Byron De La Beckwith was jailed for the murder of NAACP leader Medgar Evers in 1963 and not a Klan leader. Thanks to Susan Osnos, an especially careful reader for noting the hiccup.
Jerry Mitchell has been an investigative reporter in Mississippi for decades. Over those years, he has been responsible for many of the biggest stories to have come out of the state. Here’s a glimpse from Mitchell’s illustrious career biography:
His work helped put four Klansmen behind bars: Byron De La Beckwith for the 1963 assassination of Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers, for ordering the fatal firebombing of NAACP leader Vernon Dahmer in 1966; Bobby Cherry, for the 1963 bombing of a Birmingham church that killed four girls; and Edgar Ray Killen, for helping organize the 1964 killings of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner.
Mitchell wrote a well-received book, Race Against Time, about these cases and the courageous pursuit of justice by the victims’ families. He has received more than thirty national journalism prizes and a $500,000 MacArthur “genius” grant.
I asked him how he’s been compensated by his employers for his exemplary efforts. “Sure,” he replied, “I could have gone to New York and made a lot more money. But I feel we can have far more impact here in Mississippi, where the need is far greater, and I feel far happier because I’m living for others and not myself.”
Jerry Mitchell is by any measure a great journalist. He is now sixty-six and is an investigative reporter for Mississippi Today, the nonprofit news organization founded in 2016 that has become unquestionably the most important source of reporting in and about the state.
Mitchell is known and respected in Mississippi, but he’s certainly not famous or a celebrity, as so many of his counterparts in the media big time aspire to be. And that is by choice. When the New York Times approached him about a job, he said he only wanted to cover Mississippi, so nothing came of the offer.
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Jerry Mitchell was born in Springfield, Missouri, where his mother and father just happened to be at the time. “Mom came for a baby shower and had me instead,” is Mitchell’s explanation. He was raised in Texarkana, Texas. His father became a Navy jet pilot (his dream job), and he went to his parents’ alma mater, Harding University in Searcy, Arkansas.
While still a student he started reporting for the Texarkana Gazette and moved with his editor to the Jackson Clarion-Ledger in 1986. That paper, long a racist mouthpiece for the state’s white citizenry, had turned around enough to win the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 1983 after having been sold to the Gannett national chain the previous year. Mitchell said he was proud to be taken on there.
As a courthouse reporter, he was inspired by the 1988 film Mississippi Burning based on the unsolved murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner to start investigating these cases, which Mississippi justice either would not or could not resolve.
Mitchell says there was nothing in his background that had particularly guided him toward civil rights and the African American experience. But his instincts for what he knew to be terrific stories motivated him. I asked him what makes an investigative reporter.
“You are never satisfied until you uncover the facts that officials don’t want you to know,” he said. His commitment to civil rights and justice reporting was not political activism. It was a determination to get at the truth of events — with details so thoroughly persuasive that, even against the odds, perpetrators will be identified and convicted.
Mitchell’s family lives in Texas, but Mississippi is his home; it is where the stream of stories that he does so well seems never ending. The success of Mississippi Today as a flourishing enterprise is one of the country’s best examples of the reinvention of local news with funding from philanthropy and paying members. Its news output is free and shared with the state’s newspapers, including the once formidable Clarion-Ledger, which like thousands of other advertising-dependent news organizations across the U.S. has seen its resources and stature diminish.
Today’s Mississippi is not the officially segregated and racist state it was in the 1960s, but the powers-that-be still need especially close monitoring. Former Governor Phil Bryant sued Mississippi Today after its reporter Anna Wolfe disclosed major welfare fraud, which won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting. The next year, a group of young New York Times-supported reporters worked with Mitchell on a series exposing the notorious brutality and corruption of sheriffs around Mississippi. That work was a finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting and for Harvard University’s Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting.
In fact, Mississippi Today’s partnership with leading national news organizations like ProPublica, the Marshall Project, and the Associated Press is an encouraging feature of the reinvention of local news underway elsewhere.
News organizations have always needed two parallel lanes to flourish — outstanding reporting on the communities, small and large, where they are located, and the financial resources to pay for the reporting, editing, and distribution to their readers.
It was in 2019, when the Jackson Clarion-Ledger was going through its third round of buyouts and layoffs, that Mitchell decided to leave and start the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, which he merged with Mississippi Today in 2023.
What enables nonprofit journalism to have enough impact in their areas to attract the financial support that is indispensable is the quality of its news, especially investigative reporting — which creates accountability for the actions of officials and public institutions.
When Jerry Mitchell thinks of getting things done, his focus on accountability is his strength. I am calling him a superstar, which I am sure is something he would never say about himself.
Results of Sunday’s run-off for Poland’s presidency show that the country’s electorate is evenly divided between the pro-European center-left government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk and the nationalists aligned with the Law and Justice Party, whose candidate, Karol Nawrocki, a historian and former boxer, received 50.9 percent of the vote. The reformist candidate, Rafal Trzaskowski, the mayor of Warsaw, got 49.1 percent.
The Tusk government sets policy, but its actions can be stymied by the president and have been repeatedly since it reclaimed power in 2023.
There is an important reality to remember. The country is united in the recognition that Russia is the greatest threat to Poland’s security, and defense spending is and will be an overriding priority across the political spectrum.
Donald Trump’s do-si-do with Russia’s Vladimir Putin and his threats to NATO are the reason last week’s piece was called “Where Good Times Are Not Taken for Granted.”
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As a reporter during the Cold War years, I visited and wrote about Poland many times, most notably in June 1979, when Pope John Paul II toured his homeland for the first time, an epic event that made it clear that Soviet control was destined to end.
I have been back as Poland joined the European Union and NATO and developed a robust economy. Younger Poles, in particular, are completely Western European in style and culture, with, of course, a recognition of Russia’s menace and the war in neighboring Ukraine.
My interest in Poland comes from my family’s history there. I came to the United States as an infant in 1944 and was intrigued by the heritage my mother and father had left behind. On my mother’s side my great-great-grandparents had nine children, six girls and three boys, every one of whom lived, by any measure, eventful lives. One boy committed suicide when he was 20.
At gatherings of my Warsaw and Krakow cousins, we guessed that there are dozens of direct descendants living today in Poland, France, and the United States.
Given that so many American Jews with Central and Eastern European backgrounds lost all their relatives in the Holocaust or can’t really trace their ancestors’ lives before arriving in the U.S., I have found the history and endurance of our close family fascinating, with so many achievements to mark and challenges to overcome.
In October, Rivertowns Books (in association with Platform Books) will publish In the Garden of Memory by Joanna Olczak-Ronikier, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, for the first time in the U.S. Here, from the forward I have written for this edition, is the background to the book and a sense of its contents.
Th book is about events in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, published just after the millennium. It received Poland’s top literary prize and was published in Great Britain in a brilliant English translation by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. It was also published in France, Holland, and Germany. This is its first publication in North America.
It tells the story of a large family in a historical memoir based in Warsaw and Krakow but with a reach across Europe and the United States. The time frame includes the Holocaust, but it is not a horror story. Some did suffer terror and torture in the Stalin era, and the family was scattered or in hiding in World War II. And yet, somehow it endures in succeeding generations to this day.
To read it now evokes the sensibility of midcentury American Jewish writers of fiction and nonfiction — Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Cynthia Ozick, Bernard Malamud, and Susan Sontag — with meticulous detail, wit, irony, and literary merit that enhances its value as an exploration of human nature.
What else makes this a book that has lasting literary appeal? Richard Bernstein, writing in The New York Times in 2005, said that the book “gained its broad audience in Poland partly because the clan described in it is one of Poland’s most illustrious, but also because its members were deeply involved in the central events of the 19th and 20th centuries.”
He describes the extensive dramatis personae as “almost Tolstoyian.” (To assist readers, a descriptive character list and family tree will be attached to Lloyd-Jones’s introduction to this edition.) The famous opening line of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” This is a happy family in many ways but also one profoundly challenged by the tumultuous events of its time.
And finally, Poland at the center of Europe, surrounded and occupied over time by Russia, Germany, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, emerged with distinctive qualities of romantic courage and idealism that severely and repeatedly stressed its existence.
The author, Joanna Olczak-Ronikier, lives in Krakow. In the cover photograph taken during the summer of 1939, weeks before the Nazis invaded Poland, Joanna was three years old; my brother, Robert, was eight; and our cousin Ryszard, who served as a navigator in the Polish branch of the Royal Air Force and would be killed in a crash in 1944, was seventeen.
There are descendants of our family in Poland and the United States today who carry on the traditions of the intelligentsia that is our heritage. In this way, we connect with our past and reckon with the extraordinary good fortune of having endured when so many Jews and others did not.
There is more to say about the book and related stories I have discovered while working on the project. I will be writing about them in the months ahead.
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Annik LaFarge, author of Chasing Chopin: A Musical Journey Across Three Centuries. Four Countries, and a half-Dozen Revolutions has just finished reading the book. Here is her comment:
“Like a great Russian novel bursting with colorful, wildly different characters, In the Garden of Memory presents the human side of the long, rich, poignant, story of Poland from the late 19th century through Partition and two World Wars. Olczak-Ronikier’s relatives are impassioned rebels and patriots; poets, translators, psychiatrists and writers; women struggling to nurture their professional ambitions despite the burdens of gender; and entrepreneurs in publishing and bookselling. We get to know each of them as they navigate the precarious dissonance of being proudly Polish and Jewish. It’s a masterful, multi-generational, portrait of a family that endures even as their world descends into chaos.”
In the New York Times of May 29, 1997, under the headline “A New Publishing House for Books on Public Affairs,” an imprint was described with the ambitious objective of delivering nonfiction of topical interest and long-term relevance.
PublicAffairs is now an imprint of the Basic Books Group at the Hachette Book Group. The newly appointed editor in chief is Meagan Levinson, who has a laudable background in trade and academic publishing. She and her colleagues have a formidable publishing history to carry forward. ************************************
From the outset, each PublicAffairs book included this note on the final page of every book:
For fifty years, the banner of Public Affairs Press was carried by its owner Morris B. Schnapper, who published Gandhi, Nasser, Toynbee, Truman, and about 1,500 other authors. In 1983, Schnapper was described by The Washington Post as a “redoubtable gadfly.” His legacy will endure in the books to come.
The note has been retired in a new era for PublicAffairs. But Peter Osnos Public Affairs Press is the name of this Substack newsletter. It will not publish books under that name. However, the spirit of Schnapper’s independent vision will persist.
Three buildings and two statues in the center of Warsaw, Poland’s capital, frame the history of the country’s tumultuous last one hundred years.
The Palace of Culture and Science, completed in 1955, is a Soviet-era symbol of “friendship” that still dominates the city skyline, although it is now surrounded by gleaming high-rises reflecting Poland’s robust modern economy. In past times, Poles would point at it, shrug, and comment: “Yes, it is small, but at least it is delicate,” which of course it is neither. There have been regular calls for it to be demolished, but the grandiose interior halls are still very much in use, being spacious and — to contemporary Warsaw residents — somewhat kitsch.
On the other side of a large plaza, long used for political flag waving (and about to be a veranda for strolling and tête-à-têtes) is the new Museum of Modern Art, designed by the American architect Thomas Phifer. It known colloquially as the “Cube,” given its rectangular dimensions. Its collection features twentieth- and twenty-first-century art, primarily by Polish artists, and exhibitions.
The crowd on hand for events recently were notably recognizable in style and animated buzz as members of the global intelligentsia.
Nearby, at Ulitsa Twarda 28, in the shadow of all the surrounding skyscrapers, is an apartment block known as the “Tenement House of Leib Osnos.” Leib (Lionel) was my grandfather, who died in the mid-1930s. This is where his family lived and where my parents huddled after the Nazi invasion of September 1939. With remarkable (in my retrospective discovery of what happened) daring, courage, and luck, my father first and then my mother and eight-year-old brother made it out of Poland and eventually to India, where I was born in 1943, just before they crossed the Pacific to the United States.
I was astonished to learn recently that the building, which was inside the notorious Warsaw ghetto from 1940 to 1942, was the only building on that street not to have been destroyed in the war. In 2019, the building was designated a National Monument. It is shuttered and shabby, yet it is widely known as an artifact of the Holocaust era in the center of Warsaw, one of the very few that is intact.
As explained by my cousin Piotr Hoffman, a Warsaw lawyer, the future of the building is unclear. It apparently cannot be torn down, and renovating it would be costly. Peering through the locked and rusty gates where my immediate family lived in what must have been a terrifying time was eerie.
As for the statues, they are the work of Alina Szapocznikow, a celebrated Polish sculptor. The triumphant embrace of the Russian and Polish soldiers holding a banner was a centerpiece in the atrium of the Palace of Culture and Science, a symbol of what the Poles considered an “asymmetrical” friendship of Communist-era allies.
In the early 1990s, the statue was consigned to ignominy in a yard where the banner and the arms disappeared and were never found.
When discovered, the statues were sent to the modern art museum, where the now elderly sculptor shaped the two men into a modern day armless “Venus de Milo,” which frames friendship in a decidedly different way. “Maybe,” a Polish art historian told me, “they are a gay couple.”
The statue is now a focal point of the museum’s grand staircase, a symbol of what was once enforced on Poland from the Kremlin and a reflection of how Poles see their situation as very much changed.
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But that is not, it needs to be said, completely the case. Russia, Prussia, and Austria conquered and divided up Poland in the eighteenth century (a division reprised in the twentieth century by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union). Today, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the ongoing war there is an ever-present menace. Nearly two million Ukrainians have taken refuge in Poland, where they have been welcomed — although immigration from less racially compatible countries has been a divisive issue.
Poland is a member of the European Union and NATO, but from 2015 to 2023 the Law and Justice Party, a right-wing populist and nationalist party, governed the country shifted its policies towards the “illiberal” style of democracy associated with Viktor Orban in Hungary.
The government is now run by a pro-EU coalition led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who has restored Poland’s commitment to progressive politics and economics. The Polish president, Andrzej Duda, is from the Law and Justice Party, and he has stalled or blocked many of Tusk’s policy priorities.
Duda, however, is term-limited, and in the first round of voting for a new president, on May 18, the centrist candidate Rafal Trzaskowski, the mayor of Warsaw, came in first. However, the second-, third-, and fourth-place finishers were candidates aligned in one way or another with the right wing. The top two candidates will compete in a runoff on June 1, so decisive power is still undecided.
Poland’s population of roughly 37 million is essentially divided in half between the urban pro-Europeans and the nationalists of Law and Justice, which has the support of the country’s powerful Catholic Church. However, there is one overriding issue on which there is complete agreement: Vladimir Putin’s aggressive Russia means that Poland’s continuing security is never guaranteed — as history readily demonstrates.
Poland has been staunchly pro-American for decades, more so in most respects than any other European nation. As he has done at home and abroad, Donald J. Trump has now baffled and dismayed the Polish public, with his professed admiration for Putin and Orban’s autocracy and the tariffs he has imposed.
Poles like their growing prosperity, and the progressive-conservative divide is not likely to upend that economic trajectory.
But a country devastated by World War II and repressed for the decades of the Cold War cannot and does not take the good times for granted.
Next Week: The Results of the Presidential Run-off and Introducing In The Garden of Memory.
“Si,” as he was always called by those in his inner circle, and even beyond in a vast empire of magazines and books, would be easy to miss in a crowd. He was small in stature and awkward in social presence. But for decades in the twentieth and twenty-first century he was the most powerful person in publishing.
As the owner of Condé Nast and for years Random House, Si exercised absolute control, shared only with his brother, Donald, who oversaw the family’s lucrative newspapers. He died in 2017. The digital era has ended what, in its heyday, was a resplendent world in which the courtiers who benefited from his largesse were also disposable at his whim.
Two books this season tell the story of Newhouse and his empire with fascinating detail in the voices of Vanity Fair, Vogue, and The New Yorker, and in the spirit of Spy (the brilliant satirical magazine of the 1980s), the New York Observer of the 1990s, the Styles sections of the New York Times, and Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, which portrayed its targets with a sneer, even when it so clearly envied their fame and fortune.
Graydon Carter’s memoir, When the Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines, is his entertaining perspective on all his successes, written with candor and enough self-deprecation to render the triumphs bearable — and when vengeance is dispensed, a sense of what lurked below the bonhomie and glamour. There is no index, so if you want to read what he says about you, you’ll have to buy the book.
Michael M. Grynbaum’s Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty That Reshaped America, coming in July and available for preorder from bookstores everywhere, is an anecdotal feast. I have a cameo as the Random House editor of Si’s personally commissioned The Art of the Deal, the book that made Donald Trump a national celebrity.
The all-star cast of Graydon Carter, Anna Wintour, Tina Brown, David Remnick, and other luminaries reflects ambition, talent, and the consequences when everything depends on the favor of one man. For instance, when Si decided that Robert Gottlieb, the editorial legend he had put at the helm of The New Yorker, wasn’t working out, he let him go with a payout of $350,000 a year for the rest of his life, which turned out to be more than thirty years.
The tangled succession story about whether Carter or Brown was first offered the editorship of The New Yorker is in both books, with an unresolved dispute. When Brown left for the misfortune of launching Talk magazine (in collaboration with, Harvey Weinstein), Newhouse offered the position to Michael Kinsley, with a million-dollar salary and a $5 million signing bonus. Kinsley said he would respond overnight, and Newhouse then left him a message pulling the offer. This has been widely reported. Some version is doubtless true.
Tina Brown’s rousing Fresh Hell Substack reflects her prenaturally sharp eye and wit,
David Remnick, an exceptionally gifted staff writer, was elevated in 1998 and is still editor in chief. No succession is in sight. (This is the place to say that Si’s instinct for great talent justfied spending fortunes on them).
Si’s capacity for financial risk in reviving Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, and the capriciousness with which he would summarily hire and fire editors and publishers, would not have been possible if he had been overseen by anyone besides his brother and their shared minions. Those days are over, but the Newhouse heirs are still dominant owners and billionaires because of investments that made money but are not interesting enough to be chronicled in the future in books like Carter’s and Grynbaum’s.
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As an editor and publisher at Random House in the eighties and nineties, I was not in the direct line of people who would reap rewards and regrets when Si dispensed favor and then disposed of those who no longer had it.
But I did get enough of a view to recognize the traits that in both the new books are portraits of power.
Si and his nephew Steve would attend Random House sales conferences, which in that period were held at resorts in Florida, Arizona, and the Caribbean. Learning that I was an early morning runner, he would ask me to join him. Our return coincided with breakfast, and others may have thought seeing us together that we had some special connection.
We did not. But in corporate politics, even a mistaken belief of influence can be a plus.
Si’s approach to those who ultimately were his employees was evident in the case of Howard Kaminsky, who was a close friend — as Howard would repeatedly remind us, with stories about their evenings at restaurants and watching old movies. Kaminsky was a cousin of Mel Brooks, with a similar comic banter but much less funny,
He was named publisher of the Random House Trade Division in the summer of 1984 and was immediately thought to be the heir to Bob Bernstein, the longtime chief executive of the whole enterprise, Random House, Inc. People would ask Bob about the arrival of a new head of the company, so it was not long before his own title began appearing on company documents as “Chairman, Chief Executive and President of Random House, Inc.” to certify who was who.
At sales conferences, Howard would take charge of who could join Si at meals. That was the vibe for three years, until in October 1987 Bernstein summoned Kaminsky and fired him.
Howard was dumfounded and was immediately on his way to Si’s office. He returned forty-five minutes later and tearfully told us that, yes, Si had confirmed that he was out. But he assured us Si was still his close friend — and that would always be the case.
It was then only a matter of time before Bernstein was replaced by Alberto Vitale, who lasted until the Newhouses sold Random House to the German company Bertelsmann in 1998.
As I heard it, Si could not understand how an enterprise of Random House’s excellence and clout was not making more money.
In 1980, Si and Don had bought Random House, Inc. (the assets included Alfred A. Knopf publishing imprint and the rights to Dr. Seuss and James Michener, two of the most successful authors then or ever) in 1980 for a reported $60 million — a front-page story in the Times when book publishing transactions were big news.
In 1998, Bertelsmann paid $2 billion for the enterprise, the number I was told by the executive for the buyer who negotiated the deal.
Business transactions reaching that scale, become the stories that Carter and Grynbaum tell, which are such fun to read. They are incidental to what really counts in 2025— power, for sure, combined with money and who controls it.
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Now that it is being aired, I found Netflix’s five-part series Turning Point: The Vietnam War more visceral in a way than other documentaries on the subject, particularly as scenes of chaos in Afghanistan and violence in Iraq are framed against the comparable episodes in Vietnam decades earlier. As a contributor, my last words in the documentary are these: “The story of the United States in Vietnam was a story of ignorance, hubris, and arrogance. So much of what we see now about the war in Vietnam was a function of the individual personality and characters of people and their inability to get tough with themselves.”
Times are different, but events are still being defined by the character of America’s leaders.
April 30, 1975, was the day the Vietnam war ended, with Hanoi’s victory. South Vietnam’s capital, Saigon, was renamed Ho Chi Minh City, honoring North Vietnam’s revered leader. Vietnamese who had been associated with the American role in the conflict were sent to “reeducation camps.” About two million Vietnamese, over time, made it to the United States, where, on the whole, they are an American immigrant success story.
The days around the fall of Saigon were vividly described by H.D.S. Greenway of the Washington Post in his book Foreign Correspondent: A Memoir. As the city prepared for the end, Greenway wrote this in the newspaper:
SAIGON, April 25 — When evening comes to Saigon, foreigners still gather on the open sided terrace of the old-fashioned French colonial hotel, The Continental Palace, to drink an aperitif as they have done for 50 years. The lights begin to come on, the waiters take orders and the slow fans on the high ceilings bring some relief in the tropical heat.
But when the hour of the curfew comes, and it now comes at 8 PM, …strange and even terrifying shapes began to gather in the darkness outside. It is the hour when beggars, cripples, prostitutes, junkies and transvestites become desperate for one last pitch. There are children, dirty and uncared for…Girls, some vacuous with narcotics, all of them begging and pleading, pulling at the last of the potential customers…
Fear pervades all contacts and contacts and all conversations now, fear of the unknown, of what will come.
For those of us in the generation that served in the war, opposed it. and, in my case, covered it as a reporter, Vietnam was a defining experience, along with the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963, the summer urban riots, the murders of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy in 1968, Watergate from 1972 to 1974, and the culmination of the Indochina conflict in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam in 1975.
The cascade of losses were the origins of America’s erosion of self-confidence, leading us to the ignominy of Donald J. Trump’s ascendency and presidency.
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Symphony Space, a large theater on Manhattan’s Upper West Side was the scene in early April of a tribute to Stevie Wonder’s album Songs in the Key of Life, released in 1976 and one of the greatest in his magnificent repertoire. Wonder is now seventy-four and can still sell out Madison Square Garden if he chose to.
The performers and the band in the tribute were all young and nearly all Black. The audience was middle-aged and older and nearly all white. There were standing ovations.
Fifty years — a half century — is a large part of anyone’s life. But for those of us who were young in 1975, my sense is that the passage of time since Vietnam and the Motown heyday in music seems remarkably close.
What else happened fifty years ago? Saturday Night Live premiered in 1975. Steven Spielberg’s Jaws became the template for the cinematic extravaganzas that he continues to make today.
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The Socialist Republic of Vietnam is a robust autocratic nation of one hundred million people. The U.S. intervention in Vietnam’s civil war was an effort to block Communist China’s influence in the region — but in 1979, only four years after Hanoi’s victory, a Sino-Vietnamese war erupted with thousands of casualties and ending in a stalemate.
The communist alliance in Indochina had already been demolished when Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1978 to oust the victorious Khmer Rouge. Simply recalling these events from the perspective of 2025 underscores the ironies of America’s misbegotten foray in the region. The impact the U.S. had there — politically, culturally, economically — has long since been superseded, but in the United States the long-term consequences of the war are palpable.
On this April 30, we are absorbing the scale and unpredictable outcomes of Donald Trump’s upheaval of the nation he leads. Are we heading toward a catastrophe or something else? It is impossible to foresee how things will look a half century from now. What music being performed now will get standing ovations then? Will this year’s expected Superman summer blockbuster (about a comic strip character that first appeared in 1938) be getting another rendition?
Will Saturday Night Live be celebrating its one-hundred-year anniversary, and will it be airing on something called television?
Living through events of magnitude, which every generation invariably does, defines how civilization evolves.
Stevie Wonder may not have known that Songs in the Key of Life would be earthshaking when he recorded it — he was only in his mid-twenties — but it has certainly been ever since. And it has proved a lasting source of joy. The fall of Saigon, for all its significance at the time, has faded. Vietnam’s leadership is appealing now to Trump not to reimpose burdensome tariffs, which are a threat to the country’s developing economy and the global order.
I have been told that as you age, time starts to pass more quickly. It has been fifty years since 1975, but it certainly doesn’t feel that way.
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On April 30, Netflix will be featuring a major new multipart documentary series on the Vietnam war. The trailer is attached
This series is about people who, while fully aware of the upheavals underway in so many institutions — government, media, education, business, NGOs — have personalities that enable them to confront challenges that have engulfed this era and get things done.
Among the ways that genius is defined, one of the best is the ability to shape data and dots into coherence so their meaning and impact can be understood.
In 1999, I was invited to a gathering of people to consider what to expect in the twenty-first century in technology, the environment, politics, entertainment, and social norms. Esther Dyson was a presenter.
She said we were entering “The Attention Age,” in which opportunities, sensations and distractions were expanding so fast that focus was becoming harder — and this was years before the loaded handheld smartphone arrived in 2007 and made everything accessible and in many respects overwhelming.
As an editor and publisher of books, my takeaway was that that the task of choosing good books and making them better would become inextricable from getting them noticed by readers. And this has been my mission ever since.
Thanks for that, Esther Dyson.
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Esther Dyson grew up in what she calls the “unique bubble” of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where her parents — a distinguished physicist and a mathematician — worked under J. Robert Oppenheimer and mingled with Nobel Prize winners and occasionally Albert Einstein.
As a teenager in the mid-1960s, she persuaded her parents to let her go to London and attend Loughton County Grammar School for Girls, in the fifth form. Enrolled at Radcliffe with what she describes as “pretty poor” grades, she took an administrator’s hint and traveled to Morocco, where her boyfriend, Timothy Crouse (later the author of the journalism classic The Boys on the Bus), was a Peace Corps volunteer. She recalls “hiding under the bed when one of Tim’s bosses showed up.”
Dyson started out in journalism but decided to go to Wall Street, where she believed — “mistakenly” she now acknowledges — people were interested in “facts and outcomes.” Here is her self-description, written with characteristic brio:
Conference impresario and tech analyst (Release 1.0 newsletter and PC Forum tech conference 1982-2007). Author of Release.2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age. Broadway Books, 1996. Best seller. Founding chair of ICANN [the NGO that administers the domain names for internet sites]. Cosmonaut in training Star City outside Moscow (2008-2009). Healthcare investor and then health philanthropist (Wellville.net project 2014-2024). Board seats including past, 23 and Me, WPP Group, Yandex and currently, Avanlee Care, Nebius, Press Reader. More on request. Portfolio of 100+ startups, widely recognized as leading angel investor.
So, her activity is extensive but, nearly as I can judge, more engaged than frenetic.
Does Esther Dyson’s have “oblivious confidence”? This is the trait I associate with the ingrained belief that accomplishments are to come, and challenges met, based on intuition, energy, and resilience. Luck happens but is not necessarily to be expected. Curiosity is certainly a prerequisite. But there is something else. In some people, success can mean arrogance and condescension towards others, and so knowing how to create, innovate, advise, and lead without a know-it-all demeanor is complicated.
Esther Dyson certainly seems to meet that standard.
I hadn’t been following Dyson when I came upon this podcast hosted by Andrew Keen, Episode 2313 of “Keen On.” Her role after a forty-plus-year career in technology, she told him, is to provide honest feedback to the tech powers-that-be while maintaining independence.
“In this role Dyson expresses concern,” Keen said, “about society’s vulnerability to ‘information diabetes’ — addictive content that, like processed food, provides short-term pleasure but long-term harm.”
For those of us who muddle through pervasive techno-jargon, Dyson’s accessible way of portraying ideas is welcome — which takes me back to The Attention Age before it had even really started.
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What is Dyson’s next project? She sent me her proposal for a book she is writing, to be called Term Limits. Our life spans have extended by a third in the past century or so. The range of information we have available and the opportunities to use all that information one way or another has never been greater.
Quoting from the latest version of the proposal:
“The purpose of the book is to use the constraints ‘Term Limits’ to examine trends…in our world today. There’s a certain conflict between the financial markets’ obsession with exponential growth, AI’s infinite scalability and society’s obsession with abundance…and the finite nature of life and attention.”
How to know when you have reached enough of anything? How to recognize and take advantage of limits.
Dyson’s generation, which is mine as well, is the first that needs to reckon with this yet-to-be-understood period of life, decades beyond what was traditionally thought to be a turning point from ascension to, well, something else.
Dyson says her approach to term limits is how best to take advantage of our accumulation of experiences and activities. Is more always longer and better?
Esther Dyson is a thinker who is also a doer, a combination that when properly deployed can get things done.
John Thornton was co-founder of the American Journalism Project and founder of The Texas Tribune. He died on March 29. His legacy is a remarkable vision for the reinvention of an indispensible resource of our national life and democracy and was essential to devising the evolving new business model for journalism.
It is with great sadness that we share the news that John Thornton, co-founder of the American Journalism Project and Elsewhere Partners, and founder of The Texas Tribune, died on Saturday, March 29. He was 59. What follows is a tribute to John from the American Journalism Project, Elsewhere Partners, and his wife, Erin Thornton.
Over the course of a remarkable career that spanned, improbably, from venture capital and private equity to the emerging world of nonprofit local media, John Thornton was known for a rare mix of entrepreneurial zeal, moral urgency, and infectious humor. He devoted himself to helping entrepreneurs realize their visions — and he developed a vision of his own that transformed the business of local journalism.
Born in Wichita, Kansas, in 1965, John graduated first in his class at Trinity University in San Antonio and went on to earn an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He began his professional life at McKinsey & Company before joining Austin Ventures in 1991, where he led nearly 50 software investments. He ultimately served as managing partner, leading a firm with over $4 billion in assets under management. He later co-founded Elsewhere Partners, an investment firm focused on bootstrapped software companies outside traditional venture hubs.
Through his work as a venture capitalist, John stumbled on what would become his greatest passion and define his legacy. In 2006, as the news business faltered, John assembled a team at Austin Ventures to explore newspaper investment opportunities. “Our team very quickly determined that there had to be easier ways to make money,” he recalled, dryly, to a class at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. He came to see news not as a business opportunity, but as vital to the health of American democracy. “I was left with this sinking feeling that something was wrong,” he said.
He became a crucial early and influential voice making the case that local news was a “public good,” and that commercial markets could not sustain it. “Maybe public-service journalism — whatever you want to call it, I call it capital-J journalism…maybe this stuff is a public good just like national defense, clean air, clean water,” he said in an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review.
In 2008, in his first journalism venture, he founded The Texas Tribune, recruiting Evan Smith, the president and editor in chief of Texas Monthly, to run it as his co-founder alongside Ross Ramsey. John assembled $4 million in seed capital, and contributed over $2 million to the organization in its founding years. The Texas Tribune would become the gold standard in nonprofit news, garner broad recognition in the industry, and inspire the founding of dozens of similar organizations in other cities and states.
A decade after starting the Tribune, Thornton co-founded the American Journalism Project, a first-of-its-kind “venture philanthropy” to raise money and fund local newsrooms across the country. He brought an investor’s discipline — ambitious, strategic, and built for growth — to a civic mission. Alongside co-founder Elizabeth Green, he recruited prominent national philanthropies to support local news at the very moment it was teetering. The premise, as he often reminded staff, was that every dollar the American Journalism Project gave local news outlets would generate three new dollars in local annual recurring revenue. His theory worked: The first 22 organizations funded by the American Journalism Project have, on average, doubled in size since they received their grants; collectively, they have added over 200 journalists to their staffs. The American Journalism Project has raised more than $225 million to fund local news and now supports a portfolio of 50 nonprofit newsrooms in 36 states.
“John was the godfather of nonprofit local journalism,” said Sarabeth Berman, CEO of the American Journalism Project. “He had the radical clarity and moral urgency to see that saving local news wasn’t just necessary — it was possible.”
But those who worked with John often noted that he was, perhaps, proudest of his investments in people. He mentored a broad range of leaders, offering his guidance with generosity, humor, and conviction. He was impatient when it mattered, and embraced fights he believed worth having. As an evangelist for the idea that a healthy democracy depends on a free and independent press, John liked to inspire others by inducting them into what he fondly called the “Democracy Hall of Fame” — and made them proud to be a part of it.
John died Saturday, March 29, in his hometown of Austin, after a long struggle with mental health.
He engaged in life so wholeheartedly that few knew the depths of his suffering. Despite his internal battles, he chose to meaningfully participate, to be in service to others, and to fiercely love the people in his life. That intense commitment was John’s essential characteristic, to the enduring benefit of his family, friends and co-workers.
John gloried, above all, in his family. He was devoted to his wife, Erin Thornton, and to giving his step-sons, Wyatt Driscoll and Wade Driscoll, a family life that he was not as fortunate to have had. He leaves behind not just a legacy, but a movement — one that will continue in his spirit. Plans for a memorial to honor John’s life will be forthcoming.
We will miss him immensely.
Read all about it! The American Journalism Project
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The documentary Becoming Katharine Graham portrays her reign as publisher of the Washington Post with all the distinction it deserves, especially impressive as the Post in the Jeff Bezos era seems so troubled. (The film is on Amazon Prime, and I was told that Bezos said he had watched it and found it inspiring.)
Many years ago, I heard Graham, in a speech extolling the newspaper’s strength, assert, “The Washington Post is Woodward and Bernstein” the great Watergate duo. Also, she said, it is “Woodward and Lothrop,” a major downtown Washington department store and a major advertiser, which was liquidated in 1995.
That summarizes what has happened to journalism in the twenty-first century. The pillars of what paid for news gathering and presentation in the heyday of print — display advertising and the classifieds — were essentially demolished and nothing comparable as a revenue source has yet to be devised.
For the Post, which was so dominant in the Washington market, the collapse was devastating — highlighting the irony of Katharine Graham’s insight in better times.
But if you are anywhere in the media world, the impact of lost print advertising is completely obvious — which doesn’t mean it is widely understood.
Around 2000, I was told by the publisher of the New York Times that the company had reached a billion dollars of annual revenue. Three quarters of that came from print advertising and the balance mainly from subscriptions, he said. Today the equation has been more than reversed — it is the readers who pay for the bundle of news, cooking, puzzles, and sports at the Times. Subscription revenue provides the overwhelming part of what in 2024 was $2.6 billion in revenue.
The reinvention of economics for something as central to our lives as the media — from micro providers to corporate behemoths — is a civilization-scale change. The consequences are, not surprisingly, incalculable.
The number of print subscribers to major newspapers is a fraction of what it was: the Boston Globe has fifty thousand, the Dallas Morning News has forty-five thousand, and the Denver Post has under thirty thousand, according to a list on the website Mediagazer. I’m guessing print news will always be available as a pricey premium for legacy publications that are now primarily digital. (The New Yorker and The Economist are among the most prominent media organizations holding on to substantial print readership.)
And the digital for-profit sector is now larger than perhaps people realize, including Politico and Axios and specialty sites like The Information, along with Substack, the aggregator of newsletters that come with a subscription option. Others have come and largely gone, Vice being among the most memorable.
Such is the nature of business. Journalism is an essential component of democracy and also a commodity.
As advertising-supported small and medium-size print newspapers have been depleted or have vanished, a new model has emerged. It is in the nonprofit media realm, particularly at what is usually described as “local” or “accountability” journalism, where the activity is the most innovative.
Philanthropy is a major source of support for emerging enterprises. Press Forward, a consortium of foundations, has committed $500 million to nonprofit news. The American Journalism Project is acknowledged as the leader of the field, investing, mentoring, and evaluating the resurrection. I asked Sarabeth Berman, the CEO of AJP (and I am proud to say, my daughter-in-law), to give me her assessment of how well the process is going. Here is her response:
We’re seeing nonprofit news organizations grow and find sustainability, produce vital journalism and thrive in their markets. With the right support, diversified, renewable revenue is within reach.
To give you a sense of what this looks like in practice: In January 2022, we gave Block Club Chicago a $1.6 million grant when they were a $1.9 million organization. They used our support to invest in their business team and digital revenue strategies, and by the end of 2023, had grown into a $3.5 million organization with stronger membership (8.3% growth), revenue from foundations (200% growth) and earned revenue streams (192% growth).
Similarly, Spotlight PA has grown from a $1.7 million organization in 2021 to a $4 million organization; by the end of 2023, they had grown their membership by 71%, earned revenue by 466%, support from major donors by 18% and philanthropic support by 90%.
While not underestimating what philanthropy and the support of billionaires can mean, capricious as that tends to be, I think it is not yet the case that an all-inclusive replicable model exists for a mix of subscriptions, events, sponsorships, and donations to equal what advertising had so long provided. We will be encountering successes and failures as the enterprises reach inflection points of substainability. What matters are the trends.
Gara LaMarche, a former president of The Atlantic Philanthropies and a major figure in civil society for decades, wrote a widely read piece on the subject in March titled “Overreliance on Foundations Is Unhealthy. Foundations Can Help Fix That”in which he argues that matching large donations with smaller ones from members (or, in the case of news outlets, readers) to establish a continuing revenue flow, can move a nonprofit organization beyond the need to regularly renew grants.
The clearly defined lanes of news and advertising (“church and state” was the shorthand) that prevailed in the twentieth century is being replaced. The reinvention will prevail over time because there is so much effort and innovative talent being deployed to make it succeed and because it is so important.
