William Finnegan
William Finnegan
William Finneganis a staff writer at The New Yorker and well-known author of works of international journalism. He has specially addressed issues of racism and conflict in Southern Africa and politics in Mexico and South America, as well as poverty among youth in the United States, and is well known for his writing on surfing...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
CountryUnited States of America
best far good happen manhattan north stay surf tends time top true waves window
There are good waves not that far from Manhattan - on Long Island, in north Jersey. It's true that the best surf around here tends to happen in winter, so you need a good wetsuit, and the time window of good waves is often pretty short, so you have to stay on top of the forecasts.
anyway telling work
Writing is pretty flexible work, don't you think? If you want to surf, you just have to get a lot done when the waves are lousy. That's what I'm always telling myself, anyway - write while the surf's down!
bring everybody knowing lots parking poorly strangers travelled
As I travelled around Australia, strangers in pubs, on airplanes, in beach parking lots would bring up Gina Rinehart, not knowing I was writing about her. Everybody had something to say, some of it thoughtful, some of it poorly informed, some of it vividly obscene.
memories past genre
Memoir is a weird genre for a reporter. You end up investigating your own memories, reporting out your past.
blow world looks
It's so much harder than it looks - to conjure a fictional world that some passing wolf of skepticism can't just blow down in one breath.
sports white surfing
Hawaii is the birthplace of surfing, and many Hawaiians or part-Hawaiians surf, but in the rest of the United States it's a pretty white sport.
cities community different
I need to conduct myself differently in different communities. In my experience, the journalistic conventions - you know, I'm the reporter, you're the subject, the interviewee - actually tend to hold steady much more consistently in rural Africa than they do in the American inner city.
taken two perspective
It's completely different, for instance, to report on poor farmers in Africa than it is to report on, say, poor African-Americans. The familiarity of my readers with the terrain, and their preconceptions, are quite different in those two cases, and their perspective, as I imagine it, has to be taken into account at every turn.
past dragons stories
You're after something - not a story, but a certain, exquisitely intense encounter with beauty - and the only way to find it is to tiptoe past the dragon's cave.
country relax never-quit
I've felt afraid as a reporter many times. Sometimes it's sharp, as in a bad moment, or a bad situation; other times it's general, as in a country known for kidnapping, where you can never quite relax.
war news might
Even wars, big conflicts that have drawn a lot of news coverage, sometimes seem to me to have a center that hasn't been described, that might yet be glimpsed if approached from some odd angle.
differences profound may
The differences between the received wisdom, the standard version of events, and the facts on the ground may be subtle or they may be stark, even profound.
country fun kids
Rich white people show up in a poor country to pursue their leisure-time fun, get served by black and brown people, and live in relative - or absolute - comfort. In the water, that situation can get turned on its head, though. Local kids learn to surf, know the breaks, and take most or all of the best waves, fuming turistas be damned.
book trying world
I'm trying to find out what's actually true, which is nearly always something, if not a world of things, that you can't read in books.