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Barack Obama politics David Remnick New Yorker interviews thought and opinion

People are complicated… Societies and cultures are really complicated… These are living organisms, and it’s messy. And your job as a citizen and as a decent human being is to constantly affirm and lift up and fight for treating people with kindness and respect and understanding.

Barack Obama, quoted in this fantastic New Yorker’s piece by David Remnick – nothing less than a work of magic, difficult and beautiful. Complement with President Obama on what his mother taught him about love.

David Remnick longform interviews thought and opinion media and communication journalism

You can lead by love or by fear. Fear can work—but it always blows up.

Fantastic interview with longtime New Yorker editor David Remnick on the Longform podcast, one of these 9 intelligent podcasts for a fuller life.

Complement with David Foster Wallace’s timelessly fantastic definition of leadership.

writing plagiarism David Remnick Malcolm Gladwell media and communication thought and opinion culture and society

The issue is not really about Malcolm. And, to be clear, it isn’t about plagiarism. The issue is an ongoing editorial challenge known to writers and editors everywhere—to what extent should a piece of journalism, which doesn’t have the apparatus of academic footnotes, credit secondary sources? It’s an issue that can get complicated when there are many sources with overlapping information. There are cases where the details of an episode have passed into history and are widespread in the literature. There are cases that involve a unique source. We try to make judgments about source attribution with fairness and in good faith. But we don’t always get it right. In retrospect, for example, we should have credited Miles Wolff’s 1970 book about Greensboro, because it’s central to our understanding of those events. We sometimes fall short, but our hope is always to give readers and sources the consideration they deserve.

New Yorker editor-in-chief David Remnick’s elegant and wise response to allegations of Malcolm Gladwell’s plagiarism.

Then there is the psychology of cryptomnesia and unconscious plagiarism – lest we forget, writers themselves are often unable to draw the line between their conscious and unconscious borrowings.