Jason Fagone's Blog, page 2
October 3, 2013
On school-reform reporting
I wanted to gather my thoughts on Dan Denvir’s post about last week’s conference of education donors in Philly. Dan and I went back and forth on Twitter about it and I think I probably owe him a longer response.
So my irritation at stories like this — stories that tag the charter-school movement as “corporate reform” and paint all reformers as tools of Big Money — has been building for a while. I’m not an expert on urban education, it’s not my beat, but I have written some stories that touch o...
June 17, 2013
A sentence
Some days all you feel good about is a sentence. This is it for today:
A fire pit crackled, and the humid air filled with happy drunken chatter, and the hills blurred in the dusk.
Except… “dusk.” Dusk is kind of ruined for me.
December 27, 2012
5 things I’ve learned about guns
Lately, in between other projects, I’ve been reading about guns and the gun debate. After the Newtown massacre, it’s been hard not to. Also, I live just outside of Philadelphia, where it’s likely thatgun-related violence has left tens of thousands withpost-traumatic stress disorder, and where1,243 people have been shot this year alone. This is an attempt to organize my thoughts and document some of what I’ve learned.I’m far from an expert, so if you know a fair amount about this issue, you’ll...
November 25, 2012
Sympathy for the Devil
This morning I came across one of Jeffrey Goldberg’s 2010 pieces from Cuba — in particular, the one in which he goes to the Havana aquarium with Fidel Castro to see a dolphin show. It contains maybe the most bizarro exchange I’ve ever read. I won’t spoil it for you, but something about it fills me with glee. I’ve always liked profiles of villains, I guess, and in the best ones, there are often moments like this, when either the reporter or the subject drops his guard and you get to see a flas...
July 28, 2012
The 5 best and 5 worst sentences written about Penn State in the aftermath of the Freeh Report
This isn’t one of those pieces that I wanted to write. This is one of those pieces thatIhadto write, so that I can stop obsessing about something and move on.
What I’ve been obsessing about lately is the media coverage of the Penn Statescandal. I can’t stop reading other people’s writing about Penn State. I can’t stopanalyzing it and fact-checking it and pointing out, on Twitter, all that is dumband lazy and opportunistic and grandstanding and cheap. I needhelp, is whatI’m saying.
I went to Pen...
July 9, 2012
“You are an honorable man”
It’s not online yet, so you’ll have to buy a copy of Esquire to read it, but Tom Junod’slatest story, The Lethal Presidency of Barack Obama, is well worth seeking out — a remarkable fusion of storytelling and argument. Written in the second person, as if addressed directly to Obama himself, it makes the case that Obama has carved out a new doctrine of targeted assassination that will have ripple effects for decades to come. Junod writes like no one else, but in particular, he writes about mor...
July 5, 2012
“Horseplay in general is down”
The excerpt below is from a new Philly mag story by Don Steinberg, about a week he spent at a sleepaway summer camp in the Philadelphia suburbs, in search of the evocative “camp smell” that he remembers from his youth. I love this story; it’s so well-observed and unpretentious and lovely:
…I continued my informal hunt for evocative smells. I toured a boys’ bunk, Oklahoma (all the bunks are named after colleges), and it was familiar: the metal-frame bunk beds, clothes hanging on rafters, toilet...
July 4, 2012
How not to pitch
From time to time I get emails from people asking me about the best way to pitch stories to magazines. As it turns out, there are already many excellent pitching guides on the Internet. For my money, the best and most practical is Jennifer Kahn’s,which I saw atGangrey. I could quibble a little with the fact that Kahn wants the writer to bear 100 percent of the burden for a successful pitch. Ater all, you can’t eliminate all risk from a story proposal. Sometimes it’s just the job of an editor...
Revise
Deep into book revisions. I like revising. Some days I read parts of the draft I completed last November and it’s like I’m reading something written by another person. I wonder how common this feeling is among writers. I don’t think writing style changes that much in six months. It’s more like I’ve forgotten what it was like to write those pages,the emotional experience of trying and sometimes failing to solve certain problems, and now I’m just looking unemotionally at the result. Sometimes f...
July 1, 2012
“You don’t have the left hand fucked up enough”
I’m not sure if Men’s Journal is going to post my tennis piece before Wimbledon is over. So I thought I’d type up my favorite part of the story, an excerpt from a Team USA practice before the team’s first-round Davis Cup tie against Switzerland (which the U.S. eventually won):
I’m riding in a black van through the Swiss countryside, on the way to watch the first U.S. practices of the week and try to figure out how American tennis fell behind and what’s being done to catch up. Sitting behind me...
