My writing – Page 19 – Christopher Wink

Recession thick, but some sectors still hiring

People in line for unemployment benefits in Detroit. (Photo by Francis Miller, January 1952)

I now know a handful of bright people – some family, some friends, some young all smart and competent – who are victims of what is becoming a growing economic hysteria, made worse by media… and blogs. This from the Washington Post:

New unemployment figures from the Department of Labor show average new jobless claims for the past four weeks up more than 200,000 from a year ago to their highest level since Dec. 1982.

The latest Washington Post-ABC News poll found job cuts reaching a broad swath of Americans: nearly two in 10 reported they or someone in their household had lost a job in the past few months, and almost three in 10 said their household had been hit with a pay cut or reduced hours at work.” [Source]

That can only affect this freelance journalist, as it does millions of Americans.

Continue reading Recession thick, but some sectors still hiring

Blogging elsewhere in 2008: a highlight reel

I did a lot of blogging here and elsewhere in 2008. Care for a review?

Publications:

Super Tuesday Blog — writing about a younger perspective on the 2008 presidential primaries for WHYY, the Philadelphia NPR affiliate
Broad & Cecil — a news blog I helped launch for The Temple News, my college newspaper
Philadelphia Partisan Politics — a blog I created to chronicle writing my undergraduate honors thesis
Capitol Ideas — adding state government reporting to the Harrisburg blog of the Allentown Morning Call
WDSTL — a travel blog and video podcast I maintained with a friend while backpacking Europe

Below see some specific posts from those publications.

Continue reading Blogging elsewhere in 2008: a highlight reel

Notes on seeing Europe from a train

: On the train destined for Stockholm, Sweden on Nov. 1, 2008.

By Christopher Wink | Oct 23, 2008 | WeDontSpeaktheLanguage.com

You take trains from big cities to other big cities. Lands, untold by tour books and unseen by sloppy tourists like yourself, unfold beneath your high carriage of jet setting: two months, 10 cities 3,000 miles wide and two or three days deep.

You are riding great dividers of place and time, laughing at great empires of history. Slicing corridors of culture. Other trains pass with silent screams at 70 miles per hour. You mull issues of personal importance and navigate narrow bathrooms.

There’s the old story of the boy who took a train and came back a man. No great story of accomplishment or adventure, but stalking late-night cars and toeing empty rail yards. Sleeping with a bag in his lap until he wanted someone to know him again. Until he learned who is chasing whom.

Continue reading Notes on seeing Europe from a train

WDSTL travel essays posted

On the train destined for Stockholm, Sweden on Nov. 1, 2008.

On the Creative page of this site, I have posted a handful of travel essays I wrote for WeDontSpeaktheLanguage.com, while podcasting and blogging in Europe.

They are not professional clips, but if you didn’t get a chance to read them this fall on WDSTL, see them here. Direct links below.

Continue reading WDSTL travel essays posted

Help me understand the credit crisis

With some business reporting background, I really should have a better, more fuller grasp on the complexities of what caused today’s growing financial meltdown. But lots of smart people are having trouble understanding.

For the Philadelphia Business Journal in April, I put together an interesting Q&A on the mortgage crisis with E. Robert Levy, the executive director of the Mortgage Bankers Association of New Jersey.

If only we knew then that that was just the beginning. Now those failing mortgages have collapsed other parts of the global economy, and everywhere – perhaps outside of North Dakota – is feeling the pinch.

A friend forwarded me a good video from American Public Media discussing collaterized debt obligations – the financial products that brought last spring’s mortgage foreclosure surge to the world.

It helps, seriously. See it below.

Continue reading Help me understand the credit crisis

The boy in the train station coffee shop

By Christopher Wink | Oct. 8, 2008 | WeDontSpeaktheLanguage.com

Worlds – yes, disparate worlds – come to some form of a cross-section in red-eyed, late nights in train stations.

Early Tuesday morning, we were doing that, surfing the intersection of the young and the acutely itinerant – being reminded of the sociological difference between situational and generational poverty.

We, three, were in a 24-hour coffee shop just before 1 A.M., waiting on a 6 A.M. train. A security guard recommended the spot, a few modern chairs off to the side where people buy cups of foam and cream. A young man, a year or two my junior, sat beside me, tapping his foot and twitching in his chair, regularly, if subtly. The kind of movements you might expect at 1 A.M. in a late-night train station coffee shop.

Continue reading The boy in the train station coffee shop

Welcomed by the children

By Christopher Wink | Oct 26, 2008 | WeDontSpeaktheLanguage.com

He liked the movement of the mouse cursor on my computer screen. So I pried his hands from the keys and opened up Microsoft Paint. With a few interruptions to change color and tool, a four-year-old who stumbled upon me in a park in Budapest, Hungary drew me a computer-generated painting.

Children don’t likely understand the concept of language. I certainly don’t remember when I learned of the six billion people in the world, most don’t speak like me. The little boy with the dirty sweatsuit, dirt on his brown-olive skin, and sand in his bushy, black hair spoke on to me, in a language I couldn’t understand.

He shrieked, too. First when – hoping to get him to stop smacking my laptop – I took his underarms and lifted him into the hanging leaves of a nearby tree.

He was positively gleeful.

He got on toy horse near the swings and – with a strong-armed point and another high-pitched shout – demanded I get on one nearby. For a few good moments, he and I raced fast and long toward a Soviet-era apartment complex across the street.

Then he got off and wanted to be lifted more. Offering demand I still couldn’t understand, but smiling in a way I could.

I don’t know where he went. Someone called what I thought was a name – a woman in the distance. He asked me to lift him once more – into the branches and leaves. He spoke more to me, grabbed some leaves and tossed them at me – sand included – and was gone.

Running off with a green soccer ball. A young boy I’ll never know. Who shrieked in my ears, threw sand at my face and gave me a pleasant picture to keep.

Originally written for the travel blog WeDontSpeaktheLanguage.com.

Can Philadelphia retain its best college graduates?: media industry looks bleak

During recent weeks backpacking Europe, I have had a great deal of time to think about my future – mostly on long train rides between the great cities of Western history, Vienna and Berlin, Brussels and Prague. I want very badly the opportunity to write, to tell stories in a resurgent metropolis.

Right now, I am trying my very best to make that Philadelphia – the home of my alma mater, Temple University, from which I graduated in May.

Since the world seems to be in financial meltdown, it might seem silly for me to question the sluggish hiring of me and my peers, but I can’t help but wonder if Philadelphia is on the road to better retention of graduates from its many, varied and respected colleges and universities.

Continue reading Can Philadelphia retain its best college graduates?: media industry looks bleak

Freelance: Retired poet-priest in Irish Echo

My story on Philadelphia priest John McNamee in the Irish Echo on Oct. 8, 2008.

This story appeared in the Oct. 8, 2008 edition of the Irish Echo, the country’s oldest Irish American newspaper.

PHILADELPHIA – One of the most celebrated Irish Catholic priests in the country has returned home.

After nearly 30 years serving his native Philadelphia archdiocese, author and poet John McNamee retired in June and retreated for six weeks to a friend’s house in Ireland. He returned home last week [Aug 30] and now is ready to decide what will be the next stage of his storied life. What that will entail even he doesn’t yet know.

“I am not going to put an agenda on myself,” McNamee, 75, said. After a lifetime wearing a priest’s collar, he walks a decidedly more secular path than the religious one he has come to know.

“I am anxious to breach those two worlds as best as I can,” he told the Irish Echo in a phone interview.

If the success of his writing career is any indication, he will.

Read the rest on Page 10 of this Irish Echo digital archive.

You may recognize the cast of characters from an earlier story I did for Philadelphia Weekly, which focused on McNamee’s replacement Kevin Lawrence.

I heart John Baer: Move Pennsylvania Society weekend from NYC to Philly

Ed Rendell and others at 2006 Pennsylvania Society dinner in New York City.

One of the largest and, admittedly, one of the many embarrassments of old Philadelphia is that the annual Pennsylvania Society dinner is held in midtown Manhattan.

It seems like a suggestion that Pennsylvania’s largest city – the city of firsts, the workshop of the world, the first great city of the United States – isn’t good enough. Or as Fred Anton, head of the Pennsylvania Manufacturers Association, told eminent Daily News columnist John Baer, Philly isn’t “exotic” enough. His recent most column lambasted the 109-year-old celebration:

Cancel next month’s Pennsylvania Society weekend in New York City, or curtail it, or work on moving it to its home state.

In the worst economy since the Great Depression, with 1.2 million jobs lost this year, with state unemployment at 5.7 percent, the highest rate since right after Gov. Rendell took office in ’03, with the city facing job cuts and a $1 billion shortfall, it just strikes me as a tad unseemly to, you know, party hearty. [Source]

But, this deal is even more twisted than even Baer acknowledges, though I would like to take this opportunity to point out that I was once in a group photo with him.

Continue reading I heart John Baer: Move Pennsylvania Society weekend from NYC to Philly