On March 10, AIR MAIL Co-Editor Alessandra Stanley and Deputy Editor Nathan King sat down with Ken Auletta—the New Yorker writer and author of several books including, most recently, Hollywood Ending, on Harvey Weinstein’s rise and fall—and Shawn McCreesh, a writer for New York magazine and former clerk to The New York Times’s Maureen Dowd, to discuss their “Adventures and Misadventures in Journalism.” The conversation ranged from the speakers’ morning news digest to the advantages and disadvantages of big media companies, to where to find New York City’s best chicken parm.
Stanley also spoke with the author and Fresh Prince of Bel-Air creator Andy Borowitz in a conversation ranging from daily news (in which Borowitz referred to MSNBC as “Fox for vegans”) to Youtube makeup tutorials to his new book, Profiles in Ignorance: How America’s Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber.
The panels were part of the second annual New Orleans Book Festival, held on the Tulane campus and co-chaired by Walter Isaacson, a professor of history at the university and the author of biographies on Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, and Henry Kissinger. Isaacson is currently at work on a book about Elon Musk. Our thoughts are with him.
Over three days, the festival, which was free and open to the public, featured readings, panels, and talks with more than 100 speakers, including Carl Bernstein, Bill Gates, Malcolm Gladwell, Maggie Haberman, Michael Lewis, Walter Mosley, Kara Swisher, and Cleo Wade. The star attraction was not a speaker, however, but rather AIR MAIL’s re-purposed horse trailer that dispensed sno-balls—the bright-pink New Orleans treat known elsewhere as a snow cone or shaved ice—to students and festival-goers on the Berger Family Lawn. —Julia Vitale
Alessandra Stanley and Nathan King’s conversation with Ken Auletta and Shawn McCreesh can be viewed here. Stanley’s conversation with Andy Borowitz can be viewed here
Julia Vitale is a Deputy Editor for AIR MAIL