Spiritual Quote of the Day (St. John Paul II, on ‘Emigration in Search of Work’)

“[T]he person working away from his native land, whether as a permanent emigrant or as a seasonal worker, should not be placed at a disadvantage in comparison with the other workers in that society in the matter of working rights. Emigration in search of work must in no way become an opportunity for financial or social exploitation. As regards the work relationship, the same criteria should be applied to immigrant workers as to all other workers in the society concerned. The value of work should be measured by the same standard and not according to the difference in nationality, religion or race. For even greater reason the situation of constraint in which the emigrant may find himself should not be exploited. All these circumstances should categorically give way, after special qualifications have of course been taken into consideration, to the fundamental value of work, which is bound up with the dignity of the human person. Once more the fundamental principle must be repeated: the hierarchy of values and the profound meaning of work itself require that capital should be at the service of labor and not labor at the service of capital.”—Polish-born pope St. John Paul II (1920-2005), in the encyclical Laborem Exercens (“On Human Work”), issued Sept. 14, 1981

This Day in Journalism History (Raines Begins Trying ‘Times’ Running the Gray Lady)

Sept. 5, 2001—Howell Raines took over as executive editor of The New York Times with superabundant self-confidence. In two stormy years atop the “paper of record,” he exuded a grating self-righteousness. Several years later, following revelations of widespread fabrication and fraud by reporter Jayson Blair on his watch, he reviewed his fall from the newspaper where he had worked for 25 years with self-pity.

Less than a week after assuming control, Raines threw the paper’s overwhelming resources into the biggest story that he and other journalists had ever covered: the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

At first, it seemed to vindicate his philosophy of “flooding the zone,” or devoting saturation coverage to a major news event, day after day. In his first year at the helm, The Times won Pulitzer Prizes, including the first given to its metro desk since the 1950s.

But more than he or his acolytes realized, all that celebration and self-congratulation were not entirely warranted.

First, the staff responsible for producing the prize-winning stories (including its ongoing special section, “A Nation Challenged”) had been largely picked and guided by predecessor Joseph Lelyveld.

Second, as noted in Eric Boehlert’s Salon post-mortem on the scandal that ended Howell’s reign, top editors’ direction of the DC bureau’s news coverage “represented an unprecedented attempt to micromanage the newspaper and infuriated editors and reporters, many of whom began to flee to other papers and other jobs.”

Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., the publisher of the newspaper who had selected Raines for the top editorial post, should have taken more seriously a December 2022 Newsweek article warning of newsroom rumblings about this direction. 

He must have sensed that, for all his friend’s talent (a Pulitzer Prize winner himself, for a 1992 Times Magazine essay about his family’s maid, Grady Hutchinson, in the segregated South of his childhood) and experience (bureau chief stints in Atlanta, London, and Washington), Raines needed to relax his management style.

According to Ken Auletta’s June 2002 New Yorker profile, “The Howell Doctrine,” Sulzberger not only cautioned Raines that he could not employ the star system he had used as Washington bureau chief, but confided in associates "that he would have blocked Raines’ promotion [to executive editor] if Sulzberger was not convinced that he had changed.”

But you might as well ask a leopard to change its spots. It wasn’t enough that Raines thought he had a mandate from Sulzberger to make the paper “smarter, livelier, and more appealing to the geographically diverse and demanding national audience on which its future depends,” as he put it in a May 2004 Atlantic Monthly account of his tenure. 

He also saw a conflict between “the senior editors who endorsed these improvements and traditionalists on the newsroom floor and among mid-level managers.” The latter, he claimed, “wanted the paper to stay the way it was.”

The members of the latter faction went unnamed. There is every reason to think that the claim was fatuous, a grope in the dark by a former journalism giant too blind to understand how his own failings led to his departure from the job he craved and the paper he loved.

In his first day on the job, Raines thought he was sending a symbolic signal to staff by putting on his desk a copy of the Charles Gaines 1972 novel Stay Hungry, the application of which seemed obvious to him in a competitive news environment.

But he missed the other signals that the newsroom picked up about his imperious manner in fielding questions at breakfasts and lunches, including an expression that even friends thought made him look like “an angry hawk.”

Terms other than “flooding the zone” might better describe the coverage that Raines soon assigned to some topics, with the most polite being “crusade.” “Obsession” would fit even better. “Hobbyhorse” might have worked especially well in some instances:

* The verdict was most mixed on the Roman Catholic Church abuse scandal. No doubt, an institution to which one in five Americans belonged at the time needed to be scrutinized, and there was no doubt that exposing the misdeeds of individual priests and the coverup by the hierarchy prevented countless future crimes. But the number of collective column inches, the lack of oversight on individual stories, and the secular viewpoint of the paper’s staff and readership raised real questions about objectivity and even anti-Catholic bias. (For instance, assuming that TV showrunner David Kelley was “raised Catholic,” it headlined a review of one of his scripts about the abuse scandal, “A Catholic Writer Brings His Anger to 'The Practice'”—and needed to run a correction when it turned out that Kelley was, in fact, raised Protestant.) Moreover, Raines’ motives for propelling the coverage were hardly pure; Martin Baron, executive editor of The Boston Globe, later told Roy Harris for a 2008 article for Poynter that he heard his counterpart at the Times was “annoyed that we were onto the biggest story of the year and seemingly headed to a Pulitzer,” and determined that his paper would cover it at the national level and consign the Globe to local stories about the scandal.

*The Bush administration claim that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction was certainly covered in depth, but without the skepticism it deserved. A 2004 “Editor’s Note,” after an internal investigation, concluded that Judith Miller’s stories on this justification for the war buildup that “information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged” by senior management at the time—an assessment that Raines predictably took issue with.

* Campaigning incessantly for the Augusta National Golf Course to open to women was hardly the most consequential story in Raines’ tenure, but it was certainly the one that provoked the most ridicule. The revelation of spiked columns by two writers who disagreed with the position only made matters worse.

But the Blair fiasco represented a fundamental challenge to the Times’ credibility that could not be ignored.

What Raines’ friends and defenders downplayed, in noting that other journalists were not forced out of their positions or faced such dire damage to their reputations for their misdeeds, were the sheet multiplicity and breadth of Blair’s transgressions, including fake quotes; locations supposedly visited even as he sat in his Brooklyn apartment; details invented from photographs and other news reports; and passages plagiarized from other reporters.

An exhaustive, nearly 7,500-word post-mortem that, to his credit, Raines authorized, concluded that at least 36 of Blair’s final 73 stories filed before his resignation were tainted by fraud. 

Worse, high-level figures such as Washington editor Jill Abramson and metro editor Jonathan Landman had been raising red flags, with Landman even warning, in a blunt April 2002 memo, “We have to stop Jayson from writing for the Times. Right now.”

Five works elapsed after Blair's firing before Sulzberger took further action. When Raines could not contain the mushrooming scandal or the newsroom muttering that had now become a cacophony, he and managing editor Gerald Boyd were forced to resign.

The disappointment must have been enormous when Raines finally grasped that he would function as an agent of change at the Gray Lady in a far different fashion than he expected.

Largely because of the Blair scandal, the Times instituted the ombudsman position (or, as they called it, a “public editor”), an independent watchdog who investigated reader complaints of inaccuracy and unfairness. 

Six journalists performed that function for the next 14 years, until the paper decided that the rise of social media helped maintain accountability. (I still think that was a mistake.)

In Andy Robinson’s July 2017 retrospective on the position in the Columbia Journalism Review, Margaret Sullivan, the penultimate Times public editor, noted the scandal epitomized “so many issues that were and still are happening in newsrooms: the effort to diversify the staff, people who find mentors, the pressure that reporters are under, the intense pressure that they’re under at places like The New York Times, the things that can go wrong, the way that in the new age you could simply be talking to your editor on your cell phone, and they wouldn’t know where you were.”

Quote of the Day (Simone de Beauvoir, on ‘Authentic Love’)

“Authentic love must be founded on reciprocal recognition of two freedoms; each lover would then experience himself as himself and as the other: neither would abdicate his transcendence, they would not mutilate themselves; together they would both reveal values and ends in the world.”— French existentialist philosopher, social theorist, novelist, and feminist activist Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986), The Second Sex (1949)

Quote of the Day (P. G. Wodehouse, on a Desperate Young Man)

“A young man with dark circles under his eyes was propping himself up against a penny-in-the-slot machine. An undertaker, passing at that moment, would have looked at this young man sharply, scenting business. So would a buzzard.” — English humorist P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975), The Luck of the Bodkins (1935)

This Day in Literary History (Alison Lurie, Smart, Tart Pulitzer Winner, Born)

Sept. 3, 1926—Alison Lurie, who used her longtime career in academe as material for critically acclaimed fiction, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1984 novel Foreign Affairs, was born in Chicago.

I first encountered the work of Lurie in the mid-Seventies, with her biting academic satire The War Between the Tates. Though she had written four prior novels, this was the first to attract widespread attention—enough for it to land on the bestseller lists and to be adapted into a 1977 TV movie starring Elizabeth Ashley, Richard Crenna, and Annette O'Toole.

For anyone wanting to know what how the nation’s campuses were roiled in the late Sixties by the Vietnam War, women’s lib, and the sexual revolution, this insider’s take, with its cool irony, remains an excellent place to start.

Many neophyte authors follow the mantra “write about what you know,” but I was unaware until I started researching this post just how closely Ms. Lurie followed that.

Several of her novels (including The War Between the Tates) feature characters from Corinth University, a school that shares a classical association and upstate New York setting with the institution where Ms. Lurie taught for decades, Cornell University.

Her female protagonists (the same age, within a few years, of Ms. Lurie) are often involved with children’s literature—her academic specialty. She couldn’t help but regard with tart disdain how these books were viewed by her colleagues, as in this passage from Foreign Affairs:

“For the truth is that children’s literature is a poor relation in her department –indeed, in most English departments: a stepdaughter grudgingly tolerated because, as in the old tales, her words are glittering jewels of a sort that attract large if not equally brilliant masses of undergraduates. Within the departmental family she sits in the chimney-corner, while her idle, ugly siblings dine at the chairman’s table –though, to judge by enrollment figures, many of them must spout toads and lizards.”

With all of that said, readers should be careful not to construe her fiction as directly autobiographical. Maintaining the kind of ironic distance she was able to keep towards her characters would have been difficult, if not impossible, if they derived entirely from her experiences and emotions.

For instance, like Erica Tate in The War Between the Tates, Lurie suffered through the collapse of her marriage to another academic. But, while the marital conflict in the novel was brought to a boil by an extramarital affair, Lurie’s marriage deteriorated as her first husband underwent a conversion to Roman Catholicism—a spiritual orientation that, as the child of religious skeptics, she had little or no use for.

Over the years, I have wondered why Ms. Lurie was unable to sustain her mid-career popularity. Some of it may relate to the fact that creators of so-called “literary fiction” don’t work in genres where they can become “brand authors.”

But I suspect most of the problem instead rests with her frequent recourse to the academic environment she knew so thoroughly—a setting outside the experience of many common readers in the U.S. Throughout most of her career, her popularity was higher in the U.K., where writers such as A.S. Byatt, Kingsley Amis, David Lodge, and Iris Murdoch have enjoyed success with “campus novels.”

Readers who do try Ms. Lurie will find a fiction writer able to put her literary influences to use in contemporary contexts:

*Her consistently wry narrative voice (you can practically see her narrators raise their eyebrows) is reminiscent of Jane Austen.

*With his “international novels” (featuring encounters between innocent Americans and more jaded British), interest in artists, and midlife fascination with the supernatural, Henry James provided Lurie with another template.

*And her intense study of children’s literature led Lurie to plumb the complex personalities and frequent fears of the very young.

Above all, Lurie exemplifies the tendency of so many writers—no matter their time or nation—to write from a personal wound. With Lurie, that wound began even before childhood, in birth. As she wrote in a 1982 essay for The New York Times Book Review:

“I was a skinny, plain, off-looking little girl, deaf in one badly damaged ear from a birth injury, and with a resulting atrophy of the facial muscles that pulled my mouth sideways whenever I opened it to speak and turned my smile into a sort of sneer. I was clever, or, as one of my teachers put it, ‘too clever for her own good,’ but not especially charming or affectionate or helpful. I couldn't seem to learn to ride a bike or sing in tune, and I was always the last person chosen for any team.”

The precocious but lonely child took refuge in books, especially, at that young age, fairy tales. To her joy, she discovered her own personal superpower: “With a pencil and paper I could revise the world.”

It made the difference in her life, which ended six years ago in a hospice in Ithaca, NY.

Lurie would be delighted to know that admirers of her fiction are celebrating the centenary of her birth on both sides of the Atlantic this month. In New York City, the 92^nd Street Y will host “Alison Lurie at 100” on Tuesday, September 15, featuring authors Bruce Handy, Joanna Rakoff, and Micah Perks in conversation with Cody Upton.

And in London, the British Library hosts “An American in London: A Celebration of Alison Lurie” on September 29, with speakers including Amanda Craig, Elly Griffiths, and Dame Margaret Drabble.

Quote of the Day (Sir Ben Okri, on Museums As ‘A Tremendous Force for Public Good’)

“The best way to spend £20 is a visit to a good museum, most of which are still free in Britain. Long may this continue. It is a tremendous force for public good. I recommend that you donate half of your £20 to the museum after such a visit, to help them with their work. A pot of tea and some biscuits are all you need to restore yourself before heading back out into the mild hallucination of the outside world.” — Nigerian-born British poet and novelist Sir Ben Okri, "The Aesthete: Ben Okri,” The Financial Times, Aug. 1, 2026 (“How To Spend It” supplement)

Unlike Britain, most U.S. museums charge admission fees. But Sir Ben’s point remains well taken: museums are a “tremendous force for public good” in terms of what they can teach visitors. Let’s keep it that way.

Quote of the Day (Studs Terkel, on the ‘Assault Upon Our Intelligence’)

“I’ve always felt… that there’s a deep decency in the American people and a native intelligence — providing they have the facts, providing they have the information. The September 11 assault was horrendous. But there’s another assault that’s taking place. It’s an assault upon our intelligence. It’s an assault upon our sense of decency as well as upon our faiths too, I believe. We are the most powerful nation in the world, but we’re not the only nation in the world. We are not the only people in the world. We are an important people, the wealthiest, the most powerful and, to a great extent, generous. But we are part of the world.” —Pulitzer Prize-winning American oral historian, actor, and broadcaster Studs Terkel (1912-2008) interviewed for PBS “Religion and Ethics Newsweekly,” Dec. 19, 2003

In the two decades since Terkel’s remarks, I would have to say that the “assault upon our intelligence” has grown more relentless, and, in important ways, has even breached longtime defenses.