Even if you are the luckiest journalist in the world, you’ll never get to write a lede like this:

If a scholar of Norse mythology had been in the stands of Yankee Stadium on Tuesday night, he or she probably would have advised Yankees fans to not make too much out of the 5-3 victory against the Red Sox.

…

The best thing I’ve read all week is a feature on… well, you know how people get all up in arms over Al Gore’s carbon footprint, since he went and made an important and widely-seen documentary on global warming? OK, so Leonardo DiCaprio did the same thing for “The 11th Hour” and everybody’s waiting for the same questions: But Leo, they’ll squeal, veins a-blazing, how can you say anything about the environment when you sometimes use fossil fuels?

Well, Kate Coe has a really fantastic, nuanced approach to this on Grist. Please read it — it’s not a defense of DiCaprio. Not hardly. But it also condemns those consarned private-jet questions, if less loudly (and vulgarly) than I might do myself. A taste:

All the lite ‘n’ easy questions have been asked and answered. Conners Petersen was pretty passionate about consumers affecting corporate change. I’ve got only one shot, so I ditch my question about spreading the word to the folks on the block and go for a quality-of-life topic. I introduce the showbiz equivalent of the “conscious consumption” issue that peppers their press materials.

“Is this a union film?”

Whoa, baby. Steeee-rike. Ms. Kate Coe, I’d send you flowers if it weren’t for the environmental implications. (Wait–are there environmental implications? Must be.) Anyway, it’s a great piece for anybody with an interest in documentary films, Hollywood, the environment, the environment and class, unions or magazine journalism. Um, and writers writing about how awesome they think their press conference question is. Because that’s what happens. But read it! (And for someone really mad at Leo, check this out.

Technorati tags: [ environment | yankess | red sox | dicaprio | 11th hour | hollywood | union | labor ]