Lauren Kirchner

At 50, 'New York Review of Books' celebrates the longevity of a magazine, and a mission:

The Review, which celebrated its 50th anniversary last night at Town Hall, found its niche almost immediately, and has been largely immune to the shifts in the business of cultural production and criticism, enduring for five decades and retaining its spot as the elite platform for probing, diverse cultural criticism and argument, right to the present day.

Bio: Lauren Kirchner is a writer living in New York City. Her work has appeared in the Columbia Journalism Review, Wired, the Awl, and elsewhere, and can be found here.

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At 50, 'New York Review of Books' celebrates the longevity of a magazine, and a mission

50-new-york-review-books-celebrates-longevity-magazine-and-mission

The Review, which celebrated its 50th anniversary last night at Town Hall, found its niche almost immediately, and has been largely immune to the shifts in the business of cultural production and criticism, enduring for five decades and retaining its spot as the elite platform for probing, diverse cultural criticism and argument, right to the present day. More

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By Lauren Kirchner

on February 6th, 2013 11:53am

 
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The voices of NPR’s 'Planet Money' wonder if we’re all doomed, financially speaking

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The show opened with the kind of lesson you wish your high school econ teacher had taught you. Planet Money correspondent Robert Smith bartered a drink ticket to an audience member in exchange for a simple task, and in so doing, demonstrated some key economic concepts. "What just happened here, this is actually how all prices are determined," he said. "At the end of the day, Katie's happy—she's got a drink ticket—I'm happy (the nail is out), and Adam Smith is happy in his grave. The invisible hand of the marketplace works. But—not all the time." More

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By Lauren Kirchner

on January 25th, 2013 1:05pm

 
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Steve Earle, Mary Karr, and many more writers and musicians gather to support struggling Red Hook

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It was like that all night. The money was flowing, the bartenders were mixing, and the readings were often very funny. But it was also so undeniably sad. “It’s a scandal that they have to have a benefit like this for social services,” cartoonist Ben Katchor said, shaking his head. “The whole thing is nuts. The people in public housing down there, they don’t even get enough social services when the sun is shining.” Katchor would later read from a few of his comics with the help of a laptop and overhead projector. More

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By Lauren Kirchner

on November 15th, 2012 2:05pm

 
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A mission to cover up the (lightly) radioactive legacy of Ridgewood

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Even as the city recovers from the hurricane, another, wholly unrelated cleanup is quietly underway in one corner of Queens. More

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By Lauren Kirchner

on November 14th, 2012 9:27am

 
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Elizabeth Cline's cure for throwaway fashion: 'slow clothes'

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“Fashion’s race to the bottom,” as she puts it, can’t be fixed overnight, but she shows that we need an extreme makeover of our attitude towards clothes as disposable goods. Cline’s book is as personal as it is polemical, and it follows her journey from a Forever 21 fanatic to an educated, careful consumer. She confesses her sins early on: the moment she realized that she had to change her ways was when she hauled home a heavy bag of identical shoes from K-Mart. She had seen a bargain she just couldn’t pass up—$7 a pair—and, in the thrill of the hunt, bought out the store in her size. The shoes soon fell apart and fell out of fashion, and the remainders languished in her closet. More

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By Lauren Kirchner

on June 21st, 2012 12:25pm

 
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'Can we talk?' Raunchy Joan Rivers slays them in Union Square

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The biggest cheers of the night came when Rivers answered a question about her opinion of the presidential election. “Both sides are shit, and I think they should take all the money they spend on this campaigning, and put it in the education system,” she said. “And we should have a woman president.” But because she just couldn’t resist, she followed that up with: “Meryl Streep would have made a great president. Wasn’t she great in Precious? She can play any role.” More

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By Lauren Kirchner

on June 6th, 2012 9:57am

 
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Andrew Blum on what the Web really looks like, and how far that email you just sent really travels

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Blum said that a Google image search for “The Internet” will tend to call up blobby illustrations that resemble the Milky Way or the blue-marble image of the Earth from space. “It’s meant to mean that it’s something that we can’t fully understand, and we’re meant to be in awe of the totality of it,” said Blum of such renderings. He said his goal in writing this book was to break through that sense of awe, and to find the connection points between the intangible and the tangible. More

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By Lauren Kirchner

on May 31st, 2012 1:38pm

 
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Quirky illustrator Christoph Niemann presents his new book and talks about New York's power to inspire

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“That’s still the most fascinating thing for me about being in New York,” Christoph Niemann, whose new book, Abstract City, is out this week, said. “[It’s] that you have this shared life, such a set of shared experiences, that I think it’s a vast kind of treasure of material. So after that, I completely forgot about this idea of trying to do ‘special’ things, and said, ‘I’m just going to do things I’m obsessed with, and the chances are pretty high that other people are obsessed with it, too.’” More

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By Lauren Kirchner

on April 17th, 2012 10:29am

 
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Reuters Institute hosts a debate taking stock of the crisis in British (and U.S.) journalism

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Our version of sensationalized, questionable journalism, Nicholas Lemann noted at the Reuter's hosted debate, is perhaps our cable television. Fox News and MSNBC, both highly polemical, have their own ways of forcing the political conversation towards one issue or another. They don’t do it behind closed doors, through bribery and phone-hacking (that we know of), but they do it through exaggeration and on-air hysterics. Molehills become mountains, and politicians often have no choice but to respond. More

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By Lauren Kirchner

on April 16th, 2012 11:48am

 
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Journalists and photographers discuss the lingering effects of war reporting, and coming home

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This month marks nine years since the American invasion of Baghdad. While the United States military mission in Iraq officially ended in December, the impact of war will continue to reverberate for many years to come, both for those who fought it and with those who witnessed it. The latter group was the focus at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism on Wednesday night, where the Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma hosted a panel of Iraq war journalists—many of whom came of age, both professionally and personally, during their time there. More

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By Lauren Kirchner

on April 5th, 2012 10:59am