Chronicler of poverty
What can a writer teach a designer of the built environment? Perhaps a lot, such as a few basic principles of fieldwork: Learn from both the sky view of data and the ground view of reality. Don’t talk just to the powerful. And stay awhile. Katherine Boo came bearing these and other insights for a week as a senior Loeb Fellow at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD). Boo is a long-form journalist who specializes in poverty and what she calls that socio-economic state’s “tropes of hope and innovation.” She also arrived bearing recognition and status, with the chops to offer a lesson or two. Boo, after all, has already hit the trifecta for nonfiction writers: the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and a coveted gig as a staff writer at The New Yorker. She also won a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, often called the “genius” award. To understand Boo’s reporting methods (immersion...