The Slant

When The New York Times contacted Majora Carter, the award-winning eco-strategist from the South Bronx, she was excited. “I thought it was going to be a story about real issues: food access, economic wellbeing and the health of our community,” Carter told The Slant in an exclusive interview last month. Instead, when she read the April 4^th article, she found an imbalanced, gossip-laden piece passing for bona fide news.

The story began with a provocative title: “Hero of the Bronx Is Accused of Betraying It.” As Carter read it, she concluded that The New York Times had done a hatchet job on her controversial decision to endorse FreshDirect, the online grocery delivery service that plans to move its headquarters to the South Bronx in 2015. In the story, Carter’s detractors argue that the traffic and pollution generated from the company’s delivery trucks will harm a community already battling disproportionate levels of asthma and other health struggles like obesity and diabetes. Carter counters that the positives—job opportunities, better food options—trump the negatives. She also says that the company is making the necessary changes to its fleet of trucks to reduce its carbon footprint in the area.

The central premise of the piece hinges on the claims of former allies who argue that Carter betrayed the community by capitalizing “on past good deeds in the way that politicians parlay their contacts into a lobbying career, or government regulators are hired by the companies they once covered,” a point which Carter summarily rejects. In chronicling Carter’s spectacular rise from local, grassroots eco-activist to internationally renowned powerhouse, who garnered prestigious awards (a Peabody and a MacArthur Genius Fellowship, among others), to established for-profit green consultant, the story suggests that the 46 year-old has positioned herself to earn oodles of money from speaking gigs and lucrative business partnerships at the expense of the South Bronx.

But a crucial nuance the article missed was the inner battle Carter had waged to find her voice and use it in the service of the greater good without neglecting herself–not an easy task for most women, especially women of color. Her husband, James Chase, had even come up with a name for the condition she struggled to overcome: “entitlement deficit disorder.”

Before Carter became famous enough to warrant a bristling Times piece, she was, in fact, a self-described introvert, who diligently followed her mentor, the late community advocate, Yolanda Garcia, from one conference to another. In the South Bronx, the memory of Garcia, a diminutive Latina who passed away in 2005, is remembered with the same reverence as another fierce neighborhood defender Fiorello La Guardia, the New York mayor who fought corruption, racism, and modernized infrastructure in the city during the 1930s and 1940s.

For the young Carter, Garcia was a powerful force, raising the hope of urban revitalization for the poor. “I was so taken by her that I would have carried her bathwater,” Carter told us. At a public meeting one day, where Carter’s mentor was advocating for a better solid waste management system for the community, Garcia turned to her protégée and said, “Why don’t you lead the presentation?” Carter panicked, but her teacher insisted. “She said to me, ‘Majora, this is your community. You have every right to speak on its behalf,’” Carter recalls. “I remember being so afraid that I almost peed on myself.”

Not wanting to disappoint, Carter spoke to the group—albeit with shaky, hesitant words —and in doing so found her voice. Today, that voice, resolute and eloquent, is front-and-center in the environmental debate of the 21^st century. But it seems, that as Carter continues to scale the walls of success and amplify her message, old collaborators want to pull her down and silence her—as does the country’s most esteemed publication.

When The Slant reached Carter by phone, she addressed the accusation that she’s taken credit for others’ eco-work, debunked the notion that she’s an uncritical partner of big business, and spoke eloquently about the racist and sexist impulse in our culture to want to dwarf a black woman’s rise to towering heights.

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Imagine writer-director Paul Schrader’s delight when The New York Times Magazine, the bastion of cultural taste and respectability, called to write a piece about his latest directorial effort, The Canyons. Despite having penned cinematic classics like Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and The Last Temptation of Christ, Schrader’s signature flicks–those beautiful meditations on misfits (vigilantes, gigolos, drug dealers, prophets) and life on the social fringe—could not be made today. In fact, most of his body of work—including his masterpiece Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters and American Gigolo—belong to a bygone era.

Back in Schrader’s heyday, the 70s and 80s, the movie theater was the prime venue for showcasing new films and audiences hungered for the originality and grit of character-driven dramas, the kind of pictures that made Schrader famous. But with the advent of cable, Hulu, YouTube, Netflix, iTunes–a plethora of new outlets for making and distributing films–Hollywood studios have grown less inclined toward the riskier fare found in Schrader’s oeuvre. And audiences these days seek their drama-fixes via cable or online. 

None of that, of course, has stopped Schrader from getting his offbeat, nuanced narratives onto celluloid: He’s relied on his own savings account— $350,000 in one instance—and global financing to bring his works to life.  But for The Canyons he sought new school methods–social media and Kickstarter—to materialize his vision.    

So when the Times rang to feature him and the cutting edge ways he’s getting his stories told, he was more than happy to reciprocate their interest.  But the angle changed—and dramatically so—when he cast the infamous Lindsay Lohan in the lead role. The story (Stephen Rodrick’s “Here’s What Happens When You Cast Lindsay Lohan in Your Movie”) devolved into “a celebrity driven beast,” as Schrader put it.  

Rodrick’s delicious page-turner chronicles the highs and (mostly) lows of Schrader’s experience working with the unhinged and unreliable former child star: her inability to be on time, her resistance to fulfilling stated commitments (like a four-way sex scene), her challenges to Schrader’s direction, her emotional outbursts and more.  

When The Slant reached the maverick moviemaker at his home in New York City, he gave us his take on Rodrick’s wild read, and offered refreshing insights on filmmaking today, Lindsay Lohan, TMZ and Taxi Driver.  

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When the economy tanked in 2008, Aaron Gell lost his post as executive editor of Radar, then a print magazine. To soften the blow, he started ASSME (American Society of Shitcanned Media Elites), inviting fellow fireds to meet, drink and discuss the changing (and crumbling) state of their profession.  Amid the sinking economy and mass job casualties, ASSME captured the zeitgeist, attracting a whopping amount of media attention (The New York Times, Advertising Age, New York, Gawker, etc.). But just as the group started gaining serious momentum, its leader landed a job as the new editor-in-chief of Hemispheres, United Airlines’s magazine.

Today, Gell is eons away from those drab days.  While continuing to ratchet up an impressive portfolio of work at premier publications (The New York Times, Vanity Fair, New York, Details, Elle), he’s also published Speak of the Devil, a riveting Kindle Single about his former colleague, Peter Braunstein, who, one eerie Halloween night in 2005, chillingly turned from journalist to sex criminal.

And this summer, he struck journalism gold when Jared Kushner, the owner of The New York Observer, tapped him to become the paper’s new editor-in-chief, a position Gell calls “the best job in media.”

In his first full-length interview since snagging the top spot, Gell points to the salmon paper’s strong Hurricane Sandy coverage to challenge critics who argue that the Observer lost its “inimitable voice” and editorial heft when legendary editor Peter Kaplan decamped for Conde Nast in 2009.  (He also responds to Nathan Heller’s fascinating profile of Kaplan in the September 14 issue of The New Republic.) Herewith, his plans for improving the paper and increasing online traffic–plus, the skinny on what it’s like to work for Kushner.

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Last month, the novelist John Reed hosted “Revise & Recant,” a National Book Critics Circle event, where guilt-laden book reviewers took center stage to retract unfair or unnecessarily harsh critiques they’d written in the past. One by one, the repentant pundits carved out a space for themselves within that quintessentially American tradition of public atonement, ushering in a new  genre of sorts–the literary apology.  (Surprisingly, no major media outlets covered the gathering, except for The Wall Street Journal in an aptly titled story, “Regrets, Even Critics Have a Few.”)

Reed, the 43-year-old son of renowned New York City artists David Reed and Judy Rifka, grew up among tall ceilings and long windows in the spacious lofts of 1970s TriBeCa, then a shabby bohemia burning with creativity.  Those early years informed the liberalism and inventiveness in his four novels (A Still Small Voice, Snowball’s Chance, The Whole, All the World’s A Grave) and short story collection (Tales of Woe)–as well as his expert rabble-rousing.

On September 25th, the provocateur invited The Slant to one of his old haunts in TriBeCa, Nha Trang, a Vietnamese eatery. Over oysters, he hammered home the First Commandment of literary criticism:  Thou shall not review work thou hast not read.  He also shared what inspired “Revise & Recant,” who showed up to confess cruel critiques and how criticism often misses the mark:

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Feminist thinker Naomi Wolf’s latest work, Vagina: A New Biography, which dropped earlier this month, draws on science, philosophy and cultural history to make the case that the vagina is central to women’s brain-power, creativity and psychological well-being. The tract also argues that the lady part needs to be lavished with praise and love, as if a goddess, from its male admirers in order to facilitate domestic bliss and maximize female power.

In 1991, Wolf wrote a searing first book, The Beauty Myth, that reignited feminist consciousness and helped usher in the third wave of feminism. Only 29-years-old at the time, she persuasively argued that the greater political and economic stature women achieve, the more pressure they’re under to meet ever-growing and impossible demands on physical beauty. This thesis, journalist Michelle Goldberg astutely observes in her recent review of Vagina, is even more relevant today given the run-of-the-millness of Brazilian bikini waxes and the freaky upsurge in cosmetic labiaplasty. Since that thunderous beginning, Wolf has written seven more books, including the boldly named Vagina.

While it’s garnered a flurry of reviews from publishing powerhouses—The New York Times Sunday Book Review, The New York Review of Books, The Economist, Slate.com—it’s been brutally and almost universally panned. But Wolf, with tireless fists of might, is not backing down. In an exclusive interview with The Slant, she provocatively challenges Ariel Levy’s biting critique in The New Yorker, Miranda Purves’ critical review in the September issue of Elle and Jemima Lewis’s spin in the U.K.’s Daily Mail:

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