Daniel Okrent (born April 2, 1948) is an American writer and editor. He is best known for having served as the first public editor of The New York Times newspaper, inventing Rotisserie League Baseball, [1] and for writing several books (such as Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, which served as a major source for the 2011 Ken Burns/Lynn Novick miniseries Prohibition). In November 2011, Last Call won the Albert J. Beveridge prize, awarded by the American Historical Association to the year's best book of American history. His most recent book, published May 2019, is The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America. [2]
Born to a Jewish family [3] in Detroit, Michigan, Okrent graduated from Cass Technical High School in Detroit [4] in 1965 and from the University of Michigan, where he worked on the university's student newspaper The Michigan Daily .[ citation needed ]
Most of his career has been spent as an editor, at such places as Alfred A. Knopf; Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich; Esquire Magazine ; New England Monthly ; Life Magazine ; and Time, Inc.
His book Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center (Viking, 2003) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for History.
In October 2003, Okrent was named public editor for The New York Times following the Jayson Blair scandal. He held this position until May 2005.
Okrent and Peter Gethers, having acquired the theatrical rights to the site and name of the web series Old Jews Telling Jokes , co-wrote and co-produced a revue of that name. [5] It opened at the Westside Theatre in Manhattan on May 20, 2012.
From 2003-2008, he was chairman of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. He has been awarded honorary degrees by the University of Michigan and the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts.
Since 2017, Okrent has been listed on the Advisory Board of the Secular Coalition for America. [6]
Okrent formulated what has become known as "Okrent's law" in an interview comment he made about his new job. It states: "The pursuit of balance can create imbalance because sometimes something is true", referring to the phenomenon of the press providing legitimacy to unsupported fringe viewpoints in an effort to appear even-handed. [7] [8] [9] [10]
Okrent invented Rotisserie League Baseball, the best-known form of fantasy baseball, in 1979. The name comes from the fact that he proposed the idea to his friends while dining at La Rôtisserie Française restaurant on New York City's East 52nd Street. Okrent's team in the Rotisserie League was called the "Okrent Fenokees", a pun on the Okefenokee Swamp. He was one of the first two people inducted into the Fantasy Sports Hall of Fame. [11] Okrent was still playing Rotisserie as of 2009 under the team name Dan Druffs. Despite having been credited with inventing fantasy baseball he has never been able to win a Rotisserie League. His exploits of inventing Rotisserie League Baseball were chronicled in Silly Little Game, part of the ESPN 30 for 30 documentary series, in 2010. [12]
Okrent is also credited with inventing the baseball stat, WHIP. [13] At the time he referred to it as IPRAT, signifying "Innings Pitched Ratio".
In May 1981, Okrent wrote and Sports Illustrated published "He Does It by the Numbers". [14] This profile of the then-unknown Bill James launched James's career as baseball's foremost analyst. [15]
In 1994, Okrent was filmed for his in-depth knowledge of baseball history for the Ken Burns documentary Baseball . [16] During the nine-part series, a red-sweater-wearing Okrent delivered a detailed analysis of the cultural aspects of the national pastime, including a comparison of the dramatic Game 6 of the 1975 World Series between the Boston Red Sox and Cincinnati Reds to the conflict and character development in Russian novels.
In the late 1990s, as editor of new media at Time Inc., Okrent wrote about the future of magazine publishing. [17] He believed that the advancement of digital technologies would make it easier for people to read newspapers, magazines and books online. [18] In late 1999, Okrent made a prediction about the future of print media in the Hearst New Media Lecture at the Graduate School of Journalism of Columbia University. [17] He told his audience:
I believe they, and all forms of print, are dead. Finished. Over. Perhaps not in my professional lifetime, but certainly in that of the youngest people in this room. Remove the question mark from the title of this talk. The Death of Print, full stop. [19]
Okrent has participated in LearnedLeague under the name "OkrentD". [20] [21] He is the uncle of American linguist Arika Okrent.
A fantasy sport is a game, often played using the Internet, where participants assemble imaginary or virtual teams composed of proxies of real players of a professional sport. These teams compete based on the statistical performance of those players in actual games. This performance is converted into points that are compiled and totaled according to a roster selected by each fantasy team's manager. These point systems can be simple enough to be manually calculated by a "league commissioner" who coordinates and manages the overall league, or points can be compiled and calculated using computers tracking actual results of the professional sport. In fantasy sports, as in real sports team owners draft, trade, and cut (drop) players.
Kenneth Lauren Burns is an American filmmaker and historian known for his documentary films and television series, many of which chronicle American history and culture. His work is often produced in association with WETA-TV and/or the National Endowment for the Humanities and distributed by PBS.
A speakeasy, also called a blind pig or blind tiger, was an illicit establishment that sold alcoholic beverages. The term may also refer to a retro style bar that replicates aspects of historical speakeasies.
In baseball statistics, walks plus hits per inning pitched (WHIP) is a sabermetric measurement of the number of baserunners a pitcher has allowed per inning pitched. WHIP is calculated by adding the number of walks and hits allowed and dividing this sum by the number of innings pitched.
Fantasy baseball is a game in which the participants serve as owners and general managers of virtual baseball teams. The competitors select their rosters by participating in a draft in which all relevant Major League Baseball (MLB) players are available. Fantasy points are awarded in weekly matchups based on the actual performances of baseball players in real-world competition. The game typically involves MLB, but can also involve other leagues, such as American college baseball, or leagues in other countries, such as the KBO League.
Baseball is a 1994 American television documentary miniseries created by documentary filmmaker Ken Burns about the history of the sport of baseball.
The Great American Novel is a novel by Philip Roth, published in 1973.
Geoffrey Champion Ward is an American editor, author, historian and writer of scripts for American history documentaries for public television. He is the author or co-author of 19 books, including 10 companion books to the documentaries he has written. He is the winner of seven Emmy Awards.
John Morris Sheppard was a Democratic United States Congressman and United States Senator from Texas. He authored the Eighteenth Amendment (Prohibition) and introduced it in the Senate, and is referred to as "the father of national Prohibition."
Wordplay is a 2006 documentary film directed by Patrick Creadon. It features Will Shortz, the editor of the New York Times crossword puzzle, crossword constructor Merl Reagle, and many other noted crossword solvers and constructors. The second half of the movie is set at the 2005 American Crossword Puzzle Tournament (ACPT), where the top solvers compete for a prize of $4000. Wordplay was the best reviewed documentary film of 2006, according to Rotten Tomatoes.
Wayne Bidwell Wheeler was an American attorney and longtime leader of the Anti-Saloon League. The leading advocate of the prohibitionist movement in the late 1800s and early 1900s, he played a major role in the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which outlawed the manufacture, distribution, and sale of alcoholic beverages.
William Anthony Gamson was a professor of Sociology at Boston College, where he was also the co-director of the Media Research and Action Project (MRAP). He is the author of numerous books and articles on political discourse, the mass-media and social movements from as early as the 1960s. His influential works include Power and Discontent (1968), The Strategy of Social Protest (1975), Encounters with Unjust Authority (1982) and Talking Politics (2002), as well as numerous editions of SIMSOC.
The Fantasy Sports & Gaming Association (FSGA), formerly the Fantasy Sports Trade Association, is a Middleton, Wisconsin-based trade group representing the fantasy sports and gaming industries. In 2019, the FSTA changed its name to the Fantasy Sports & Gaming Association with to coincide with changes in US law allowing states to enable sports betting.
Steven Ira "Steve" Wulf is an American magazine journalist, editor, and book writer. A former executive editor at ESPN The Magazine, Wulf continues to write for ESPN The Magazine as well as ESPN.com. Before joining ESPN, Wulf worked for numerous publications, including The Evening Sun in Norwich, NY, Sports Illustrated, Entertainment Weekly, The Economist, and Time. While working at SI as an associate writer, he met his wife, Jane Bachman Wulf, who was the magazine's chief of reporters.
William Edward Leuchtenburg is an American historian. He is the William Rand Kenan Jr. Professor Emeritus of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a leading scholar of the life and career of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Peter Gethers is an American publisher, screenwriter and author of television shows, films, newspaper and magazine articles, and novels; he is the author of several books, including the bestseller The Cat Who Went to Paris, published in the UK under the title A Cat Called Norton, the first of the Norton the cat trilogy about his Scottish Fold, Norton. He lives in New York City and Sag Harbor, New York.
Joseph Lee was a wealthy Bostonian who trained as a lawyer but never practiced law, and is considered the "founder of the playground movement". He was a social worker, author, and philanthropist. Lee believed that community life could be strengthened by playgrounds and play. Lee was also a proponent of eugenics and a major financial supporter of the Immigration Restriction League, a Boston-based group that promoted race-based eugenics as a basis for restricting immigration from eastern and southern Europe.
Arika Okrent is an American linguist and writer of popular works on linguistic topics.
Prohibition is a 2011 American television documentary miniseries directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick with narration by Peter Coyote. The series originally aired on PBS between October 2, 2011 and October 4, 2011. It was funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities. It draws heavily from the 2010 book Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition by Daniel Okrent.
Lynn Novick is an American director and producer of documentary films, widely known for her work with Ken Burns.
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