Some of you have asked for more of a look into my world. What it’s like when potential stories rain on you, as they are this week. What do you do? Who do you call?
While I love the fact that “corruption” is an extremely broad category, encompassing international politics, finance, the law the culture… it’s tricky when there’s Epstein-related news, Kushner-related news, British royal family news, Hunter Biden-related news, Trump Investigation news, a market meltdown and campus culture war news – and it’s only Wednesday. It can be paralyzing. That’s why it’s so helpful to hear from you what topics you are interested in. I’m going to continue to poll you at the bottom of the page. And we are going to start some Q and A sessions going forward, where I get to hear more from you. And we have a dialogue. Please write in the comments section topics you’d like to address with me through a live chat session.
Today I want to mention the campus culture war news from Stanford Law school. You‘ll recall I did a series of deep dives about an event that got shut down at Yale Law School almost a year ago (here and here), so the fight over free speech at our top law schools is something I’m fascinated by. Why do law students at the top law schools in the country heckle visiting conservative speakers, this time a Trump-appointed Judge, to the point that they get accused of censorship and find themselves, I’d argue, on the wrong side of the mainstream narrative? They run the risk of looking primitive, when they are anything but. They are the brightest and the best in the country.
It’s a subject I’ve been researching for a deep-dive project that I’m not ready or at liberty to disclose yet. But what I can tell you, as I write this on March 16 is that for the second time in my career we are approaching deadline time for an Audible podcast series. I find myself thinking a lot about the spring of 2021 when we approached a deadline for Chasing Ghislaine – my first Audible podcast series. It was a huge learning curve. Not least because when you write for the ear you need to write in themes, as opposed to chronologically, which is what you mostly do for readers.
Perhaps the most surprising discovery of all was that the closer we neared to the end for Chasing Ghislaine, the more my colleagues insisted I rest! How unusually solicitous, you might be thinking! But they were governed by a very practical concern: my voice. It turns out that your voice really suffers if you are tired or de-hydrated. And just as if a movie star is late, ill or has a melt-down (see news reports of the new Jamie Fox/Cameron Diaz movie shoot in London) it halts production, so too, if a podcaster’s voice cracks, it wrecks the studio schedule. It’s a whole costly saga! And my voice did get tired one after during production for Chasing Ghislaine – annoyingly on a day after which I thought I’d got a good night’s sleep.
Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates