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May 25, 2012

Rabbi Yonason Goldson: Thinking About Faith
Mark Clayton: Is Hillary's State Dept. hacking Al Qaeda? Not quite
David G. Savage: Supreme Court limits protection against double jeopardy
Ashley Powers: A nightmare, then conviction is tossed
Erika Bolstad: Temple cancels Wasserman Schultz speech
Deroy Murdock: WWII hero Karski to receive U.S. Medal of Freedom
Kimberly Lankford: Health Coverage for College Grads
The Kosher Gourmet by Ethel G. Hofman: The former president of the International Association of Culinary Professionals, whose members included the likes of Julia Child, is back with contemporary Shavous cuisine: Ruby Fruit Soup, Sweet Noodle Kugel with Cheese, Key Lime Curd, Calsone Casserole Frittata with Wild Mushrooms, Sun-dried tomatoes and Olives, Baked Tilapia with Pepper Cheese Cream and Brown Sugar Shortbread
May 24, 2012
Jeff Jacoby: The peace process battered Israel's reputation
Clifford D. May: What Iran's Rulers Want
Michael Muskal: 'Pro-choice' position hits record low, according to poll
Chris Farrell: Are We in a Tech Bubble?
Kimberly Lankford: Switching Medicare Advantage Plans Mid-Year
Bryan McIver, M.B., Ch.B., Ph.D.: Mayo Clinic Medical Edge: Understanding hyperthyroidism and its variety of treatment options
The Kosher Gourmet by Penelope Wall: PHILLY CHEESE STEAKS --- hold the steak!
May 23, 2012
Ex-CIA spy in Iran's Revolutionary Guard: Baghdad talks highlight Western naivete
Tony Pugh: More private colleges offering tuition discounts
Lisa Gerstner: 4 Money-Etiquette Questions Answered
Mary Beth Franklin: How to Choose the Right Annuity for You
Art Markman, Ph.D.: Get smart: How to bulk up your creativity muscles
Tina Susman: The wig wasn't enough: Man gets 13 years for posing as his dead mom
The Kosher Gourmet by Emma Christensen:A simple way to do fish right
May 22, 2012
David S. Cloud and Kathleen Hennessey: Obama changes mind on Pakistan invite to NATO summit --- and then gets dissed by country's president
Warren Richey: Can US group challenge overseas surveillance act? Supreme Court to decide
Thomas M. Anderson: Walking Away From a Mortgage
Environmental Nutrition editors: The lowdown on a low-acid diet
The Kosher Gourmet by Megan Gordon: Enjoy a celebration of the most rich and layered flavors: Black bean, sweet potato and quinoa chili
May 21, 2012
Mark Clayton: Cybersecurity: How US utilities passed up chance to protect their networks
Howard LaFranchi: NATO summit: Who will foot the bill for long-term Afghanistan security?
Chris Farrell : Earn Dividends in Emerging Markets with This WisdomTree ETF
James K. Glassman: 5 Stock Picks Among Online Retailers
Stephen Whiteside, Ph.D. : Mayo Clinic Medical Edge: Social anxiety disorder --- or just shy?
Guy Jackson : Victim's father regrets death of Lockerbie bomber
The Kosher Gourmet by Mario Batali: Famed chef's veal shoulder farsumagru: A festive meat course for late spring
May 18, 2012
Rabbi Berel Wein: Striving: The People of the Book's Book for (All of) the People
Caroline B. Glick: Embracing dangerous delusions and not our friends
Steven Goldberg: 5 Great Stock Picks and the Exchange-Traded Fund that Owns Them
Janet Bodnar: How to Teach Kids to Handle Credit Cards
Mary Pickett, M.D.: Ask the Harvard Experts: Don't be forced into gluten-free lifestyle based merely on a doctor's false-positive test
The Kosher Gourmet by Carolyn Malcoun: DIY healthy lunchbox treats: HOMEMADE FRUIT BARS for kids and brown-bagging adults alike
May 17, 2012
Warren Richey: Teacher fired for being unwed and pregnant can sue religious school, court rules
Josh Mitnick: Netanyahu's 'centrist' coalition is already proving it's anything but
Steven Goldberg: Earn Dividends in Emerging Markets with This WisdomTree ETF
Mary Beth Franklin: Retirement Savings Tips for New Grads
Amina Khan: Research links coffee to lower death rates
Chelsea Sheasley: Social media: Is it too feminine?
The Kosher Gourmet by Faith Duran : Cheesy Potato Breakfast Casserole with Cheddar and Sun-Dried Tomatoes
May 16, 2012
Jackson Holahan: The Aleppo Codex
Jonathan Tobin : Iran Declares Victory in Nuclear Talks
Anne Kates Smith: 7 Stocks That Let You Sleep Tight
Carmen Terzic, M.D., Ph.D. : Mayo Clinic Medical Edge: A variety of exercises can help improve balance
Melissa Healy: National strategy on Alzheimer's disease aims to halt it by 2025
The Kosher Gourmet by Joyce White : GOODNESS GRACIOUS: GREENS! 4 winning recipes that are no longer just for down-home folks (Includes expert tips & techniques)
May 15, 2012
Dennis Prager: God and Man at (and for) Liberty
Kristen Chick: Obama administration resumes arms sales to Bahrain despite serious unresolved human rights issues. Activists feel abandoned
Pat Mertz Esswein: Homes are now affordable again and mortgage rates are low. What you need to know before you buy
Kathy Kristof: Our Practical Investor Fights Inflation with These 6 Investments
Sue Hubbard, M.D.: The Kid's Doctor: Lactose intolerant young child? Check again
Environmental Nutrition Editors: Get the facts on palm sugar sweetening
The Kosher Gourmet by Kathy Hunt: Spread a Little Excitement with EXOTIC CONDIMENTS (4 RECIPES)
May 14, 2012
Richard Simon: Purple Hearts for domestic terror victims?
Nando Pelusi, Ph.D.: The privacy paradox: Surrounded by strangers, we risk isolation, anxiety
Chris Farrell: Investing Lessons from the Great Recession
Lisa Gerstner: How to Protect Your Identity, Finances If You Lose Your Phone
Harvard Health Letters: Heart disease and dementia
Tiffany O'Callaghan: New hormone mimics effects of exercise without the sweat
The Kosher Gourmet by Megan Gordon: MANGO COCONUT OAT MORNING MUFFINS are a bright but hearty delight
May 11, 2012
Rabbi B. Shafier: Why happiness will always be elusive
Charles Krauthammer: Echoes of '67: Israel unites
Howard LaFranchi: With G8 snub, US-Putin 'reset' off to stumbling start
Jeremy J. Siegel: Investors, Relax About Rising Interest Rates
Jessica L. Anderson: Get the Best Deal on a Used Car
Jett Stone: Forget face-lifts and fake knees. Scientists have seen the fountain of youth --- and it's broccoli
The Kosher Gourmet by Chef Mario Batali: The famed chef's vegetable dish that tastes true to the season: FAVAS AND SUGAR SNAP PEAS WITH POTATOES AND TARRAGON
May 10, 2012
Clifford D. May: The Real Palestinian Refugee Problem
Sergei L. Loiko: Putin sends warning to U.S., NATO in Victory Day speech at Red Square
Mary Rourke: How being a 'mentch' got Vidal Sasoon his start and fighting in Israel's War of Independence provided him with confidence and a strong sense of his own identity
Harvard Health Letters: Palliative care: Underused therapy yields surprising benefits
Jeff Bertolucci: Get Home Phone Service for Less Than $10 a Month
Rachel L. Sheedy and Susan B. Garland : Make the Right Moves to Boost Benefits
The Kosher Gourmet by Betty Rosbottom: Gleaming with its golden, crimson, and snowy white hues, this silken smooth and creamy STRAWBERRY ORANGE TRIFLE looks impressive, but is easy to prepare
May 9, 2012
John Rosemond: Parents, stop destroying the American male
Valerie J. Nelson: Maurice Sendak, author of 'Where the Wild Things Are,' dies at 83
Bob Frick: Angst Over Annuities
Sharon Palmer, R.D. How you can reduce your risk -- or delay -- chronic diseases associated with aging
Howard LeWine, M.D.: Ask the Harvard Experts: Why did my blood pressure suddenly shoot up?
Lisa Gerstner: Lower the Rate on All Your Loans
The Kosher Gourmet by Emily Ho : Springtime soba with miso sauce offers a coloful mix of fresh textures and flavors
May 8, 2012
Edmund Sanders: Netanyahu suddenly cancels new elections, forms unity government
Frank J. Gaffney Jr.: Farewell to European superstate
Anne Kates Smith: 4 Stocks That Mimic Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway
Gaia Vince and Clare Wilson The Rise of Miniature Medical Robots: Fantasy Fast Becoming Reality
Paul Takahashi, M.D.: Mayo Clinic Medical Edge: Never suffer night leg cramps
Jessica L. Anderson: Extended-Warranty Warning
The Kosher Gourmet by Diane Rossen Worthington: Celebrate National Chocolate Chip Day with the Best Cookie Ever (Includes techniques)
May 7, 2012
Mark Clayton: Homeland Security warns major cyber attack aimed at gas pipeline industry underway
Angus Roxburgh: Putin Decoded: World view of a Russian feeling dissed
Kimberly Lankford: Navigate a Course for Long-Term Care
Kevin McCormally How to Adjust Your Tax Withholding
Celeste Robb-Nicholson, M.D.: Harvard Health Letters: How do you treat a Baker's cyst?
Joanne Capano: Healthy Snacks for Children: The Choices May Surprise You
The Kosher Gourmet by Penelope Wall: Classic Creamy Spinach Dip with a Fraction of the Calories and Fat
May 4, 2012
Rabbi Nathan Lopes Cardozo: Holy 'trivialities'
Jonathan Tobin: Bibi v. Barak will be no contest this time around
Steven Goldberg: Blue Chip Stocks On Sale Worldwide
Art Pine Slow Productivity Growth a Blessing --- For Now
Sue Hubbard, M.D. : The Kid's Doctor: Are Kids Too Wired?
Kerri-Ann Jennings, M.S., R.D: Foods that are good for your smile
Amy Paturel, M.S., M.P.H.: Eating Well: Foods that are good for your smile
The Kosher Gourmet by Betty Rosbottom: Strawberry rhubarb parfaits are elegant yet simple to assemble
May 3, 2012
Michael Freund: Who's Afraid of the Messiah?
Clifford D. May: The Foggiest War
Susan B. Garland: Insurance to Cover Old Old Age
Steven Goldberg 6 Reasons to Bet on a Big Bull Market
Harvard Health Letters: Treating prostate cancer --- no rush to judgment
Larry Gordon: Harvard, MIT partner to offer free online courses
Naomi Nix : Man gets free trip to Chicago after postcard sent by mother in 1957 finally reaches him
The Kosher Gourmet by Diane Rossen Worthington: Intensely Italian vegetable frittata is a seriously simple standby


Jewish World Review Sept. 18, 2008 / 18 Elul 5768

A clatter of editorial writers

By Paul Greenberg


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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | What's the collective noun for editorial writers? I need to know because a whole herd of us is coming together this week here in Little Rock. But to call us a herd gives us too much credit for organization. I know it's a coven of witches, a pride of lions, a murder of crows, but what do you call an agglomeration of editorial writers?


My nomination: a clatter. As in the sound made by those old Royals and Underwoods in the noisy, crowded, smoke-filled newsrooms of yesteryear.


There was something romantic, promising, alive about that sound. There still is, which may be why there's a market even now for manual typewriters among the sentimental, or just wistful.


We won't be a full-fledged clatter until the program gets under way with greetings from Mike Huckabee, formerly a governor and presidential candidate, and currently political commentator and bass guitarist with his rock 'n' roll ensemble, Capitol Offense.


There'll be some other Big Names on the program, like syndicated columnist Juan Williams and John Shelton Reed, the DeTocqueville of Dixie. He's rounded up a whole passel of eminent sociologists to talk about the latest incarnation of that curious ethnic/geographic/cultural group known as Southerners.


We'll talk about the Wal-Mart Effect and the impact of Hispanic immigration, too. The obligatory tour of the Central High Museum is to follow a discussion about the ever-evolving historical significance of the Little Rock Crisis of 1957. It'll all be in keeping with the convention's theme this year: "The Next South, the Next America."


Who knows, we may even get around to discussing editorial writing at some point.


All in all, this conclave should be quite a show. It could even prove an education if we pay attention.


Editorial writers should be trickling into the lobby of the Peabody Hotel here in Little Rock all during the day. One by one they'll set down their luggage and the obligatory laptops that have replaced the old Royal and Remington portables, and start looking around for old friends or, even better, old enemies. Some of us have feuded for so long we've started to like each other.


You grow fond of people you see Same Time Next Year — year after year. And I've reached the age where I not only see old friends but a ghost or two, editorial writers from the past who used to be at these conventions but have made their last deadline. Tony Snow, a lapsed editorial writer who wound up a presidential press secretary, had been invited to speak at our final dinner, but had a previous engagement. Dang, it'd be good to see him again at one of these things and renew the past, slightly rewritten to give ourselves much better lines.


And I still miss Ann Lloyd Merriman of the Richmond News-Leader and later Times-Dispatch, our historian and keeper of the flame, who left a hole the size of a continent in this outfit's institutional memory when she died a few years ago. How describe her? She was a combination of Virginia gentility and invincibility, of Lee and Jackson, only wrapped in a cloud of cigarette smoke and sipping a bottomless libation. In short, a helluva newspaperwoman.


As you would imagine, given newspapermen's talent for organization, the National Conference of Editorial Writers is a kind of anarchists' convention, a mix of class reunion and debating society. And I can hardly wait for it to pick up steam and get really rolling.


How describe our membership? H. L. Mencken, the Sage of Baltimore, and a man who could write a mean editorial in more than one sense of the word, attended one of the first of these editorial writers' conferences. His writings remain fruit for the mind—a mix of verbal razzmatazz and cold observation that still cuts uncomfortably close to the bone. For example, here's his summary description of the nation's editorial writers at that early conference of same:


"Copy readers promoted from the city room to get rid of them, alcoholic writers of local histories and forgotten novels, former managing editors who had come to grief on other papers, and a miscellany of decayed lawyers, college professors and clergymen with whispered pasts. Some of these botches of God were pleasant enough fellows, a few even showed a certain grasp of elementary English, but taking one with another they were held in disdain." Certainly they were by Mr. Mencken, who never mixed his talent with tact. In his case, that would have been a sad dilution.


We've grown considerably more respectable since Mr. Mencken's time, more's the pity. The modern, contemporary editorial writer, alas, has an abundance of tact and all too little talent. Like any patron saint, Henry Louis Mencken is much honored amongst us, but too little followed. Literal-minded, imagination-short, terribly solemn, dutiful to a fault, we now might find eloquence in bad taste, or at least a violation of the stylebook.


Year after year, these conventions grow more like a wake for the great editorial writers we've lost, and for the old, Menckenesque editorials page that took no prisoners. This year we'll be told, again, that editorial writing is a dead art, and we just don't know it — and had better learn to blog. But as Truman Capote said of the works of another author, that's not writing, it's typing. So we write on, the happy few of us who are left, and still think of our newspapers as personas with a history, character and opinion of their own to express — through us.

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JWR contributor Paul Greenberg, editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, has won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing. Send your comments by clicking here.

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