Southern Bookman

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.

J.D. Salinger's books enter the digital age

J.D. Salinger's books will be published digitally for the first time, according to a front page article in Monday's New York Times.

Salinger's works are the last major literary estate to enter the digital world, according to the Times. Although the reclusive Salinger hated technology, the J.D. Salinger Literary Trust decided that his work is being forgotten by a new generation geared to reading on smartphones and computer screens.

"The Catcher in the Rye," "Nine Stories," "Franny and Zooey" and "Raise High the Roof Beam Carpenters and Seymour, An Introduction," will be converted into e-books, but not audio recordings, Salinger's son, Matt, announced. The estate also will continue its ban on movie versions of the books.

Matt Salinger also told the Times that more of Salinger's writing will be published in the next few years. As rumored, Salinger, who died at age 91, kept writing until the end of his life and produced a voluminous amount of new material.

A lot of the unpublished work concerns Salinger's mystical Glass family, his son said. Unable to find reliable software to convert Salinger's handwritten work into print, Matt Salinger is painstakingly typing the manuscripts.

Long a favorite of middle-school and high school classes, "The Catcher in the Rye" is seen as outdated by young readers today. Girls especially find the book unrelated to their concerns. Black readers also don't find the book relevant.

Yet, Salinger's Holden Caulfield and his memorable portrait of New York City surely will draw younger fans attuned to the beauty of language and Holden's quest for meaning.

I'll be happy to have an e-book copy of "Nine Stories" available for convenient reading. "For Esme in Love and Squalor" is one of those stories I must reread, along with "A Perfect Day for Banana Fish" and "Just Before the War With The Eskimos."

Along with many other male Salinger fans, I fell in love with Franny Glass, imagining myself also dating her on a crisp Ivy League football weekend. But when I reread the novella a few years ago, it seemed overwrought and treacly.

I consumed "Raise High the Roof Beams, Carpenters," and "Seymour: An Introduction," but they show a decline in Salinger's writing, with too much exposition at the expense of artistry. Still, narrator Buddy Glass, Salinger's alter-ego, is a good companion.

While I welcome the e-book publication of Salinger's classics, I can't wait to see what he was working on all of those years hiding away in New Hampshire. Perhaps brilliant new masterpieces will arrive, or disappointing, unrealized work. Either way, Salinger fans will greet them in a frenzy.

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Innovative editor Adam Moss leaving New York magazine

The beleaguered magazine industry received another shock Tuesday with the annoucement that New York magazine editor Adam Moss will be leaving in March, as The New York Times reported.

Under Moss, New York magazine and its online branches Vulture and the Cut produced outstanding coverage of politics, business, international relations and climate change while riding ahead of the wave in TV, fashion, film, books, theater and art reporting.

Former editor of the New York Times Sunday magazine, Moss carried New York's legacy inherited from founder Clay Felker into the Internet age.

Despite its incisive and far-ranging coverage of New York City and the national scene, profits remained sluggish. Recently, the magazine announced a pay wall for its web site.  That seemed to conflict with the web site's free-wheeling style.

As with Graydon Carter and Tina Brown at Vanity Fair and Anna Wintour at Vogue, New York closely reflected Moss' personality. Moss' departure is another sign that the era of strong editors and vivid magazines is passing away.

 

 

Joseph Heller's "Catch 22" the most influential novel of 1960s

Emily Temple's "A Century of Reading" series on LiteraryHub has given useful and entertaining lists of the defining American books of each decade beginning with the 1900s.

I've had no quarrel with Temple's top 10 lists until, as might be expected, she reached the 1960s on Tuesday.

My objection is that she left Joseph Heller's 1961 novel "Catch-22" off her Top 10 selections, relegating it to the much larger "See also" list.

"Catch-22" was the essential work that defined the anti-establishment, anti-military, non-conformist spirit of the 1960s. Heller's book was much more influential than those she places on the top 10.

While I appreciate Temple's honoring of poetry by including Sylvia Plath's "Ariel," on the decade's top 10, "Catch-22" inspired the 1960s generation much more than Plath's posthumous collection.

Heller's black-humor masterpiece outweighs three of the other novels she includes, "Portnoy's Complaint," "Slaughterhouse Five" and "Stranger in a Strange Land."

While Temple says in her introduction "I do not make any claim on exhaustiveness," I was mystified how she could have left Norman Mailer's 1968 classic "Armies of the Night" off both the top 10 and "see also" lists.

Mailer's new journalism landmark about the Vietnam protest march in Washington, D.C., is another defining work of the era. To my mind, it should have made the top 10 over the new journalism books Temple names, "Slouching Toward Bethlehem" and "In Cold Blood."

A strong case for top 10 status could also be made for Tom Wolfe's "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test." 

Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring," placed on Temple's secondary list, should have also been on the top 10. Carson's book launched the environmental movement and still inspires the campaign against climate change.

Temple's "see also" roll ignores several other books that illustrated the zeitgeist: Eldridge Cleaver's autobiography "Soul on Ice," Richard Farina's novel, "Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me," Hunter S. Thompson's New Journalism classic"Hell's Angels" and Frederick Exley's memoir/novel "A Fan's Notes."

While the 1960s marked television's ascendency for news and entertainment, the decade also brought an outpouring of important, vital literature. Temple's incomplete list brings more debate to a contentious time.

 

Teddy Wayne's interviews with writers on Literary Hub show vibrancy of American literature

I've been disappointed by the Literary Hub web site. Its articles often wallow in author self-indulgence and book fetishism.

An exception is Teddy Wayne's monthly interview column, "5 Writers, 7 Questions, No Wrong Answers."

In the feature, Wayne asks five young or established fiction writers the same recurring questions about their inspiration, outside of books, and critical terms they find irritating. The writers also share what was going on in their lives when they were writing their novels or short story collections.

The writers are asked to not respond in complete sentences, resulting in more imaginative, reflective and poetic answers. 

A question about each writer's strengths and weaknesses brings informative reflections on writing techniques, and encouragement for younger writers. 

Wayne's column affirms that American literature remains alive and well.

 

Author Michael MacCambridge analyzes death throes of Sports Illustrated

Sports Illustrated's decline is one of the saddest stories of the digital age's ravaging of once strong publications.

Michael MacCambridge, who wrote the best history of the magazine's glory years under Andre Laguerre, delivers an insightful autopsy report for Ringer, one of the online sites sucking away at SI's audience. 

SI's latest death rattle is switching to biweekly publication, as MacCambridge relates. After a series of staff cutbacks and dubious management decisions, SI and the even more venerable news weekly Time were sold this year to the Iowa-based Meredith Corp., which now seeks to unload the once indispensable publications began by Harry Luce.

Having grown up reading the magazine, loving its weekly accounts of sporting events by Dan Jenkins and other writers and its golf lessons by Jack Nicklaus, I subscribed to SI for a time on my e-reader. But finding little distinctive about the magazine that I couldn't find elsewhere, I canceled the subscription.

I was not alone, as MacCambridge relates. As its print edition founders, SI's web site lacks the spark of sites like the Athletic and Deadspin. ESPN's web site seems newsier. 

MacCambrige relates how SI passed on a chance to buy ESPN a few years ago, ceding its sports media dominance to the cable channel, which went on to challenge SI with a print magazine that had stronger appeal to younger sports fans.

SI remains profitable, and perhaps someone like Jeff Bezos will buy it, and Time, and restore their luster. If not, an honorable death will be merciful.

You got ideas? Mercedes-Benz wants them

Atlanta really is an international city after all.

Mercedes-Benz opened its new North American headquarters in Sandy Springs Thursday and announced that an automotive ideas lab will be opened in the Atlanta metro area, according to a triumphant report arrayed across The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's front page.

The German company has similar labs in Stuttgart, its home city, Berlin and Beijing. Now, Atlanta will get a Lab1886, referring to the year the company launched the world's first gas-powered car. With the labs, the company seeks to remain at the forefront of technology and innovation. 

Mercedes' vision appears far different from Atlanta's traffic-snarled present. The company, citing Atlanta's universities and high-tech entrepreneurial work force, showed a belief that the state and metro area will change its transportation future. 

The ideas lab will be autonomous from new headquarters campus in Atlanta's burgeoning northern suburb. Mercedes Benz USA CEO Dietmar Exler said that the lab will operate separately "from the operations of the big mothership," with the freedom to explore "promising ideas wherever they come from - internally and externally," according to the Atlanta Business Chronicle.

The company sums up the driving future with its CASE formula: connectivity, autonomous driving, flexible use (shared and services) and electric power.

Lab1886 will have limitless horizons, including business development outside of automobiles. Robots, driverless cars, ride-sharing, smart roads, flying cars. global markets, and new industrial processes and materials are some of the possibilities.

While the company built its new campus in Sandy Springs, the AJC surmised that the intown high-tech area around Georgia Tech would be attractive for the ideas lab, which will employ 24 people and open this summer. A site near Tech would give the lab the required distance from the headquarters building. 

The company is keeping its lab location secret for now, but I thought it interesting that Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms was shown in an AJC photo along with Gov. Nathan Deal and Mercedes execs looking at a primitive 19th century car.

Mercedes' news could also persuade Amazon to take a closer look at Atlanta as the site of its second headquarters. The Seattle conglomerate at least will take notice of Mercedes' ideas lab announcement.