Re-examining "The Power Broker"

FOR three decades his image has been frozen in time. The bulldozing bully who callously displaced thousands of New Yorkers in the name of urban renewal. The public-works kingpin who championed highways as he starved mass transit. And yes, the visionary idealist who gave New York Lincoln Center and Jones Beach, along with parks, roads, playgrounds and public pools.

This is the Robert Moses most of us know today, courtesy of Robert A. Caro’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography from 1974, “The Power Broker,” which charts Moses’ long reign as city parks commissioner (1934-60) and chairman of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority (1946-68). A 1,286-page book that reads like a novel, it won a Pulitzer Prize and virtually redefined the biographical genre by raising the bar for contemporary research. Today it remains the premier text on the evolution of 20th-century New York, a portrait of a man who used his power without regard for the human toll.

But according to the Columbia University architectural historian Hilary Ballon and assorted colleagues, Moses deserves better — or at least a fresh look. In three exhibitions opening in the next few days — at the Museum of the City of New York, the Queens Museum of Art and Columbia University — Ms. Ballon argues that too little attention has been focused on what Moses achieved, versus what he destroyed, and on the enormous bureaucratic hurdles he surmounted to get things done.

With the city on the brink of a building boom unparalleled since Moses’ heyday — the reconstruction of Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn, an overhaul of the Far West Side, sweeping redevelopment downtown — Ms. Ballon and other scholars argue that his legacy is more relevant than ever.

“Living in New York, one is aware there has been no evident successor or successors to Moses,” she said. “There aren’t master builders. Who is looking after the city? How do we build for the future?” All around New York State, she suggests, people tend to take for granted the parks, playgrounds and housing Moses built, now generally binding forces in those areas, even if the old-style New York neighborhood was of no interest to Moses himself. And were it not for Moses’ public infrastructure and his resolve to carve out more space, she argues, New York might not have been able to recover from the blight and flight of the 1970s and ’80s and become the economic magnet it is today. ...

Read on...

Is Journalism Ready for a Black President?

I thought this was a good CJR Daily article about how the press tends to cover black candidates. It's true that the emphasis tends to be on the candidate's race much more than issues in some cases. Already we're seeing a trend of that with Barack Obama.

Forget America, is Journalism Ready for a Black President?

Tony Dokoupil

"Is America Ready for a Black President?" It's a question that many media outlets have posed recently ahead of a possible presidential run by Senator Barack Obama. But instead of asking if the country is prepared, the press would do well to ask itself, "Is Journalism Ready?" Not necessarily, say political scientists studying media coverage of minority candidates. Their research on black politicians running in majority-white districts turns up some touchy historical patterns that are germane to both Obama-mania and also the national media's readiness to cover a highly competitive white-black contest.

Three main batches of research -- the most recent published this winter in the Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics builds on two others published in the summer 1999 Journal of Politics and as the book Voting Hopes or Fears? -- focus on mayoral races in New York and Seattle in 1989, and national congressional contests in 1992, 1994, and 2004. It's a small sample by social scientific standards, and shouldn't be considered conclusive. But the primary limit on its size is also a commentary: blacks are still largely absent in the pool of candidates seeking state and national office, let alone the pool of winners. In the 130 years since Reconstruction, only two African Americans have been elected governor, and only three have been elected senator. None have come from a state more southern than Virginia.

Check out the rest of the article here.

Somewhere, somehow Judith Regan's ears are perking up

Another good reason for being a journalist. We get paid (or can at least craft a killer book pitch) doing the inane things that most people get fired for... at least in a loose sense. This lady should team up with the gramatically ignorant, stick figure model who drafted her entire autiobiography on test computers at the Apple Store in Soho. They could teach at class at the Learning Annex.

Perhaps Clark Kauffman could pitch in as an "expert" and give them some ghostwriting hours. He does seem to have a flair for the kicker.

A Des Moines woman details her idling on the job on her employer's computer.

By CLARK KAUFFMAN
REGISTER STAFF MEMBER

January 19, 2007

A Des Moines hotel worker has been fired for using her employer's computer to keep a massive, detailed journal cataloging her efforts to avoid work.

State records indicate that Emmalee Bauer, 25, of Elkhart was hired by the Sheraton hotel company in February 2005. During most of 2006, she worked at the company's Army Post Road location as a sales coordinator.

At one point during her employment, Bauer was allegedly instructed to refrain from using company time to work on her personal, handwritten journal. Rather than stop writing at all, Bauer allegedly began using her work computer to keep the journal up to date.

"I am going to be typing all my thoughts instead of writing all day," wrote Bauer, according to portions of the journal that were entered into evidence at a recent state hearing dealing with Bauer's request for unemployment benefits. "That way, there isn't any way to tell for sure if I am working really hard or I am just goofing off."

Over the next several months, Bauer composed a book-length journal of 300 single-spaced pages, describing in excruciating detail her dogged efforts to avoid any sort of work.

"This typing thing seems to be doing the trick," she wrote. "It just looks like I am hard at work on something very important."

A supervisor discovered the journal late last year and fired Bauer for misuse of company time.

Other journal entries, according to evidence presented at the hearing:

- "I am going to sit right here and play Elf Bowling or some other nonsense. Once lunch is over, I will come right back to writing to piddle away the rest of the afternoon. ... I have almost 100 pages here! I wonder how long that's going to take to print?"

- "I don't feel like doing a single worthwhile thing today. It's 11:00 and so far I have stuck to that. ... I have managed to waste half of the day doing nothing constructive. That isn't exactly an easy task, either."

- "It's noon already and I don't feel like I have accomplished a damn thing. Accomplishment is overrated, anyway."

- "I just have to get through the next seven hours and forty-six minutes and then I will be free."

- "(I have) an hour of time that needs to be wasted - I mean 'spent wisely.' I know, that's a crock. I am only here for the money and, lately, for the printer access. I haven't really accomplished anything in a long while ... and I am still getting paid more than I ever have at a job before, with less to do than I have ever had before. It's actually quite nice when I think of it that way. I can shop online, play games and read message boards and still get paid for it."

At the state hearing, Bauer testified the journal was intended to help her deal with anxiety and frustration. She said she didn't believe her firing was warranted because other employees violated company policy without being penalized.

Administrative Law Judge Susan Ackerman denied Bauer's request for unemployment benefits last week, saying the journal demonstrated a refusal to work, as well as Bauer's "amusement at getting away with it."

In the journal, Bauer speculated that her writings might someday be published even though they dealt largely with the minutiae of her daily life such as rearranging the furniture at home, doing the dishes and planning for a tattoo on her lower back.

"I don't really think about much of anything as I type or write," she wrote. "I simply put on paper what I am feeling in that exact moment. ... It could be a side note to my biography someday that no one supported my writing and I was forced to do it secretly at the risk of persecution."

Post-Master's Hangover

Like a real journalist, I know just the cure: Actual hangover. Who's down after all-day orientation tomorrow?