Eric Schlosser

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Eric Schlosser
SCHLOSSER - current headshot.jpg
BornEric Matthew Schlosser [1]
(1959-08-17) August 17, 1959 (age 64)
New York City, U.S.
OccupationInvestigative writer
NationalityAmerican
Education Princeton University (BA)
Oriel College, Oxford (MLitt)
Period1995—present
GenreNon-fiction
Notable works Fast Food Nation (2001)
Reefer Madness (2003)
Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety (2013)
Spouse
Shauna Jean Redford
(m. 1985)
[1] [2]
Children2
Parent Herbert Schlosser (father)
Relatives Robert Redford (father-in-law)

Eric Matthew Schlosser (born August 17, 1959) is an American journalist and author known for his investigative journalism, such as in his books Fast Food Nation (2001), Reefer Madness (2003), and Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety (2013).

Contents

Biography

Schlosser was born in New York City, New York; he spent his childhood there and in Los Angeles, California. His parents are Judith (née Gassner) and Herbert Schlosser, a former Wall Street lawyer who turned to broadcasting later in his career, eventually becoming president of NBC in 1974 and later becoming a vice president of RCA. [1] [3] [4]

Schlosser graduated with an A.B. in history from Princeton University in 1982 after completing a 148-page-long senior thesis titled "Academic Freedom during the McCarthy Era: Anti-Communism, Conformity and Princeton." [5] He then earned a Master of Letters in British Imperial History from Oriel College, Oxford. He tried playwriting, writing two plays, Americans (1985) and We the People (2007). He is married to Shauna Redford, daughter of actor Robert Redford. [1]

Journalism and books

Schlosser started his career as a journalist with The Atlantic Monthly in Boston, Massachusetts. He quickly gained recognition for his investigative pieces, earning two awards within two years of joining the staff: he won the National Magazine Award for his reporting in his two-part series "Reefer Madness" and "Marijuana and the Law" (The Atlantic Monthly, August and September 1994), and he won the Sidney Hillman Foundation award for his article "In the Strawberry Fields" (The Atlantic Monthly, November 19, 1995).[ citation needed ]

External videos
Nuvola apps kaboodle.svg Presentation by Schlosser on Fast Food Nation at the 92nd Street Y, May 31, 2001, C-SPAN
Nuvola apps kaboodle.svg Booknotes interview with Schlosser on Reefer Madness, June 15, 2003, C-SPAN
Nuvola apps kaboodle.svg Presentation by Schlosser on Reefer Madness at the Miami Book Fair, November 9, 2003, C-SPAN
Nuvola apps kaboodle.svg After Words interview with Schlosser on Command and Control, September 27, 2013, C-SPAN

Schlosser wrote Fast Food Nation (2001), an exposé on the unsanitary and discriminatory practices of the fast food industry. Fast Food Nation evolved from a two-part article in Rolling Stone. The book won the 2002 Firecracker Alternative Book Award for Nonfiction. [6] Schlosser helped adapt his book into a 2006 film directed by Richard Linklater. The film opened November 19, 2006. Chew On This (2006), co-written with Charles Wilson, is an adaptation of the book for younger readers. Fortune called Fast Food Nation the "Best Business Book of the Year" in 2001. [7]

His 2003 book Reefer Madness discusses the history and current trade of marijuana, the use of migrant workers in California strawberry fields, and the American pornography industry and its history. William F. Buckley gave Reefer Madness a favorable review, [8] as did BusinessWeek . [9]

Schlosser's book Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety was published in September 2013. [10] It focuses on the 1980 Damascus Titan missile explosion, a non-nuclear explosion of a Titan II missile near Damascus, AR. [11] [12] The New Yorker's Louis Menand called it "excellent" and "hair-raising" and said that "Command and Control is how nonfiction should be written." [13] It was a finalist for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for History. [14]

He has been working on a book on the American prison system, which has been over 10 years in the making. [15]

Works

Films

Schlosser appeared in an interview for the DVD of Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me , having a one-on-one discussion with the filmmaker about the fast-food industry. He did not appear in the film itself. He was interviewed by Franny Armstrong in 2005 and is a feature interviewee in her film McLibel . He co-produced Food, Inc. (2008), with Robert Kenner.

Schlosser also served as co-executive producer on the 2007 film There Will Be Blood . In 2014, he was an executive producer of the farmworker documentary Food Chains, [16] a credit he shared with Eva Longoria. They both won a James Beard Foundation Award for their roles. [17] Schlosser also shared a director credit for the multimedia installation entitled "the bomb", an experimental film about nuclear weaponry coupled with a live score by The Acid. [18]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Damascus, Arkansas</span> Town in Arkansas, United States

Damascus is a town in Faulkner and Van Buren counties of central Arkansas, United States. The population of Damascus was 382 at the 2010 census.

<i>Fast Food Nation</i> 2001 book by Eric Schlosser

Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal is a 2001 book by Eric Schlosser. First serialized by Rolling Stone in 1999, the book has drawn comparisons to Upton Sinclair's 1906 muckraking novel The Jungle. The book was adapted into a 2006 film of the same name, directed by Richard Linklater.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John McPhee</span> American writer

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Louis Menand is an American critic, essayist, and professor who wrote the Pulitzer-winning book The Metaphysical Club (2001), an intellectual and cultural history of late 19th- and early 20th-century America.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jonathan Schell</span> American author and advocate against nuclear weapons (1943–2014)

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Reuben Sturman, sometimes referred as the "Walt Disney of Porn", was an American pornographer and businessman from Ohio, who co-founded sex toys company Doc Johnson. He was featured as a subject in Eric Schlosser's 2003 book on underground economies, Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market.

<i>Reefer Madness</i> (Schlosser book) 2003 book by Eric Schlosser

Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market is a book written by Eric Schlosser and published in 2003. The book is a look at the three pillars of the underground economy of the United States, estimated by Schlosser to be ten percent of U.S. GDP: marijuana, migrant labor, and pornography.

<i>Fast Food Nation</i> (film) 2006 American film

Fast Food Nation is a 2006 mockumentary political satire black comedy film directed by Richard Linklater and written by Linklater and Eric Schlosser. The film, an international co-production of the United States and the United Kingdom, is loosely based on Schlosser's bestselling 2001 non-fiction book Fast Food Nation.

<i>The Hundred Year Lie</i> Book by Randall Fitzgerald

The Hundred Year Lie: How Food And Medicine Are Destroying Your Health (2006) is a book by investigative journalist Randall Fitzgerald that examines the rise of the local and global influence of the United States food and chemical industries, and argues that they have, over the last century, altered, affected and damaged the lives of millions of people in the United States by introducing synthetic chemicals into the mainstream food chain.

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Isabel Wilkerson is an American journalist and the author of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (2010) and Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020). She is the first woman of African-American heritage to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism.

Hilton Als is an American writer and theater critic. He is a teaching professor at the University of California, Berkeley, an associate professor of writing at Columbia University and a staff writer and theater critic for The New Yorker. He is a former staff writer for The Village Voice and former editor-at-large at Vibe magazine.

<i>9-11</i> (Noam Chomsky) 2001 book by Noam Chomsky

9-11 is a collection of interviews with Noam Chomsky first published in November 2001 in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. The revised edition of 2011, 9-11: Was There an Alternative?, includes the entire text of the original book and a new essay by Chomsky, "Was There an Alternative?".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">1980 Damascus Titan missile explosion</span> Explosion of a US ICBM in Arkansas

The Damascus Titan missile explosion was a 1980 U.S. nuclear weapons incident involving a Titan II Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM). The incident occurred on September 18–19, 1980, at Missile Complex 374-7 in rural Arkansas when a U.S. Air Force LGM-25C Titan II ICBM loaded with a 9-megaton W-53 nuclear warhead experienced a liquid fuel explosion inside its silo.

<i>The Bomb</i> (film) 2015 American documentary film

The Bomb is a 2015 American documentary film about the history of nuclear weapons, from theoretical scientific considerations at the very beginning, to their first use on August 6, 1945, to their global political implications in the present day. The film was written and directed by Rushmore DeNooyer for PBS. The project took a year and a half to complete, since much of the film footage and images were only recently declassified by the United States Department of Defense.

<i>Command and Control</i> (book) 2013 science history book by Eric Schlosser

Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety is a 2013 nonfiction book by Eric Schlosser about the history of nuclear weapons systems and accidents involving nuclear weapons in the United States. Incidents Schlosser discusses in the book include the 1980 Damascus Titan missile explosion, the 1966 Palomares B-52 crash, and the 1961 Goldsboro B-52 crash. It was a finalist for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for History. A documentary film based on the book aired as an episode of American Experience on PBS in early 2017.

<i>Command and Control</i> (film) 2016 American film

Command and Control is a 2016 American documentary film directed by Robert Kenner and based on the 2013 non-fiction book of the same name by Eric Schlosser. It was released initially in the United States at the Tribeca Film Festival and then in the United Kingdom at the Sheffield Doc/Fest on June 11, 2016. It is based on the 1980 Damascus Titan missile explosion in Damascus, Arkansas between September 18–19, 1980. The film aired on the PBS network series American Experience on January 10, 2017.

Ben Taub is an American journalist who is a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. He has written for the magazine about a range of subjects related to jihadism, crime, conflict, and human rights, mostly in Africa, Europe, and the Middle East.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 "Shuana Redford Married In Utah". The New York Times. October 6, 1985. Archived from the original on January 21, 2018.
  2. "Robert Redford is a grandfather". Eugene Register-Guard . Eugene, Oregon. August 3, 1992. p. 2 via Google News Archive.
  3. Seabrook, John (October 22, 2001). "Dept. of Second Chances: A Mothballed Mural". The New Yorker. Retrieved May 12, 2014.
  4. "Felicia Warburg Becomes Fiancee; Bennington Alumna Engaged to Robert William Sarnoff, Son of R.C.A. Head Strauss". The New York Times. April 27, 1950.
  5. Schlosser, Eric Matthew (1981). "Academic Freedom during the McCarthy Era: Anti-Communism, Conformity and Princeton". Princeton University Senior Theses. History Department, Princeton University. Access Restrictions: Walk-in Access. This thesis can only be viewed on computer terminals at the Mudd Manuscript Library...To order a copy complete the Senior Thesis Request Form. For more information contact mudd@princeton.edu.
  6. "Firecracker Alternative Book Awards". ReadersRead.com. Archived from the original on March 4, 2009.
  7. Kahn, Jeremy (December 24, 2001). "Best & Worst 2001 Honest CEOs. Harebrained ad campaigns. Appalling outfits. They've all earned a place on our year-end list". money.cnn.com. Retrieved May 10, 2011.
  8. "Reefer Madness". National Review . Retrieved May 10, 2011.
  9. "What Is America Smoking?". BusinessWeek . May 19, 2003. Archived from the original on September 10, 2011. Retrieved May 10, 2011.
  10. Greta Johnsen. "Five Books To Read This Fall".
  11. Mead, Walter Russell (September 12, 2013). "Atomic Gaffes: Command and Control by Eric Schlosser". The New York Times . Retrieved September 18, 2013.
  12. McKinley, James (October 5, 2012). "Fast Food Nation Author Will Return With Book on Nuclear Weapons". The New York Times . Retrieved October 6, 2012.
  13. Menand, Louis (September 30, 2013). "Nukes of Hazard". The New Yorker.
  14. "The Pulitzer Prizes | Citation". Pulitzer.org. Retrieved May 12, 2014.
  15. Falconer, Morgan, "Eric Schlosser on why he's giving up food", Sunday Times (London), February 5, 2010
  16. Tara Duggan, Documentary shows how those who pick our food get a raw deal, San Francisco Chronicle, November 25, 2014
  17. "The 2015 Book, Broadcast, and Journalism Awards: Complete Winner Recap". www.jamesbeard.org. Retrieved February 5, 2018.
  18. Mintzer, Jordan (February 11, 2017). "'the bomb': Film Review | Berlin 2017". The Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved February 5, 2018.