“[…] people want their suffering to mean something.”

“There was a time, a little more than a decade ago when I lost a thread that I had been following up until that point, and I was left with nothing. So I sat in a house by the ocean in South Dartmouth, Massachusetts and read all the novels that Robert Stone had then written—Hall of Mirrors, Dog Soldiers, A Flag for Sunrise, Children of Light, and Damascus Gate. They were bedtime stories I could trust—the kind that ended badly. […]

David Samuels:
There’s an encounter that Americans have again and again with other people in other places, where they come in with a burst of belief in some grand project. Meanwhile, the natives are sitting there and looking at them like this and wondering, ‘what kind of con is this? Are these people out of their minds? Or maybe they’re supermen.' And then there’s a moment where the Americans are standing there, in whatever strange place they are planning to make over in their own image, and everything starts to vibrate and then they realize that something in the edifice they’ve built in their mind’s eye isn’t solid, and then you hear the crack. And then something awful happens. Eventually, the people living there have to go and sweep up the mess and get on with their lives, which is just another one of the messes that foreigners have made in their yard.
Robert Stone:
Which is their history.
David Samuels:
Is our history based on some kind of belief or ignorance that condemns us to repeat that cycle again and again, in new places?
Robert Stone: I don’t know. I don’t know the answer to that question. It often seems that way.”
— David Samuels (in conversation with Robert Stone), The Daily Beast
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Buy books by David Samuels and Robert Stone here... 

stop the presses, please...

"The Internet democratized writing. Obviously.
     Nearly anyone can string together a few sentences and try to find an audience. Writing seems like an easy gig, or at least one for which no additional knowledge base is required. There's a reason Will Hunting's intelligence is shown through his math prowess, not his ability to pen a paragraph. The number of 'writers' exploded, even while one estimate for the number of official jobs for full-time journalists decreased from 61,000 in 1997 to 45,500 in 2012.

     But the destruction of the job market hurts not only the quantity, but the quality. For one thing, it reduces the number of mentors. 'There's a whole generation of kids who are really bright and who are interested in this work. None of them have been trained as reporters and it's disastrous,' said David Samuels, who writes frequently for Harper's Magazine, The Atlantic, and the New Yorker. 'Reporting is a craft. Like other crafts, you learn it through apprenticeship and by doing the job. You can't substitute blogging on the Huffington Post for writing long reported pieces for magazines or working your way up from the Quad Cities Times to the Chicago Tribune….
     Alana Newhouse is the editor-in-chief of Tablet and a frequent speaker on panels about the state of the media and longform journalism. She argues that the issue is not the increase in people putting pen to paper or keypad to blog, but the lack of a mechanism for separating those who should remain amateurs from those who should make a living from writing.'"
— Noah Davis, The Awl
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