📚 Roger's Highlights

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A batch of the best highlights from what roger's read, .

After flirting with the idea for decades, Trump was ready to take the plunge on June 16, 2015. Unlike most of my colleagues in the media, I knew instinctively when Trump came down that golden escalator to declare his candidacy that he would be a formidable candidate. Every time Trump said or did something stupid, they would declare him to be toast, only to find him climbing higher. And the same cycle repeated itself during the general election. They were misreading both the man and the mood of the country. There was no middle ground. I was called a Trump sycophant when I argued that the billionaire shouldn’t be counted out, and when I criticized him on some issue, his loyalists would savage me as a Trump hater. Both were way off the mark. I don’t like either party. I believe even the best politicians can be self-serving hypocrites. My brand has always been fairness. I’ve been a reporter and columnist for the Washington Post and Newsweek. I’ve been an anchor at both CNN and Fox. I’ve got plenty of opinions but I don’t take political sides. And I’ve always tried not to be trapped in the airless bubble of establishment media types. My father sold shirts for a living. I grew up in a city-subsidized apartment building next to a sewage treatment plant in the non-trendy part of southern Brooklyn. I went to the state university in Buffalo, which is practically Ohio, though I did get a master’s at Columbia. My first job was working the night shift at a newspaper in Hackensack for $10,000 a year. So I may have been quicker than most of my colleagues to grasp that the country was fed up with the empty promises and utter dysfunction of Washington. I was sensitive to the fact that many Americans we blithely categorize as working class had lousy jobs, were bouncing between jobs, or worried about losing their jobs, and were brimming with resentment. I didn’t dismiss them as racist yahoos. This novice candidate, I thought, is connecting on a visceral level.

Media Madness

Howard Kurtz

Bill raised everybody’s standard, what we defined as acceptable. Perfection was his acceptable norm, and he got us thinking we could achieve it by teaching us what perfection was and how to reach it—not just how to locate a receiver, but every other aspect of doing your job at the top level, whatever that job was in the organization. It was something special, teaching a person, a whole team, an entire organization, to want to be perfect, to want to get to the next level, and the next one. And then do it.

The Score Takes Care of Itself

Bill Walsh, Steve Jamison, Craig Walsh

The Nagasaki bomb contained about 14 pounds of plutonium, but the waste generated fills acres of manicured dirt, the texture of a baseball infield, just downhill from the plant. “The tank farm,” they call it. One hundred and seventy-seven tanks, each roughly the size of a four-story apartment building and capable of holding a million gallons of “high-level waste,” lay buried on Hanford’s tank farms. Fifty-six million gallons in the tanks are classified as “high-level waste.”

The Fifth Risk

Michael Lewis

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