Peter Slevin via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other...
- Steps from Peter Slevin:
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
'mātriks / "source" / from "mater", Latin for "mother". We're real mothers for ya!
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
- Steps forward by: The Matrix
Who I Am & Where I Live
- Name: Peter Slevin
- City: Chicago, Illinois
- Country: United States
My Life & Work
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Bio:
Peter Slevin is a Medill associate professor who spent a decade on The Washington Post’s national staff and is currently a contributing writer for The New Yorker, focusing on national politics. He teaches classes on politics and the media; the U.S. role in world affairs; and reporting strategies on current events, from the 2020 presidential campaign to the intersection of policing and race in Chicago.
Slevin’s career as a reporter has taken him around the country and the globe, where he has covered events and personalities of every description, taking particular interest in telling stories rich with the voices of the people involved. His ambitious biography of Michelle Obama was voted one of the best biographies of the year by PEN America, and was translated into Chinese, Korean and Dutch.
After starting his career at a small afternoon newspaper in Hollywood, Florida, Slevin moved to The Miami Herald, where his stint included seven years as European bureau chief, chronicling the collapse of communism in central Europe and the Soviet Union. Later, he reported from Cuba, Haiti and Mexico, then moved to Washington as chief diplomatic correspondent. He joined The Post in 1998, spending two years covering Washington, D.C., before crossing to the national staff in time for the Bush-Gore recount in Florida and the Clinton presidential pardon scandal. As a diplomatic correspondent after the 9/11 attacks, he wrote extensively about U.S. foreign policy and the Iraq war, concentrating on the Bush administration’s controversial post-war planning and the aftermath of the American-led invasion.
Slevin spent six years as The Post's Chicago bureau chief, delivering deadline work and deeply reported stories, with a special focus on politics and the home front of the Iraq and Afghan wars. He produced long-form pieces about soldiers, their preparations for war and their return home, as well as the impact of war on their families, communities and public opinion. Continuing his work at the intersection of politics, media and the public, he is frequently asked to give lectures on the role of journalism in the age of Donald Trump.
At Medill, Slevin admires creative approaches to storytelling and believes that some of the best journalism flows from research and critical thinking done before the reporter has asked the first question. Urging his students to zig when the press pack zags, he leads an undergraduate seminar titled “Politics, Media and the Republic,” as well as "Dilemmas of American Power," cross-listed with Medill and International Studies, which focuses on the U.S. role in the world, from the Vietnam War to the modern Middle East. Among his courses are graduate and undergraduate versions of “Police, Race and Community.” He has guided student reporting trips to Cuba, France and Jordan, as well as to numerous states in the Midwest.
bio from https://www.medill.northwestern.edu/directory/faculty/peter-slevin.html
My Media & Markets
- ▶ Book Purchases: http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/217206/michelle-obama-by-peter-slevin/
- ▶ Twitter: peterdslevin
- ▶ Website: http://www.medill.northwestern.edu/directory/faculty/peter-slevin.html
- ▶ Article: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/19/books/review/michelle-obama-a-life-by-peter-slevin.html
- ▶ Articles: http://www.newyorker.com/contributors/peter-slevin
- ▶ Articles 2: http://www.washingtonpost.com/people/peter-slevin/
More
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Quotes, Notes & Etc.
About Peter Slevin's MICHELLE OBAMA
This is the inspiring story of a modern American icon, the first comprehensive account of the life and times of Michelle Obama.
With disciplined reporting and a storyteller’s eye for revealing detail, Peter Slevin follows Michelle to the White House from her working-class childhood on Chicago’s largely segregated South Side. He illuminates her tribulations at Princeton University and Harvard Law School during the racially charged 1980s and the dilemmas she faced in Chicago while building a high-powered career, raising a family, and helping a young community organizer named Barack Obama become president of the United States.
From the lessons she learned in Chicago to the messages she shares as one of the most recognizable women in the world, the story of this First Lady is the story of America. Michelle Obama: A Life is a fresh and compelling view of a woman of unique achievement and purpose.
Finalist for the 2015 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography
One of Booklist’s Top Ten Biographies of 2015
“Detailed and absorbing. . . . [B]ring[s] a storied public figure to life.” —The Washington Post
“A deeply informed portrait of the first lady and her native Chicago. . . . Her larger story, told so powerfully in Slevin’s biography, suggests she will forever be a force with which to be reckoned.”
—Chicago Tribune
“A must-read. . . . An important new biography. . . . Slevin treats [the First Lady] and her accomplishments with the detail and nuance they deserve.”
—Elle Magazine
“A standout. . . . Michelle Obama’s story is an American classic. . . . Slevin combines access to her and her family and friends with a keen understanding of American politics and history.”
—USA Today
“Thoughtful. . . . Ripe with revelations about her deeply complicated relationship with her own position as an Ivy League-educated black woman. . . . Richly rendered context for Mr. Obama’s 2008 campaign, when Mrs. Obama suddenly became a litmus test.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“[A] meticulously reported, close-up look. . . . A detailed portrait of an ambitious, civic-minded woman with a track record for getting things done.”
—The Florida Times-Union
“Makes a convincing case that Mrs. Obama’s popularity today has more to do with events that took place on the south side of Chicago decades ago than with the work of an image maker in the East Wing of the White House.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“Impressively reported and researched. . . . fast-paced.”
—Chicago magazine
“Richly detailed prose. . . . tons of little-known nuggets revealed in the book, offering readers a closer look at the Mrs. Obama they never knew.”
—NBC
“[An] intimate view of her life. . . . The most comprehensive portrait to date of the nation’s first African-American first lady.”
—Atlanta BlackStar
“The most ambitious and authoritative book about [First Lady Michelle Obama] yet. Richly reported, beautifully written, thoughtful in its judgments and revelatory in its details . . . a work that does justice to Michelle Obama in a fresh way.”
—John Heilemann, co-author of Game Change and Double Down
“The life of Michelle Obama is a uniquely American story, and Peter Slevin tells it beautifully in this deft, revealing work. . . . Slevin also paints a rich picture of Chicago’s South Side during the past century and the family and forces that helped shape this exceptional woman.”
—David Axelrod, former Senior Advisor to the President, director of the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago
“Slevin is dogged in his reporting, nuanced in his storytelling and thoughtful in his analysis. He not only shows us who this historical first lady is, but how she came to be. In the process, he reveals much about our times and our culture.”
—Robin Givhan, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic for the Washington Post
“Compelling. . . . [An] exhaustive and thoughtful portrait. . . . will delight the most ardent Michelle Watchers.”
—Patrik Henry Bass, NY1
“An amazing, eye-opening biography that begins on Chicago’s South Side and ends in the White House. . . . a rich, powerful portrait at once revealing of Mrs. Obama and of ourselves as Americans.”
—Dexter Filkins, author of The Forever War
The world's artistry via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other ...
... a project conceived and built in the fertile, fecund and atavistic ground zero of Bahia, Brazil initially for the discoverability of this singular region's dispossessed genius.
All explained in the window immediately below. Followed — beneath this window — by scores of magnificent artists, each leading to myriads more artists/categories. Inside this window also may be found our Brazilian record store radio, named by British journal The Guardian as one of 10 of the Best Radio Stations Around the World!
IF YOU CAN'T STAND THE HEAT
Brazil is not a European nation. It's not a North American nation. It's not an East Asian nation. It straddles -- jungle and desert and dense urban centers -- both the equator and the Tropic of Capricorn. It absorbed over ten times the number of African slaves taken to the United States of America, and much of its aboriginal population was absorbed into the general population-at-large. Its people have lived under oligarchy, plutocracy, dictatorships and massive corruption, with elements of these still strongly entrenched today.
But!
Brazil has buzz...not the shallow buzz of a fashionable moment...but the deep buzz of a population which in spite of -- or perhaps because of -- the tough slog through life they've been allotted by humanity's dregs-in-fine-linen, have chosen not to simply pull themselves along but to lift their voices in song and their bodies in dance...to eat well and converse well and much and to wring the joy out of the day-to-day happenings and small pleasures of life which are so often set aside or ignored in the European, North American, and East Asian nations.
For this Brazil has a genius perhaps unparalleled in all other countries and societies, a genius which thrives alongside peeling paint and holes in the streets and roads, under bad organization by the powers-that-be, both civil and governmental, under a constant rain of societal indignities...
Which is all to say that if you don't know Brazil and you're expecting any semblance of order, progress and light, you will certainly find the light! And the buzz of a people who for generations have responded to privation at many different levels by somehow rising above it all.
Raimundo Sodré, in a conversation ranging from New Orleans to Harlem and the South Side of Chicago ... through Appalachia and Irish villages and Russian shtetls and the unofficial symbol of Brazil's Bahian-born national music (the pandeiro) almost certainly having arrived in Brazil in the hands of Sephardic Jews (including conversos) fleeing the Inquisition, once remarked: "Where there's misery, there's music!"
A pandeirista on the roof. And it's not just music. And it's not just Brazil.
