Archives for September 2020

That led to her becoming the host of a local public-service television show, which shared a studio with the CBS News program “Face the Nation.” One day a CBS producer, who noticed that Ms. Brown was putting makeup on her guests, even the men, came over to her and said, “Your people look wonderful and mine look terrible.” He hired her to make up his guests at $19 per session.

Her first customer for “Face the Nation” was the speaker of the House, Sam Rayburn. He thought makeup was for sissies, but the producers worried that his bald head would shine under the lights. They told Ms. Brown that she had to persuade him to let her work her magic.

She thought about it for a while, she recalled in a 2009 speech in Washington, then said to him, “Mr. Sam, if you let me powder your nose, I will not relieve you of your manhood.” Rayburn guffawed.

“Once he recovered,” she added, “he said, ‘Well, you just go ahead, honey.’”

She worked in makeup for 40 years in CBS News’s Washington bureau, where she met many movers and shakers appearing on “Face the Nation.” Her clients included the television journalists Walter Cronkite and Eric Sevareid as well as Eleanor Roosevelt in her post-White House years and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Those who became president would often call her over to the White House in advance of television appearances. John F. Kennedy may have looked like a natural on TV, but he worked at it, Ms. Brown said. “He drove us crazy,” she said, with constant questions like whether he should cross his legs (“whatever makes you comfortable”) and whether he should take voice lessons (“yes”). He followed her suggestion and attended a workshop in New York City on television technique.

“He wanted to understand what cameras and lights and lenses did to him,” she told The New York Times in 1994. “He would walk behind the cameras and ask the technical people: ‘How do you mix the audio? Why do you have this light there?’”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/29/us/lillian-brown-dead.html

The Booker’s decision to move out of Mr. Obama’s way could also fuel new criticism that the prize, originally established in 1969 to honor writers from Commonwealth countries and the Republic of Ireland, has become too Americanized and increasingly focused on the U.S. book market. American authors have dominated the Booker nominees in recent years, following a 2014 rule change that made any novel written in English and published in the U.K. eligible.

Since the change, the American novelists Paul Beatty and George Saunders have won the prize; this year, out of the six shortlisted books, three are by American writers, while a fourth author holds dual Scottish and American nationality. Two years ago, a group of prominent writers argued that the foundation should ban American authors from eligibility, but the foundation was unswayed.

The Booker, which in previous years has been announced in October, will now be awarded directly after the National Book Awards, which will take place in an online ceremony on Nov. 18, potentially creating a logjam of coverage that could dilute the impact of the prizes.

“With them coming as close as they are to us, of course we’re concerned, we’re worried for our authors,” Lisa Lucas, the executive director of the National Book Foundation, which administers the National Book Awards, said in an interview. “It’s difficult to have a prize like the Booker, which didn’t need to participate in the American landscape in the years before their change, but now you have American books dominating the Booker list. They are now having to function on some level alongside our prizes.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/29/books/booker-prize-barack-obama-promised-land.html

Abby Hofstetter, 21, who stepped down as managing editor of Washington Square News, said in an interview that Dr. Griffin had failed to explain the journalistic use of the word in a Slack message to staff.

“That hurt our Black staff,” Ms. Hofstetter said. “Tensions were really high. The way that so much of the staff just woke up to that message, it was very clear that she did not understand the gravity of what she was saying.”

In the post signed by the staff members who quit, the students listed other complaints about Dr. Griffin, a former journalist at The Oklahoman and The Guthrie News Leader, also in Oklahoma, who is the president of the College Media Association. They said she had pressured an editor “to reveal their ‘real name’ after the editor disclosed their non-cisgender identity,” said trigger warnings on articles about sexual assault were unnecessary, stated that “racism is a matter of subjectivity” and demanded stories “without regard to reporters’ personal safety at protests and students’ time and responsibilities beyond WSN.”

Ms. Hofstetter said she had asked Dr. Griffin, who is white, to apologize but to no avail. “When we felt we had exhausted all of our other options, we realized we were not comfortable working in an environment like this,” she said.

Washington Square News covers N.Y.U. and the neighborhoods surrounding the Manhattan and Brooklyn campuses. It publishes a weekly print paper during the academic year and runs a website that is updated more frequently. It operates autonomously but has N.Y.U. journalism professors on its advisory board, and the university provides office space on Third Avenue.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/28/business/media/nyu-washington-square-news-adviser.html