In the Platonic dialogue Phaedrus, Socrates worried about writing’s impact on the art of memorisation and the bardic recitation of poetry. Similar alarms have been raised about the printing press, cinema, radio, television and the internet. The new method of communication would kill the old one, and the old one, of course, was better.
I used to think these arguments were reactionary and easily disproved by, for example, turning on a radio 50 years after they said TV would kill it. But the internet, of course, is a killer on a whole other order of magnitude – thousands of newspapers, periodicals and magazines have disappeared in the past two decades as readers have shifted online to get their news in bite-sized portions.
Rogues author Patrick Radden Keefe has investigative skills and a prose style that highlights economy and elegance.Credit:Getty Images
The 10,000-word article exploring a particular topic or individual was supposed not to work any more in the age of YouTube and TikTok, but as Patrick Radden Keefe demonstrates in his superb collection of New Yorker pieces, Rogues, the form actually lives and thrives as long as it is in the hands of a skilled practitioner.
The subtitle of Rogues is “true stories of grifters, killers, rebels and crooks” and indeed in these pages we run the gamut of many kinds of villainy, from stone-cold killers to rascally forgers of vintage wine. How do you forge a bottle of vintage wine? Well, it turns out to be a lot easier than you’d think, thanks to the greed and gullibility of the plutocrats who bid on these things at auction.
Rogues contains 12 essays featuring a broad cast of characters, some of whom Radden Keefe interviewed and others whom he had to hunt down through sources. Two of the darker pieces, the hunt for El Chapo, the leader of Mexico’s most ruthless drug cartel, and Ken Dornstein’s quest to find his brother’s killer in the Pan Am bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, are among the best in the book.
Radden Keefe went to Yale Law School and has clearly retained his ability to do forensic analyses of documents and witnesses. His Lockerbie article, The Avenger, not only thoroughly unpacks the case but also has time to reflect on the very nature of revenge itself, examining the ethical works of Robert Nozick and Elie Wiesel. The Avenger is also an example of why this kind of in-depth reportage still matters.
Radden Keefe’s darker pieces include one about Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, seen here following his capture in 2014.Credit:AP
The last thing I’d seen on Lockerbie was an Adam Curtis documentary on YouTube suggesting that Colonel Muammar Gaddafi and the Libyans were completely innocent of all involvement in the Pan Am bombing. Curtis used music, video and collage to make his case. Radden Keefe’s technique relies only on facts, inference and logic. The latter is more convincing, at least to me.
As Akira Kurosawa showed us in Hidden Fortress, sometimes following a minor character is the best way of illuminating a bigger event or theme. Radden Keefe treads this path in his essay Winning, which has the subtitle How Mark Burnett Resurrected Donald Trump As An Icon of American Success. Radden Keefe makes a fairly convincing argument that but for British ex-para Mark Burnett and his tawdry TV show The Apprentice, Donald Trump’s political ambitions would have gone exactly nowhere.