We finished the third and final season of The Split last night, a British series about a family – mother and three daughters – all but one of whom specializes in family law (though not family harmony). It features Nicola Walker, who seems to be in every British series, and Stephen Mangan, who should be.
My post criticizing the new plaza on Las Olas Boulevard appeared yesterday in the Sun-Sentinel as a Letter to the Editor. I heard from two friends and a woman who used to read me in the Travel section.
The Sunday New York Times featured a front-page story on mango season in South Florida. And while it captured the joy the fruit brings to many of us, it got a few things wrong about summer. “The tropics,” the reporter wrote, “begin to stir.” Yes, in the tropics, but we’re the subtropics. Also: “The roads get emptier.” “Empty” is not an adjective any South Floridian would ever use to describe our roadways. “Less crowded” would be more accurate.
We live in censorious times. “We used to punish bad actions,” Matthew Parris wrote in The Spectator last week, “not thoughts.” And he had an interesting theory as to why that had changed: an increasing decline in a belief in God.
Parris, a non-believer himself, noted that in former times there was a general belief that God was watching over everyone, and knew what was in everyone’s heart. This was disconcerting, to say the least, but it relieved people of the task of judging others. When people did or said things of which we disapproved, we could let them go, comfortable in the knowledge that, in the end, God would deal with them in His own way. “Not my business,” Parris points out, was a phrase that one used to hear quite often. Not so today. Now, everything is everyone’s business. We have all become God, judging our fellows and, often, bringing punishment down on them.
Yesterday evening, World News Tonight with David Muir devoted more time to Pat Sajak’s announcement of his upcoming retirement than it did to the death of Cormac McCarthy.
About an hour later, also on ABC, Anne Applebaum appeared in a question on Jeopardy!
When Sam Zell purchased the Tribune Company in April of 2007, employees didn’t quite know what to think – at least those of us toiling in the far reaches of the empire. At the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, the day the news broke, we took the elevators downstairs and watched a video relay of the meeting being held in the Tribune Tower in Chicago. A reporter asked President and CEO Dennis FitzSimons what Zell’s vision for the Tribune was. FitzSimons, looking trim and relieved in shirtsleeves and tie, said he didn’t know.
Zell appeared to journalists as a swashbuckling moneybags. Soon we all knew the Horatio Alger story of how, as a boy, he had ripped off classmates by selling them Playboys for more than he had paid for them, and how, later in life, he had gotten a reputation for reviving moribund businesses (the latter action earning him the title “grave dancer”). Much was made of the fact that he never wore a tie.
Zell took over as chairman of the Tribune Company at the start of 2008, and came down to Fort Lauderdale to address the troops. He climbed onto the stage wearing jeans and a tight-fitting sportcoat, his shirt generously open at the neck. He declared, in a voice dripping with self-satisfaction, “I’m filthy rich” – adding that whatever happened to the company (which he had made private) would have little effect on him; we were the ones who stood to gain, or lose. He slouched and cursed and brought down the house.
The stuffed shirts were dead! Long live the enemy of cravates!
Soon, we began receiving emails from “Sam” asking for our suggestions on how to make the Tribune better. This struck us, at the time, as more democratic than desperate. Just as the new employee handbook, glib and cavalier, seemed to be a salvo fired at a bland and overly-cautious company (and product), not a green light for the top brass to behave like adolescents.
Zell’s stated resolve to increase revenues without reducing resources quickly eroded. One afternoon in July our editor gathered everyone in the newsroom and announced the first layoffs in the history of the Sun-Sentinel. Somehow I imagined that I would be a part of them.
A few days later the banner that had hung in the stairwell for months – “You Own This Place Now” – was gone. And Zellmania was officially over. After being thrilled that he didn’t wear a tie, people now realized he didn’t have a clue.