• If you haven't yet read Doug Blackman's magnificent opus Slavery by Another Name, by all means do so. Blackman, who writes for the Atlanta desk of the Wall Street Journal, uses an old-school journalist's feature-writing technique to describe the corrosive effects of the Jim Crow Era through the eyes of a single black family in north Alabama, and his writing is nuanced, insightful, and often poetic. What distinguishes Slavery from other works on this subject, though, is its emphasis not on the often-told political and legal injustices of Jim Crow but on the economies of the era---namely, the coal mines, lumber camps, and steel and paper mills that were worked, for decades, by hundreds of thousands of black males who were conscripted, against their will, into government-sanctioned forced labor camps created by for-profit corporations, and who labored in unspeakably obscene conditions which even many antebellum slaveowners would have likely found offensive. What makes this sorrowful tale still relevant in our time is that many of these companies, or their various corporate offshoots, are still in existence today, living reminders of a place and time when government and industry worked as one indistinguishable entity, forming synergies of forced labor and money, to build an industrial state on a sea of captive labor: An American gulag, in other words. In all, it's a sobering read, but I thought it was well worth the effort. So too, apparently, did the Pulitzer Committee, which awarded it this year's Nonfiction prize.
• And it should go without saying that this year's Pulitzer winner in Music was, ahem, years overdue for the honor.
• It was certainly a shock to read this morning of the apparent suicide of the new head of Freddie Mac. One only hopes that developments like this played no role in it. It's a bad omen either way.
• Before we pronounce dead-tree journalism dead in the water, we should stop to salute great reportage when we see it:
U.S.counterterrorism officials are reacting angrily to ex-Vice President Dick Cheney's claim that waterboarding 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed 183 times was a "success" that produced actionable intelligence."Cheney is full of crap," one intelligence source with decades of experience said Tuesday.
And that, my friends, is journalism we can believe in.
---Vitelius
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