Linda Gordon is a professor of history at New York University.
Q: What’s the first thing you read in the morning?
A: I read The New York Times with my coffee. However, I find its coverage limited and its reporters increasingly passive, not asking hard questions. So:
Q: What newspapers and magazines do you subscribe to or read regularly? What do you read in print vs. online vs. mobile?
A: I try to read The Guardian online and I subscribe to the Guardian Weekly—its international coverage and editorials are far better than those of the Times. I subscribe also to The Nation, Harpers, The New Yorker, and Newsweek. I don’t read much of The Nation except for its two excellent columnists, Katha Pollitt and Gary Younge; I read much of the other three magazines, but not at all promptly—I often save them for airplane trips. I also get newsletters from various organizations, political and scholarly, such as Catholics for Free Choice, LAWCHA [Labor and Working Class History Association], and the American Association of University Professors.
Q: What books have you recently read?
A: Novels I’ve read recently include Abraham Verghese’s Cutting for Stone; Nella Bielski, The Year is ’42; Colm Toibin’s The South; Moses Isegawa’s Abyssinian Chronicles; Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears; Edward P. Jones, The Known World.
Histories I’ve read recently include: Lisa A. Lindsay, Working with Gender: Wage Labor and Social Change in Southwestern Nigeria; Lynn M. Thomas, The Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction and the State in Kenya;
Philip J. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places; Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, A Tale of Two Cities: New York and Santo Domingo after 1950; Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through 20th Century Europe; Josiah Lambert, If the Workers Took a Notion: The Right to Strike and American Political Development; Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America.
Q: Has your reading of professional journals changed in the past 10 years? How so?
A: I continue to read first the book reviews; those regarding books in my field I read closely. As the specialization within history writing has increased, I can only read articles very selectively. I always read with an eye toward articles I think my grad students should know—both students in my classes and students writing dissertations
Q: Do you read blogs? If so, what blogs do you like best?
A: I rarely read blogs. I am probably missing some interesting material but don’t have the time.
Q: Do you use Twitter? If so, who do you follow?
A: I’ve never used Twitter.
Q: What are the guilty pleasures in your media diet?
A: I don’t tend to be guilt-ridden about anything I read and only wish I had more time for novel reading—the problem here is the great expansion in the amount of good history writing to keep up with. I much appreciate the increased publication of novels in translation. The closest I come to feeling guilty is acknowledging that I tend to like only novels with a strong narrative drive and coherence, so I find a lot of “experimental” writing too challenging—although I know that what is “experimental” to me is no doubt standard to more literary readers. —Evan R. Goldstein
Sketch by Ted Benson
