"Hello from the other side." -- Adele
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To the best of my recollection, of all the courses I taught over a long teaching career, only one was explicitly about writing.
All of the others focused on some aspect of methodology -- how to gather information, validate it, organize it, and defend it once published.
In the course of considering all of that, we spent a great deal of energy studying how to obtain and interpret documents, identify and interview sources, attend and describe events, notice patterns, pick up details, stay attention to nuances and instincts, and how to trust our own intuition about people and situations.
But there is another component to the whole equation and that is how to tell a story. Accordingly, as I became a better writer myself (which is a process not unlike body-building), I incorporated "how to investigate the story" into my teaching curriculum.
Partly this was in reaction to receiving too many poorly-told story drafts as a teacher and as an editor.
The problem was and is that journalists (and everybody) gets too caught up in the twists and turns of a reasonably complicated story to stay in control of the narrative.
The trees become the forest and that is not necessarily a pleasant experience for a reader lost in the forest and trying to make her way from tree to tree.
The point is that working on the narrative is easily as important as working on gathering the facts. And this is true in non-fictional well.
***
Speaking of trees and forests, I spotted a report this morning that there are only 669,000 trees in San Francisco, while the best population estimate suggests that there are 875,000 people.
This raises the prospect that something very good for the environment could be easily accomplished by planting 206,000 more trees, bringing the tree-people ratio into balance.
Of course, San Francisco is essentially a big sand dune pocked with multiple granite outcroppings and not an especially conducive environment for greenery.
But as the development of Golden Gate Park proved back in the 1880s, there are ways to fix that. So I say it's time for a big tree-planting campaign in the city and county of San Francisco.
Who will step up?
***
THE HEADLINES:
* Taliban issue no-shave order to barbers in Afghan province (AP)
* Inside the Afghan airlift: Split-second decisions, relentless chaos drove historic military mission (WP)
* Is Going to the Office a Broken Way of Working? (New Yorker)
* San Francisco is home to 669,000 trees (SFC) and 875,000 people. (US Census)
* The Return of Empty Shelves and Panic Buying -- Supply chain issues are leaving supermarket shelves empty. Shoppers might yet make things worse. (Bloomberg)
* Big Tech Companies Amass Property Holdings During Pandemic-- Google’s announcement last week that it would purchase a Manhattan office building for $2.1 billion is the latest in a string of blockbuster corporate real-estate deals since the start of the pandemic. (WSJ)
* Under a new bill signed on Monday, a ballot will be mailed to every registered California voter in future elections. Voters will still have the option to send in their ballot or vote in person (AP)
* Entire families of Latino people were wiped out in floodwaters in a 1921 storm that laid waste to San Antonio's mostly Latino barrios. The storm sowed the seeds of the community's environmental justice movement. Read -- Alexander C. Kaufman's fascinating story on why it's still relevant today. (HuffPost)
* ‘Covid hit us like a cyclone’: An Aboriginal town in the Australian Outback is overwhelmed (WP)
* Firefighters are still working to contain the Windy fire, the K.N.P. complex fire and the Fawn fire, which are encroaching on ancient sequoia forests (AP)
* Tattoo sales are soaring in the Bay Area after pandemic slump. (SFC)
* Lego's earnings double, boosted by adult fans -- Toymaker Lego doubled its earnings over the first six months of the year as customers flocked to its reopened stores to buy Star Wars building sets and flower bouquets made from its colorful plastic bricks. (Reuters)
* Japan to lift all coronavirus emergency steps nationwide (AP)
* Republicans Block Government Funding, Refusing to Lift Debt Limit -- Senate Republicans opposed legislation to avert a government shutdown and prevent a debt default at a critical moment for Democrats’ domestic agenda. (NYT)
* Packs Of Ravenous Wild Boars Are Ransacking Rome (NPR)
* Cancer Without Chemotherapy: ‘A Totally Different World’ -- A growing number of cancer patients, especially those with breast and lung cancers, are being spared the dreaded treatment in favor of other options. (NYT)
* Alarming New Adult Trend ‘Plateauing In Your Career And Relationship’ Sweeps Nation (The Onion)
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