‘Endless undulation’
“View Across Frenchman's Bay from Mount Desert Island After a Squall’’ by Thomas Cole (1845)
“There are times when a man wants solitude, and particularly this is so when he is watching the endless undulation of the sea.’’
— Dudley Cammett Lunt (1896-1981) lawyer and writer, in The Woods and the Sea: Wilderness and Seacoast Adventures in the State of Maine. He was born in Portland, Maine, but lived most of his life in Delaware while returning each year for summer vacations in The Pine Tree State.
David Warsh: The exciting lives of former newspapermen
— Photo by Knowtex
SOMERVILLE, Mass.
After the Internet laid waste to old monopolies on printing presses and broadcast towers, new opportunities arose for inhabitants of newsrooms. That much I knew from personal experience. With it in mind, I have been reading Spooked: The Trump Dossier, Black Cube, and the Rise of Private Spies (Harper, 2021), by Barry Meier, a former reporter for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Meier also wrote Pain Killer: A “Wonder” Drug’s Story of Addiction and Death (Rodale, 2003), the first book to dig in to the story of the Sackler family, before Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty (Doubleday, 2021), by New Yorker writer Patrick Radden Keefe, eclipsed it earlier this year. In other words, Meier knows his way around. So does Lincoln Millstein, proprietor of The Quietside Journal, a hyperlocal Web site covering three small towns on the southwest side of Mt. Desert Island, in Downeast Maine.
Meier’s book is essentially a story about Glenn Simpson, a colorful star investigative reporter for the WSJ who quit in 2009 to establish Fusion GPS, a private investigative firm for hire. It was Fusion GPS that, while working first for Republican candidates in early 2016, then for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, hired former MI6 agent Christopher Steele to investigate Donald Trump’s activities in Russia.
Meier, a careful reporter and vivid writer, doesn’t think much of Simpson, still less of Steele, but I found the book frustrating: there were too many stories about bad behavior in the far-flung private intelligence industry, too loosely stitched together, to make possible a satisfying conclusion about the circumstances in which the Steele dossier surfaced, other than information, proven or not, once assembled and packaged, wants to be free. William Cohan’s NYT review of Spooked was helpful: “[W]e are left, in the end, with a gun that doesn’t really go off.”
Meier did include in his book (and repeat in a NYT op-ed) a telling vignette about Fusion GPS co-founder Peter Fritsch, another former WSJ staffer who in his 15-year career at the paper had served as bureau chief in several cities around the world. At one point, Fritsch phones WSJ reporter John Carreyrou, ostensibly seeking guidance on the reputation of a whistleblower at a medical firm – without revealing that Fusion GPS had begun working for Elizabeth Holmes, of whose blood-testing start-up, Theranos, Carreyrou had begun an investigation.
Fritsch’s further efforts to undermine Carreyrou’s investigation failed. Simpson and Fritch tell their story of the Steele dossier in Crime in Progress (2019, Random House.) I’d like to someday read more personal accounts of their experiences in the private spy trade, I thought, as I put Spooked and Crime in Progress back on the shelf Given the authors’ new occupations, it doesn’t seem likely those accounts will be written.
By then, Meier’s story had got me thinking about Carreyrou himself. His brilliant reporting for the WSJ, and his 2018 best-seller, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup (Knopf, 2018, led to Elizabeth Holmes’s trial on criminal charges that began last month in San Jose. Thanks to Twitter, I found, within an hour of its appearance, this interview with Carreyrou, now covering the trial online as an independent journalist.
My head spun at the thought of the leg-push and tradecraft required to practice journalism at these high altitudes. The changes wrought by the advent of the Web and social media have fundamentally expanded the business beyond the days when newspapers and broadcast news were the primary producers of news. In 1972, when I went to work for the WSJ, for example, the entire paper ordinarily contained only four bylines a day.
So I turned with some relief to The Quietside Journal, the Web site where retired Hearst executive Lincoln Millstein covers events in three small towns on Mt. Desert Island, Maine, for some 17,000 weekly readers. In an illuminating story about his enterprise, Millstein told Rick Edmonds, of the Poynter Institute, that he works six days a week, again employing pretty much the same skills he acquired when he covered Middletown, Conn., for The Hartford Courant forty years ago. (Millstein put the Economic Principals column in business in 1984, not long after he arrived as deputy business editor at The Boston Globe).
My case is different. Like many newspaper journalists in the 1980s, I worked four or five days a week at my day job and spent vacations and weekends writing books. I quit the day job in 2002, but kept the column and finished the book. (It was published in 2006 as Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations: A Story of Economic Discovery).
Economic Principals subscribers have kept the office open ever since; I gradually found another book to write; and so it has worked out pretty well. The ratio of time spent is reversed: four days a week for the book, two days for the column, producing, as best I can judge, something worth reading on Sunday morning. Eight paragraphs, sometimes more, occasionally fewer: It’s a living, an opportunity to keep after the story, still, as we used to say, the sport of kings.
David Warsh, a veteran columnist and an economic historian, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this essay first ran.
House walls instead
“The Peaceful Use of Walls” #2 (encaustic on panel), by Willa Vennema. She lives most of the year in Portland but summers with her family on Swan’s Island, south of Mount Desert Island, where most of Acadia National Park is.
She says:
“My most recent series of work is entitled ‘The Peaceful Use of Walls.’ This series was in response to the controversy over President Trump’s desire to build a multibillion-dollar wall on our boarder with Mexico. I do not believe a huge wall is the answer to our immigration problems. This series depicts a hopeful, nurturing and peaceful alternative for the use of walls—houses.’’
She’s a member of New England Wax.
See her video by hitting this link.
Jackson Lab partnering to build employee housing on expensive tourist mecca Mount Desert Island
From The New England Council (newenglandcouncil.com):
“The Jackson Laboratory, the world-famed biomedical research institution, is partnering with Developers Collaborative, based in Portland, Maine, to build employee apartments near the laboratory’s Bar Harbor, Maine, facility, on Mount Desert Island.
“Because of the close proximity to Acadia National Park, tourism in the area has driven real estate prices up, making affordable housing for employees scarce on the island. The first phase of development, called the Schooner Head Housing Project, will consist of five buildings with 44 apartments, and is expected to be complete by the summer of 2021. The finished project will include 100 additional units. Developers Collaborative has overseen other housing projects in the Hancock County area, including a 50-unit complex completed in 2018 and fully occupied by mid-2019.
“I go to every new employee coffee [gathering] in Bar Harbor,” says Catherine Longley, Jackson Lab’s Chief Operation Officer, “And the No. 1 issue the employees say is, ‘I can’t find a place to live.’”
Ledgy fields
The shore of Mount Desert Island, Maine
“She was the one who lived up country
Half in the woods on a rain-washed road
With a well not near and a barn too far
And the fields ledgy and full of stones
That the crows cawed over and liked to walk in…’’
From “After Reading The Country of the Pointed Firs,’’ by Jean Garrigue (1912-1972)
The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) was Sarah Orne Jewett’s (1849-1909) most successful novel. It’s about a woman novelist who travels to Maine to find peace in order to finish a book.’’
Set in the fictional fishing community of Dunnet Landing, based on villages on Mount Desert Island, the novel reads rather like a collection of sketches, Like Jewett, the narrator is a woman, a writer, unattached and genteel. Anxious to protect her writing time, she works in an empty schoolhouse. Still, she also spend a lot of time with her landlady, Mrs. Todd, a herbalist, and the latter’s family and friends.
