Barrett Brown
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I, Barrett Brown, Have Returned
Prison was a formative experience. Thank you, Department of Justice!
Local News
What Do David Foster Wallace and Barrett Brown Have in Common?
Barrett Brown, as you might know, won a National Magazine Award earlier this week for a jailhouse column that began right here on FrontBurner and then migrated to Glenn Greenwald's Intercept. Well, he won for three installments published by The Intercept. We're happy to have been part of the process and aren't looking for any credit (we totally deserve all the credit). And, as you might also know, I won a National Magazine Award for a profile I wrote of Barrett. Which has led me this past week to remark to several people that Barrett must be the only subject of an NMA-winning story to have won an NMA himself. Right? I mean, because how could that have happened twice? So I asked the kind folks at the American Society of Magazine Editors, which bestows the awards, to confirm that it had never happened before. Well, it has.
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Barrett Brown Wins National Magazine Award From Behind Bars
Now read his columns from before it was cool.
Local News
Barrett Brown Named a Finalist for National Magazine Award
This is a little crazy. And delightful. Here's what has happened: in 2011, I wrote a story about Barrett Brown that won a National Magazine Award. (An NMA, for those not in the biz, is like a Pulitzer of magazine journalism. (Even though they recently began awarding Pulitzers for magazines, the NMAs are still the country's highest magazine award.)) Then I spoke at Barrett's sentencing hearing, and he still got sent to prison for 63 months. But prison, in some ways, has been good to Barrett. He started collecting stories and writing about his Kafkaesque life behind bars in a column for D Magazine called "The Barrett Brown Review of Arts and Letters and Jail." It was a pretty dang good column. So good that last summer Glenn Greenwald's Intercept stole it away from us. No hard feelings. We were happy that Barrett's work had found a larger audience. Well, yesterday, Barrett's column was named as a finalist in the NMA's Columns and Commentary category. Some fun trivia about this development:
Local News
Barrett Brown Gets Shipped Off to a Medium Security Prison
Another column by Barrett Brown has just been published by The Intercept. It's a delight to read, as always. But he got busted for snorting morphine and has been transferred to a higher security prison in South Texas. So it's a rather depressing column, too.
10 Most Eligible Men in Dallas
Barrett Brown on Jonathan Franzen’s Purity
The Intercept brings us another dispatch from Barrett Brown, who is still in the hole. This time, he reviews Jonathan Franzen's book Purity. I say this without hyperbole: it is a brilliant piece of writing. It's 2,500 words, so don't click over now unless you've got 15 minutes or so of uninterrupted reading time. It deserves to be read carefully, savored.
Crime
Barrett Brown’s Latest Dispatch From Prison
I know, I know. You are still upset that Barrett Brown is no longer writing his prison diaries for FrontBurner. You consider him a total sellout for leaving to write for Glenn Greenwald's Intercept. Please, I urge you, let the anger go. Be happy for Barrett. Well, except for the fact that he's still in the hole and was recently given another 30 days there, in addition to the 30 he's already done, plus three months of phone, commissary, visiting, and email restriction. You'll learn all that and more if you read his column that just went up on The Intercept. My favorite part, though, was the following description of his new cellmate. I'm sure Greenwald will forgive the length of this excerpt: