Buzzfeed has published a wonderful story by Ruby Cramer called “The Place Where Letters To Hillary Clinton Go.” It’s about 30-year-old Rob Russo, who is in charge of Hillary Clinton’s political and personal correspondence. He’s drafted 110,000 letters for her since 2008, and it looks like he’ll double that number eventually, because, since Election Day,…
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Throwback Thursday: When Havoc Struck
As I’ve said before, there are fascinating stories to be found in the obituary sections of newspapers. I’m specifying “newspapers,” rather than the “news,” because if you’re not physically turning the pages of a print edition, it’s easy to miss anyone whose death doesn’t make the homepage of a website or the top of a…
The Helpers Included Mr. Rogers Himself
After a tragedy — when people wonder how to talk to kids about terrible things — a decades-old story told by the late PBS children’s-show host Fred Rogers will be cited again and again. That’s as it should be, because the message is timeless. The gentle man known as Mr. Rogers shared what his mother…
ProPublica Wins a Fourth Pulitzer Prize
ProPublica won its fourth Pulitzer Prize yesterday! The public-service category’s prize was awarded for a story — done in partnership with the New York Daily News — about abuses of nuisance abatement laws in New York. The laws give police the power to evict people using their homes or business for illegal purposes, but they’ve…
ProPublica For the Win, With All the Receipts
During yesterday’s White House press briefing, Sean Spicer was asked about a story published by MrB’s organization, ProPublica, that morning. ProPublica’s Derek Kravitz and Al Shaw wrote that previously unreported changes to a trust document allow Trump to draw money from the supposedly “blind” trust for his more than 400 businesses, at any time, without…
Recommended Reading
Yesterday, the New York Times published a fascinating story by Ellen Barry on young rural women in India who are recruited to move to Bangalore to work in factories. There, the women — some of them teenagers — make products for Westerners, including Marks & Spencer miniskirts. The work is relentless, the hours are long,…
Recommended Reading: Painkillers and Prince
The Los Angeles Times has published a must-read story about how the promotion of OxyContin helped set off the prescription opioid epidemic in the U.S. The investigation by Harriet Ryan, Lisa Girion and Scott Glover found that even before OxyContin went on the market in 1996, clinical trials showed that the effects of OxyContin showed…
Congrats to ProPublica on Its Third Pulitzer Prize!
A big congratulations to MrB’s nonprofit investigative reporting organization, ProPublica, on its third Pulitzer Prize! The article was a collaboration with another nonprofit, The Marshall Project, which specializes in covering criminal justice. T. Christian Miller, a senior reporter for ProPublica, and Ken Armstrong, a writer for The Marshall Project, won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for…
Recommended Reading: “Last Men Standing”
George Michael’s quote in yesterday’s post about “the years when HIV was a killer” reminded me that I’ve been meaning to share the San Francisco Chronicle’s “Last Men Standing” project. The Chronicle described its package of print and digital stories and film this way: “They outlived an epidemic, but San Francisco’s AIDS survivors are still…
You Might Literally Die If You Miss My Jewelry Sale
If you missed Jessica Bennett’s recent New York Times story on the latest developments in Internet-speak, you better read it if you ever hope to communicate with me again. Srsly, the new jargon is so second-nature for me now that I just can’t even when people don’t use it. When I get a text, email…