Brooksians In the News

Three Brooks graduates recently penned pieces for major outlets that continue to define their voices as resonant journalists.

The Power Of Keeping Quiet

Dan Lyons ’78 excerpted a section from his recently published book titled “STFU: The Power of Keeping Your Mouth Shut in an Endlessly Noisy World” in Time magazine in January 2023. The magazine piece, titled “Talking Less Will Get You More,” describes Lyons’s realization of his “talkaholism,” a term coined by communications scholars to describe a form of extreme overtalking.

“It’s not entirely our fault,” Lyons writes. “We live in a world that doesn’t just encourage overtalking but practically demands it, where success is measured by how much attention we can attract … We’re tweeting for the sake of tweeting, talking for the sake of talking.” Lyons points out that, in fact, many powerful and successful people do the exact opposite. He points to Apple CEO Tim Cook, President of the United States Joe Biden, Albert Einstein and former United States Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg as examples. “Instead of seeking attention, they hold back,” he writes. “When they do speak, they’re careful about what they say.”

“Most of us will not get appointed to the Supreme Court or become tech billionaires, but we can prevail in our own day-to-day battles,” Lyons writes.

Experiencing Nature From Prison

Documentary filmmaker Merete Mueller ’02 published a short film for the New York Times in December 2022 that documented the experiences of people in prison who viewed nature imagery as part of an exploratory program. During scheduled downtime and while in high-stress situations, imprisoned people who were struggling emotionally could request to visit the “blue room” to watch nature videos.

“It was a privilege to be present with each person I filmed,” Mueller wrote for the Times. “I hoped their perspectives might shed light on our relationship to nature and the effects of being held in an environment that is, by design, largely cut off from it.”

UNCOVERING A MULTIMILLION-DOLLAR FRAUD

Alexander Clapp ’09 published a longform piece in The Guardian in December 2022 titled “The sludge king: how one man turned an industrial wasteland into his own El Dorado.” Clapp follows the story of Daniel Boldor, a Romanian businessman who hatched a plan to return his hometown to glory following decades of blight brought on by the mining industry, who was then accused of running a multimillion-dollar fraud. Clapp is an Athens-based journalist and fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford University, who has written extensively on Europe, the Balkans and the Middle East.