Tag: Legacy

Categories
News Writing

A Tribute to John F. Burns

“The commitment to fairness and balance and to shunning conventional truths when our reporting leads us in unexpected directions has been our gold standard.” — John F. Burns

As I’ve gotten older I pay closer attention to the obituary section of the New York Times. It frequently teaches me and brings back unusual memories that surprise me. Today it was my memory of years of reading the writings of John Burns brought back to life as I read his obituary.

Burns retired over ten years ago. I now remember thinking at the time just what a loss that would be for the paper. Reading Alan Cowell’s obituary of John F. Burns this morning, I felt that absence acutely.

For years, Burns was my first read—a “fireman” of the foreign desk who didn’t just report on the heat; he translated the embers.

Burns belonged to an era of journalism that felt more like a literary calling than a content cycle. He was a man who could find the “sweep of history” in the “telling detail of the present.”

Who else would think to frame the harrowing siege of Sarajevo through the haunting notes of a cellist playing Albinoni’s Adagio amidst the rubble? He understood that to explain a war, you must first explain the soul of the city being broken by it.

His career was a map of the 20th and 21st centuries’ most jagged edges—from the “wasteland of blasted mosques” in Bosnia to the “harrowing regime” of the Taliban in 1990s Afghanistan.

Yet, for all his Pulitzers and his debonair appearances in a Burberry raincoat on Red Square, there was a refreshing, stubborn humility to his craft.

He famously tilted against the “missionary complex” of modern reporting. He didn’t want to save the world; he wanted to see it—clearly, fairly, and without the blinding influence of ideology.

There is something deeply moving about his partnership with his wife, Jane Scott-Long which wasn’t familiar to me. While John was the “full force of talent” at the keyboard, Jane was the architect of safety, turning run-down Baghdad houses into fortified sanctuaries with “military-style blast walls” and, perhaps most essentially, a state-of-the-art coffee machine. They were a team that survived the “chaos of war” by creating a small, civilized center within it.

In his later years after she passed, Burns became more reclusive, a quiet departure for a man once known as a “raconteur with panache.” It’s a transition that mirrors the profession itself. He flourished in a pre-internet era, where time-zone differentials allowed for “considered writing.” Today, the “blue pencil” of the editor has been replaced by the instant, unvetted roar of the social feed.

His final story for the Times was about the reburial of King Richard III. It was a fitting end: a story about the “sweep of the centuries” propelling the news of the day.

As I reflect back on his work and my years of reading it, I realize that what I miss isn’t just the news he delivered. I miss the way he delivered it—with the patience of a historian and the heart of a poet. He kept the paper straight, and in doing so, he helped us keep our bearings in a world that so often feels lost. Especially today.

Categories
Blogs/Weblogs Writing

Notes for a Distant Shore

I spend an embarrassing amount of time trying to control how people hear me. Most of us do. We want to be understood, neatly categorized, and told we make sense. But sitting down to actually write and sharing publicly requires dropping all of that. You just have to surrender.

Richard Rhodes nailed the feeling:

“To write is always to seal notes into bottles and cast them adrift at sea; you never know where your notes will drift and who will read them.”

You’re basically bottling up whatever is rattling around in your head on a Tuesday afternoon, tossing it into the digital ocean, and walking away. It’s vulnerable. Honestly, it’s a little reckless.

Once the bottle leaves your hand, you lose your voice. You can’t tap the reader on the shoulder to explain what a sentence really meant. The person who finds it brings their own weather to the shore. They might read a lifeline into a paragraph you barely thought about, or miss your main point entirely because they were distracted by the tide.

Forget about engagement metrics. The connections that actually matter rarely show up on a dashboard anyway. You write something, and it drifts. Maybe for years. Then someone stumbles over it exactly when they need it. You aren’t writing for a demographic; you’re writing for some random person walking the beach. True serendipity.

In the end, you just have to trust the water. Even if the bottle sinks, the act of throwing it is usually satisfying enough.

“Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?” (Annie Dillard, The Writing Life)

Categories
Authors Books History

The Devil’s Rope

We often mistake simplicity for innocence. When we look at a technological innovation, we tend to judge its weight by its complexity—the microchip, the steam engine, the nuclear reactor. But sometimes, history turns on the axis of something far more rudimentary. Sometimes, the world changes not with a bang, but with a sharp, metallic scratch.

I was recently reading Cattle Kingdom by Christopher Knowlton, and I stopped cold at a passage regarding the invention of barbed wire. It’s an object we pass by on highways or stumble over in overgrown fields without a second thought. Yet, Knowlton writes:

“None was more significant than the creation of barbed wire, which literally reshaped the landscape and set the stage for the era’s eventual destruction—at great personal cost to so many of its key players.”

It is a profound observation. We tend to romanticize the American West as a geography of endless horizons—a place defined by what it didn’t have: fences, borders, limits. It was the Open Range. But that openness was fragile. It existed only as long as the technology to close it was absent.

When Joseph Glidden and others patented their variations of “The Devil’s Rope” in the 1870s, they weren’t just selling steel fencing; they were selling a new concept of ownership. Before wire, a man owned what he could patrol. After wire, a man owned what he could enclose.

The quote strikes a melancholic chord because it highlights a paradox of human progress: the tool created to maximize the land ended up destroying the culture that relied on it. The cowboys, the cattle barons, and the drifters who defined the era were undone by the very efficiency they sought. The wire made the cattle industry profitable on a massive scale, but it also ended the cowboy’s way of life. It stopped the long drives. It turned the cowboy from a navigator of the plains into a gatekeeper.

And, as Knowlton notes, the “personal cost” was staggering. This reshaping of the landscape wasn’t just aesthetic; it was violent. The wire cut off migration routes for bison and the Indigenous tribes who followed them. It sparked the fence-cutting wars, neighbor turning against neighbor in the dark of night, snapping tension wires that represented their livelihood or their imprisonment, depending on which side of the post they stood.

There is a lesson here for us today, far removed from the dusty plains. We are constantly inventing our own versions of barbed wire—digital boundaries, algorithmic silos, tools designed to corral information or efficiency. We build these structures to create order, to claim our stake, and to protect what is ours. But every time we draw a line, we must ask: what era are we destroying? What open range are we closing off forever?

The landscape is always being reshaped. The question is whether we are building fences that protect us, or cages that trap us in.

Categories
Living Music

The Strangest of Places

There is a particular kind of silence that fills the room when you read the obituary of a contemporary. It isn’t just the news of a celebrity passing; it is a check engine light on your own dashboard. Bob Weir is gone. He was 78. I am 78.

I have good memories of seeing him playing with Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh, et al at the Fillmore in San Francisco. Such a different time the 60’s were and the Dead’s music was a big part of that.

When you share a birth year with someone, you share a timeline. You walked through the same decades, witnessed the same wars, the same shifts in culture, albeit from different vantage points. For Weir, it was from the stage of the Fillmore or Winterland Ballrooms and stadiums across the world. For me, it was a different path. But arriving at this specific mile marker—seventy-eight years of age—feels like we both pulled into the same station at the same time, only for him to disembark while I stay on the train a little longer.

I was reminded of a line from “Scarlet Begonias,” quoted recently by Alyssa Mastromonaco:

“Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right.”

In our youth, those “strangest places” were literal—backstage hallways, late-night diners, or the chaotic joy of a festival crowd. We looked for the light in the noise. But at 78, the definition of strange changes. The strangest place to find the light now is often in the mirror, observing a face that has weathered nearly eight decades. Or it is found in the quiet of an early morning, realizing that the absence of pain is its own kind of euphoria.

Weir spent a lifetime improvising, trusting that the music would find its way back to the tonic note. There is a lesson in that for those of us left here. The “light” isn’t always a flash of brilliance or a grand finale. Sometimes, if you look at it right, the light is simply the grace of being here, right now, able to listen to the song one more time.

The music never really stops, does it? It just changes players.