaking with won’t fully comprehend what he’s saying or simply won’t care. This was an important lesson: It’s one of the reasons I try to be well prepared for each interview, on the assumption that a guest is