Marie Winn (née Wienerová; 1936) is a journalist, author, and bird-watcher. She is known for her books and articles on the wildlife of Central Park and her ''

Wall Street Journal ''The Wall Street Journal'' is an American business-focused, international daily newspaper based in New York City, with international editions also available in Chinese and Japanese. The ''Journal'', along with its Asian editions, is published ...

'' Leisure & Arts column. She appears in Frederic Lilien's documentary film, ''The Legend of Pale Male'' (2010). She is also known for writing '' The Plug-In Drug'' (1977), which explored the impact of television on young children, and for her involvement in the

quiz show scandals The 1950s quiz show scandals were a series of scandals involving the producers and contestants of several popular American Game show, television quiz shows. These shows' producers secretly gave assistance to certain contestants in order to prearr ...

of the 1950s.

Early life

Born in 1936 in

Prague Prague ( ; cs, Praha ; german: Prag, ; la, Praga) is the capital and largest city in the Czech Republic, and the historical capital of Bohemia. On the Vltava river, Prague is home to about 1.3 million people. The city has a temperate ...

Czechoslovakia , rue, Чеськословеньско, , yi, טשעכאסלאוואקיי, , common_name = Czechoslovakia , life_span = 1918–19391945–1992 , p1 = Austria-Hungary , image_p1 ...

, Winn is one of two daughters of Hanna (née Taussig) and Josef Wiener aka Joseph A. Winn, a psychiatrist; her sister was the writer

Janet Malcolm Janet Clara Malcolm (born Jana Klara Wienerová; July 8, 1934 – June 16, 2021) was an American writer, journalist on staff at ''The New Yorker'' magazine, and collagist. She was the author of '' Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession'' (198 ...

. Winn is a U.S. citizen who attended the

Bronx High School of Science The Bronx High School of Science, commonly called Bronx Science, is a public specialized high school in The Bronx in New York City. It is operated by the New York City Department of Education. Admission to Bronx Science involves passing the Spec ...

Radcliffe College Radcliffe College was a women's liberal arts college in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and functioned as the female coordinate institution for the all-male Harvard College. Considered founded in 1879, it was one of the Seven Sisters colleges and he ...

and

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

. In May 1958, while Winn was a contestant on ''

Dotto ''Dotto'' was a 1958 American television game show that was a combination of a general knowledge quiz and the children's game connect the dots. Jack Narz served as the program's host, with Colgate-Palmolive as its presenting sponsor. ''Dotto'' ...

,'' a knowledge-quiz type TV game, a notebook which belonged to her was found by another contestant, Ed Hilgemeier, who discovered that the notebook included questions and answers to be used during Winn's appearances.

Jack Narz John Lawrence Narz Jr. (November 13, 1922 – October 15, 2008) was an American radio personality, television host, and singer. Early years Narz was born to John and Ado Narz, in Louisville, Kentucky, along with sister Mary, and younger brothe ...

, the host of ''Dotto'' at the time, recalled, when interviewed for a PBS documentary, that he believed Winn to be "a little too pat" when giving her answers. A CBS executive vice president, Thomas Fisher, tested

kinescope Kinescope , shortened to kine , also known as telerecording in Britain, is a recording of a television program on motion picture film, directly through a lens focused on the screen of a video monitor. The process was pioneered during the 1940 ...

s of the show against Winn's notebook and concluded that the show appeared to have been fixed. The executives also learned the show's producers had paid Winn, Hilgemeier, and Winn's opponent Yaffe Kimball-Slatin to keep quiet about the notebook.

Writing career

''The Plug-In Drug''

Winn is the author of '' The Plug-In Drug'' (1977), an often scathing critique of television's addictive influence on the young, Winn wrote, "The television experience allows the participant to blot out the real world and enter into a pleasurable and passive mental state." In 2002, she added new material to update the study as ''The Plug-In Drug: Television, Computers, and Family Life,'' published on the 25th anniversary of the original book.

Pale Male

An advocate for the protection of wildlife, Winn gave the name

Pale Male Pale may refer to: Jurisdictions * Medieval areas of English conquest: ** Pale of Calais, in France (1360–1558) ** The Pale, or the English Pale, in Ireland *Pale of Settlement, area of permitted Jewish settlement, western Russian Empire (179 ...

to the

red-tailed hawk The red-tailed hawk (''Buteo jamaicensis'') is a bird of prey that breeds throughout most of North America, from the interior of Alaska and northern Canada to as far south as Panama and the West Indies. It is one of the most common members with ...

that nested on a

Fifth Avenue Fifth Avenue is a major and prominent thoroughfare in the borough of Manhattan in New York City. It stretches north from Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village to West 143rd Street in Harlem. It is one of the most expensive shopping stre ...

building, receiving much press coverage.Lueck, Thomas J. "Co-op to Help Hawks Rebuild, but the Street Is Still Restless", ''The New York Times'', December 15, 2004.
/ref> She was also prominent in preserving Pale Male's nest when it was threatened with removal. She wrote about these events in her book, ''Red-Tails in Love: Pale Male's Story – A True Wildlife Drama in Central Park'' (1998). The book is an expansion of her ''Smithsonian'' magazine articles and her column in ''

The Wall Street Journal ''The Wall Street Journal'' is an American business-focused, international daily newspaper based in New York City, with international editions also available in Chinese and Japanese. The ''Journal'', along with its Asian editions, is published ...

.'' Frederic Lilien's documentary film, ''Pale Male'' (2002), is an adaptation of Winn's book and includes interview scenes with Winn.

References

Notes Further reading
Winn, Marie. "The Loss of Childhood," ''The New York Times'', May 8, 1983: Excerpt from ''Children Without Childhood'' (Pantheon, 1983).
Further listening
Marie Winn interviewed on NPR's ''All Things Considered'' (12/10/04)
Sources

* ttp://www.nycaudubon.org/pdf/birds-cpark-doc-oficial.pdf Winn, Marie and Creshkoff, Rebekah. ''The Birds of Central Park: An Annotated Checklist'' (pdf) Selected bibliography *''The Fireside Book of Children's Songs'' (Simon and Schuster, 1966) *''The Plug-In Drug'' (Penguin, 1977) *''Red-Tails in Love'' (Random House, 1998) *''Birds of Central Park'' by Cal Vornberger, foreword by Marie Winn (Abrams, 2005)
''Central Park in the Dark'' (FSG, 2008)

External links

* ttp://mariewinn.com Marie Winn official sitebr>Pale Male
{{DEFAULTSORT:Winn, Marie 1936 births Living people Writers from Prague American ornithological writers American people of Czech-Jewish descent American women non-fiction writers Czechoslovak emigrants to the United States The Bronx High School of Science alumni Columbia University alumni Radcliffe College alumni Contestants on American game shows Jewish American writers The Wall Street Journal people Women ornithologists Women science writers 20th-century American non-fiction writers 20th-century American women writers 20th-century American scientists 20th-century American women scientists 21st-century American scientists 21st-century American women scientists 21st-century American women writers Scientists from New York (state) 21st-century American Jews