A TALK WITH THEO EMERY!!!!!

   

Hey Charlie ,

      

       For my first blog , I am going to talk about the talk with Theo Emery we had on last Wednesday ,

  as you 've seen in the title I really enjoyed this talk . It was really interesting to see the point of view of a journalist on the progress of  journalism , its qualities and flaws .Theo Emery is an American writer and journalist , he has been a journalist for 20 years now , he started in a small newspaper in Boston , I was quite surprised when he told us that his first article was about a puppet show anyway as the years went by he went from associated press to report on the Congress in Washington DC then to  writing for the New York Times , he is married and has the cutest baby ever , he showed his picture to end on a positive note at the end of his talk .

  We talked about what it is like to be a journalist nowadays , also the impact of social media on newspapers , he thinks that the social media is a good thing for newspapers , more and more people read online , it is the same thing as reading a paper newspaper  and that being journalist is harder then before , people think that they are the bad people but they are just doing their work .  He also came to present his recently published book "Hell Fire Boys" , it deals with the history of chemical welfare in the United States of America . 

  Theo Emery  had the idea to write this book when he went to write two articles on a house in Washington DC which was being destroyed for being builed on a pit filled with gas and chemicals tanks , so he began to search further and found that in the 1917 America entered the war against Germany after suffering from chemical attacks , Americans knew that they have to improve their weapons , so they built the biggest chemical laboratory called the American University experiment station where they created masks , suits etc... 

     One year later an accident happened so they had to shut down the laboratory and throw all the gas and chemical tanks left  in a pit they digged called the Maurer pit ( at that time people tought  that  under ground was safe ) ,many years later, 1993 to be specific , while doing constructions , they found the pit  so they had to evacuate the hole area which is still to this day being cleaned ,the  Maurer pit it is called like this because there is a picture where a soldier called Charles William Maurer  is emptying the gaz tanks in this pit .

  

So that is all for my first blog (and certainetly not the last )I  hope you enjoyed it and I hope you will read this book , I am counting on reading it and here some photos that miss Choffrut  kindly shared with us thank you again !

                                                                                         thanks you for taking the time to read it ,

                                                                                                              see you later !