Andrew Holter — Going Around: Selected Journalism - with Dave Zirin

A courtly man of Southern roots, Murray Kempton worked as a labor reporter for the New York Post, won a Pulitzer Prize while at Newsday, and was arrested at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago along the way. He wore three piece suits and polished oxfords and was known for riding his bicycle around New York City while listening to his CD Walkman and smoking a pipe with wild red hair that later turned white. He developed a taste for baroque prose and became, in the words of Robert Silvers, his editor at The New York Review of Books, ''unmatched in his moral insight into the hypocrisies of politics and their consequences for the poor and powerless.''He went to court proceedings and traffic accidents and funerals and to speeches by people who either were or wanted to be rich and famous. He wrote about everything and anybody--Tonya Harding and Warren Harding, Fidel Castro and Mussolini, Harry Truman and Sal Maglie, St. Francis of Assisi and James Joyce and J. Edgar Hoover.From dispatches from a hardscrabble coal town in Western Maryland, a bus carrying Freedom Riders through Mississippi, an Iowa cornfield with Nikita Krushchev, an encampment of guerrillas in El Salvador, and Moscow at the end of the Soviet Union (these last two assignments filed by a reporter in his 70s), Kempton's concerns and interests were extraordinarily broad. He wrote about subjects from H.L. Mencken to Tupac Shakur; organized labor and McCarthyism; the Civil Rights and Black Power movements; presidential hopefuls and Mafiosi; frauds and failures of all stripes; the "splendors and miseries" of life in New York City.PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781644214510?ic_referral=T7OWiKw14FY0qi2SbRyaxUCUMu1vaLjH_aXnVEFSUNIwM4mhKSFzYukvHqsjXQN9_5EycLz1xsRyzd2_EMP231qOtC8oFOPD7qQRfc7MY811dnCzvYYG0ny_ZO8sqjxlle9D980Andrew Holter is a historian and writer based in Chicago, formerly of Frederick, Maryland, and Baltimore. His work has appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, Rolling Stone, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Brooklyn Rail, Lapham's Quarterly, and other publications. As an independent historical researcher, he has contributed to books, radio programs, and museum exhibitions, and served as the primary archival consultant for Theo Anthony's 2016 documentary Rat Film, which the New Yorker called one of "62 Films That Shaped the Art of Documentary Filmmaking."Holter is in conversation with Dave Zirin. Zirin is the sports editor at The Nation Magazine, their first sports editor in over 150 years of existence. He is the author of 11 books on the politics of sport, including most recently The Kaepernick Effect. In addition, he is the co-producer and writer of the new documentary, Behind the Shield: The Power and Politics of the NFL. Named one of UTNE Reader’s “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Our World,” Zirin is a frequent guest on ESPN, MSNBC, and Democracy Now! He also hosts The Nation’s Edge of Sports podcast and Edge of Sports TV on The Real News Network. *recorded 5/8/2025