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From his teenage years as a taxi driver in New York, Times reporter Michael Powell has been adept at changing lanes. He joined The Times in 2007 as a reporter and columnist for several newspapers, covering national political campaigns and reporting for the Business desk. He wrote the Gotham column for the Metropolitan section and was the Sports columnist for The Times for six years.
Last year, his stories began a rhythm that didn’t allow for fast-paced but required more nuance and words to reveal: free speech and expression. This post comes at a time of division and grudge in the United States over race, class, and gender issues and how we talk about them.
The following conversation with Mr. Powell about his recent work has been edited and summarized for clarity.
How would you describe your rhythm?
The idea is to report and think about the issues that are currently setting our brains and emotions on fire as clearly and in detail as possible: race, class, privilege, gender.
For all sorts of good reasons, people feel absolutely fervent about these issues. But if you allow yourself to be immersed in a set of strong beliefs, this is problematic in developing a complex worldview, and The New York Times harbors an admirable arrogance that it will encompass the world in all its complexity.
We must tackle the areas I write about as fearlessly as possible and from as many perspectives as possible.
What explains your focus on respectable liberal institutions like yours? Smith College and American Civil Liberties Union?
It is the essence of rhythm. How they turned this cultural moment into politics, discipline; for example, the extent to which colleges find themselves issuing illiberal and conclusive regulations – all of which are features of intellectual life at the moment. This looks very worth exploring.
If there has been any disappointment with this rhythm, it is the determined reluctance of many liberal institutions to engage. Some of it is fear. When I look at elite private school Grace ChurchThere were definitely powerful people I talked to in the community, “Yeah, we have a problem. We use a very candid tool to discuss race and class and persuade children to talk about it without silencing them for fear of saying something untrue.” They would accept this. But no one at Grace speaks on the record.
The ACLU was the exception. Legal director David Cole and executive director Anthony Romero were on the phone for long and interesting conversations. The ACLU marched for an institution committed to freedom of expression.
Some censored political activity pro-Palestinian activism or Discussing critical race theory in schools shows that the most dangerous attacks on freedom of expression come from the right. However, these topics do not appear in your columns. Why not?
I’d like to take a look at the tasks around teaching history. This is something we report quite extensively. If you would go back and have a look what we did in texas and prohibitions against teaching – forget critical race theory, just teach Texas history — we reported very well. There is less urgency for me to do this.
I’m interested in iconoclastic-minded people, both left and right. If I hear anything about a Black Marxist uninvited Talking to the Democratic Socialists of America or feminist lawyers article Allow the Obama administration’s policies on sexual assault and harassment.
What do you like and dislike about this beat?
I’m free to follow my nose. I invite intellectuals like Adolph Reed and have long conversations with them. I order more books from Strand than I could read in three lifetimes.
After an article is published, the first hour or two is some kind of delightful torture. You wait to find out that someone will come back and say, “You misunderstood this” or “You misrepresented my position”. These are the same concerns I had when I started journalism at the age of 23, but now they’re even worse. You realize these are third rail issues. People will read very, very closely.
But if you’re not interested in discussions, if you’re not interested in cutting grain, why become a reporter?
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