This is so neat. It’s always difficult to find the balance between the world’s ugliness and its beauty—with this exception (and that of certain cheerful state-run propaganda engines, which can be a delight to read), newspapers often err too far on the side of the former.
Last week, Israel’s oldest newspaper, Haaretz, took a one-off chance, temporarily replacing its workaday reporters with 31 of the country’s leading poets and authors. The writers, as writers do, ran amok. They filed epic front-page news reports on daily life in the first person; ruminated about childhood in an interview with the country’s defense minister; and delivered the weather report as a sonnet. The market report, written by a celebrated children’s book author, read like a fairy tale: “Everything’s okay. Everything’s like usual. Yesterday trading ended. Everything’s okay. The economists went to their homes, the laundry is drying on the lines, dinners are waiting in place … Dow Jones traded steadily and closed with 8,761 points, Nasdaq added 0.9 percent to a level of 1,860 points …”
Wow, worlds collide! Daniel Estrin, the writer of the Forward article that’s linked from Freakonomics, is an old friend. He’s working as a journalist in Jerusalem. Next time you’re there, you should meet up. I told him the same thing about meeting you in New York.
Wow, cool. Good thing I’m in Jerusalem, like, all the time. But I’d love to meet him.