Reading is the only way to learn how to write. I kept pushing this point all semester and I certainly assigned a lot of readings. This being college, and these being college students, we operate with this wonderful notion that everyone has the time and desire to read it all.

But anyone who ever went to college knows that’s not true. Although I “loved to read” as a teenager and college student, I didn’t truly get busy reading until after I left college. At about age 22 or 23, I suddenly wanted to read everything, especially longform feature writing, nonfiction books, cultural criticism and serious magazines and newspapers. I started reading not only for content, but to study the craftsmanship.

It’s a habit, like exercise. Wondering why a particular writer seems to have so many ideas and great stories in him is like wondering why someone has six-pack abs. (Sorry for this sorta macho metaphor.) People with beautiful bodies make it look easy, because the rest of us don’t get up every single morning and see them working out for hours and hours. People with beautiful words in them are working out, too, when they read. Last week’s New Yorker is basically 100 stomach crunches or a series of stretches, just a warm-up to our real regimen. Reading is regarded by most as a leisure activity, but it isn’t — or not only. It takes the same sort of discipline as exercise. It requires the same amount of effort.

There are several articles I wanted us to read as a group in the class that we just never got around to. (I always knew we’d never get to all of it.) When I tweaked the final two weeks of class and altered the final story assignment, I abandoned quite a few examples of pop-culture narrative, especially the longer stuff.

So here’s a list. You might not ever get around to it. Many years may go by, and, in a nostalgic twitch, you’ll return here for these links. They’ll be here.

My biggest regret is that we didn’t get to do the fraught genre of Celebrity Profiles. I was going to start with two classics …

• “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” by Gay Talese in the April 1966 issue of Esquire, which has been studied and autopsied time and again.

• Pair this with “Do You Sleep in the Nude?,” a profile of Ava Gardner by Rex Reed, also from Esquire. (Not online, that I can find, but reprinted here in The New Journalism.)

For the sake of discussion, I wanted to contrast that with a couple of celebrity profiles from the current day that provoked a lot of debate about the genre, including self-indulgent writing, breaking conventional formats, crossing ethical boundaries, jealous writers, “girly” journalism and whatnot:

• “American Marvel,” Edith Zimmerman’s profile of actor Chris Evans from GQ in 2011.

• “The Full Tatum,” Jessica Pressler’s profile of Channing Tatum, also from GQ in 2011.

… and I was also going to ask the Jour494 students to fan out into the world and bring back a celebrity profile from the current crop and dissect it, looking for how it was assembled and where (or if) any journalistic compromises seem to have been made.

Some other readings we never got to:

• Maureen Tkacik’s 2011 takedown essay about Steve Jobs. This remarkable, measuredly brutal essay ran during a wave of hagiographic obituaries after Jobs’s death. It also gives us a lot to think about, argue about, and consider –not only about Jobs, but about our tech-consumer culture.

• I wanted us to read Dan Kois’s 2012 New York Times Magazine profile/story about Lynda Barry’s writing workshops, mostly for the pure pleasure of it.

• I wanted us to read a couple of Chris Jones (former Pollner prof, Esquire writer) articles: One, a gorgeous 201o profile of Roger Ebert, and the other, also from 2010, was a mysterious case of a man who won The Price is Right’s Showcase showdown with a correct (to the exact dollar) bid, which had never happened before.

• Another casualty of time and syllabus space: A 2012 story in Rolling Stone by Josh Eells, The Secret Life of Tom Gabel.

• Most college students have read (or were asked to read) journalist Barbara Ehrenreich‘s Nickel and Dimed. (If you haven’t read it, please do. One of our era’s finest works of immersion journalism.) I wanted us to read her essay on the pink-ribbon cancer culture industry, “Smile or Die: The Bright Side of Cancer.” You can read the original Harper’s magazine version of it here. I recommend her book Bright-Sided: How Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. (I would add: “and Journalism,” so we could talk about the uses of skepticism in this relentlessly upbeat, big-hugs, magical-thinking age.)

• Jake Silverstein’s book, Nothing Happened and Then It Did, is something I’d like to give anyone starting out on his or her first journalism job. It’s a strange book, in that it reprints some of Jake’s longform nonfiction for magazines and alternates with fictional chapters about a “Jake Silverstein,” a young journalist in pursuit of big stories in the west Texas wastelands. I would much rather that young journos with wandering hearts and an appetite for adventure read this instead of Hunter S. Thompson.

• We were supposed to read Washington Post music critic Chris Richards’s page 1 tale of the hunt to find the ruins of George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic’s missing “Mothership,” rumored to be buried in the kudzu jungles of suburban Maryland.

• I also wanted us to read Michael Kruse’s piece about a woman who died in her garage and whose body went undiscovered for a long time, even after the house went into foreclosure. The pop-culture angle here is difficult to determine, but I wanted us to examine the power in the details of the things we own and keep in our homes. Once you’ve read it, you really must read this.

• There’s something fun and startling about “Eating Beef Jerky at the Bodies Exhibit,” written in 2010 by Trent Moorman of The Stranger. I wanted to incorporate this piece somewhere between our talks about criticism and scene stories.

• Tony Earley’s 1998 Harper’s essay, “Somehow Form a Family,” about a childhood spent watching television (“The Brady Bunch” especially), almost made our reading assignments during the personal-essay stage. Here’s a link to the book version.

• It probably wouldn’t have been a huge hit in class, but someday check out Rebecca Brown’s “Hawthorne,” an essay about Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, from her book American Romances.

• I had picked out the first chapter of Joshua Gamson’s “The Fabulous Sylvester,” a biography of the late, gender-bending disco singer of the ’70s/’80s. Just read the first 13 pages, “Get Ready for Me” — an amazing act of setting scene and character while describing a whole other world, in this case, that of South Central Los Angeles teenagers of the 1960s.

Also:

• More Susan Orlean — including her profile of schlock painter Thomas Kinkade. Just go ahead and get yourself a copy of The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup.

• A little more Joan Didion — pictured above in her everyday guise, smoking next to her Corvette — including the title essay from The White Album.

• Take a look at David Samuels’s magazine stories in his collection Only Love Can Break Your Heart. Likewise, check out Nathan Rabin’s The Big Rewind: A Memoir Brought to You by Pop Culture.

• I had flagged a couple of chapters to share from Tom Bissell’s Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter.

• Don’t forget Henry Allen: Going Too Far Enough (collected essays from the Washington Post) and What It Felt Like (an epic 10-part essay on the 20th century).

Also don’t forget everything else ever written. Get busy. There will be a quiz, and it will be given by everyone in the writing business who thinks they’re smarter than you.

PS: If you want to share thoughts about books, I’m on Goodreads.

My very good friends Leslie Yazel (deputy editor of the “Personal Journal” features section of the Wall Street Journal) and her husband Jeremy Egner (producer and writer in the arts & leisure department of the New York Times) came to class on Monday to talk about their careers, their work, the state of online and print journalism, editing (being an editor; being edited), how to get story ideas, how to conduct yourself in a big news operation, and how to keep up with popular culture and, most of all, how to stay ahead. That’s a lot to talk about and they were both funny, friendly and, most of all, hopeful.

And Jemma, their 23-month-old daughter, sat on the floor behind them and quietly entertained herself for EIGHTY MINUTES, people — using only a blanket, a sleepy-baby doll, a few stickers and her own stylin’ new pink Montana cowboy boots (made by real Indians — in India). Someone should have made a video of her and posted it to every mommy blog in the land. Mister Hank will buy her a pony* someday in gratitude. (*pony might not be actual.)

Leslie and Jeremy had loads of great advice, not just in class, but later over drinks at The Keep. Listening to them in class, what struck me was how random a career really is over time. Despite Type-A plans and aspirations, you must always be ready to roll with something new.

Jeremy, for example, admits to flaking off in his early 20s before he buckled down and got his degree at the University of Texas. In the late ’90s he parlayed entry-level work at the Austin American-Statesman into a column, which led to taking a job at a broadcast trade journal in Washington, DC — a big leap. While working a full time job, he decided to go for a master’s degree in online journalism at American University. And, rather suddenly, that led to a job offer from the Times as a web producer. So he went to New York — even though it meant Leslie would stay behind in Washington for a year.

Leslie went to the University of Iowa, studied journalism, worked a year for the Des Moines Register and then took a chance and moved to London, where she worked for trade magazines. She came back to the States and moved to San Francisco and freelanced. Then she decided to take a chance on New York, and worked her way into staff jobs at magazines — Maxim and then Glamour. Then she decided to try moving to Austin and freelancing. Then she got a job as a features editor at the Austin American-Statesman (after I worked there), which is where she met Jeremy. And when he got that job offer in DC, off they both went, where she landed a job as an arts editor at the Washington Post. And when he moved to New York, she held down the fort for a year and they had a commuter marriage. The she quit a job she loved and moved to New York herself, and, through connections and determination, found temporary editing jobs at Redbook and Seventeen, before landing something permanent at the Journal.

I don’t mean to turn this into an epic tale of triumph (which it’s not) and I admit it’s got a whole lot of good luck and fortunate timing as a central theme, but I do want you to see what you must do: Jump at opportunities. Network a lot — but not willy-nilly. Keep working, keep working, keep working. Keep pitching. Keep learning. When it happens, go for it, even if comes with sacrifice and hassle. Successful journalists tend to leave every comfort zone they have. The University of Montana’s j-school has a long list of alums who took the plunge and worked their way to the top, closer to home and far away. Find them and ask them how. There are a lot of obstacles in your way in the media business of 2012, but there were always obstacles.

Careers are long; a lot can happen — for good and for bad. The point is you don’t have to be an Ivy League alum or a born New Yorker to get there. (Frankly, I think Montana makes you a little more interesting.) Look back: Jeremy is from Texas. Leslie is from Iowa. I’m from Oklahoma. Nothing so special.

So this is why I’m on your asses to keep up with all forms of culture: You don’t want to get out there and find yourselves steamrolled by the coastal elites.

* * *

I didn’t give reading assignments for Wednesday, Sept. 19, but we’re going to continue with our look at how to write great criticism.

Thanks, everyone, for turning in your reported essays. Collectively, you all filed a little more than 20,000 words — which is about 1/4 of a book. Just look at the subjects you’ve written about. Taken together, it sounds like a book about American mainstream life in 2012, an echo of Henry Allen’s Going Too Far Enough:

Corn dogs, teddy bears, cowboy hats, Chuck Taylors, Chacos, calendars, Instagram, record players, baseball hats, orange earplugs, Eggo waffles, Allen wrenches, Subarus, hair extensions, old guitars, Dale Earnhardt stickers — all of it wrapped up in duct tape.

Nice.

Wednesday in class we talked more about the reported essay, which the students are beginning to work on and will file on Sept. 17.

What the heck is a reported essay? I think the adjective “reported” is there mainly to make those of us with journalism degrees feel a tiny bit better about publishing essays alongside the news. There are a lot of fine lines and danger zones in this form of writing, many of which invite the journalist into a less comfortable but potentially more creative realm. (Important: creative does not equal “made up.”) Should all the reported facts — the things you learn in the course of reporting, talking to experts, talking to anybody — be attributed (he said, he said, he said) in a feature essay or does that somehow bog down the beauty of it? (It depends, he said.) Should the facts speak for themselves and take on such qualities as irony, resonance, symbolism, metaphor? Or should the reporter’s notes instead build toward a kind of authority, which sets a vibe or tone? When does a riff start to read too much like a stoner story? How do we synthesize a lot of information about a thing (or a place, or a person, or a personality type) and turn it into its own piece of art? It usually takes a couple of drafts, that’s for sure. That, and a good and patient editor.

We talked about my piece from way back about plastic patio chairs: how it came to be, how I tried to do it, how I got it right on the second draft (or whatever “right” is — it never, ever feels pristine).

I also read aloud (and handed out copies of) a short reported essay that Ben Montgomery wrote five years ago in the Tampa Bay Times (nee St. Petersburg Times) about the unheralded majesty of the 7-Eleven taquito.

(Class: If you’re not checking into gangrey.com, a blog where Ben and a couple of other fantastic writers post daily links to current examples of daring work appearing in newspapers and magazines, please have a look.)

Henry Allen, self-portrait

I also talked a lot about Henry Allen, who, in my opinion, is pretty much the master of this kind of thing. Henry was my editor for almost a decade. I read the contents page of his 1994 book Going Too Far Enough, a compilation of his best Washington Post essays from the 1980s and early ’90s. The book’s contents page reads almost like an essay in list form, in which each piece is titled as a single subject. It really gets the idea-factory going. Read it and let your mind imagine what these pieces might have been about …

State fair, Summer houses, Casablanca, WASPs, Clouds, Tract mansions, Landscape, New Hampshire, Kennedy, Zsa Zsa, The Wyeths, Batman, Stephen Hawking, Dennis Hopper, Hoover, Guns, Thomas Hart Benton, The ‘80s, The Daily News, Mice, Harvey Pekar, The bus, Young fogies, Vietnam, Cigarettes, Sweat, Folklife, Crayons, Marching, Miss America, Good wars, Bad vacations, Space, Fireworks

I talked about some other reported essays I wrote and filed to Henry over the years — I spared the class the torture of actually having to read them — some of which were okay and some of which were sort of duds: Blue tarps, Above-ground pools, Interstates, Flip-flops, Living alone, “Sheetz vs. Wawa.” I could go on and on. (The students now know this about me.)

SO. Why are we doing this kind of assignment first, instead of last? Isn’t it kind of … daunting to start like this? Yes. I want the students to try something ambitious, perhaps a form they’ve never tried before. It’s a good way to stretch their wings and show me how they write.

More than that, the reported essay assignment is about NOTICING THINGS, which is going to serve them well on later, more traditional assignments. Noticing the popular culture motifs and objects and talismans all around us. Thinking about them. Finding out why they are the way they are. Talking to people — experts, and just plain people — about them. Finding the meaning in them. And then writing the hell out of it.

Already some of the students have pitched me some fantastic ideas for their essays. I’m dying to share them with readers of this blog, but I won’t — not yet.

No class on Labor Day. Our next class is Wednesday, Sept. 5. Here are the reading assignments. More reported essays, none of them very long, by writers with entirely different voices and approaches:

I was struck by this picture I saw on the New Yorker‘s Book Bench blog, which they found on the White House’s Flickr photo account. Those are the president’s hands. That’s his health-care bill signing speech. [UPDATE: A couple of commenters here have said it isn't Tuesday's speech; I was going by some of the content of the speech -- health care -- and the fact that the upload date on the photo is March 22. If anyone wants to analyze or report it out from what we can see, please do.] [UPDATE 2: see comments below.] That’s Jon Favreau, his speechwriter, next to him. Just look at what sort of line-editing you get when you write speeches for Obama. (Click here for a close-up)

A photo like this is thrilling, gratifying and also terribly frightening to anyone who delivers his or her own writing to an editor. (Or a group of editors.) I wonder how this picture makes other people feel. I see it and feel a swelling of pride — not in the president so much as in the hard work that goes into good writing.

But I also get a lurching feeling in my stomach. I have marked up my own drafts like this, and, when invited, I have done the same for other writers. (Though probably not to this extent.) I certainly have received manuscript pages back from George Hodgman that looked like this.

When it comes back to you in this condition, you have to take a deep breath and just deal with each mark, one by one.

At the Washington Post, we don’t edit on paper. The equivalent to this picture would be to come over to your editor’s desk and see your story up on his or her screen, filled with “red notes,” sort of like the edit-track function in Microsoft Word. Questions are in red. Cuts are in red. Suggestions for rewrites are in red. My eye is trained to immediately look for instances of red; only once, on an edit with Henry Allen several years ago, did I open the file and see more red than black. (Which turned out to be false panic — most of the red was actually a long note from Henry after the lead paragraph suggesting that I veered off in the wrong direction.)

I think Joel Garreau might have been the last editor I had who liked to mark up a hard-copy printout of a feature by one of his reporters. (Sometimes he’d disappear to the men’s room with it, which lends a whole new meaning to clean copy.)

I do know a lot of my colleagues still hit ctrl-P so they can edit their own work from a hard copy. Delightfully, we even have an option to print it out as justified columns of type in the Post font. I still love to print out a story and, if there’s time, take it with me to a quiet bar, order a glass of wine, and have at it.

I did a lot of that with Tinsel chapters — mark, mark, scratch, circle, fix, scribble [pause for sip of wine, maybe a Sancerre, maybe a Malbec, sometimes not wine, sometimes a Jack and 7] and then read on, scribble some more, try not to eat too many bowls of snack mix.

The sort of paperwork created by hard-copy editing mostly belongs in the recycling bin, but it is a gold mine for research archives and literary sleuths. It’s too bad future researchers won’t have many of this era’s marked-up drafts to pore over.

This picture also makes me think of how many people would shit their pants if you handed back their writing with this many marks on it.

Starting about a decade ago, there were lots of stories about teachers who switched from red pens to happier colors (purple, green) when marking-up student assignments, so as to soften the blow to kids who grow up in a cocoon of praise and esteem-building feedback.

You can only imagine what sort of parent-teacher conferences would be arranged, or formal complaints immediately filed to the department chair or dean’s office, if teachers and professors started handing back papers that looked like Obama’s edits. I say Jon Favreau is earning his pay. ($172,000.)

To answer the question all my journo friends have been asking me for the last three days: Yes, I saw the whole thing (the verbal and then physical fray Friday night, right on deadline, between an editor and writer in the Style section) and yes, I have many thoughts about it, and no, I won’t share a whole lot of them. (The story I’ve linked to, the second dispatch from Erik Wemple in as many days, is the most accurate telling of the event.)

The story has circled the globe — NPR, The Guardian UK, blogs galore. But, as I’ve told the media reporters who’ve called me (I have a bit of a reputation as a helpfully on-the-record Post employee to media critics in need of a quote), this is one I’m trying to stay mum on, because it feels like family.

Henry Allen was my editor for nine wonderful years. (I switched editors when I was made the TV critic in August.) There is not a day when he’s in the office that I don’t learn something from him. Henry, who is 68, had already decided to leave The Post. He took the buyout in 2003, and to my great benefit, has worked about eight or so months a year, on contract, ever since. As I’ve said many times, Henry’s already written every story I would want to do, and did it 8,000 times better, and has been a strong, generous editor and champion advocate of my work. Also he’s my friend and inspiration.

People love him; readers love him, still, and rejoice when he files, even though his byline appears a few times a year (since he is principally an editor). By this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a bronze Henry Southworth Allen statue being erected as we speak — maybe in front of the Newseum, except that Henry quite publicly holds the Newseum (the idea of a news-eum, the fakey word news-eum, even) in characteristically low regard.

The fight embroiders his legend, and if that’s the narrative people outside the newsroom desire here (brilliant elder writer and editor fights for the last shred of quality in the middle of the newspaper’s identity crisis), then I can understand that. Henry was angry for one very right reason: It’s about the work.

But everything else was wrong. What happened on Friday night was scary and sad; it was not enthralling and it did not have a Front Page, golden-era quality of glory. To think so is like believing that old cliche that all journos used to have booze in their desk drawers. Please do regard Henry as one of the greatest newspaper feature writers who ever lived and please do think of him as a tough-as-nails, thoroughly passionate editor who does not suffer fools. Please do allow this event to be a fantastic flourish to one of the greatest careers at the Post, as a stand-in for your own despair about the business. But also, dear journos? Get a grip.

My only other angle to the story is this: What made Henry snap was that a writer called him a naughty word, an epithet that rhymes with “coughstucker” and is playfully or spitefully reserved as a way to insult a man, by implying he’s gay.

Being an enthusiastic coughstucker myself, I would someday like to ask Henry if it was the insulting delivery of the word, or the subtext of gayness that the word implies that angered him most? Seeing as how our department is gleefully R-rated in much of its casual discourse, it’s hard to know. (The worst thing about all this? The possibility that we could all get hauled into a sensitivity seminar. Not Henry, of course, he’s outta there, but the rest of us. To which I say FUCK THAT, oops, I mean, aw hell, no.)

Back to my question: Was it about the person who said it? The way he said it? Or that it was said at all? If another person in Style called me a coughstucker, I’d just have to shrug and use the Popeye retort: I am what I am.