I once estimated how many bylined pieces I’ve published in my five decades of scribbling for money. Including everything from 300-word bleats to 8,000-word slabs, I believe I’ve written somewhere around 3,000 stories.

Now imagine how many interviews I have conducted for all that work. Imagine the number of dumb questions, astute questions, informative replies, curt replies, self-indulgent monologues, misheard statements, revelations, lies, confessions, obfuscations, factual errors, wrong memories, hazy memories, remarkable memories, “ums” “ahs” and “wells…”, the number of times scientists began an answer with “so…”, profanities excised, profanities left in, misheard Qs, misheard As, illegible notes that appeared to have been written by my foot, failed recorders, unfortunate statements, and bon mots. There’s been a lot.

Important note: Most have been for magazine features: arranged, unrushed, detailed, comprehensive, sometimes but not often confrontational. Rarely have I done interviews familiar to newspaper reporters — eyewitnesses, next of kin, celebrities on junkets, members of the audience, athletes in locker rooms (thank god).

That said, I’ve listened to myself for 50 years, and the advent of podcasts means now I’ve listened to dozens of other people conduct interviews. A few do it very well, with grace and courtesy and minds electric with curiosity. Some — including big names in the business — are terrible. The spacious middle of the bell curve is occupied by people who do all right but do things that sometimes leave me talking back to my phone or dashboard in exasperation.

Exasperation leads to action. Hence this baker’s dozen observations and comments about interviewing.

I.

I have read so many articles and interviews about how to conduct an interview, perhaps too many. So many that I’ve lost count of the number of people who have said, “A good interview becomes a conversation.”

Well…

A conversation is a generous exchange of thoughts and feelings. It’s a little gift economy of information, opinion, courtesy, affirmation and acknowledgment that creates social links and reinforces bonds and makes possible reasoned social discourse. It’s how we maintain kinship, friendship and alliances, how we resolve conflict, how we express ourselves outside art. It’s how a society coheres and a culture responds to change.

An interview is a formal process in which I, the reporter, request information from you, the subject. I have honestly declared who I am and why I want to interview you. Our relationship is professional only. We are not friends, kin, allies or collaborators, no matter how amiable our exchange might be. We are not engaged in conversation.

II.

So what? This: If you replay the recording of an interview and what you hear is a conversation, then you talked too much and listened not enough. You have let the interview become, in part, a platform for your own views, emotions, anecdotes, biography, and it’s unlikely that any of that is pertinent to your story. You have overlooked that your subject probably has little interest in you and thus little interest in a chat. What have you gained by expending a quarter or a third of your limited interview time talking about yourself to someone who doesn’t care?

III.

At more of a meta-level, pretending that an interview is a conversation is less than honest. Pretending to become your subject’s friend or ally or confidant is a con — usually a little one, but a con all the same. It’s all too easy to betray the person across the table. Ethical professionals keep their notebooks open, their pens in motion and their intentions clear. Some of our respondents will make wrong assumptions about this relationship and believe that they were, indeed, part of a friendly or sympathetic conversation. There’s not much we can do about that, but we don’t need to encourage it.

IV.

Which is not to downplay the importance of rapport. When a journalist sits down to be interviewed about interviewing, or addresses a conference, and brings up turning an interview into a conversation, what they’re often talking about is establishing some kind of unthreatening common ground that will persuade the subject to be forthcoming. There are dozens of reasons for people to be reluctant to talk to us, starting with their own shyness or reticence or wariness about the press. We do need  our subjects to trust us, and that’s harder when we can’t find our way to rapport.

Establishing good rapport is not easy and never guaranteed. It starts with clarity about roles and intentions: I’m here to ask you questions, you see me writing down your answers, and you are responsible for what you say. If I can convince you that I will be honest and professional and that I intend to listen, we will be off to a good start.

V.

The fastest way to rapport is to show, from the first question, that we are paying attention. Few people can resist talking to someone who is not only listening, but taking them seriously enough to write down what they’re saying. We all crave acknowledgment and we all want to be heard. Approach someone with honest interest and attentiveness and you find that often as not, your problem will not be getting them to talk. Your problem will be getting them to stop.

VI.

Accept that you will never establish rapport with some people. No matter what you do, they remain icy, hostile, suspicious, or all but mute. Journalists do not come armed with subpoenas; no one ever has to talk to us. Why someone would agree to an interview with me and then refuse to answer my questions is a mystery, but I’ve had it happen more than once. People can be funny that way.

Sometimes the damnedest things open someone up. Many years ago I flew from Cincinnati, Ohio, to Birmingham, Alabama, to investigate a financial scandal. There was someone who had known the central figure of my story all his life, so I called this guy up and he agreed to be interviewed. When I sat down in his CEO’s office, though, it was obvious within five minutes that he had no inclination to answer any of my questions. I’d come hundreds of miles for these interviews, but he didn’t care. He wouldn’t even stop his paperwork to meet my gaze. After about 15 painful, worthless minutes, I noticed that he had a collection of miniature duck decoys sitting on a table by my chair. I picked one up and correctly identified it as a hooded merganser. He looked at me quizzically and asked me to name another one. I named three more. (Don’t ask me why I knew the species of ducks; I just did.) Suddenly, I was in business. He couldn’t believe that a boy from Ohio knew ducks (in his pronunciation, duuuucks), but since I did, I was good people and he’d be glad to answer my questions. Which he did for the next 45 minutes.

There ya go.

VII.

On the matter of questions: Ask them one at a time. Not, “Could you tell me what happened ______, and also why ______, and what you think came of it?” Ask a single question, keep it short, then shut up and listen. The answer will lead to the next question, and the next; you don’t need to bundle them four at a time. In my experience, the quality of answers is in inverse proportion to the number of questions you pose in one breath. You will get around to all of them, at least the important ones.

VIII.

And don’t supply answers to your own question: “Why did you leave the meeting early? Was it ___, or because ___, or your disaffection with ___?” You are here to ask questions, not administer a multiple-choice test. Just ask, then shut up and listen.

When you supply a set of possible answers, you do one of two things, neither of them good. If it’s a knotty question, you provide your subject with an off-ramp to avoid a more straightforward, candid, and revealing answer. Or you signal that you’ve already composed the story in your mind and aren’t listening to anything except what contributes to and validates that narrative. Or both. Let your subject provide the answers. Set the stage for surprise.

IX.

And anyway, supplying possible replies is a subconscious form of competing with your subject, a sort of stealthy bragging that you already know the answers. Don’t do that. Don’t compete with your subject. No matter how experienced we are, we never get over a certain amount of insecurity when we go in to interview someone. It’s all too easy to allow that insecurity to turn the interview into a sort of status competition. Don’t pretend that you know more than you do. Don’t waste everyone’s time by trying to assert common status where there isn’t any. In the context of the interview, your subject has the higher ground — she knows more about something than you do, and you’re the one who needs to hear it. That’s why you’re here with a notebook. Get over it.

X.

But don’t approach an interview as a supplicant, either, apologetic for taking time out of your subject’s day or in need of explanation or enlightenment because gosh, you know this is an imposition and thank you so much for agreeing to my dumb questions.

A proper interview is a professional transaction, and your subject isn’t gifting you with anything. We’re all adults here and your subject consented to be interviewed. Never apologize for doing your job, and don’t be sorry (or sheepish) about all you don’t know.

I cringe when I hear journalists or podcasters say, five times in a 30-minute interview, “Could you please talk a little bit about…” A “little bit”? Why only a little bit? You want your subject to tell you a lot, so why be timid about asking for it? You don’t need to act grateful for having been granted an audience. Your subject hopes to gain something, too; that’s why he or she agreed to see you.

XI.

Over the course of five decades, my shortest interviews all began with the subject stating, “I won’t talk to you unless I get to read the story before it’s published.” (I never agree to that, and if the subject insists, the interview is over.) My longest single interview took 10 hours, with a forensic psychiatrist who is an expert on serial killers. We began at noon, after he’d kept me waiting in his office lobby for an hour past our appointment. Then we talked through lunch, we talked through him canceling an appointment so we could keep talking, and we finally stopped at 10 p.m. only because we were too hungry to keep going. The next night we got together for five more hours. It was all valuable and not once boring. And not once did I say, “Could you tell me a little bit about…”

If an interview is vital for your story, do what you can to leave the rest of your day open. You never know what might happen in that ninth hour.

XII.

If your job entails talking to elected officials or corporate executives or athletes or police officers or entertainers, you will encounter people who are adept at dominating the room and dictating terms. I once interviewed the CEO of a large insurance company. He had a doctorate and insisted, in all situations, on being addressed as Dr. Barrett, so I might have known what I was in for. He walked into the meeting room and handed me a piece of paper. This was our “interview,” already written by him, despite our never having spoken. He’d composed it as a dialogue — Mr. Keiger’s questions, Dr. Barrett’s answers. As far as he was concerned, once I had the paper in my possession the interview was over. I am rarely speechless. This time I came close. But in the end I courteously informed him that this would not be sufficient and I intended to ask him some further questions. He didn’t look pleased, but he didn’t throw me out, either.

For a successful interview, you — the one with the notebook — want to be in charge. You should never be arrogant or dismissive or abrupt about it, but whenever possible you do need to be firm in a courteous way. You may not succeed in getting what you need from a domineering subject — honest, factual, detailed answers are not required by law — but sometimes it’s better to walk away than to cede control. If you’ve had to do so, the next day call the person back to reschedule. You’ve established the ground rules, and you’ll be surprised how often you get another shot at the interview.

XIII.

Expect the unexpected.

An artist once interrupted one of our many interviews for a magazine profile by announcing he wanted to paint my portrait, and he did. It made for a good bit in the story. A few weeks later, he exhibited the picture at City Hall. My wife hated it.

Speaking to people right after lunch can be problematic. The CEO of a large investment firm nearly fell asleep in the middle of our interview. I watched him struggle to remain attentive, but his eyes were crossing and he kept listing in his chair. He was a courteous man and I felt bad for him.

Another CEO, this one the boss of a huge jet-engine manufacturer, a Fortune 100 company, interrupted our interview because, he said, “I have to tinkle.”

I’ve often spoken to people in their homes. On one such occasion, my subject’s toddler daughter climbed into my lap during the interview and fell asleep.

I once had a subject, a horse trainer, warn me not to pet her barn cat. I did anyway. The cat bit me. Guess I should have shut up and listened.

* * *

Dale Keiger, retired editor of Johns Hopkins Magazine, is author of the anthology “The Man Who Signed the City: Portraits of Remarkable People” and writes a newsletter of essays in “The Joggled Mind.”

The post 13 ways to consider an interview appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

I have known the writer Ann Finkbeiner for around 30 years now. She writes mostly about science, especially astronomy and cosmology, and possesses a deep and warm intelligence as well as formidable dexterity with the English language and a love of story. “Warm intelligence:” Ann can be as rigorous and dispassionately analytical as the coldest data scientist — she wasn’t married for many years to the late physicist Cal Walker for nothing — but her work is suffused with wonder and love for the universe and for knowledge and our ability to turn our small lives to the understanding of it all.

She’s also the originator of what has come to be called, among science writers, the Finkbeiner Test when writing about women in science:

I’m going to write the profile of an impressive astronomer and not once mention that she’s a woman. I’m not going to mention her husband’s job or her child care arrangements or how she nurtures her students or how she was taken aback by the competitiveness in her field. I’m not going to interview her women students and elicit raves about her as a role model. I’m going to be blindly, aggressively, egregiously ignorant of her gender.

An emphatic yes to all of that.

Ann and I were faculty colleagues at Johns Hopkins University and I know her to be cranky about writing and publishing and academia in a way I find endearing, in part because it aligns with my own crankiness about those subjects. We are the sort of friends who don’t see each other for three years, then get together for coffee and conversation and never once think, Why don’t we do this more often than every three years? She’s written several estimable books (I recommend “The Jasons: The Secret History of Science’s Postwar Elite”) and is a co-founder and curator of the blog “The Last Word on Nothing,” which I also commend.

Back in August, she published on TLWON an essay of her own that is so good I wish to share it. Pause a moment and read it here; it clocks in at only 830 words or so. Then please read a few paragraphs of my appreciation for its lovely lines.

The Boundary Conditions Being What They Are

Ann Finkbeiner

I’ve written books and didn’t find the experience pleasant: I’d go underground for 2 or 3 or 4 years, maybe 5, and when I’d stick my head up into the light of the world again, the world was changed. Like, during one of my underground sessions, the internet took hold and when I surfaced, the print magazines for which I’d written were saying their last goodbyes. Or during another session, my job whisked out from under me and ok, I was sick of academia anyway and worse yet, now that I was free to only write, I found I was also sick of my writing. All of this is to say, coming out of the pandemic is a lot like coming out of a book: new world, what the hell?

And of course even when it’s over, it’s not over. Just like page proofs have to be corrected and publicity has to be arranged and endured, the pandemic has its upticks and new variants and friends suddenly cancelling afternoon teas.

Meaning, I don’t know how to live in what remains of the past and simultaneously figure out how the present is different. I think this is a liminal state, neither land nor water but some kind of uncertain swamp in between. I do hate uncertainty which, too bad because at this point in time, the swamp is the rule, it’s non-negotiable, it’s the boundary condition.

“Boundary condition” means different things to different scientists but in general it’s the immovable thing that can’t be changed, only worked within. A river running along a granite wall has to run parallel to the wall: the wall sets the boundary condition.

One thing for sure: given current boundary conditions, I need therapy. Every week, I meet with a psychotherapist and a physical therapist; and every day I practice both. Shoulders back and down. Speak kindly to myself. Run my fingers up to door frame to the top. Separate the anxiety from the situation that’s provoking it. Hold a stretchy band in both hands with elbows at the side and pull my hands apart. Figure out what’s so frightening about wanting comfort. Lie down and slowly punch my arms into the air. Think of life’s little epiphanies. The tiny black hummingbird is at the feeder and the sun hits it just so and it turns iridescent green, and it drinks and drinks and then its head pops up and it winks out of space and time, gone.

Once I was in the woods, writing, in a cabin with a grand piano in it and a piano player needed to practice so I said sure, while you play I can write. I couldn’t. She worked her way through two volumes of Beethoven sonatas, and while Beethoven seems to write in sentences, his sentences were more complicated than mine and much more interesting so I got distracted and meanwhile she filled up the cabin with the Waldstein, up to the peaked roof, every atom of air in that cabin moved by Beethoven. I was breathing Beethoven.

How many years ago was that? Twenty? Thirty? I’m at the age where you don’t suddenly lose days or months or years, you lose decades. Getting old: another liminal state. I’m sticking my head out of the ground from the pandemic just in time to face old-age planning. Also someday, not as far away as it used to be, is death, another boundary condition. I have no particular reason to think about death but I am aware of the time. How can all this life just go away? I will miss it all so much. I look at the hummingbird, the little kids in my tree, the lottery card the neighbor leaves on my porch, other neighbors having a kids-in-bed girl-party on their porch, the extraordinary mix of people at the farmers’ market united in their focus on peaches and sweet corn, and I get blinded by loss; I don’t want to ever leave this. My therapist gets a little snippy: then don’t, she says, it’s all out there, you don’t need to miss it now.

Sticking a head up in the middle of a patch of dense, tall, intense green, ferny amsonias is a pale magenta phlox. I had deleted all the phlox years ago because it wasn’t flowering much and got terrible fungus, and I dug it all out. And yet years later, there it is. New world: what the hell? The phlox had been white and this pale magenta guy had to go back into its ancestry for its color and its will to live. “I’m here,” it says, “I am what I am and I’m here. Make of that what you will. And also just do the best you know how.”

My reader mind glides through Ann’s piece and thinks, Wise and lovely. My writer mind lights on each word, rolls back two paragraphs and reads them again, listens to a sentence three times, spots the reappearance of certain phrases, the artful use of repetition. Writer mind builds a schematic diagram of the piece’s structure, smiles, smiles again, and thinks, This is so good. And because we’re friends, Well done, Annie.

If an essay is thinking through prose, or the prose record of thought, or both, Ann’s first three paragraphs are her mind working its way to the core question:

Meaning, I don’t know how to live in what remains of the past and simultaneously figure out how the present is different.

She also introduces a pair of ideas that animate and orient her mind on this day: the liminal state and the boundary condition. Those ideas, which she deftly defines, are simultaneously binders that hold the essay together and lenses through which she refines and sharpens her thinking.

She’s established that she’s someone who hates uncertainty while living in an uncertain period in her life and in the culture, and she copes with therapy, physical and psychological. Braiding the precise and mundane details of what this means day-to-day calls forth a striking example of something that brings joy amidst the inchoate and the frightening:

The tiny black hummingbird is at the feeder and the sun hits it just so and it turns iridescent green, and it drinks and drinks and then its head pops up and it winks out of space and time, gone.

Here my writer mind ruefully nods to a sentence so good I wished I’d written it first. (And notes, in that same paragraph, how an adroit writer and thinker beautifully characterizes the effect of the Waldstein sonata — “every atom of air in that cabin moved by Beethoven” — then lets that sentence lead her to the lovely, “I was breathing Beethoven.” A two-line demonstration of the essay process.)

Followed by a seeming stray thought: a memory of a cabin and a grand piano, winking into existence as if filling the space vacated by the hummingbird, limned in several more striking sentences that nevertheless prompt my writer mind to say, Mrmff? What’s this doing here? Answered in the next graph by the author pondering how long ago she breathed Beethoven and where the hell do the days and years ago and awareness of the ultimate boundary condition, her own expiration date. Which leads to all that she’ll miss when she’s gone and her therapist’s snippy but apt suggestion that it’s silly to miss in advance what’s still all before you.

Taking the therapist’s advice, Ann makes a gift of one more thing sticking its head up — a trope, by the way, that appears three times and serves as one more thing to hold all of this together — this time a stubborn phlox that refuses to exit the stage of her garden and in its atavistic persistence points her mind to a destination, a state of awareness she can live with:

“I’m here,” it says, “I am what I am and I’m here. Make of that what you will. And also just do the best you know how.”

I cannot improve on that. So here I shut up and simply give thanks.

* * *

Dale Keiger, retired editor of Johns Hopkins Magazine, is author of the anthology “The Man Who Signed the City: Portraits of Remarkable People” and writes a newsletter of essays in “The Joggled Mind.”

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EDITOR’S NOTE: This is one of two posts analyzing the stand-out profile of tennis greats Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova by Washington Post sports columnist Sally Jenkins. You can also read our Q&A with Jenkins about her special relationship and interviews with the athletes.

Vladimir Nabokov never wrote “Good Readers and Good Writers.” The esteemed, oft-quoted “essay” of that title, published in 1980 as the first part of “Lectures on Literature,” actually was pieced together by an editor from notes Nabokov made for a lecture on Jane Austen. All the same, the cobbled result is essential reading for aspiring scribblers and it includes this:

In order to bask in that magic, a wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle even though we must keep a little aloof, a little detached when reading.

On rare occasions I read a piece of journalism that gives me that telltale spinal zap. The most recent was a few weeks ago when I read Sally Jenkins’s superb “Bitter Rivals. Beloved Friends. Survivors.” published by The Washington Post as one of its “Deep Reads.” It’s a long piece for a newspaper, around 8,500 words; the audio version runs more than 50 minutes.

Jenkins, a long-time Post sports columnist, delves and ponders the remarkable 50-year friendship between Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova, who in their day were the best women’s tennis players in the world. On the court they were ferocious competitors who waged one epic battle after another in the finals of the biggest tournaments. They were coldly lethal toward each other when carrying racquets but somehow became best friends for life. As Jenkins reveals, “best friends” doesn’t begin to encompass their bond.

The greatness of this story did not gradually unfold to me. It was there from the start. By the end of the four-sentence lead (one of them a fragment), Jenkins had my full attention:

There is an audible rhythm to a Grand Slam tennis tournament, a thwock-tock, tock-thwock of strokes, like beats per minute, that steadily grows fainter as the field diminishes. At first the locker room is a hive of 128 competitors, milling and chattering, but each day their numbers ebb, until just two people are left in that confrontational hush known as the final. For so many years, Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova were almost invariably the last two, left alone in a room so empty yet intimate that they could practically hear what was inside the other’s chest. Thwock-tock.

There it was: the serve-and-volley cadence of the opening sentence, the sound effects, the spot-on observations and Jenkins’s command of language. A tournament starts with 128 players and goes “until just two people are left in that confrontational hush known as the final.” Those two people return to a locker room “so empty and yet intimate that they could practically hear what was inside the other’s chest.”

Zap.

I could expend 500 words on Jenkins’s first two paragraphs, but I’ll stop at 10: I knew I was in the hands of a master.

Bending time without losing the reader

I read on past Jenkins’s crafty bit of stage-setting and soon my editor’s brain slipped under the sentences to take stock of the architecture of the piece. I’ve been reading, writing, editing and teaching for so long, I now read with a bifurcated brain. Half loses itself in the storytelling while the other half steps back and, with some Nabokovian detachment, says, Okay, how’d she do that? What’s going on here? That seems like an odd decision, huh… Why can’t I put this down even though I have no interest in tennis and should have started dinner 20 minutes ago?

The editor’s part of my frontal cortex noted that six paragraphs in, the piece becomes unstuck in time. It begins in the reader’s present with those half-dozen first graphs that crook a finger: Got a minute? Got 50 minutes? You really should read this story about these famous tennis players. Jenkins then reels back to 1973, before skipping ahead to 1981 and then pulling out of the narrative altogether for 533 words in which she describes and differentiates Evert and Navratilova as they become famous and the public responds to them. After that, she drops us back into 1975, then ’81 again, before landing on their lives in retirement running up to 2022, when each receives a dreaded cancer diagnosis.

Then, with no real transition, we’re in the story’s present, at lunch with them and Jenkins in a Miami hotel. Though not for long. After a dollop of conversation, we reel back to 1973 and each woman’s slightly different memory of the day they met as teenagers. Finally, we settle into a long, engrossing account of the years when they became the two best female players in the world and squared off in one Grand Slam final after another. With a touch as perfect as a winning backhand, Jenkins zooms in to highlight crucial moments of crucial matches, then pulls back to situate everything in her protagonists’ complicated lives, then takes us back courtside.

Making superstars relatable

These vignettes of epic matches are as good as sports writing gets: vivid, perceptive, propulsive. Jenkins brings her knowledge and experience to bear; she knows tennis and knows what to watch for in the games grown-ups play. She aces one piercing phrase after another: “the compressed lethality of this two-fisted young woman,” a backhand winner “through an opening as narrow as one of [Everts’] old hair ribbons.” Navratilova and Evert “went at each other like flashing sabers,” “the delicate sweetheart vs. the bulging lesbian,” which out of context may sound needlessly callous but is essential to the story.

(Jenkins is just as good writing about off-the-court. I defy you to find a better paragraph about friendship than this:

Friendship is arguably the most wholly voluntary relationship. It reflects a mutual decision to keep pasting something back together, no matter how far it gets pulled apart, even when there is no obligatory reason, no justice-of-the-peace vow or chromosomal tie.)

These match reports charge the story’s batteries and the momentum carries us through sections where Jenkins nimbly turns the two women this way and that to reveal more about their characters and personalities and flaws. It’s usually hard for the rest of us to feel anything in common with athletes so good they seem scarcely human. Jenkins gets past this by characterizing all the ways these two were just like us: their fears, their insecurities, their moments of meanness, their bad decisions. And she shines more light on them by braiding various perspectives: how Evert and Navratilova seemed to each other, how they were portrayed by the media, what other players thought of them, how the public responded as their rivalry intensified.

Graph after graph, through their encounters on the court and then the ordeal of their cancer treatments, Jenkins pops in and out of her sequential narrative to elicit comments from each woman as she takes them back year by year by year. The effect is like a voiceover that enriches our understanding of why Jenkins has focused on these particular scenes, these incidents, these details that limn the Evert-Navratilova bond. At the story’s conclusion, the author loops back to lunch in Miami and a bit of what the players’ lives are like now.

Journalism as an exploration

As I teased apart the story’s components — mostly on rereading because the first time I told my inner editor to shut up and let me enjoy this — I pondered why it worked so very well. Why didn’t the story collapse under its own contrivance? All those time shifts. Jenkins could have simply pulled the reader in with a clever lead, applied her storytelling chops to a straightforward chronology, then turned the Miami lunch into a nice kicker and been done with it. Were all those woven story arcs necessary? Was she showing off? Why did I never feel adrift? (Answers to the first two: yes, and no. Answer to the third: Read on. Or better, read the story if you haven’t.)

I’ve no window into the mind of Sally Jenkins, but I don’t picture her, fingertips poised over the keyboard, mentally engineering the story. Here I need a tight focus. Now a little commentary from Chrissy — wait, no, from a lesser opponent. Yeah, that works. A description of the 1981 US Open final goes here and Navratilova’s coming out gay goes there. To achieve the right effect I’ll place some stuff about Evert’s private life here…and there you go.

Maybe that’s how she works, but I don’t think so.

Jenkins is a wonderful journalist. But I think she approached this story not as a reporter but as an essayist. Journalism is declarative. Essays are interrogative. The journalist says, This is what I know. She has made up her mind and imposed some order on messy reality to communicate something important. She deals in points, straight lines, right angles. The essayist deals in fractals. She says, I’m not sure what to make of this, but come with me as I try to figure it out. Journalism is essential, but essays are a richer literary experience because, when done right, they resonate with emotion that might be inappropriate in reporting, and they make room for doubt and mystery that might hamstring journalism’s credibility. Essays are capacious in this way; they encompass not only what’s documented but what’s in the corner of the eye, the back of the mind and the inarticulate gut.

Jenkins-as-essayist puts on the page the intellectual and emotional work of trying to grasp a profound friendship. For example, early in the piece she quotes Evert recalling that one of the first people she called after learning she had cancer was Navratilova. And Jenkins writes:

Wait a second. Is Evert saying that the rival who dealt her the deepest professional cuts of her life, whose mere body language on the court once made her seethe, was among the very first people she wanted to talk to when she got cancer?

Then, when Navratilova remembers making the same call on getting her own diagnosis, Jenkins writes:

Hang on, you say.

Go back.

This is a smart, gifted writer reaching for the ineffable. Trying to figure out how, after (and through) one of the fiercest rivalries in all of sports, two women could come to reside in each other’s heart. As readers, we don’t have to keep a complex time structure straight or acquire an interest in tennis because what we’re really following is Jenkins’ train of thought. All the forked paths seem natural because that’s how our minds work, too. We’re happy beside Jenkins because who doesn’t yearn for the kind of friendship she lays before us?

A final point, if I may. One of the most striking features of Jenkins’s masterpiece is how open and candid Evert and Navratilova were with the writer. They seem to have withheld nothing. At times there’s a level of intimacy that’s dumbfounding. Jenkins earned that kind of trust, from two women who were all too familiar with bad press, because she brought to their encounter decades of honesty, integrity, sensitivity and professionalism.

I don’t know how Evert and Navratilova feel about the outcome, but I think their trust was amply rewarded.

***

Dale Keiger, retired editor of Johns Hopkins Magazine, is author of the anthology “The Man Who Signed the City: Portraits of Remarkable People” and writes a newsletter of essays in “The Joggled Mind.”

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By Dale Keiger

[dc]I[/dc]f you write for a living and stay with it long enough you will accumulate a bulging folder of journeyman’s work. You don’t renounce it and you don’t brag about it. It’s the work that working pros do.

You will also write a few portfolio pieces — stories that win praise, recognition, and gratitude from editors and readers, stories you re-read in occasional fits of vanity and think, That’s a good one. If you are gimlet-eyed about your own work — no easy task — even after 30 or 40 years your portfolio folder will not bulge. It might contain a half-dozen pieces. At best.

My first 10 years of post j–school, full-time magazine journalism now feels like an apprenticeship. I did some good work, did some hack work, won some admirers, made a few enemies, won a few awards, made some mistakes. I aspired to art while slowly — very slowly — learning craft. My teachers were practice, experience, trial and error, good editors and exemplars like John McPhee, Tracy Kidder, Edward Hoagland, Paul Theroux and Annie Dillard.

It took me about 15 years to achieve a level where every few years a fortunate convergence of the right subject, right editor, right deadline, right state of mind and right ability set me up to compose something that didn’t merely get the job done but had some voltage running through it.

I’d love to attribute those pieces to genius, but yeah, right. I think what happened is on rare occasions I was able to see not just the story that any professional knows how to construct, but sense the presence of a much better story waiting to be revealed. That is, if I could put my darting mind in neutral long enough to see it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “Great genial power, one would almost say, consists in not being original at all; in being altogether receptive; in letting the world do all, and suffering the spirit of the hour to pass unobstructed through the mind.”

The key words there are receptive and unobstructed. With enough practice, it’s not that hard to pull a few hundred sentences out of our notes and arrange them in a coherent article. We do that all the time. We can do it in 45 minutes if we have to.

But a great story isn’t bolted together like an Adirondack chair. It’s received by a writer who had the time and awareness to let her reporting settle and speak to her about what to write. The best piece lurking in your notes usually doesn’t wave its arms like the friend you’re meeting on a stadium concourse. Instead, it makes brief eye contact but goes to no more effort. You’re either paying attention or you miss it. The story doesn’t care, which is maddening.

Welcome to the writing life.

Two examples might make this all a little less sketchy. In one case, to write the best story I first had to scrap one that was good enough. In the other, I had to turn my own intellectual shortcomings into a virtue.

Letting the story speak to you

For the first, I’d gotten a dream assignment: Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore was creating, from scratch, a full-length opera based on E.M. Forster’s “Where Angels Fear to Tread.” I would have full access to everybody: the librettist and director, the composer, the conductor, the vocal coaches, every member of the cast. The librettist and composer generously gave me all their correspondence from seven years of collaboration on the book and score. My reporting began the day after casting and, over the ensuing six months, I spent so much time at rehearsal, talked to so many people and took so many notes that on opening night I discovered the company had listed me in the program: Dale Keiger—Chronicler.

After attending the performances, which culminated my reporting, I couldn’t wait to write the story. A 5,000-word draft came easily. I knew what I wanted to say. My editor praised it. All seemed promising when I took the manuscript in hand on a Saturday, eager to polish it and turn in the final on Monday.

But after reading three pages I felt a growing dread. After three more pages there was no denying it: The story I’d spread out on my desk was dead on arrival. “Leaden” would be a charitable assessment: no narrative drive, no creative energy, no spark, all the excitement of a five-inch metro section story on the county zoning board. How could I have gotten it so wrong?

Writing for a magazine, I had the luxury of time, but not much; I was only a few days from deadline. I went for a solitary walk, trying not to think about the story so I wouldn’t interrupt my subconscious thinking about the story. After a mile or so, I knew what was wrong.

Roy Peter Clark, writing scholar and coach at The Poynter Institute, says, “Reports give readers information. Stories give readers experience.” I would add: An article is generic; a story is unique. You can build your generic article and assemble your report — or you can find the one story that only you could tell. The story that unscrolled in my mind as I strolled down the street was of being in the audience on opening night, experiencing what everyone around me saw and heard but from the unique perspective of having witnessed months of extraordinary labor by dozens of smart, talented, dedicated artists. Anyone with a ticket saw what the musicians did; I knew how they’d done it.

I sat down and reworked my story scene by scene. First I presented a short vivid summary of what happened onstage, followed by an account how the librettist had tweaked Forster’s material, how the composer wrote a melody to honor his soprano wife’s beautiful high notes (she wasn’t in the cast but she was on his mind), how one of the tenors became a favorite of the ladies in the cast, how a young woman struggled with her part until she first donned the costume and everything came together. I borrowed energy from opera’s narrative and layered in the drama and tension present when artists go all in with talent, ego and insecurity to see what might be created.

"Making Angels" was structured like the play itself, in scenes and acts. The scene-by-scene synopsis presented the characters; the rest presented the people who brought the characters to life.

Explaining what you can't explain

My second example arose from a much different assignment. "The mathematic mind of Emily Riehl" was  assigned as the profile of a rising star in an abstruse mathematical field called category theory. I had written enough pieces on particle physics, molecular biology, cognitive science, epidemiology and cybersecurity to know how to make recondite knowledge not just comprehensible but engaging. But mathematics? That presented a challenge of a higher order. I would have to translate equations I didn’t understand and theory I barely grasped into meaningful prose, and I had to get it right.

As novelist and essayist Paul Theroux once said about hearing Pashto for the first time, I felt like a dog listening to music. Not only that, I had to make readers care. I had to enter this austere, abstract world of symbolic thinking and come out with a human story that still did justice to the math and didn’t patronize the reader. (Math is hard, said the talking Barbie.)

Writing about science means humbling yourself about how little you know, and then writing the story in the authoritative voice of a tentative expert. But as I tried to work up a lead after many hours of conversation with my subject and other mathematicians, I had an idea: What if early in the story I made an admission counter to my customary I’ve got this science-writer attitude? I couldn’t really explain the math because prose is unavoidably imprecise and approximate in ways that math is not. Plus, because I can’t read equations, my own understanding was vague in its own way. Instead of mathematical precision, all I could offer was to sort of explain Riehl’s work.

In other circumstances that might be a lame cop-out. But on this one occasion it was a virtue because at the heart of Riehl’s work are all the ways that numbers and equations and meaning are not as concrete as commonly supposed. In her work, math could be as mysterious as metaphor. She explored a strange realm in which even an equals sign meant something different. That mathematical knowledge was fuzzier and more elastic than commonly supposed was not my problem — it was the point. As I wrote:

“Two” doesn’t seem to pose a deep and complicated question: two kids, two shoes, two peas in a pod. What’s so hard? But “two” itself is not a thing, it’s a mathematical object. It’s an idea that helps us think about other things. You can’t pick up a two, throw a two, or eat a two because it doesn’t exist. Yet it inheres in everything, everywhere that pairs exist.

The story worked, I think, because I could say to the reader, You know that unease you feel over almost understanding what I’m trying to say while at the same time sensing that the full meaning is eluding both of us? Mathematicians can feel the same way. That bafflement was there for Riehl, too, but for her it was a way into whole new realms and important new mathematics. I found the real story only when I saw that my struggle for comprehension and precise definition was congruent with how Riehl’s mind worked. Her math and my prose had more in common than I’d imagined.

Trusting yourself — and the story

Sometimes you must surrender the idea of steering the story toward a predetermined structure and destination. We all know how to do the latter, so it feels secure.

Letting the story find its own way takes faith in the process (and in yourself) and that can be hard. (Daily reporters usually won’t have the time, but much of their work answers to different demands, and those demands need to be honored.) But in work that goes beyond the article to the story — beyond the information to the experience — you have to get out of your head because, given half a chance, your head will suck the life out of creative work. Your head will always play it safe and cue up whatever worked the last time. And what worked the last time might get the job done, but it won't produce something you can be proud of 20 years from now.

* * *

Dale Keiger, retired editor of Johns Hopkins Magazine, is author of the anthology "The Man Who Signed the City: Portraits of Remarkable People" and writes a newsletter of essays in "The Joggled Mind,"

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In 2014, I interviewed a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University about the use of computer simulations to rehabilitate stroke patients. At one point our conversation veered to this idea he had about athletes: Talent in sports was misattributed. He didn’t dispute that genetics blessed some people with extraordinary speed or reflexes or size, or all three. If inclined to play games — soccer, basketball, football, tennis, et al — those so blessed were ahead from the start.

But, he argued, not by that much. Their superior talent was not a set of inherent physical attributes that distinguished star athletes from everyone else. What the great ones possess, be it LeBron James or Serena Williams or Aaron Judge or Megan Rapinoe, is superior knowledge.

Tom Brady isn’t a great quarterback because he’s big or has a strong arm; thousands of young men are big with strong arms. Brady is great because he knows more about football and how to play it better than anyone else. His brain holds an extraordinary store of football knowledge and the ability to process it at lightning speed. Sportswriters used to describe how basketball phenom Larry Bird could look at a picture from any game he’d played as a Boston Celtic and recall, accurately, where everyone else had been on the court at that moment — knowledge that informed his play every time he brought the ball forward. Wayne Gretzky could skate to where he knew the puck would go because not only did he know what the other players were going to do, he knew how the puck played off the boards differently in every National Hockey League arena.

It all came back to knowledge. The neuroscientist said this also explained the success of many star players’ offspring. Sure, they’d inherited beneficial genetic traits. But more important was the knowledge they’d absorbed growing up with superstar Mom or Dad.

Creativity passion as a personality quirk

The neuro’s theory is not without holes. Great coaches have similarly deep knowledge of the game, but many of them had been mediocre players. What they knew could not make up for how they couldn’t hit a curve ball or sink a 50-foot putt. Plus, I thought the theory sidelined the importance of practice and how hard great athletes work.

But I don’t toss out the scientist’s idea altogether because I harbor a similar notion about creative talent, including writing.

I was raised on conventional wisdom: Talent came from the gods, from the universe, from dumb Darwinian luck. Its conferral on this person but not that one was capricious. Some got it, some didn’t, what are you gonna do? This viewpoint wasn’t entirely benign. It made it easier to sanction artists as weirdos or undeserving. Those of us not anointed with faerie dust had to work for a living — real work, not that artsy pseudo-work — and earn what was handed to artists as some sort of welfare from the muses.

I don’t discount that there are people born with, for want of a better term, certain knacks. A knack for getting a good tone out of a violin, a knack for graceful movement or playing to the camera, a knack for the striking word choice. When I was a school kid, teachers said I had a talent for writing. But I think I just had a knack for mimicking grown-up writers and fooling grown-up teachers. Knacks are not talent. They’re just little boosts that don’t get you very far on their own.

Genuine talent, I believe, is a personality quirk.

The nature of this quirk is an overwhelming predisposition to spend hour after hour, day after day, doing the same thing over and over and over and over. And then doing it some more. The “talented” writer is the one who is willing, even happy, to spend seven hours at a time sitting alone, in silence, stringing words together. And then throwing most of them out and doing it again tomorrow. The finest painters I’ve known are people who, given the endless possibilities of any given day, will choose to paint and paint and paint. I used to be a musician, and soon learned that the best musicians are happiest when playing, whether onstage or alone in a stairwell. I once watched a documentary film on The Rolling Stones and noted that no matter the setting or the circumstance, Keith Richards always had a guitar in his hands.

This essential personality quirk could be described as nothing more than being endlessly fascinated and pleased by the repetitive tasks that make art. When I taught nonfiction writing at Johns Hopkins University, students would ask, “Do you think I have what it takes to become a writer?” I always replied, “I don’t know. How much do you enjoy making sentences? Because that’s what you’ll spend all your time doing.”

No art without practice

Here I loop back to the neuroscientist and his theory of knowledge. The finest journalists I’ve ever encountered know more than the journeymen. They know the language, know a gazillion words, know what their peers and forebears have written, know their subject like they know their own back yard, seemingly know something about everything.

The appetite not only for knowledge but for the labor of acquiring it is another essential personality quirk: When I realize there’s something essential to my work that I don’t know, I can’t leave it alone. I have to learn it. But that’s okay, because learning about something is as much fun as writing about it. At the beginning of a semester I would introduce myself to my new undergraduates: “I’m one of those odd people who writes all the time, and when I’m not writing I’m reading, and when I’m not writing or reading I’m thinking about writing and reading.” I exaggerated, but not by much. If I have a talent, there it is.

There is no art without a practice. If, as a journalist, you’re not comfortable thinking of yourself as an artist, try this: There is no craft without a practice. And I don’t see how there can be a practice without this inexplicable affinity for the daily work. The daily same-old-same-old.

For sure, “blessed by the gods” has a romantic appeal far above “if that’s your idea of fun.” If it makes you feel better, think of it this way: The very best ones were blessed by the gods with weird personalities.

That’s not how I see it, but it’s not like I’ve been blessed with always being right.

***

Dale Keiger is the retired editor of Johns Hopkins Magazine and author of “The Man Who Signed the City: Portraits of Remarkable People.” He writes essays in a newsletter called “The Joggled Mind.”

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[dc]F[/dc]or a time in the early 1990s, I wrote narrative journalism for a business magazine. One of my better efforts recounted the fight for control of an investment bank. Someone would become the bank’s next CEO and several smart, ambitious people wanted the job. Dueling factions within the company wanted their man — apparently no women were under consideration — to get the job. I approached about 25 executives for interviews and because everyone wanted his or her version of events represented, only two turned me down. The story was complex, with copious detail that required stringent accuracy and contending versions of events that I had to weigh, corroborate and carefully frame. I spent so much time at the bank’s headquarters, one morning I walked in and the receptionist handed me my messages.

The issue with my story on the cover hit the newsstands (we still had those in 1991) and I waited. Not for long. A day or two after publication, the magazine’s receptionist let me know I had a call from the bank’s lead counsel, who had been the primary ally of one of the contenders who had lost. Here we go, I thought. I took the call and he didn’t bother with hello. He just said, “I don’t know how you did it, but you got it exactly right.”

I was pretty pleased with myself, and in the coming days received more affirmation from some of the main players. But from time to time I’ve reflected on the experience and wondered: Did I get it exactly right? And even if I did, what did that mean? That I had told the true story or just accurately recounted what 23 people told me? How would I know? Especially important in our profession, how do we know what we know?

That last question is heavy enough to merit its own -ology: epistemology.  I’ll not be digging that deep. But I do want to argue that if we stop once we’re satisfied that our quotes are accurate, our numbers add up and our citations are correct, we’ve stopped short. To be conscientious about accuracy is necessary —but it’s not the whole game. Accurate reporting is information, and the world’s already drowning in that. What’s essential is knowledge. That changes our primary question from Am I right? to What do I know? And whenever possible, we want to write not just what we’ve been told, but what we know.

The pitfalls of 'he/she said' reporting

Ponder for a moment how we report. We take notes on what we see and hear. We interview people about what they saw and heard. We interview people about what they having seen and heard. We pore over documents. We slog through social media posts. We analyze photos and videos. Maybe we read books. We review past reporting from what used to be called the morgue. Then, having convinced ourselves that now we know the story, we write it.

But under pressure of a deadline and our own ambitions, it’s all too easy to gloss over how we know this, that and the other. We want to make sense; we want to be the people with the explanations. Our egos do not want to admit that we may not know as much as we think we do, and emotion leads us to prefer certain versions of what is known. This is not a new problem. In the 5th century BCE, Thucydides noted in “The History of the Peloponnesian War:”

 I have made it a principle not to write down the first story that came my way, and not even to be guided by my own general impressions; either I was present myself at the events which I have described or else heard of them from eyewitnesses whose reports I have checked with as much thoroughness as possible. Not that even so the truth was easy to discover: different eyewitnesses gave different accounts of the same events, speaking out of partiality for one side or the other, or else from imperfect memories.

Smart guy, Thucydides.

Reporting without judicious skepticism about what we’ve seen, heard, read and been told sets us up to write stories full of accurate reporting but not much accounting for that knowledge. “The working class is fed up with immigration.” How do you know? “The light from this galaxy took 13.6 billion years to get here.” How do you know? “Never standing up from your desk is an invitation to a heart attack.” How do you know? From 2016, “Trump has no chance.” How do you know?

It’s not that reporters don’t ask those questions; it’s that we don’t ask them often enough and keep asking until we get an answer. We don’t question conventional wisdom and sanction authority. (Never underestimate the allure of embracing the safety of conventional wisdom.) And we don’t question our own perceptions and assumptions. How we know what we know?

Cognitive bias and comfort in company

The pitfalls are everywhere. There’s an old joke about economists: Convene four of them in a meeting and in no time you’ll have seven opinions about the economy. Ask a cop or trial attorney about eyewitness testimony and they’ll say something similar. No matter how smart, alert and well-meaning we may be, we all miss things that were right in front of us, misperceive some of what we didn’t miss and filter everything through our biases, state of mind and sensory shortcomings. As Stacy Morford wrote in an essay published by The Conversation, a nonprofit news organization that boasts of itself “academic rigor, journalistic flair:”

Not only are we in the grip of a staggeringly complex array of cognitive biases and dispositions, but we are generally ignorant of their role in our thinking and decision-making.

That’s true for everything we witness as journalists, and everything witnessed by the people we interview. (Consider a close play in a football game. Every replay camera angle shows something different. Every official and player on the field saw something different, as did every spectator in the stadium and every TV viewer at home.)

This perceptual problem is compounded by our reliance on human memory. Most of the time, reporters are asking about events that took place an hour ago, a month ago, four years ago. The consensus among neuroscientists is that when I recalled my exemplary business journalism at the top of this essay, my brain did not extract unaltered details from a secure neuronal database; no, my brain sampled my memory and then reconstructed the story. Apparently, this happens every time I remember something, whether it’s from 30 years ago or this morning. Memory isn’t just fallible; it’s creative every time it’s tapped. You see the problem.

So how fortunate we are to have documentation. Except…do we know how all that documented fact was assembled? Do we know who is the author of the documents and the context and the sources of information and the pressure exerted to produce a desired paper record? Do we know how to read the document? Investigative reporters are familiar with the summary trick: A supposedly disinterested, neutral committee probes some alleged malfeasance and issues a 349-page report that begins with a seven-paragraph executive summary that says Yes, we found some things that were amiss, but really, nothing all that serious. Then a diligent reporter combs the other 348 pages and finds serious problems that the committee was reluctant to disclose. A story doesn’t become true, doesn’t become knowledge, just because someone wrote it down.

More problems arise when our documentation consists mostly of previous reporting. We mine that work for context and backstory and details that we’re grateful we don’t have to look up ourselves because we’re running out of time and hey, that’s a lot of work. This is essential considering the fast pace of most journalism but it introduces new ways to be wrong. Statements misunderstood by reporters, paraphrases that misconstrued what a source meant, incorrect numbers, dubious comparisons, misplaced significance — through repetition all of that becomes part of the record. It may not be what is true but it becomes what is known. I once interviewed a pair of academics whose specialty was the misuse of statistics and data by journalists. They gave me a succinct summary of what they’d observed about the press:

“Practice doesn’t make perfect. Practice makes permanent."

For years I worked in Cincinnati, Ohio, and sometime in the 1980s I wrote a long magazine piece about the city manager, who was employed by City Council to be the equivalent of the city’s COO. He was under a lot of pressure and rumored to be in danger of being fired. No one had accused him of incompetence and there was not one whiff of scandal. Instead, there was this vague but pervasive notion that he was not the right guy for the job, a notion usually articulated as “He has a problem with the neighborhoods.” Sure enough, as I reported the story, members of the council and other city officials, one after another, told me the city manager had a problem with the neighborhoods. I was uneasy with the vagueness of it all, so I did the most basic thing a reporter can do: I picked up the phone. The city had 48 officially designated neighborhoods, each with a neighborhood council and an individual who served as a liaison with City Hall. I called every one of them. Only two said they were unhappy with the manager. One, a sharp-tongued gentleman who said, “I think his attitude is rotten,” conceded that he’d never invited him to a neighborhood meeting or function, never even reached out for a conversation. I reported in my piece that 46 of 48 neighborhoods had no issue with the city manager. Then for months afterward, I read more stories in the daily press that cited his problem with the neighborhoods.

The discipline of verification

What to do? As journalists we cannot work (and as humans we cannot live, or at least live well) without belief in and respect for facts and expertise. None of us can do without knowledge. But if journalists are to contribute to knowledge — and I think we should — we have to ask of everyone, especially ourselves, “How do you know?” It’s not enough to fact-check our stories. We must know-check our facts.

Bertrand Russell wrote, “In all affairs, it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.” Knowledge never arrives fully formed and eternal. It accretes slowly and undergoes constant review and revision. At one time everyone knew the sun orbited Earth and kings ruled by divine right. The most skilled, careful and honest reporter gets it right most of the time, but not all the time. We correct what we got wrong and keep working because, as Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel observed in “The Elements of Journalism:”

In the end, the discipline of verification is what separates journalism from entertainment, propaganda, fiction, or art.

I remember an interview I read with the Grateful Dead’s bassist, Phil Lesh. He was asked about all the wild stories that have always followed the band and made up its lore. Lesh wryly observed, “All the stories are true, and more of them there are the truer they get.”

Nice kicker, don’t you think? I have hunted for the source of that quote, which I’m sure was an article in Rolling Stone, and never been able to find it. I’ve never even found it paraphrased. But I’m sure I remember it accurately. Trust me, I know what I know.

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Joan Didion died on December 23, 2021, and by Christmas internet searches were returning page after page of obituaries that described her as a “peerless prose stylist.” She has long been celebrated as a journalist, essayist, novelist and memoirist, and plaudits like “peerless prose stylist” began in the early 1970s, especially when Tom Wolfe included her in his 1973 anthology “The New Journalism.”

This interests me now because when I return to her work, her essays and journalism from that era strike me as not all that good — lots of glossy sentences and a striking voice that applied varnish to skimpy reporting, sketchy reasoning, and confirmation bias. Her prose was not yet peerless, but it did let her get away with a lot, especially among readers who were not paying enough attention to her flaws because look at her in that Julian Wasser photograph, leaning against a Corvette Stingray, all California cool and fragile but for the cigarette and frosty gaze that hinted at an inner bad girl.

That was Sixties Didion. Twenty years later, she had turned herself into the estimable journalist and essayist who has elicited so much admiration. That could only have been done with tremendous hard work from someone who could have coasted on her reputation (and big paydays from Hollywood screenplays) but did not.

To illustrate the arc of her development, let’s consider four pieces that span more than 20 years: from 1966, “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream;” from 1967, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem;” from 1978, “The White Album;” and from 1988, “Insider Baseball.”

Rhetorical tricks and fuzzy connections

“Dreamers” was the story Wolfe selected for his collection alongside work by Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Michael Herr, Gay Talese, Garry Wills and others, including himself in typical Wolfean self-promotion. That’s quite the peer group. The piece first appeared in The Saturday Evening Post as a true crime narrative about Lucille Maxwell Miller, who was convicted of murdering her husband in October 1964 by setting fire to their Volkswagen with him unconscious inside it. The piece is ambitious to be more than just a seedy crime story. Didion seemed to be reaching well past conventional reporting for some sort of impressionistic social critique that portrayed mid-’60s California as a dark and creepy place no more authentic than a movie set. She announced her intent with the first line: “This is a story about love and death in the golden land, and begins with the country.”

When Didion published the story in 1966, she had been in the magazine business for about six years, and in “Dreamers” her inexperience shows — four long opening paragraphs of portentous generalities (“it is the season of suicide and divorce and prickly dread”), lots of details presented as facts with little indication of how the author knew them, too many irrelevant details meant to create a vague sense of deeper truth. For example, Didion notes that elsewhere in California on the first day of Lucille’s trial a woman had sat on the hood of her car all night to prevent its repossession, a 79-year-old pensioner had shot up three poker parlors, an actor’s wife had responded to his announcement of their impending divorce which he had made on a talk show, and a 16-year-old had leapt from the Golden Gate Bridge and survived — incidents that had no connection to or bearing on the murder trial. “Dreamers” is full of that sort of thing. Essayist Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, one of Didion’s harshest critics, accused her of cheating readers with rhetorical tricks. In a 1980 takedown titled “Joan Didion: Only Disconnect,” which appeared in The Nation, Harrison wrote, “[A] magician can pull a rabbit out of a hat and get away with it; a writer’s job is to tell us what the rabbit was doing in the hat in the first place.”

“Dreamers” doesn’t get much attention now, but to this day more people applaud “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” published a year later, than any other work Didion did in the Sixties. The piece, also published by The Saturday Evening Post, is a long skein of oddball encounters and disturbing scenes from a few months that Didion spent in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco when it was hippie central. The vividness of Didion’s writing makes for an entertaining slideshow but it doesn’t make up for shallow journalism. She opens with two graphs of cryptic observations that do little more than establish her unease (unease was a Didion trademark):

Adolescents drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins, children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that held society together. … All that seemed clear was that at some point we had aborted ourselves and butchered the job…

Which is where a Post editor should have said, “I’m sorry, Joan, but what the hell does that mean?”

Didion’s approach to reporting here is not diligent gathering of verifiable details informed by rigorous thought as to what they say about reality on the street. She mostly just visits and chats with a motley bunch of dopey characters who live in the Haight. At the time, the neighborhood was home to many full-time residents, working musicians, shopkeepers, entrepreneurs and lots of other grown-ups, but Didion seems mostly interested in teenagers who sound shallow, naive, oblivious and frequently dumb. She tries too hard to make more of them. She writes:

Once we had seen these children, we could no longer overlook the vacuum, no longer pretend that the society’s atomization could be reversed. … At some point between 1945 and 1967 we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing.

Meaning…what?

Novelist Zadie Smith, an admirer, nevertheless observed in The New Yorker: “Like that of many literary writers, her seemingly fierce logic, upon inspection, sometimes proved to be merely sparkling rhetoric, and under the influence of precisely the kind of emotional distortion she professed to dislike.”

Didion set these kids up as canaries in a mine about to blow up, and no doubt all too many of them came to bad ends. But without any reporting to explain where they were from, how they ended up here and the sort of misfortunes that befell some of them — Didion repeats rumors of rampant rape and crime but makes no discernible effort to look into them — they offer little more than proof that most adolescents sound loopy no matter where you find them. As writer Jay Caspian Kang would astutely observe in a tribute to Didion upon her death, in “Slouching” she “relies on a stylistic trick: She declares the world is ending and then dumps a bunch of observations about Haight-Ashbury in 1967 in your lap and asks you to make all the necessary connections.” (Kang also admits he spent his career stealing inspiration from Didion.)

If “Slouching” is not good reportage, is at least a good essay? Not really. The whole point of an essay is for the author to sort her thinking on a perplexing subject or situation and arrive at meaning. Didion doesn’t sort much of anything. She merely describes a set of encounters, then says, “See what I mean?” We don’t, and finding meaning in the material was her job, not ours. “Slouching” is little more than an entertaining period travelogue.

Keen reporting and dazzling social commentary

About 10 years later, Didion produced “The White Album,” and the title essay proves how far she’d come. Once again, she’s working in mosaic, but now each of the mosaic’s segments is grounded in material fact and acute observation and arranged with more rigorous thought and intent. This time she arrives at meaning that holds up under scrutiny. There are fewer cryptic portents, fewer dubious assertions, less wobbly reasoning. With great skill she assembles 15 set pieces that don’t seem to add up until they do, with potent effect. Didion centers herself in the story as a successful, prosperous, privileged writer who nevertheless seems to be cracking up. She seeks medical assistance, which isn’t much help. (She reprints her actual psychiatric evaluation, which diagnoses her as “a personality in process of deterioration.”) She tries entertaining friends and hanging out with her favorite band, The Doors. Neither provides relief. Immersing herself in more crime stories, one involving the Black Panther leader Huey P. Newton, could not have been much help.

And then the Manson murders happen. All of this refracted through Didion’s overwrought sensibility may not be your idea of fun and can feel disingenuous. (Grizzuti Harrison, who could tear into Didion with the glee of a 4-year-old pulling the wings off a bug, recalled Gloria Steinem once telling a reporter on her way to interview Didion, “Ask her how come, if she spends all her time crying and swimming and struggling to open a car door, she finds the energy to write so much?”) But it was dazzling work that felt true in all the ways her earlier work had not.

Didion’s nominal subject in “The White Album” was how destabilizing her life in Los Angeles was in 1967 and 1968, with good reason. But her deeper subject was the danger of a life ordered or driven by false narratives that go unchallenged. The first sentence of “The White Album” —  “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” — has been taken out of context to become a sort of affirmative credo, especially by writers. That’s not what Didion meant. She was sounding a warning: Fail to question these stories at your peril.

In 1988, she covered the Dukakis-Bush U.S. presidential campaign for The New York Review of Books and delivered a superb piece of political journalism, “Insider Baseball.” She stepped away from her self-absorption — no more updates on her migraines or deteriorating personality — and focused her formidable intelligence and acute eye on how the professional political operatives and campaign press collaborated to shape the narrative of the presidential race that put George H.W. Bush in the White House. No one — candidates, advisors, speechwriters, flacks, pollsters, reporters — seemed to have any interest in the real lives and concerns of the electorate. She wrote:

When we talk about the process, then, we are talking, increasingly, not about ‘the democratic process,’ or the general mechanism affording the citizens of a state a voice in its affairs, but the reverse: a mechanism seen as so specialized that access to it is correctly limited to its own professionals. … What strikes one most vividly about such a campaign is precisely its remoteness from the real life of the country.

Didion marshals one example after another of all she observed and overheard to back up that charge. With carefully modulated indignation, she indicts everyone involved. In a later essay, “Political Pornography,” she would write:

The genuflection toward ‘fairness’ is a familiar newsroom piety, in practice the excuse for a good deal of autopilot reporting and lazy thinking but in theory a benign ideal. In Washington, however, a community in which the management of news has become the single overriding preoccupation of the core industry, what ‘fairness’ has often come to mean is a scrupulous passivity, an agreement to cover the story not as it is occurring but as it is presented, which is to say as it is manufactured.

The hard work of speaking the truth

By 1988 and “Insider Baseball,” Didion had become an exemplary journalist. And she’d done something much harder and more important than that: She had developed the ability and the resolve to step outside of the pervasive narratives, including her own, to see if they stood up to scrutiny, to reveal their falsity and the consequences when they didn’t, and to deliver voltage to our passivity. Because most of us, most of the time, are passive. We seek comfort by settling into the lee of the stories we tell ourselves, the auto-narratives that shelter us from life’s headwinds. I think we have little choice. We can only work with the minds we’ve been given. But we can ask far more questions than we usually do, and that’s what I take from Joan Didion. That, and the decades of relentless effort she put into becoming the writer who deserved the praise prematurely bestowed on her 50 years ago.

***

Dale Keiger is the retired editor of Johns Hopkins Magazine and author of "The Man Who Signed the City: Portraits of Remarkable People," from 10,000 Days Press.

The post The making of Joan Didion: From fuzzy facts to peerless prose appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

Hemingway is having a moment. Again. The eponymous documentary by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick that has been airing and streaming on PBS — air streaming? — has exhumed the cultural conversation about the author. That conversation has not displaced the one about Taylor Swift rerecording her first albums, but we are not a bookish culture.

Much of the revived discussion has been about the man, who from one week to the next could be gentle, cruel, generous, spiteful, a sentimental romantic, a mean misogynist, an anti-fascist, an anti-Semite, a true friend, a betrayer of friends, a cat-lover, a hunter, a vigorous outdoorsman, and a sad and battered suicidal depressive. Turns out his macho persona papered over an inner Hemingway who was more gender-fluid than most of us ever imagined. Who knew?

Though Burns and Novick concentrated on the man behind the guise, there was some routine discourse about his prose: plaudits in the documentary from writers including Edna O’Brien, Tobias Wolff, Mary Karr and Tim O’Brien, and in written commentaries the usual loose tossing about of “Hemingway forever changed American fiction.”

Well, maybe some American fiction. Tracing literary influence is a tricky business. Mainstream fiction, what most American fiction is by definition, has not changed much post-Hemingway, but for an increase in cussing and sex.

But where Hemingway surely has been influential is in what serious, artistically ambitious writers have learned from close attention to his work. The Hemingway who wrote the stories “Indian Camp,” “The Killers,” “Big Two-Hearted River” and “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” and the books “The Sun Also Rises,” “A Farewell to Arms” and “A Moveable Feast,” was a superb writer, subtle and profound and courageous. Anyone who aspires to fine narrative storytelling, be it fictional or factual, has much to learn from the complicated gentleman from Oak Park.

Writing true sentences

When I taught literary nonfiction at Johns Hopkins University, I frequently admonished my students to “write like you mean it.” (So frequently that at the end of one semester, my graduate class presented me with a binder blazoned with that phrase on the front cover; they called it a “Keigerism.”) I urged them to work with conviction — this story needs to be told and it needs to be told this way. I wanted them to make it real, make it true, and make it their own.

Hemingway’s best prose exemplifies what I preached. In “A Moveable Feast” he wrote, “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” This passage has been mocked as pretentious by people who miss the point. To write the truest sentence that you know requires you, the writer, to be rigorous with yourself about facing what you actually do know, what makes you believe it to be true, and the limits of what you know versus what you merely suppose. It takes no small discipline to write only true sentences — to be true to yourself and to your story.

And it takes unwavering conviction. As he told an interviewer from The Paris Review, “Once written you have to stand by it.” I believe this conviction (plus his training at the Kansas City Star) lies behind Hemingway’s famously lean prose. He believed truth ought to be asserted in direct and unequivocal statements. If you were in the truth game, you committed yourself to concrete and precise language. This is what is true, right here. Hemingway was wary of tiptoeing toward the truth through qualifying subclauses and the equivocation of adverbs and the imprecision of adjectives. He put absolute faith in nouns and the naming of things.

When you name something (and all nouns are names), you swear to its truth. It’s no accident that investigations aim to “name names.” Nouns do not hedge and are not subject to opinion. A ball is a ball. We can argue whether it’s red or closer to orange or really maroon or scarlet, but there’s no argument about it being a ball.

The stories that matter are built from the tangible and anchored in the concrete. Hemingway once responded to some of the reviews of “The Old Man and the Sea:” “There isn’t any symbolism. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The sharks are all sharks, no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit.” He’s protesting too much, I think; I’d bet a daiquiri that he was not that oblivious to symbolism. But I do believe he meant it when he argued for the truth residing in the nouns, in the sea and the old man and the boy. Hemingway’s sentences land with conviction because we sense his discipline and integrity in stating only what he knows to be true, and all that he knows to be true, whether it’s beautiful or ugly.

Stealth exposition

Another of his remarkable skills was his ability to tell a full story by telling only part. At his best, he knew exactly how much to tell us and how much to withhold. Reading Hemingway, we feel like we create the story with him, and that’s a profound level of engagement. We’re not being told the story, we’re discovering a story, or so it feels, and he was so good at it he could be confident that we would discover the very story he meant to tell. I think of it as stealth exposition.

Most of the dialogue in “The Sun Also Rises” is banal on the surface, as is most real conversation. But the attentive reader understands all that’s unsaid, all the emotion lurking beneath the banality, and all that the characters reveal by what they can’t bring themselves to say. In “Death in the Afternoon” he wrote, “If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them.” There you have it — it’s all right there.

Leaving 80 percent of the story up to the reader, which was how Hemingway once described his technique, is a trickier proposition when you are writing nonfiction. Nobody gets hurt if the reader of a novel misconstrues what lies below the surface of the author’s prose. Journalists and other nonfiction authors can’t leave that much to implication. They need to provide more information and more corroborated fact to be conscientious and credible and responsible. But I think there are two lessons here for factual writers.

One is to gauge carefully how much information you pack into your story. A story flounders from too much detail, too much description, too much attention to the inconsequential by a writer who either has too little confidence in his or her own skill, too much fear of being challenged or doesn’t trust the reader to get the story right unless every last detail is spelled out. I usually bail out of such stories long before they end.

The other lesson — maybe not a lesson so much as an example worth following — was Hemingway’s integrity toward the story and his way of telling it. This was a man desperate to be not just a writer, but a literary lion ranked with the masters. He risked it all by investing years in developing a unique prose style and then insisting that his stories could be told no other way. Had he not enjoyed so much critical and popular affirmation early in his career, he might have surrendered and resorted to writing to please conventional taste. We’ll never know. But because he didn’t, we have Hemingway. Out of similar conviction, we have Annie Dillard and Joan Didion and Tracy Kidder and John McPhee. Tom Wolfe and Geoff Dyer. Gay Talese.

All of whom have spent their adult lives writing like they mean it.

***

Dale Keiger is the retired editor of Johns Hopkins Magazine and author of “The Man Who Signed the City: Portraits of Remarkable People.”

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[dc]O[/dc]n a warm spring night in 1974, I was an Ohio University student reporter amid a riot. Not a riot against repression or inequality or injustice or the Vietnam War, not that sort of riot. Rather, the sort of riot that results when a throng of restive, probably beered-up male undergraduates in the center of town grows in number until there’s sufficient mass to produce something stupid, like someone hurling bricks through a few shop windows, and the city authorities prove even dumber by deploying several dozen helmeted cops armed with tear gas and clubs so big they could lean on them. Witless boys instigated the vandalism. The police instigated the riot.

I have three vivid memories from that night. One is a wine bottle that tore the air between another reporter and me at eye level. (That would have hurt.) Another is the caustic nastiness of tear gas. (That did hurt.) The third is from several hours into the night after police had pushed the confrontation out of town and onto one of the dormitory quads. A line of students threw rocks and bottles while a line of cops dodged the brickbats and fired gas pellets. What I recall so clearly is a student in an upstairs dorm room who opened his window, propped a stereo speaker on the sill, and blared out the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young anti-anthem “Ohio.”

[caption id="attachment_157568" align="alignleft" width="237"] Former magazine editor and '60s music fan Dale Keiger[/caption]

Some of my generation — I am now 66 — probably believe we invented protest music. Just like we invented rock ’n’ roll, premarital sex, cannabis smoking, and really boring antiwar assemblies called teach-ins. Let’s just say our grasp of history had its weak points. In the 1840s, the Hutchinson Family Singers toured the country protesting slavery by singing abolition songs, on one occasion for President John Tyler in the White House. (According to John Gac’s "Singing for Freedom: The Hutchinson Family Singers and the Nineteenth-Century Culture of Reform," that didn’t go over so well.) Protest singer Joe Hill plied his trade on behalf of the Industrial Workers of the World in the early 1900s. In 1915, Alfred Bryan responded to the possibility of the United States entering the First World War by penning, “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier.” There was Bob Miller and “Farm Relief Blues”—“We’re breakin’ our backs/With a carload of tax/How much longer must we wait?”—in 1929. Aunt Molly Jackson and “Ragged Hungry Blues” in 1931, Billie Holiday and “Strange Fruit” in 1939, Woody Guthrie and “This Land Is Your Land” in 1940, the Weavers and Pete Seeger in the 1940s and ’50s. I could go on like this for a while.

But a story repeated often enough becomes the narrationis populi, and my generation’s protest song narrative situates the crest of musical indignation in the 1960s: Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Phil Ochs, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Country Joe McDonald, “Blowing in the Wind,” “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” “Masters of War,” “We Shall Overcome,” “Universal Soldier,” “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag.” “I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night/Alive as you and me.” The portion of Dylan’s 60-year career devoted to protest spanned only about 20 months, but he will never shake the association. If you’re my age, try not picturing him performing in a faux-humble denim shirt and work boots.

The shifting rhythms of protest music

People still write and perform protest songs, but it’s been a long time since they counted for much in popular culture. No, that’s not true — hip-hop and rap have produced any number of potent protests. What I meant to say is, since the Sixties, protest songs have lost their cultural standing with white people. This leads to a knotty question: What did all those righteous anthems accomplish?

I may be too much the skeptic, but I suspect the emblematic recordings of Dylan et al. rarely impelled anyone to man the barricades unless you count nudging the suggestible toward mild civil disobedience. That’s not what those songs were for; they weren’t triggers,  they were signifiers. They were sung to bond the faithful. It’s no accident that so many 1960s marches and rallies included somebody with a guitar and a conspicuously earnest vocal delivery. Protest songs reassured their audience that they were among like-minded, right-thinking people. You heard the song, you knew the song, you realized everyone around you knew the song, and now you felt safer and stronger. The ritual reassured that there were thousands like you: I’m with my people, and my people have an activated social conscience. We march and chant and protest, and we listen to protest songs from the stage between rousing and not-so-rousing speeches.

That’s not a bad use for music. But the noteworthy protest songs of the 1960s, when examined as communiques to the resistance, suffer from the same thing — a gentility that airs grievance in a vocabulary and syntax designed not to unnerve a white, educated, prosperous audience. Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’” was clever and articulate. But it was as passive a bit of musing as “Blowin’ in the Wind.” The latter stands against the great evils plaguing 1960s America, war and racism, then delivers not a stirring call to action but a tepid lament: “The answer, my friends, is blowin’ in the wind.” Listen to the record, shrug sadly, and reach for a refill of Chardonnay. Subsequent songs would prove that Dylan reserved his passion and aggression for former friends and ex-lovers. His songs of social grievance never matched the indignant venom of his romantic grievances.

Protest music as comfort — and as rage

There’s a second kind of protest song, though. This one is not meant to make a room full of the converted feel better about themselves. This one is a cathartic blast of rage. Joan Baez’s crystalline voice reassured her audience that they were on the right side of the arc of history. Neil Young’s raw, ragged vocal on “Ohio” warned his audience that they had been declared outlaws and were caught in a conflict that could get them killed.

The story of the song is a story of passionate urgency. Young wrote it in a few hours, two weeks after the Ohio National Guard shot and killed four student protestors at Kent State University on May 4, 1970. The other members of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young hastily convened in a Los Angeles studio and recorded the song in only two or three takes (Graham Nash recalled the session lasting 90 minutes). Within days, Atlantic Records had pressed the record and gotten it to radio stations throughout the country.

Despite the haste of its creation, “Ohio” is a masterpiece of concision and poetic nuance. The song has only four chords, and Stephen Stills, David Crosby, and Young tuned their guitars down to what’s known as D modal Celtic tuning, which naturally creates a dark droning quality. Young launches “Ohio” with an aggressive riff set to an ominous marching cadence. The first verse is a pair of alarming bulletins that bracket his response to the awful event: “Tin soldiers and Nixon comin’/We’re finally on our own/This summer I hear the drumming/Four dead in Ohio.”

The six-line chorus can be heard two ways, embodying the inchoate times. On one listen, you might hear a clarion call, with the third line reinforcing the first: “Gotta get down to it/Soldiers are gunning us down/Should have been done long ago/What if you knew her and/Found her dead on the ground/How can you run when you know?” But the chorus also can be heard as an anguished conversation. An embittered patriotic supporter of the war declares it’s about time the government cracked down. “Should have been done long ago.” How can you say that? is the response. They are gunning us down! That dead girl in the Life magazine photograph? What if you knew her? What if she were your daughter? How can you run from the truth of the government marching on campus and killing college kids?

There’s a last bit of songwriting mastery, a touch so subtle it’s accomplished by a lone apostrophe. In the first verse, Young sings, “Tin soldiers and Nixon comin’” — a headline set in past tense. But the second time he sings it, the line has changed: “Tin soldiers and Nixon’s comin’.” Present progressive tense. Nixon and the soldiers with their bayonets — they’re comin’ for us again. The first verse delivered terrible news; the second verse declares that it’s happening again, and this time we fight.

“Blowin’ in the Wind” voiced resignation. “Ohio” gives voice to rage. The first is a fine song. But the latter is a far better story.

A form of journalism

I think we should consider protest songs as a form of journalism. Advocacy journalism, to be sure, with no use for neutrality, but journalism all the same. Protest songs report events, document injustice, and prompt questions. They comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Protest singers are muckrakers. They are not always fair, frequently overwrought and naive, and their stories don’t always stand up well to fact-checking. But the same can be said of a good bit of activist journalism. That doesn’t diminish its importance. The songs tell the stories of their time, and the true endure. I can barely remember a lyric from all that conscientious coffeehouse protest music. I will never forget, “Four dead in Ohio.”

Dale Keiger has been a scribbler-for-hire for more than 45 years. Most recently, he was editor of Johns Hopkins Magazine. His new project, Play This Record Loud, revisits the impact of 1960s music on a generation.

The post How protest songs echo — and sometimes lead — the stories of our times appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

[dc]S[/dc]ally Jenkins has been writing for the sports section of the Washington Post going on 20 years. The Associated Press and the Society for Professional Journalists have named her the nation’s best sports columnist so many times (seven, combined), they will soon need to retire her number. She’s also the author or co-author of a dozen books; four of them have landed on the bestseller list of The New York Times.

Jenkins’ Post column on February 25 was titled, “We Don’t Know Whether the Coronavirus Should Affect the Olympics. We Do Know the IOC.” I always at least bookmark anything she writes, but this piece’s lead pulled me right in:

The Summer Olympics are such a crowded, sweat-dampened, close-packed and germ-ridden affair that attending them can be like hanging out inside someone’s mouth.

That’s a one-sentence advertisement for her prose — astringent, forthright, vivid, leaving no doubt as to what she thinks. Jenkins does not just entertain and inform — she’s also a potent advocate for the athletes who have enabled her career.

[caption id="attachment_154865" align="alignleft" width="225"] Sally Jenkins[/caption]

After that crackling lead sentence, Jenkins says it’s too early to argue for calling off the Tokyo Olympics, scheduled to commence in about three months, but by no means too early to ask the IOC how it intends to keep the athletes safe and healthy. So far, the IOC’s answer seems to be “trust us, we’ve got this, no need for any alarming discussion of contingency plans.” (Editor's note: As of today (March 18), organizers of the Summer Games said they would go ahead this July as scheduled, but are discussing contingencies.)

Then Jenkins gets to her point: When the IOC says “trust us,” be worried. With so much money on the line, the Olympic Committee will be loath to even raise the prospect of postponement or cancellation, and it has a dismal record of considering the welfare of athletes. She notes, pungently:

This is not a body that anyone should trust to deal out transparent information. This is a body that specializes in authoritarian prestige branding and coverups. It has worked hand in glove with the thugocracies of China and Russia, tolerated slave labor and other human rights abuses in the construction of Olympic stadiums. It let athletes plunge into infected waterways in Rio, knowing they were environmentally dodgy and that some would be sickened, which they were.

One thing that draws me to Jenkins’ work is that she always writes like she means it. I was curious about the emotional and moral commitment that brought her to the topic, and the gnarly considerations that any columnist faces when wading into an overwrought conversation like the one we’re having about covid-19 and institutional responsibility.

[dc small]W[/dc]hat prompted you to step into the early torrent of press coverage of Covid-19 to write about the IOC and the Tokyo Olympics?
Well, experientially, if you’ve ever been, the Olympic Games is the largest petri dish in the world. It was a natural thought: Is a massive gathering the right thing to do this year?
Also, this is about the time organizers usually ramp up their rehearsal events, and it is hard to see how they can do that under the circumstances.
The quarantines and closures could seriously interfere with the run-up and preparations for the Tokyo Games, and it seemed right to get ahead of the issue and put a little heat on the IOC and the organizers to address some questions.

In writing about public health emergencies, it’s often not easy to spot the line between responsibly raising serious issues and feeding uninformed anxiety. Did that give you pause when you sat down to write this piece?
It sure did. And what also gives pause is the economic damage that could be caused by cancellation or postponement, which is potentially another kind of ailment, though not lethal. Organizers put their hearts into these things and so do the locals; they’re enormous sources of excitement and pride and you don’t want to be a killjoy.
What broke the tie for me was the knowledge that the IOC and other governing bodies have a bad habit of saying, “Come on in, the water is fine,” when they know it’s not. As in Rio, where the water was not fine. They assured athletes that open water events in Rio would be clean, KNOWING that the organizers had failed to come through on their environmental promises and that the water was virally swarming. So.
They lull the public with reassurances and professions of confidence and expertise, and thereby actually expose them. In our country, the USOC assured families it was giving their gymnast-daughters the finest medical care in the world. When in fact the USA Gymnastics doctor was a shabby little practitioner who turned out to be a serial pedophile and child pornographer. Those professions of confidence and expertise led to many, many more victims, all because there is so much money at stake that no one wants to deliver bad news or truthful cautions. It motivates coverup.
And when athletes or families try to sue, their position is, “We had no legal duty to you or your children.”
I don’t trust these entities as far as I can throw them.

A number of the governing bodies of major sports have begun grappling with the epidemic—UEFA with its Champions League soccer tournament, for example. What drew you to the Olympics situation?
Again, fundamental distrust of the dynamics.  Japan probably has $25 billion invested in building and hosting. Comcast has about $5 billion invested, contingent on commanding massive viewership in this particular time slot. Otherwise contractually it has to give back money to the advertisers.
This is not a recipe for sound decisions. They are irrational sums, and they can lead to irrational decisions.
You worry that because the IOC so fears a financial disaster, they could court another kind of disaster — a human one.
My concern is that they think, “Well, we always pull it off somehow. This will go fine.”

Was the column prompted by the Olympics being the biggest international sports event on the horizon? Or was this, at least in part, a gateway for discussing the myriad problems with the IOC?
See above. Look, the Games themselves tend to be glorious once the athletes take over, and at times even transcendental. But the IOC is fundamentally a hoarder of inordinate wealth, and the leadership is hermetically sealed in five-star hotels, and it hasn’t found the bottom of the skim pot yet. Its leaders can rationalize anything. Witness their coziness with Putin and acceptance of human rights abuses in China — letting Xi Jinping off the hook for every agreement he violates — in order to grow the profit pool. Just because all these great kids manage to scrape the grime off with their performances in the pool or on the track doesn’t excuse the dirt.
The IOC in both Beijing and Sochi put a buck ahead of human bodies. So it begs the question of judgement.

From time to time, you write a potent column standing up for athletes. I’m reminded of powerful writing you’ve done about the exploitation of NCAA football players, especially your August 2018 piece titled “Prehistoric College Football Coaches are Killing Players.” Does this advocacy spring from a specific source, or a more general sense that a sports columnist should step up for players being wronged or exploited by those who wield power?
It stems from the fact that I make my living off their sweat. For whatever reason, I feel highly, highly conscious of that.
As a sportswriter you have a front seat to the extraordinarily grueling amount of work that goes into making something look fast or graceful or easy. Elite Olympic level sport is not a healthy undertaking; it’s a to-the-very-brink exercise in pain and exhaustion and the limits of physical tolerances. The audience really doesn’t see that. But writers who are around for the daily grind do. You see the swelling, and the limping, you know? And you also see the terrible stakes for Olympic athletes who train four years for a performance that might last eight seconds. You cover a lot more failure and loss than you do great victories.
Athletes are highly ephemeral creatures. Breakable. They turn themselves so completely over to craft; they achieve such remarkable physical precision. And yet they are highly susceptible to being used — and to being used up, burned by others. So you feel protective. And you feel a duty.
If there is one thing I wish I could do as a sportswriter, it’s create a groundswell movement to restructure these organizations to give athletes more rights and self-ownership, to stop this constant preying on them by these massive financial entities in which people on the sidelines in crested blazers literally skim off their sweat. It just seems important to try to counteract that.

Who do you consider your audience?
The little voice inside my head. And my darling departed dad, who had an unbelievable ear for honest writing, and who always said, “Take the prevailing wisdom and then look at the opposite, and ask yourself if it isn’t smarter.” He wanted me to be an independent thinker and probably taught me to distrust approval from any audience. He taught me not to mind being alone on an issue. Sometimes that means you’re in just the right place. (Editor's note: Jenkins’ father was the revered sportswriter Dan Jenkins, who passed away in 2019; she wrote about her father's influence on her life and career in a column for the Post)

One can imagine the reaction to some of your columns in the offices of the NCAA or IOC. But do you ever hear from athletes when you write a piece like the coronavirus column?
I don’t hear much feedback from athletes. I mean, I’m pretty sure Tom Brady and LeBron James and Serena Williams and Katie Ledecky aren’t making Sally Jenkins a part of their day. Sometimes I will hear from a coach, every now and then from an owner. I can remember Jed York of the 49ers reaching out very kindly once. The NFL, given how much I have flayed their people in type at times, has always been supremely courteous and professional in terms of feedback.
I don’t think we writers matter nearly as much to athletes as they do to us. And that’s as it should be, because they’re the main actors and we’re just the witnesses.

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