Entries associated with the tag "Tori Marlan":

I found myself sharing a table with Dawn Clark Netsch at a dinner last week and she said she'd noticed changes in the Reader. Was the paper OK? "We've got a story on page one by John Conroy," I said, and that was answer enough. A week later I'd have had to say no. John -- and Tori Marlan, Harold Henderson, and Steve Bogira -- were no longer with the Reader.

Laying off these staff writers, which editor Alison True did at the beginning of this week, was surely one of the hardest acts of her life and certainly a low point in the history of this newspaper. "Over the years," True said Thursday in a message to the staff, " John, Harold, Tori, and Steve have produced some of our most important and exciting stories. Their achievements have included brilliant investigative work, prestigious awards, and possibly most important, spurring social change in a city that always needs it. . . . I can't emphasize enough that this action in no way reflects a judgment on the value of the work of these particular writers, and in fact it's my fervent hope that they'll continue to work with us on a contractual basis."

They're gone because the Reader couldn't afford to go on paying them their salaries -- "As you might guess, this move represents a shift in the financial structure of our relationship with contributors," True wrote.

They're gone because a few years ago Craigslist moved in on our classifieds section -- and classifieds represented a huge portion of our income. They're gone because the old Section One -- the editorial section -- was for decades the tail that wagged the dog here, and when revenues fell it became impossible to continue to allocate the same funds to it.

I called the boss, Ben Eason, in Tampa and reminded him that the last time we'd talked he was saying John Conroy deserved a Pulitzer Prize. (That's a popular idea around here. He's been writing about police torture since 1990, but there's no Pulitzer for persistence, no matter how important the subject.) The first time Eason and I talked, just after Eason had bought the paper this summer, I said that Conroy was, in effect, the canary in the coal mine -- as long as he was OK readers would know the Reader was OK. 

"I know, I know," said Eason, who was informed of True's intentions before she made her move. "All I've done is, I've said this is what the budget number is. This is what we’ve got to have. And it’s the same number that’s been out there since August."

Eason and Creative Loafing have some interesting, and let's hope brilliant, ideas about the future of the Reader and the CL chain of six newspapers. "It's ultimately to me a navigation problem," Eason told me. "How do you keep putting out a newspaper at a quality people expect and how do you migrate this stuff to the Web, which is ultimately the future? We’re in a fight over who can tell you more about the street corner in Chicago. You've got a mobile phone and you're hungry or you want to rent an apartment and you're consulting your cell phone, and its going to be Google or Yahoo and they’re getting their information from somebody. Those guys" -- Yahoo, Google -- "they’re not even pretending to be journalists," said Eason.  But "we're the journalism right behind them, the stories and information that's still the most comprehensive and best stuff out there. But the challenge is make that turn. I guess I felt that if I was doing fundamental damage to the Reader I wouldn't have bought the Reader."

While writing for the Reader, Conroy's published acclaimed books on Northern Ireland and torture. Bogira, who's been on leave working on a book, published a terrific book on Chicago's criminal courts, Courtroom 302, that HBO is planning to turn into a miniseries. Our last cover story by Marlan, who recently completed a Patterson Fellowship, concerned a Yemeni student who's still being held prisoner in Guantanamo two years after he was recommended for release. Henderson blogged for us, tossed off features on just about anything, and had the most eclectic mind at the paper. Does their departure do fundamental damage to the Reader? 

I want to say no, because the remaining staff is top drawer. But I expect readers to mourn the departed. Newspapers haven't come to the point where no one will notice.

A few days ago the New York Times carried a story on its front page about changes in the civics test that immigrants have to pass to become citizens. The new test makes rote learning less important than a grasp of the ideas that have shaped America. For instance, this question is out: "How many branches are there in the United States government?" And this one's in: "What stops one branch of government from becoming too powerful?"

Interesting question. At one time I'd have answered, the other two. The three branches of government -- the executive, the legislative, and the judicial -- hold each other in check. But even though that's what we're taught in school, and it's what we'd like naturalized Americans to believe, how true is it really? 

Be sure to read Tori Marlan's cover story in the new issue of the Reader on Mohamed Mohamed Hassan Odaini,  a young Yemeni man who's been a prisoner in Guantanamo for the past five years. Consider the glimpse it offers of Congress subverting our system of checks and balances. "The Republican-controlled Congress did what it could to help the Bush administration stave off judicial oversight," Marlan writes. "After the Supreme Court ruled [that Guantanamo prisoners could challenge their detention in U.S. courts], it passed the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, stripping Guantanamo prisoners of their access to U.S. courts. When the Supreme Court ruled that the law had no effect on already pending cases, Congress dotted that i by passing the Military Commissions Act of 2006."

This is a snapshot of Congress as presidential toady, sucking up to government's alpha branch by cutting the geeky judiciary down to size. Among conservatives, curbing the courts has long been regarded as righteous behavior, and given the changes in the Supreme Court, we may soon find liberals replacing them in the chorus. "Activist court decisions have undermined nearly every aspect of public policy," Ed Meese, who'd been Ronald Reagan's attorney general, told a Senate committee in 1997. "Congress should exercise its power to limit the jurisdiction of the federal courts." Congress has tried. One big issue facing the U.S. Supreme Court in its new term is how much leeway federal judges have to think for themselves in the face of the federal sentencing guidelines Congress has set. Perhaps what we really have in the U.S. is less a balance of power than a rock-paper-scissors arrangement: the executive bullies the legislative, which bullies the judicial, which now and then bullies the executive.

Here are ruminations from another era about executive power:

"The irony is that all of us for years have been defending the presidential prerogative and regarding the Congress as a drag on policy. It is evident now that this delight in a strong presidency was based on the fact that, up to now, all strong presidents in American history have pursued policies of which one has approved. We are now confronted by the anomaly of a strong president using these arguments to pursue a course which, so far as I can see, can lead only to disaster. It is not hard to assert a congressional role; but, given the structure of the American system, it is very hard to see how the Congress can restrain the presidential drive toward the enlargement of the war. Voting against military appropriations is both humanly and politically self-defeating."

The year was 1967, the president Lyndon Johnson, the disaster Vietnam, and the ruminator Arthur Schlesinger Jr.  Selections from Schlesinger's private journals have just been published as a book, Journals, and an excerpt (registration or purchase required) that includes the above passage appears in the October 11 New York Review of Books. Yet Democratic senators such as Fulbright, Church, Morse, McGovern, Kennedy, and McCarthy did speak out against the war. Compared to the feckless Republican performance 40 years later, Democrats rose in insurrection.

But it would be 1974 and the resignation of President Nixon before it was possible to say that in the long run the checks had checked and the balances had balanced. Maybe equilibrium only exists in the long run. Maybe the none-too-reassuring answer to that new question on the civics test is simply -- time.