A guest piece by Holly Thomas:
The opinions of employed journos on unpaid internships are always interesting. This, ‘The power of the intern’ (Laurie Penny, The Guardian 9 April) is one of the most biased, hypocritical conceptions I have seen.
First, she complains about the prevalence of young privileged people working for free in journalism. She follows with a description of herself as an intern, a “posh dogsbody” with “my Oxford degree and nice rounded vowels”. Right.
She further claims that interns “shape the atmosphere of an office”, and frets over the worrying “influence they can have on the daily workings of the political machine”. Apparently, because she was asked questions as an intern, it is to be presumed that all interns are consulted by their bosses, and that the opinions of said interns are taken as gospel.
Also, says Laurie, interns are posh. And “liberal organisations” (?) will be corrupted, because they are “in the awkward position of financial dependence” on these terrible young people. The solution? End unpaid internships.
Ending unpaid internships would render it impossible for many companies to provide the necessary experience for graduates looking to boost their CV. Many not-at-all wealthy young people currently eschew an MA (much more expensive than working for free) so that they can combine free interning with other paid work. All quite liberal points in favour of unpaid internships. All points blithely ignored in this piece.
We received a recommendation from Guardian features scribe Nicky Woolf - whose own writerly oeuvre makes for impressive reading - for this Pulitzer winner by Gene Weingarten at the Washington Post.
It is toweringly brilliant. The intro is worth quoting in full:
The defendant was an immense man, well over 300 pounds, but in the gravity of his sorrow and shame he seemed larger still. He hunched forward in the sturdy wooden armchair that barely contained him, sobbing softly into tissue after tissue, a leg bouncing nervously under the table. In the first pew of spectators sat his wife, looking stricken, absently twisting her wedding band. The room was a sepulcher. Witnesses spoke softly of events so painful that many lost their composure. When a hospital emergency room nurse described how the defendant had behaved after the police first brought him in, she wept. He was virtually catatonic, she remembered, his eyes shut tight, rocking back and forth, locked away in some unfathomable private torment. He would not speak at all for the longest time, not until the nurse sank down beside him and held his hand. It was only then that the patient began to open up, and what he said was that he didn’t want any sedation, that he didn’t deserve a respite from pain, that he wanted to feel it all, and then to die.
A reader’s suggestion by prize-winning freelance journalist Holly Thomas:
I love Liz Jones. For me she represents the antithesis to every femme-hack who’s used the phrase “as a mother”.
A recent piece, “I’d rather my man paid for sex than had an affair” (Femail, April 21) is a showcase of Liz’s ability to interpret any subject as derivative of her own experience, then describe said experience in such heart-wrenching detail as to render the original topic obsolete.
The theme was super injunctions and infidelity. Liz went above and beyond the call of duty, providing a full breakdown of her husband’s affair, her contempt for women’s magazines, and her distaste for sex:
“The only reason we do have sex is to get a man, keep a man, steal his sperm and flatter ourselves that we are attractive.”
This may appear unprofessional, inelegant. Caitlin Moran, India Knight - their digestible columns stand as models of entertaining yet thoughtful commentary. Liz is not digestible. She is clearly a lunatic. But God can she write.
Our features tutors are really into ‘show’ and ‘tell’. It’s the omnipotent binary on which our writing is judged. ‘Lots of nice show’; ‘oh dear you’ve strayed into tell’. It isn’t just our tutors. Chekhov once said, “Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass”.
Very nice Chekhov. Bravo.
Frankly, I’m a great believer in the power of tell. The most popular journalists of today (think Charlie Brooker, Grace Dent) slap you in the face with the beatific force of their tell, and no one is better at it than Caitlin Moran. Her interview with Lady Gaga was a masterclass that won her ‘best interviewer’ at the BPAs.
She really isn’t dressed casually. In a breast-length, silver-grey wig, she has a black lace veil wound around her face, and sits, framed, in an immense, custom-made, one-off Alexander McQueen cloak. The effect is one of having been ushered into the presence of a very powerful fairytale queen.
The interview was great for a few reasons:
1 - Moran remains the only broadsheet interviewer to ‘get’ Gaga.
2 - Loads of news stories emerged from it, including that the singer has hereditary lupus.
3 - It’s writerly, but unpretentious.
In one of our classes on long-form features we studied a piece by AA Gill. In comparison to his latest masterwork, though, it was something of a sedate affair. In the May Edition of Vanity Fair, he wrote a travel piece on Dubai. The phraseology contained within was beyond remarkable.
Dubai has been built very fast. The plan was money. The architect was money. The designer was money and the builder was money. And if you ever wondered what money would look like if it were left to its own devices, it’s Dubai.
The piece is filled with this kind of rich, barbed sententia aimed squarely at this vainglorious mess of a city. And it does make you wonder, given the post below highlighting another saccharine, laboured interview on the pages of Vogue, whether proper writing at Conde Nast is reserved only for GQ and the Fair.
I received a disgusted Facebook message from my sister, Olivia, who had just finished reading Vogue’s Alexa Chung interview published in their latest issue. This is what she said, and thanks for the contribution!
“The Alexa Chung interview is beyond annoying. The writer even tries to make out the reason she has a bite of carrot cake and then leaves the rest is not because she probably has food issues, but because she has a short attention span. She is seriously sucking up to her. Vom.”
Well you heard it here first. Also zero points to Vogue for interviewing one of their staff. Anyone else read the interview? Anyone impressed by it?
The Consequentialist: How the Arab Spring remade Obama’s foreign policy by Ryan Lizza, New Yorker, 2 May
I wouldn’t normally tackle stodgy pieces on American foreign policy in the New Yorker (published on 2 May), but this one had me hooked. Ryan Lizza looks at the divisions at the heart of the Obama administration - between ideology and rationality and between Hillary Clinton’s department and his own office. Perhaps it’s just a characteristic of the USA in general, but the article makes the American politics seem so much bigger and more significant than our own. It’s full of quotes from insiders - you feel right in the centre of things. You never read pieces like this on the inner-workings of UK state departments and 10 Downing Street that are almost academic in their scope and depth, although our own leaders must be making important decisions as significant to our own country. Perhaps our journalists aren’t working hard enough…
Polly Toynbee! Wouldn’t have expected anything less of her. In her Guardian comment piece she goes as far as to dub the Royal wedding the UK’s “Marie Antoinette” moment - a powerful and cruel metaphor. I am surprised she was silly enough to say “of course Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had no invitation, being the prime ministers who held back the forces of conservatism for 13 years”, an inaccurate comment to say the least. But I do like her underlying concern: that the UK has not admitted the grave challenges that it faces economically, socially, everything-ly. As per usual our love of tradition and fairytale has triumphed over looking into the future and honestly looking at what lies ahead. It’s not a Conservative revolution though - it’s far subtler than that.
