Image of the profile of Mayor Daley from the New Yorker
The opening spread from Evan Osnos’s profile of Mayor Richard Daley in the March 8th issue of The New Yorker

 

Joravsky to The New Yorker: "I Beg to Differ, Sir!"

MEDIA The longtime political reporter Ben Joravsky didn’t think much of Evan Osnos’s profile of Mayor Richard M. Daley in the March 8th issue of the venerable weekly as evidenced by this reaction piece, which posted yesterday at the Chicago Reader’s website. In a full-body slam—er, critique—titled "Taking the New Yorker for a Ride: The Chicago in Evan Osnos’s story is the Chicago you’d see out the window of the mayor’s limo," Joravsky’s most hilarious and devastating line is: "Who wrote this stuff, Billy Dec?" Ouch. 


GOOD, RELATED LINKS:
  • The story is not available online, except to New Yorker subscribers; here’s a link to the abstract.
  • In his Letter from China blog, the story’s writer—the ex-Chicago Tribune reporter and now the New Yorker’s Beijing correspondent, Evan Osnos—posted a note on 3/1/10 that includes a link to a September 2008 feature profile by Chicago’s David Bernstein, which compares the son to the father.
  • Another blog post, on 3/2/10, by Osnos talks about the fact that in 1982, the Obama-helper David Axelrod wrote a profile of the mayor in The New Yorker titled "The Son Also Rises," the young Daley’s first major story in the national media.
  • Another post at the newyorker.com with a few interesting stories about Chicago politics from the magazine’s archives.