Linked List: July 2, 2016

Saturday, 2 July 2016

Field Notes Reporter’s Notebook 

My thanks to Field Notes for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed to promote their brand new Reporter’s Notebooks. Regular readers know that I’m a huge fan of Field Notes — I carry one with me just about everywhere I go — but these Reporter’s Notebooks are really something special. It’s a reinvention of a classic style, designed with the help of John Dickerson, host of CBS’s Face the Nation. Seriously, the host of Face the Nation helped design these notebooks — how cool is that?

The main thing about Field Notes is that they’re just great notebooks, period. But what makes me adore them is the attention to detail. Everything from the paper stock to the ink to the typography (all Futura, all the time) to the utterly amusing small print inside the covers is considered with loving care.

Also, they are fundamentally damned practical. That’s true in spades with these Reporter’s Notebooks. They fold over when held in hand and lay flat on your desk. The inside cover is full of useful information, including a glossary of journalistic lingo and standard proofreading marks. Tucked into the back cover’s receipt pocket is a doozy of a story from Dickerson’s upcoming book Whistlestop: My Favorite Stories from Presidential Campaign History, adapted by Dickerson himself into the writing style of early 19th century newspapers. What more could you want?

At the very least, you should get yourself a two-pack of these notebooks. But what you really ought to do, if you love good notebooks, is buy yourself a Field Notes annual subscription. You’ll get these Reporter’s Notebooks to start, and after that, every three months you get something new, automatically. It’s like a little surprise present to yourself every three months.

Barack Obama, Night Owl 

Fascinating behind-the-scenes look inside the White House, by Michael D. Shear for the NYT:

Mr. Obama calls himself a “night guy,” and as president, he has come to consider the long, solitary hours after dark as essential as his time in the Oval Office. Almost every night that he is in the White House, Mr. Obama has dinner at 6:30 with his wife and daughters and then withdraws to the Treaty Room, his private office down the hall from his bedroom on the second floor of the White House residence.

There, his closest aides say, he spends four or five hours largely by himself.