Longform

“Journalists are the most craven recognition freaks on the planet. We make our mistakes in public because we want our innermost thoughts pasted on the refrigerator of American consciousness.”

“Even people who used to say horrible things about [Ruth] Shalit at anonymous remove loved seeing her at parties, a cerebral confection of a person — you never knew what might pop out of those oddly colored lips.”

“What remains is still a neighborhood of people with hopes of mobility, but Chancellor Avenue, the heart of the Weequahic neighborhood, no longer has any commercial viability. Turn down the wrong block, some locals say, and commerce of another sort, furtive and transitory, is under way.”

“I always thought that people who spent endless amounts of time drilling into their personal histories are fundamentally unhappy in their lives, and I’m not. I’m ecstatic in my own dark, morbid way and subscribe to a theory of the past that allows the future to unfold: We all did the best we could.”

“Behind the collapse of the Tribune deal and the bankruptcy is a classic example of financial hubris. Mr. Zell, a hard-charging real estate mogul with virtually no experience in the newspaper business, decided that a deal financed with heavy borrowing and followed with aggressive cost-cutting could succeed where the longtime Tribune executives he derided as bureaucrats had failed.”

“I mean, I live in New Jersey, which has a very good local paper called The Star-Ledger, but they’re about half as big as they used to be, and this place is a game-preserve of corruption—we needed three buses to haul away the mayors and various city council members the last time the FBI came in. I can’t help but think that the absence of high-level, sustained-accountability journalism had something to do with that.”