Southern Bookman

Iranian Pulitzer-winning playwright Sanaz Toossi discusses immigrant experience, why she turned to TV

Sanaz Toossi, who won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize this week for her play "English," can't make a living as a playwright despite a burst of success in the theater.

The 31-year-old Iranian-American writer said in a New York Times interview Thursday that she supports herself by writing for television, which allowed her to buy health insurance.

Toossi's now on strike along with other members of the Hollywood writers' union seeking increased pay and benefits from TV streaming. But media landscape changes threaten the abundant era for TV writers that has prevailed for more than a decade.

As cable TV channels and streaming services like Netflix expanded, successful playwrights turned to TV writing to earn lucrative livelihoods.

Yet changes in media technology and audience fragmentation brought reduced compensation for writers in recent years, culminating in the walkout. As the strike continues, TV production has ground to a halt.

Playwright and TV screenwriter Alena Smith in a revealing article for the Los Angeles Review of Books mourns the lack of sustaining theater income for American playwrights.

But TV opportunities for writers have also eroded, as the strike exposes. Smith in a sobering assessment of the future says that the Internet and decline of cable will disrupt the TV landscape.

Smith, a Yale Drama School MFA graduate, said she earned only $13,000 as a playwright over six years, including a federal grant. She supplemented her income with odd jobs before heading to Hollywood, where she created the popular Apple TV+ series "Dickinson."

Broadway and the New York theater once sustained American playwrights like Eugene O'Neil, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams.

From 1920 to 1940, 130 new plays were produced on Broadway each year, Smith discloses. From 1980 to 2014, the number of new productions plummeted to 14 a year, and will fall even lower as revivals, musicals and juke-box confections vie for declining audiences.

Smith foresees a similar bleak ice age for writers as the TV landscape fragments.

Toossi, the single child of Iranian immigrants, has enjoyed a meteoric rise in the theater, capped by the Pulitzer.

"English," in which four Iranians take English lessons at a storefront school outside of Tehran in order to pass a language proficiency exam, premiered in 2022 at the off-Broadway Atlantic Theater Co.  Before capturing the Pulitzer, Toossi won the Lucille Lortel Award for outstanding Off-Broadway drama.

The play is frequently produced around the country, and Toossi has received commissions from several local theater companies. Her second play, "Wish You Were Here," a comedy about Iranian women's travails in America, was produced in 2022 by the off-Broadway Playwrights Horizon Theater.

But like other playwrights whose first love is the theater, she's turned to TV to survive.

Now that sanctuary is closing too.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bill Gates, Thomas Friedman acclaim Artificial Intelligence's Brave New World

I am not a robot.

ChatGPT is not writing this piece.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman and billionaire Bill Gates are in a frenzy over Artificial Intelligence, claiming it's as revolutionary as the printing press, the Internet and the steam engine.

The new Microsoft GPT-4 bot developed by OpenAI can whip out sonnets and abecedarian verse within seconds, according to Friedman's column this week.

Along with composing poems in which each line begins with a different letter of the alphabet, GPT-4 can almost instantaneously do translations in different languages, Friedman marveled.

I'm sure GPT-4 will soon be turning out Tom Friedman columns indistinguishable from the real thing.

Gates in his blog says AI will free humans from mundane tasks and allow us "to do things that software never will - teaching, caring for patients and supporting the elderly," according to the Wall Street Journal.

Why Artificial Intelligence can't teach and care for patients was not explained.

Against corporate opposition, office workers are using OpenAI's ChatGPT to write emails, memos and messages, according to a Wall Street Journal article. The workers say it improves productivity.

Or Artificial Intelligence could be nothing more than Quiet Quitting, last year's trend.

Perhaps Friedman and Gates are right, and AI will bring bring a new golden era of human development.

I remain skeptical, and plan to ignore Artificial Intelligence as much as possible, hoping it'll be destroyed all together.

Best wishes to Generation Z as they welcome the new age, but I'm too old for a little AI buddy.

For me, Shakespeare's sonnets will never by supplanted by something called GPT-4.

 

 

 

Space telescope reaches destination 930,000 miles from earth

Putin's troops threaten Ukraine, inflation soars, political turmoil rages. But the James Webb Space Telescope has reached its perch on the other side of the sun.

With a last thrust of booster rockets, the $10 billion telescope with its 18 gold-plated hexagonal mirrors entered its orbit at Lagrange 2, a spot where the sun and earth's gravitational fields blend into equilibrium.

From its "halo orbit," the telescope will gather data from the universe's earliest moments and peer at distant stars. Jubilant NASA scientists said that the telescope will operate for 20 years or more.

The earth and sun's orbits result in five Lagrange points, numbered L1 through L5, according to the Washington Post.

 "Placing the telescope at L2 — in line with the earth and sun, where the telescope’s large shield can protect it from their glare and heat — will allow it to look farther, while also keeping its sensitive instruments at the super-cold temperatures they need to operate," the newspaper reported.

Surprisingly, the 18th century Italian-French mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange discovered the places where gravity and centrifugal force counterbalance each other.

Now, NASA scientists will align the telescope's mirrors and instruments, with the first images not appearing until June or July, if all goes well. The telescope's mirrors will gaze at the first stars that rose following the big bang 13 billion years ago.

As we muddle along on earth, the great eye in the sky will be searching for clues to the origin of the universe, and whether life exists somewhere else.

Perhaps someday we’ll find our own harmonious Lagrange point right here at home.

 

 

 

Collier's magazine of Gellhorn, Hemingway flourished during publishing's golden age

Ken Burns' Ernest Hemingway documentary on PBS mentioned that Hemingway and his third wife, Martha Gellhorn, served as war correspondents for Collier's magazine.

Gellhorn covered the Spanish Civil War and World War II for Collier's, and she brought Hemingway to the magazine to cover the liberation of Europe from the Nazis after D-Day, as the series relates. Hemingway's ham-handed undermining of Gellhorn at the magazine led to their divorce.

The program’s reference to Collier's bade me to do some Internet research about the magazine.

Founded in 1888 by Peter Fenelon Collier, the once popular publication was a trailblazer in investigative reporting, fiction, photography, layout and printing technology. The magazine published leading authors, reporters and cartoonists, reaching a circulation in the millions before World War II.

Collier's was a hybrid of Life, Look, Time, the Saturday Evening Post and more intellectual magazines like the Atlantic and Harper's. Its Wikipedia entry makes it appear most like the New Yorker.

As Americans turned to television during the 1950s, Colliers began bleeding circulation, closing in 1957. Over the years, once flourishing publications like the Saturday Evening Post, Saturday Review of Books, Life, Look, Redbook, MacLeans, True and Mademoiselle joined Collier's in the magazine cemetery.

In Hemingway and Gellhorn's glory years, magazines supported prosperous careers of multiple journalists, fiction writers, cartoonists, editors and photographers.

Although fewer Americans had even high school educations, the population read an astonishing variety of magazines and newspapers through the early 1960s. While general literacy might have been lower, people had a deeper basic knowledge of science, literature, civics and public affairs.

All in all, the once glowing promise of Internet publishing dims as consolidation and layoffs mount. The golden age of magazines will never return.

 

 

 

 

BuzzFeed News' Ben Smith seeks to restore David Carr's flair as New York Times media columnist

The New York Times took another step toward its digital future Tuesday with the appointment of BuzzFeed News' Ben Smith as the newspaper's media columnist.

Smith as BuzzFeed News' editor in chief built a respected news operation besides the web site's click-bait offerings. Now, the 43-year-old Smith will seek to restore the luster the late David Carr gave the media column.

Jim Rutenberg, who succeeded Carr after his death in 2015, will now write in-depth features for the newspaper and its magazine. While solid as media columnist, Rutenberg never achieved Carr's flair. He also showed more interest in how media intersects with politics than with Hollywood and TV glamour.

Smith caught Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet's eye with a November BuzzFeed News piece on who in the Times newsroom will take over Baquet's job when he retires in a couple of years.

With his hard-news success in building BuzzFeed News and understanding of today's digital media landscape, Smith himself will be a strong candidate to replace Baquet.

Smith is younger than other leading candidates and brings extensive writing and editing experience, including a stint at Politico. Smith's blend of new media flash and traditional news values equip him to lead the Times into its digital future.

While Smith led investigative projects that garnered two Pulitzer Prize nominations for BuzzFeed News, he also drew fire for publishing the Steele dossier accusing Donald Trump of various nefarious activities while courting Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

BuzzFeed News also struggled financially, with multiple layoffs last year. Smith says the news site has stabilized, while still losing money. The larger BuzzFeed has found success with a range of product lines.

Smith begins the column in March. Times watchers hope he brings back Carr's excitement.

 

Charleston among leaders in innovation jobs growth, report finds

I was surprised to see Charleston listed tenth among American cities that had gained the most "innovation" jobs from 2005 to 2017.

The insular Southern city where the Civil War began with the firing on Fort Sumter joined such heavyweights as No. 1 San Francisco, No. 2 Seattle and No. 3 Silicon Valley on the high-tech jobs rankings compiled by the Brookings Institution, according to The New York Times.

Charleston fell far behind San Francisco, Seattle, Silicon Valley, No. 4 Boston and No. 5 San Diego. Those cities garnered nine out of 10 innovation jobs created in the country during those years, but Charleston's making the top 10 is impressive.

A charming city of old homes, fine restaurants and waterfront vistas is apparently drawing high-tech firms with its easy-going lifestyle. The home of the Daughters of the Confederacy and a towering monument to John C. Calhoun must also have a strong population of well-educated workers. I didn't realize that the College of Charleston and the Citadel were rivals to MIT.

I'm skeptical about such reports, although the Brookings Institution is highly regarded. San Francisco made the top spot, but the Wall Street Journal editorial page frequently chortles that the city by the bay is hemorrhaging jobs because of its high taxes and expensive housing. Other reports agree with the WSJ.

Charles Schwab Co., which might not qualify as an innovation company, recently announced that it will move its headquarters from San Francisco to Dallas.

Dallas was No. 3 for innovation jobs lost, according to the Brookings report. Who knew; I thought Dallas and the rest of Texas is booming.

Washington, which recently was awarded an Amazon headquarters, hit No. 6 on the negative list. Chicago led the lost jobs category, followed by Philadelphia. Los Angeles came in at No. 4. Poor Wichita, Kansas, was No. 5.

Charleston before the Civil War led the nation in the slave trade. Now it beats Los Angeles in gaining innovation jobs.

Feeling paranoid on Peachtree Street? It might be those cameras watching you

Welcome South, (Big) Brother.

Atlanta is a global city after all, at least when it comes to spying on its citizens and visitors. Henry Grady's "brave and beautiful city" ranks 10th in the world in public street surveillance, with nearly 11,000 security cameras watching the sidewalks, according to a recent AJC article.

With 15.6 cameras per 1,000 residents, Atlanta ia the only American city to make the top 10 list, according to the Comparitech report. Eight of the top surveillance cities are in China, which holds the top five spots. London, with 58 cameras per 1,000 residents, ranks sixth. Chongqing, in central China, is the world's top snoop, with 158 cameras per 1,000 people.

Years ago, Atlanta aspired to be an international city. Little did we know it would be for video surveillance.

Go to a strip club, the giant eye will see you. Tipsy after too many drinks at lunch? Surprise, you're on candid camera. Starting a new relationship? The camera knows. Those 11,000 unblinking eyes will see what books or magazines you've purchased.

Notoriously repressive Singapore and Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates rank below Atlanta. Perhaps Atlanta can hold on to the camera-security lead as the UAB's Dubai's airport closes in on Hartsfield-Jackson as the world's busiest.

City police keeping watch on the city's streets from monitors in the Loudermilk Visual Intregration Center downtown say the prying on Peachtree reduces crime. But the ACLU says the watching handcuffs personal freedom.

If you're going to see the Falcons or Atlanta United at Mercedes-Benz Stadium, enjoy the game. The city will be watching you.

 

 

 

 

 

Deadspin crashes after staff revolts against corporate demands

The Internet has ravaged newspapers and magazines. The new age is also perilous for digital news sites.

Cheeky sports site Deadspin looks all but dead after a staff revolt against its corporate overlords.

Deadspin's staff resigned this week after a demand from its private equity owners that the site limit its coverage to sports. The site drew a hip audience with articles that branched out from sports to politics and popular culture. Writers were given wide latitude to give personal views and throw bricks at revered sports figures and institutions.

As with ESPN, Deadspin owner Great Hill Partners grew uneasy with its staff's left-leaning political coverage. Great Hill gained control of Deadspin and sibling Jezebel from Univision and formed G/O Media to run the sites. Deadspin and Jezebel were originally part of Gawker, which collapsed after wrestler Hulk Hogan won a $140 million judgment against it.

G/O Media Editorial Director Paul Maidiment's meddling with Deadspin's articles led to the resignation of Editor Megan Greenwall a few months ago. This week, interim Editor Barry Petchesky was tossed out after opposing Maidment's demands that the site limit itself to sports. The staff resigned in support of Petchesky. The writers also objected to pop-up video ads that disrupted readers. An outpouring of outrage from Deadspin fans followed the turmoil.

Deadspin's self-immolation follows massive staff cutbacks at Sports Illustrated, engineered by another private equity firm. SI soldiers on, scoring a First Amendment victory over the Houston Astros during the World Series when an Astros executive was fired for making misogynistic comments to a female SI reporter.

With Deadspin reeling, sports fans have fewer digital choices. The site's demise is another blow to free, reliable information on the Internet.

Along with ESPN, newspaper sites and the diminished SI, those hungry for comprehensive sports news on the Internet can turn to the self-congratulatory and subscription-based the Athletic, funded by venture capitalists. With a roster of mainstream sportswriters pirated from local newspapers, The Athletic labors to match Deadspin's snarkiness and unconventional views.

Private equity firms have plundered local newspapers as well as digital sites. The old press barons were greedy, but had some commitment to journalism.

 

Mike Vaccarro, Ray Ratto and Will Leitch give sportswriting pleasure

Rupert Murdoch's New York Post is often derided, but the tabloid does a good job of covering New York City.

Following the Yankees-Astros American League Championship Series, I've discovered the Post's Mike Vaccarro, one of the best newspaper sports columnists I've read in a while.

The Yankees-oriented Vaccarro's vivid language recalls the old-time sportswriting masters. He conveys baseball's excitement, drama and disappointment. Vaccaro is also the author of several books on baseball history.

Along with Vaccarro, I've had a good run recently of finding outstanding sportswriters on the Internet.

Deadspin, beset by corporate turmoil, recently began running columns by West-coast based Ray Ratto. Years ago, I heard about Ratto's coverage of California sports, but in those pre-Internet days, I never read his work. Now, I look forward to reading his witty and provocative columns that express an original viewpoint.

New York magazine and MLB's Will Leitch is another sportswriter who gives a fresh outlook. Co-founder of Deadspin, Leitch is now based in Athens, Ga., from where he turns out an impressive body of work. I mainly read his insightful New York magazine articles. He also produces a weekly Saturday newsletter, in which he reflects on sports and his life in Athens among the UGA Bulldogs.

The Internet has endangered print journalism. It's also given access to sportswriters keeping alive an American tradition.

 

Farewell, Sports Illustrated

Sports Illustrated, which thrilled generations of sports fanatics with its magnificent color photographs and hip writing, is being plundered by a bunch of vultures known as Maven.

Maven, a Seattle-based digital platform company that had seized control of SI, announced Thursday that 40 percent of the magazine/web site's staff will be laid off. The bad news arrived in a cruel pageant of canceled and revived meetings in which those cut were divided from those allowed to stay. Functionaries from Meredith Co., which still ran the magazine, carried out the hit job, while Maven issued crowing emails.

Another journalistic lion finding itself obsolete in the digital publishing jungle, Sports Illustrated had struggled to survive through shifting owners. The SI web site kept offering free content as other publishers changed to a pay-wall model. Publishing the same articles free on the Internet as appeared in the print magazine depleted its readership.

Longtime owner Time-Warner, merging with AT&T, in 2017 sold Sports Illustrated along with Time and other well-known magazines to Meredith, which publishes wholesome home and hearth magazines of eternal appeal to new generations of moms and "homemakers."

Meredith quickly unloaded SI to Authentic Brands Co. which profits from the images of dead celebrities like Marilyn Monroe and Muhammad Ali. It hoped the SI brand would sell different products. Meredith agreed to keep publishing SI for two years. But then a deal was reached with Maven to take over.

Maven plans to replace the professional writers and photographers with a network of low-paid bloggers. According to a triumphant Maven news release, a new SI digital platform will be relaunched in January, with "complementary video content."

The SI layoffs follow the announcement that New York magazine will merge with Vox Media. Like Sports Illustrated, New York magazine was late to the pay content model, offering its magazine articles for free until recently. New York magazine's cast of excellent writers fear layoffs are coming under Vox.

Like many whose sports love was inflamed by reading Sports Illustrated in boyhood, I was saddened by SI's demise. But as with many of those other star-dazzled kids, I rarely if ever read the magazine anymore.