Trailside: The New Yorker Gets In on the Act

The New Yorker Gets In on the Act

 

The Aug. 5 cover of The New Yorker on Anthony D. Weiner.

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Business Briefing | Legal News: Glaxo to Pay $45 Million to State Over Drug Marketing

Glaxo to Pay $45 Million to State Over Drug Marketing

GlaxoSmithKline agreed to pay Louisiana $45 million to settle lawsuits accusing it of improperly marketing the diabetes drug Avandia and other drugs. Lawyers for the state and the company told a state district judge that Glaxo would also pay an additional $7 million to the private lawyers who handled the state’s lawsuits against it. Cleo Fields, one of Glaxo’s lawyers, said that it did not admit any wrongdoing and was settling t move past the case.

Rebirth of Book by Aide to Carter

Hamilton Jordan, Jimmy Carter’s young, brash chief of staff, was famous during the administration for negotiating tough deals, carousing at night and shunning the stuffy customs of official Washington.

Fellow Georgians: President Jimmy Carter on the White House grounds with Hamilton Jordan, his chief of staff.

Mr. Jordan at a White House meeting in 1977.

He spent the final years of his life on a quieter pursuit: writing a memoir of nearly 300 pages that was not quite finished at the time of his death in 2008.

Now his daughter, Kathleen, a 24-year-old television producer, is rushing to polish the manuscript in the hope of getting it published and cementing the legacy of one of the most notable members of the Carter administration.

The memoir, Mr. Jordan’s third book, is an account of his life growing up in the South. According to his daughter, it describes how he witnessed the cruelty of segregation and began to feel conflicted about systematic injustices. It also recounts how he later discovered the hidden history of his family.

Raised a Baptist, Mr. Jordan was told when he was in college that his maternal grandmother was Jewish, a closely held family secret up to then. (The book’s proposed title, “Meet the Gottheimers,” came from his startled observation at her funeral that she was buried in a plot between two members of a family with the last name Gottheimer.)

Mr. Jordan, who pronounced his last name JER-dun, in the Southern fashion, began working on the book around 2005, his daughter said, and was nearly completed when he died of cancer at 63.

“He had always been thinking about writing about his past, writing about his childhood,” Ms. Jordan said in an interview. “I’m becoming intimately familiar with big parts of my dad’s life that he never talked about.”

To observers of Washington politics in the late 1970s, Mr. Jordan was a larger-than-life presence: a member of the so-called Georgia Mafia who had worked for Mr. Carter while he was a little-known Southern politician, then designed the strategy for his successful bid for the governor’s office and his campaign for the 1976 presidential election.

When Mr. Carter was elected to the White House, he appointed Mr. Jordan, then 34, his chief of staff.

“He transformed ‘Jimmy Who?’ to the president of the United States,” said Charles S. Bullock, a professor of political science at the University of Georgia. “That was the high point of his career â€" getting his boss elected as president. The reviews that Jordan got as presidential chief of staff were much more critical.”

The stories about Mr. Jordan’s after-hours behavior were legendary. According to one published account, he once spat a mouthful of an amaretto-and-cream cocktail down the cleavage of a woman in a bar. (The White House released a statement denying it.) He was accused of using cocaine at Studio 54 during a jaunt to Manhattan â€" a charge that was investigated by a special counsel and found to be unsubstantiated.

Another story, told by Sally Quinn in a 5,000-word article in 1977 in The Washington Post, went like this: Mr. Jordan, a guest at a dinner party given by Barbara Walters, gazed at the “ample front” of the wife of the Egyptian ambassador and then drunkenly declared, “I’ve always wanted to see the pyramids.” (“Slur to Envoy’s Wife Tied to Carter Aide,” a New York Times headline blared the next day.)

In his book “No Such Thing as a Bad Day,” in which Mr. Jordan chronicled his previous bouts with cancer, he denied unequivocally that any incident had taken place.

His fame was briefly revived last year when his character was featured in the film “Argo,” the Oscar-winning account of the Iran hostage crisis. The role was played by Kyle Chandler, the star of “Friday Night Lights.”

The unfinished memoir reaches back to Mr. Jordan’s childhood in Albany, Ga., in the 1950s, a time when the South was in the middle of tumultuous changes on attitudes about social mores and race.

Jerry Rafshoon, a television and film producer who was Mr. Carter’s communications director and one of Mr. Jordan’s closest friends, has helped Ms. Jordan with the editing of the memoir.

A version of this article appeared in print on July 27, 2013, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Rebirth Of Book By Aide To Carter.

Travel Blogging Today: It’s Complicated

When Keith Jenkins plans a trip, he doesn’t have to cobble together vacation days, or frequent flier miles, or scour the Web for deals on big-ticket items like hotels. Mr. Jenkins, the Amsterdam-based blogger behind Velvet Escape (velvetescape.com), simply finds sponsors.

Last year, he planned a trip to Cape Town with a handful of other bloggers and pitched it to the local tourism agency, which agreed to foot the bill. He estimated that the resulting itinerary â€" including a stay at a villa with ocean views, shark-cage diving, visits to wineries and spa massages â€" was worth about 5,000 euros (about $6,440) but ended up costing him little beyond the nerve it took to board a ferry to Robben Island. The tourism office later told him that he and the fellow bloggers he’d invited had kicked off its most successful social media campaign to that point, featuring a Twitter hashtag â€" #lovecapetown â€" that is still in use.

Initially, Mr. Jenkins said of his blog’s focus, “I didn’t really think of it as luxury travel. I just thought this is the way I like to travel.” Mr. Jenkins, who worked as an investment banker before turning to travel blogging in late 2008, added: “Backpacking is something I did as a student.”

Mr. Jenkins’s approach to blogging â€" and travel â€" speaks volumes about the state of a medium that began as intimate and creative. The paradigm has shifted across the board, in areas like food, parenting and so-called lifestyle blogs. But nowhere has the shift been as jarring as it is for travelers. “I want to travel the world” is no longer an idealistic statement, it is a transactional one.

It’s impossible to estimate the number of independent travel blogs. Thousands of writers and photographers now travel the world registering their thoughts through platforms like WordPress and Blogger. But there is indication that the ranks of the bloggers whose aspirations are not just creative have grown: blogger attendance at the annual conference known as TBEX was about 1,000 this year, more than double that of last year’s event in Keystone, Colo., and the “speed dating” sessions in which bloggers seek sponsors grew to 3,629 from 206 last year.

The proliferation of these blogs, and what is becoming a go-to way of financing them, would seem a boon to the daring people who want to keep logs of life on the road and the readers who want to consume them. But as travel blogging comes of age, the landscape has become vastly more complicated and more fragmented. It can all be daunting â€" and increasingly difficult for both bloggers and readers to navigate.

Travel bloggers tend to be independent-minded and passionate about their areas of interest. The best of them also tend to be on the cutting edge of the travel world, making them a valuable resource for readers frustrated with out-of-date guidebooks and what is often a morass of user reviews on sites like TripAdvisor. But they also face unique challenges; for one, they have to be not just their own editors in chief, but also their own directors of marketing and Web developers. And, ideally, they need to stay objective despite all the sponsorships.

To figure out how to navigate the mountains of online content available from various bloggers, and to answer the question of how they manage to travel amid all these demands, I turned to the bloggers themselves, and found a broad spectrum of approaches and advice.

If there is a single rule of thumb for how to choose which blogs to make time for, it is to measure them on a scale of how driven they are by business concerns. The recent TBEX conference in Toronto, with its rah-rah keynote speeches and panels on “Content Strategy” and “The Intersection of Marketing and Blogging,” made one thing clear: those waters are increasingly murky.

Nowhere was this more evident than the popular speed-dating sessions. Bloggers signed up for eight-minute sessions with 138 sponsors. At the end of each appointment, chimes sounded and a mellifluous female voice echoed across the sprawling convention hall: “It is now time to move to your next appointment.” With that, bloggers said their goodbyes and thank-yous and scrambled to get to their next potential sponsor.

Amid the scrum was Michelle Holmes, a travel blogger (wanderingoff.ca) and writer â€" her day job is as a parks manager in Toronto â€" who went on about 20 speed dates in all, which led to a handful of follow-up conversations with marketers and a couple of probable sponsored trips. It put her one step closer to her goal: “to be able to balance a work-slash-writing career without selling my soul.” The weekend, she said, amounted to a success.