John Dickerson

John Dickerson is co-anchor of "CBS Evening News" and anchor of "CBS Evening News Plus." He is also a Contributing Writer to The Atlantic and is co-host of the Slate Political Gabfest.

  • 12/02/2023: Discovering the photography of Saul Leiter

    Social media is a scourge, obviously. But I have been trying to respond to the negative effects of

    social media (cortisol-driving, attention-shredding, ego poking) with long-looking.

    Long-looking is the practice of spending a lot longer on an idea, piece of art, song, etc. than you normally would so that it give up additional meanings.

    If I am going to go to social media, I promise myself, I am going to sit with what I find with intention and patience.

    Thank goodness, then, for Bill Shapiro who posts regular introductions to great photographers.

    Recently: Saul Leiter. I spent a day with this picture in my head:

    Paris, 1959

    You can find more wonderful, deep images at  https://www.saulleiterfoundation.org/color. (Significantly less important: what is the story behind Do I Want to be a Mom? the book on top of the pile in the studio where Leiter is photographed. It’s the main photo on the Saul Leiter Foundation main page)

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  • 03/14/2023: T.R. Barista

    Another important contribution to history: presidents as wrestlers. Or, in Teddy Roosevelt’s case, a Brooklyn barista.

  • 03/14/2023: Essay for our 3/13/23 Show

    How it started: How it wound up: View this post on Instagram   A post shared by Prime Time with John Dickerson (@dickersonprimetime)

  • 03/14/2023: Tricky balance for presidents in a bank panic

    Usually, I’d just post this to the Twitter thread connecting public events to the book The Hardest Job in the World, but this passage is too big:

  • 03/07/2023: Quiet Hired

    Quiet hired seems like a good new term for an old thing. That’s distinct from fad expressions to name things that don’t exist or that have existed forever but aren’t illuminated by the new phrase. A wave of the Quiet Hired might lead to a Quiet Riot.

  • 03/07/2023: Getting off your Phone is just the first step

    Thank you to The Dispatch for the link to this article by Rhiannon Williams in MIT Review: “The problem isn’t necessarily the amount of time you’re spending scrolling on the phone as much as what you’re looking at.” The piece touches on something I wrote about in this piece for The Atlantic, which is about […]

  • 03/04/2023: Happy Birthday Time Magazine

    Time magazine celebrated its 100th birthday on March 3rd. We’re coming up on the 30th anniversary of my first professional byline on March 22, 1993. Tanks to Joelle Attinger, John Stacks, Sam Gwynne, Jonathan Beaty and Jill Smolowe for that first shot: It was not for a few months that I’d get a top byline […]

  • 03/04/2023: The Calvin Coolidge Colonic

  • 03/03/2023: Runaway Presidency

    When you are president, things can get out of hand: This is from Jimmy Carter’s White House diary. It demonstrates something about Carter but also the benefit of a presidential retreat where a president can have a minor mishap like this and it won’t get blown out of proportion by the press. Think it wouldn’t? […]

  • 03/02/2023: AI Rendering of Presidents with Mullets

    This Twitter thread of presidents with mullets is hit or miss, but reminds that LBJ essentially grew a mullet at the end of his life: It kinda came to that: https://t.co/qoZwjxBF4i pic.twitter.com/vRCsu57Zgz — John Dickerson (@jdickerson) March 2, 2023  

  • 03/02/2023: The Most Rarefied Presidential List

    The ranking of presidents provides hours of enjoyment for professionals and hobbyists alike. This ranking is perhaps the greatest of all: “…soon, remains of George Washington, Ronald Reagan, John F. Kennedy, and Dwight D. Eisenhower will join the DNA and cremated remains of many of the people who worked on Star Trek and be blasted into […]