Dr. Solomon: Now, you understand I can't just give you new irises. Because if I do, the retinal scans will read the scar tissue, alarms will go off, and large men with guns will appear.
I respect and empathize with reporters and editors who must compete in today's environment. And I know full well that when I've been covering campaigns, which I still do, I've made my mistakes and have been far from perfect.
The media thinks that only the cutting edge of science, the very latest controversies, are worth reporting on. How often do you see headlines like 'General Relativity still governing planetary orbits' or 'Phlogiston theory remains false'? By the time...
When we talk about reviews, what we are really talking about is just a market report - it's like reading about the new Lexus. You have to know what the guy writing the review cares about to understand his take. Does he like sports cars, or does he li...
As N.Y.C. Public Advocate, I released a report that showed that stop-and-frisks of African Americans in 2012 were barely half as likely to yield a weapon as those of white New Yorkers - and a third less likely to yield contraband. Despite this eviden...
Man at Accident: [after Terry has backed into his car] Excuse me, but I think we've had an accident. Terry Fields: Well, goddammit, I won't report you this time, but next time just watch it, will ya?
Doug Neidermeyer: And most recently of all, a "Roman Toga Party" was held from which we have received more than two dozen reports of individual acts of perversion SO profound and disgusting that decorum prohibits listing them here.
[after reporting the stolen car] The Dude: Do you find them much, these, stolen cars? Younger Cop: Sometimes. Wouldn't hold out much hope for the tape deck though. Older Cop: Or the Creedence.
In accordance with the terms of the Clarke-Asimov treaty, the second-best science writer dedicates this book to the second-best science-fiction writer. [dedication to Isaac Asimov from Arthur C. Clarke in his book Report on Planet Three]
As a novelist, you deepen your characters as you go, adding layers. As a reporter, you try to peel layers away: observing subjects enough to get beneath the surface, re-questioning a source to find the facts. But these processes aren't so different.
From 1961 to 1964, I was fortunate enough to work at a think tank in the Kenwood neighborhood of Chicago. As a writer and editor, I reported in a publication about the thinkers. Our offices were in a former mansion; I worked in what had been the ball...
WikiLeaks exposed corruption, war crimes, torture and cover-ups. It showed that we were lied to about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; that the U.S. military had deliberately hidden information about systematic torture and civilian casualties, which...
I wrote something for my local newspaper, but nobody read it because it got buried in the obituary section.
Or was Chris thinking, as I was, that if we went to the police and told our story, our faces would be splashed on the front pages of every newspaper in the country? Would the glare of publicity make up for what we'd lose? Our privacy-our need to stay...
People sometimes imagine that just because they have access to so many newspapers, radio and TV channels, they will get an infinity of different opinions. Then they discover that things are just the opposite: the power of these loudspeakers only ampl...
He knew why he and the other children received ice cream only when newspaper photographers came to visit, and why food and clothing donated for the children got furtively resold outside the orphanage gate.
A letter may be coded, and a word may be coded. A theatrical performance may be coded, and a sonnet may be coded, and there are times when it seems the entire world is in code. Some believe that the world can be decoded by performing research in a li...
I already read everything. I read poems and plays and novels and newspapers and comic books and magazines. I read tins in supermarkets and leaflets that come through the door, unsolicited mail. None of it lasts long and it doesn't give me answers. Re...
They called our arrangement a 'Death Pact' - but, really, that's not a phrase that tells you anything important. It's just the kind of phrase that sells newspapers. For us, it was never about death. It was about life. Knowing that there was a way out...
I'm convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing. If one is writing for one's own pleasure, that fear may be mild — timidity is the word I've used here. If, however, one is working under deadline — a school paper, a newspaper article, t...
How could an alphabet—letters that didn't even mean anything by themselves—be important? But it important. Our stories, our names, our alphabet. Even Uncle's newspaper. It was all about words. If words weren't important, they wouldn't try so hard...
