Tag Archives: Interview

Remaking women’s magazines

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Newspapers and magazines are struggling in the 21st century. Twenty years after the launch of the World Wide Web, many influential publications of the previous century have folded. Readers have many more choices and advertisers have found new channels to reach them. Advertising revenues from traditional print publications have plunged.

For her new book Remake, Remodel: Women’s Magazines in the Digital Age, Brooke Erin Duffy interviewed over thirty industry professionals, engaged in participant observation, and paid close attention to the industry trade literature. She focused her attention on the production side, attempting to understand how the digital environment is influencing professional and organizational identities.

The routines developed around producing a glossy monthly magazine have shifted towards the urgent, ephemeral 24/7 digital cycle. The magazine is no longer an object but a brand. In addition to the traditional print magazine and its online surrogates, some magazines now have YouTube channels, TV shows, and retail products. Journalistic writing is increasingly being sidelined for prose that is more amenable to search engine optimization and advertisers. Whither the magazine from here?

I spoke to Brooke Erin Duffy about her new book Remake, Remodel: Women’s Magazines in the Digital Age on July 9, 2014.

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—Fred Rowland

What is spirituality?

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Do a search for spirituality in Google’s NGRAM Viewer, an online tool that graphs the incidence of words from the Google Book corpus, and you will find that in and around 1980 this word spiked. The rise is more or less consistent with the increasing appearance of the word spirituality in book and journal titles (pre-1980 books / post-1980 books; pre-1980 journals / post-1980 journals) in Temple University’s collection. The pattern appears in both popular and scholarly publications. About this time the category of “spiritual but not religious” became familiar to pollsters of religious attitudes and trends. What explains this sudden emergence of spirituality? Did anything really emerge, or was this just a definitional shift? Was spirituality colonizing new territory? Or is spirituality a “glow” word that makes everyone feel good but signifies, well, very little?

In her new book, The Ecology of Spirituality: Meanings, Virtues, and Practices in a Post-Religious Age, Lucy Bregman investigates this phenomenon. She looks at the broad changes in religion and intellectual culture that preceeded the blossoming (or metastasizing) of spirituality, and then describes spirituality’s career over the past three decades. I interviewed Lucy Bregman on July 3, 2014.

[This is the second interview I have done with Lucy Bregman. Listen to our discussion on her previous book: Preaching Death.]

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—Fred Rowland

Jesus, Jobs, and Justice

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As Bettye Collier-Thomas explains, there were female African American preachers in the nineteenth century who could pack a church or revival meeting with their inspirational Gospel sermons. At the same time, they were excluded from leadership positions. Bishops, pastors, and other leaders of African American churches and denominations recognized that women preachers were good for business. After all, females frequently accounted for a supermajority of church membership and were the most active fund raisers and organizers. The work of these women preachers and church organizers left traces in the historical record, but given the twin barriers of race and gender their contributions often went unrecognized.

In Jesus, Jobs, and Justice: African American Women and Religion, Temple University professor Bettye Collier-Thomas rescues these women – and many of their sisters in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries – from history’s slumber. Working within and outside their churches, cooperating across racial and gender lines, African American Women of faith have worked tirelessly for abolitionism, suffragism, anti-lynching legislation, civil rights, and women’s rights.

Although there are many books about the historic sweep of the Black Church, Jesus, Jobs, and Justice – in the words of reviewer M. Shawn Copeland writing in the Women’s Review of Books – “is the first [book] to comprehensively research and analyze the interplay of gender, race, and religion in the lives of African American women from the period of enslavement to the present…”

I spoke with Bettye Collier-Thomas on March 14, 2014.

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—Fred Rowland

The Digital Rights Movement

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Hector Postigo is the author of The Digital Rights Movement: The Role of Technology in Subverting Digital Copyright, in which he presents three case studies of a broad group of loosely knit organizations and individuals that address issues concerning fair use, free speech, privacy, and innovation in the digital environment. None of these concerns are new but the digital medium has changed the social, legal, and economic configuration in which the stakeholders operate. Users are no longer simply passive receivers of content but producers as well. Anyone with a computer can generate new and original online content, or can reuse and remix content in creative ways. This is a real watershed for creation and innovation and the digital rights movement is motivated by a vision of culture as shared and participatory. Expanded conceptions of fair use and free speech are essential to facilitate this vision. Individuals, organizations, and businesses that “own” content through government-granted copyrights have an interest in maintaining control in their works, for commercial and other reasons. The lines dividing users, creators, and content owners are very fluid, so much of this story is about the evolution of legal rules – government regulation – with regards to copyright and digital technology.

By looking at three different cases in which the nascent digital rights movement struggled with the owners and producers of technology and commercial media over the meaning of fair use, free speech, and cultural production, Hector Postigo provides a unique perspective on the profound changes that digital technology has set in motion for cultures, economies, and polities.

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—Fred Rowland

Box Score: An Autobiography

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Introducin’ Kevine Varrone, baseball bardster over iTunes way   five and a quarter ounces avoirdupois   leaving his ancestral home: Goodin, Strawberry, Casey Stengall       amazing  a walk is as good as a hit    we used to say   that’ll be a rope in the boxscore   Pete Gray Nanticoke brief bloom back to cobblestone streets   city of hills & stars & sky & all of it falling or held in the firmament somewhere beyond the outfield fence  Center City rises up as the light fades waiting, sea gulls, plastic bags   the eephus turns instinct on its ear (1-3) a country life & estate Penn wrote to his wife   Sacrificing, converting, teaching, mixing, blending, bleeding   it seems odd don’t you think that we run the bases clockwise & inconceivable to do so   my sister is a Red Sox fan  a glove should feel like an extension of yr hand   my dad used to say    an experimental poet, everyone reads even the kids   Bill Lee, Mark Fidrych, Harry O’Neill  rewriting history is is pretty much what baseball is all about   in 1964 the mets began playing at shea stadium   walking through the Italian Market Paul stunned it was light   in 1945 a throw by athletics outfielder hal peck hit a pigeon flying over fenway park   does my sister know this, how could she   our world is just a hanging curveball   bill lee sd   the eephus is a quaker pitch   read, listen, extras, subplots edgar alllan poe   in most reckonings the world begins in thinking   & action is a derivative miracle   Kevin Varrone made history when he spoke to Fred Rowland   & then god said when did it become night

[bolded italics by Kevin Varrone, plain print by Fred Rowland]

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—Fred Rowland

 

Marketing Schools, Marketing Cities

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Maia Cucchiara’s new book, Marketing Schools, Marketing Cities: Who Wins and Who Loses When Schools Become Urban Amenities (University of Chicago Press, 2013), is a very timely intervention into the current debate about the troubled Philadelphia public school system. Most of the research for this book took place between 2004 and 2007 as part of her doctoral dissertation during the Philadelphia Center City Schools Initiative (CCSI), which sought to market and promote Center City public schools in an effort to retain middle and upper middle class Center City families from fleeing to the suburbs in search of better schools. She shines a light on this initiative by focusing on one school and one neighborhood, which she pseudonymously names “Grant Elementary School” and “Cobble Square”. In the course of her research, she interviewed parents, administrators, teachers, and local civic and business leaders, as well as participated in many events at Grant Elementary School.

One of the most important and illuminating aspects of Marketing Schools, Marketing Cities is the way it highlights the tensions between an urban area’s economic and civic space as citizens are increasingly seen as customers and consumers. What rights and duties do we have as citizens and how are those rights and duties constrained or enhanced when they are interpreted from a narrow economic perspective? On the one hand, retaining Center City families grows the tax base and potentially benefits all Philadelphia schools, given that schools are financed primarily through real estate taxes. On the other hand, how does one justify directing additional resources to Center City schools at a time when there are so many disadvantaged schools in the outlying neighborhoods? The tensions that Maia Cucchiara investigates in Marketing Schools, Marketing Cities are still very much with us today and make this book a “must read” for anyone interested in Philadelphia public schools and the future of public education.

I spoke with Maia Cucchiara on September 19, 2013.

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—Fred Rowland

 

 

 

Samuel and the Shaping of Tradition

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The deuteronomistic (or deuteronomic) history is a scholarly theory about the way in which Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel (1 and 2), and Kings (1 and 2) were redacted into a narrative describing the rise of Israel from a loose grouping of tribes and cults into a monarchy. The biblical figure Samuel plays a significant role in this story, from his early priestly training in the temple of Shiloh to his later, profound influence on the kingships of Saul and David. Temple University religion professor Mark Leuchter has recently published a work on Samuel entitled Samuel and the Shaping of Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2013), in which he examines Samuel’s “liminality” in his different roles as priest, prophet, and judge. In the course of discussing his own theories and perspectives on Samuel, Professor Leuchter also explains the deuteronomistic history, redaction, liminality, and the chronology of ancient Israel.

I spoke with Mark Leuchter on September 12, 2013.

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—Fred Rowland

 

 

Library Prize Interviews, 2013

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Here are the interviews with this year’s three winners of the Library Prize for Undergraduate Research and their faculty sponsors. Take some time to listen to these three accomplished undergraduate scholars discussing the road to the Library Prize.

Eamonn Connor, “Miasma and the Formation of Greek Cities”
GRC 4182: Independent Study (Fall 2012)
Faculty Sponsor: Sydnor Roy

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Emily Simpson, “”Represion!” Punk Resistance and the Culture of Silence in the Southern Cone, 1978-1990”
History 4997: Honors Thesis Seminar (Spring 2013)
Faculty Sponsor: Beth Bailey

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Nicole Wolverton, “The Murder at Cherry Hill”
English 3020: Detective Novel and the City (Fall 2012)
Faculty Sponsor: Priya Joshi

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—Fred Rowland

The Scientists: A Family Romance

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Book cover depicting a city scene overlaid with multiple chemical formulas

 

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On November 15, 2012, I interviewed Marco Roth about his 2012 memoir The Scientists: A Family Romance, described by Lorin Stein of the Paris Review as

“…the first intellectual autobiography by someone our age in the searching nineteenth-century tradition of Edmund Gosse or Henry Adams: the autobiography equally of a reader and of a son, grappling with an inheritance that is both intellectual and emotional–and education for our times.”

I first met Marco Roth in October 2010 when I interviewed him and Keith Gessen about the founding of their literary magazine n+1, where both of them are currently editors.  Since Marco lives in Philadelphia, I run into him from time to time, and, hearing about his book, I asked him if he would talk to me about it. He kindly agreed. The Scientists: A Family Romance is a beautifully written book that I highly recommend.

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—Fred Rowland

 

Philly’s New Urban Dining Room

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Can restaurants serve as a means of urban economic development? Sure seems like Philadelphia is trying, as restaurants proliferate in Center City and environs.  If you’re interested in studying this question, I recommend you look at Stephen Nepa’s 2012 dissertation, There Used to be Nowhere to Eat in this Town: restaurant-led development in postindustrial Philadelphia, available through the Temple University Libraries’ digital collections.

You can also read Stephen Nepa’s article in Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum (Fall 2011),  “The New Urban Dining Room: Sidewalk Cafes in Postindustrial Philadelphia” (Temple-only).  With over 300 sidewalk cafes opening up since the late 1990s, this is an important urban phenomenon that deserves study.  Why such an explosion?  Why did it take so long?  What does it mean for the future of our city?

I interviewed Stephen Nepa on July 19, 2012 to talk about “The New Urban Dining Room.”

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—Fred Rowland