On My Radar:

Mag Men: Fifty Years of Making Magazines
by Walter Bernard and Milton Glaser
Columbia University Press
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

For more than fifty years, Walter Bernard and Milton Glaser have revolutionized the look of magazine journalism. In Mag Men, Bernard and Glaser recount their storied careers, offering insiders’ perspective on some of the most iconic design work of the twentieth century. The authors look back on and analyze some of their most important and compelling projects, from the creation of New York magazine to redesigns of such publications as Time, Fortune, Paris Match, and The Nation, explaining how their designs complemented a story and shaped the visual identity of a magazine.

Richly illustrated with the covers and interiors that defined their careers, Mag Men is bursting with vivid examples of Bernard and Glaser’s work, designed to encapsulate their distinctive approach to visual storytelling and capture the major events and trends of the past half century. Highlighting the importance of collaboration in magazine journalism, Bernard and Glaser detail their relationships with a variety of writers, editors, and artists, including Nora Ephron, Tom Wolfe, Gail Sheehy, David Levine, Seymour Chwast, Katherine Graham, Clay Felker, and Katrina vanden Heuvel. The book features a foreword by Gloria Steinem, who reflects on her work in magazines and her collaborations with Bernard and Glaser. At a time when uncertainty continues to cloud the future of print journalism, Mag Men offers not only a personal history from two of its most innovative figures but also a reminder and celebration of the visual impact and sense of style that only magazines can offer.

In My TBR Stack:

Design Thinking for the Greater Good: Innovation in the Social Sector
by Jeanne Liedtka, Randy Salzman & Daisy Azer
Columbia Business School Publishing
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Facing especially wicked problems, social sector organizations are searching for powerful new methods to understand and address them. Design Thinking for the Greater Good goes in depth on both the how of using new tools and the why. As a way to reframe problems, ideate solutions, and iterate toward better answers, design thinking is already well established in the commercial world. Through ten stories of struggles and successes in fields such as health care, education, agriculture, transportation, social services, and security, the authors show how collaborative creativity can shake up even the most entrenched bureaucracies—and provide a practical roadmap for readers to implement these tools.

The design thinkers Jeanne Liedtka, Randy Salzman, and Daisy Azer explore how major agencies like the Department of Health and Human Services and the Transportation and Security Administration in the United States, as well as organizations in Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom, have instituted principles of design thinking. In each case, these groups have used the tools of design thinking to reduce risk, manage change, use resources more effectively, bridge the communication gap between parties, and manage the competing demands of diverse stakeholders. Along the way, they have improved the quality of their products and enhanced the experiences of those they serve. These strategies are accessible to analytical and creative types alike, and their benefits extend throughout an organization. This book will help today's leaders and thinkers implement these practices in their own pursuit of creative solutions that are both innovative and achievable.

On My Radar:

The Reagan Era: A History of the 1980s
by Doug Rossinow
Columbia University Press
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

In this concise yet thorough history of America in the 1980s, Doug Rossinow takes the full measure of Ronald Reagan's presidency and the ideology of Reaganism. Believers in libertarian economics and a muscular foreign policy, Reaganite conservatives in the 1980s achieved impressive success in their efforts to transform American government, politics, and society, ushering in the political and social system Americans inhabit today.

Rossinow links current trends in economic inequality to the policies and social developments of the Reagan era. He reckons with the racial politics of Reaganism and its debt to the backlash generated by the civil rights movement, as well as Reaganism's entanglement with the politics of crime and the rise of mass incarceration. Rossinow narrates the conflicts that rocked U.S. foreign policy toward Central America, and he explains the role of the recession during the early 1980s in the decline of manufacturing and the growth of a service economy.

From the widening gender gap to the triumph of yuppies and rap music, from Reagan's tax cuts and military buildup to the celebrity of Michael Jackson and Madonna, from the era's Wall Street scandals to the successes of Bill Gates and Sam Walton, from the first "war on terror" to the end of the Cold War and the brink of America's first war with Iraq, this history, lively and readable yet sober and unsparing, gives readers vital perspective on a decade that dramatically altered the American landscape.

On My Radar*

The Watchdog That Didn't Bark: The Financial Crisis and the Disappearance of Investigative Journalism
by Dean Starkman
Columbia University Press
Hardcover


From the publisher's website:

In this sweeping, incisive post mortem, Dean Starkman exposes the critical shortcomings that softened coverage in the business press during the mortgage era and the years leading up to the financial collapse of 2008. He locates the roots of the problem in the origin of business news as a market messaging service for investors in the early twentieth century. This access-dependent strain of journalism was soon opposed by the grand, sweeping work of the muckrakers. Propelled by the innovations of Bernard Kilgore, the great postwar editor of the Wall Street Journal, these two genres merged when mainstream American news organizations institutionalized muckraking in the 1960s, creating a powerful guardian of the public interest. Yet as the mortgage era dawned, deep cultural and structural shifts—some unavoidable, some self-inflicted—eroded journalism’s appetite for its role as watchdog. The result was a deafening silence about systemic corruption in the financial industry. Tragically, this silence grew only more profound as the mortgage madness reached its terrible apogee from 2004 through 2006.

Starkman frames his analysis in a broad argument about journalism itself, dividing the profession into two competing approaches—access reporting and accountability reporting—which rely on entirely different sources and produce radically different representations of reality. As Starkman explains, access journalism came to dominate business reporting in the 1990s, a process he calls “CNBCization,” and rather than examining risky, even corrupt, corporate behavior, mainstream reporters focused on profiling executives and informing investors. Starkman concludes with a critique of the digital-news ideology and corporate influence, which threaten to further undermine investigative reporting, and he shows how financial coverage, and journalism as a whole, can reclaim its bite.

*On My Radar signifies a book that is not in my to-be-read stack, but looks very interesting.

On My Radar:

All the Art That's Fit to Print (And Some that wasn't): Inside the New York Times Op-Ed Page
by Jerelle Kraus
Columbia University Press
Trade Paperback

From the publisher website:

All the Art That's Fit to Print reveals the true story of the world's first Op-Ed page, a public platform that—in 1970—prefigured the Internet blogosphere. Not only did the New York Times's nonstaff bylines shatter tradition, but the pictures were revolutionary. Unlike anything ever seen in a newspaper, Op-Ed art became a globally influential idiom that reached beyond narrative for metaphor and changed illustration's very purpose and potential.

Jerelle Kraus, whose thirteen-year tenure as Op-Ed art director far exceeds that of any other art director or editor, unveils a riveting account of working at the Times. Her insider anecdotes include the reasons why artist Saul Steinberg hated the Times, why editor Howell Raines stopped the presses to kill a feature by Doonesbury’s Garry Trudeau, and why reporter Syd Schanburg—whose story was told in the movie The Killing Fields—stated that he would travel anywhere to see Kissinger hanged, as well as Kraus's tale of surviving two and a half hours alone with the dethroned peerless outlaw, Richard Nixon.

All the Art features a satiric portrayal of John McCain, a classic cartoon of Barack Obama by Jules Feiffer, and a drawing of Hillary Clinton and Obama by Barry Blitt. But when Frank Rich wrote a column discussing Hillary Clinton exclusively, the Times refused to allow Blitt to portray her. Nearly any notion is palatable in prose, yet editors perceive pictures as a far greater threat. Confucius underestimated the number of words an image is worth; the thousand-fold power of a picture is also its curse.

Op-Ed's subject is the world, and its illustrations are created by the world's finest graphic artists. The 142 artists whose work appears in this book hail from thirty nations and five continents, and their 324 pictures-gleaned from a total of 30,000-reflect artists' common drive to communicate their creative visions and to stir our vibrant cultural-political pot.

About the Author

Jerelle Kraus is the award-winning art director whose thirty-year tenure at the New York Times includes a record thirteen years at Op-Ed. She also worked as an art director at Time and as the art director of Ramparts magazine and of Francis Ford Coppola's City magazine.

The New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine have published Kraus's writing, including an "On Language" column that subbed for William Safire. Fluent in four languages, she was educated at Swarthmore and Pomona colleges and at l'École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. She received an MA from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Fulbright scholarship to Munich. Her Web site is jerellekraus.com.