Cooper was still carrying on with Lupe Velez — he wanted to marry her, but Cooper’s mom (recall, she was right there in L.A.) thought her too “vulgar” and “tasteless.” We might attribute her verdict to good ol’ fashioned racism, but Lupe was a bit of a hot mess. Or at least that’s how the press chose to portray her, most likely in keeping with her onscreen image as a fiery Latina. She loved acting “low-class,” and threw parties with cock fights and “stag films,” a.k.a. thinly veiled porn. She got in fights, especially over men, and was prone to extreme jealousy. To wit: angry over Cooper’s close friendship with Anderson Lawler, known, in the time’s parlance, as a “swisher,” or flamboyant homosexual, Velez supposedly “unzipped Cooper’s fly at a social gathering and started sniffing his crotch, claiming to smell Lawler’s cologne.
A fucking awesome article.
Scandals of Classic Hollywood: That Divine Gary Cooper | The Hairpin
You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do—and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time. A lot of the people whose work they’ve taught in the schools for the last thirty years, I can’t understand why people read them and why they are taught. The library, on the other hand, has no biases. The information is all there for you to interpret. You don’t have someone telling you what to think. You discover it for yourself.
When explanations of these and similar changes are made, there is talk of moving away from “assembly-line editing” and “outmoded nineteenth-century industrial processes” to some bold, modern, fresh, immediate journalism that removes all those unnecessary “touches” between the writer and the reader. This is, of course, cant. The brutal facts are these: Terrified by declines in revenue, newspapers are shedding employees to save money. They are attempting to keep as many reporters as possible to generate content, and they are gambling that you will tolerate shoddier work.
Each of these questions, when answered, will begin to limit the available options when attempting to select a measurement solution. However, in evaluating specific application requirements it will often be necessary to accept tradeoffs as different solutions may offer advantages in one area, while offering disadvantages in another. It therefore becomes very important to prioritize your requirements as you will quite often be unable to choose a single solution which meets all your needs.
As an example, dimensional measurements represent the single largest characteristic measurement category in the industry. Using various types of acquisition technology, operators have quite a few options to choose from when selecting a measurement solution to best fit their evaluation needs.
And so, in the proud tradition of good blogs everywhere, readers are left with a highly variable product. The great is rare; the dull quite common. But — and this is the genius of the online format — that doesn’t matter, not any more, and certainly not half as much as it used to. When you’re working online, more is more. If you have the cojones to throw up everything, more or less regardless of quality, you’ll be rewarded for it — even the bad posts get some traffic, and it’s impossible ex ante to know which posts are going to end up getting massive pageviews. The less you worry about quality control at the low end, the more opportunities you get to print stories which will be shared or searched for or just hit some kind of nerve.
As I’ve long talked about, traditional editing/quality control is not that important. Smart, thoughtful editing decisions, however, are — and that’s where copy editors need to go. No grousing about the Observer; instead, find your own to (re)invent.
Elizabeth Spiers and the reinvented New York Observer | Felix Salmon
Without editors planning assignments and copy editors fixing mistakes, reporters quickly deteriorate into Underwear Guys writing blogs from their den.
George Vecsey tells good stories, reflects wisely on newspapers’ nadir, then slags bloggers. Sigh.
- Ernest Hemingway, in a letter to Ernest Walsh, 1926.
I can recall a lunch in 1991, when I was editing The New York Observer, and he and Aimée Bell, his longtime editor, and I got together for a quick bite at a restaurant on Madison, no longer there. Christopher’s copy was due early that afternoon. Pre-lunch canisters of scotch were followed by a couple of glasses of wine during the meal and a similar quantity of post-meal cognac. That was just his intake. After stumbling back to the office, we set him up at a rickety table and with an old Olivetti, and in a symphony of clacking he produced a 1,000-word column of near perfection in under half an hour.
One of our lunches, at Café Milano, the Rick’s Café of Washington, began at 1 P.M., and ended at 11:30 P.M. At about nine o’clock (though my memory is somewhat hazy), he said, “Should we order more food?” I somehow crawled home, where I remained under medical supervision for several weeks, packed in ice with a morphine drip. Christopher probably went home that night and wrote a biography of Orwell. His stamina was as epic as his erudition and wit.
We’re not sure what the hot toy for the holiday season will be this year, but retailers have their favorite: the supply chain manager action figure, an iconic hero who slashes inventory and leaves no goods available for discount sales by the end of the year.
Awful Journalism Ledes 101.
What you want is practice, practice, practice. It doesn’t matter what we write (at least this is my view) at our age, so long as we write continually as well as we can. I feel that every time I write a page either of prose or of verse, with real effort, even if it’s thrown into the fire the next minute, I am so much further on.
Like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with a too blunt pin he screwed himself into her.
My name is 
