Insane Mark Danner v. George Packer 'NYTBR' Catfight Ahoy! @1:28 PM
To be published Sunday: a literary throw-down of unparalleled proportions. How great! A couple of weeks ago, George Packer reviewed for the Times Mark Danner's Stripping Bare the Body, a book that explores violence and war from Haiti to the Balkans to Iraq. This review did not do much for Danner. Hence, this coming Sunday, there is an enormous, enormous letter of complaint—it takes up more than a full page—and as well a not-terribly-brief rejoinder from Packer. We have some advance to show you! READ MORE 11
Up on the roof @12:04 PM
The New Yorker's George Packer shares the wisdom of the roofer:
"It's like they're afraid of me! So they hire a guy who's more comfortable dealing with a masculine-type person. I stand there and talk to the customer, and the customer doesn't talk to me or look at me, he talks to the intermediary, and the intermediary talks to me. It's the yuppie buffer." He wasn't slurring gay men-he described these customers as mainly "metrosexuals"-nor was the problem all yuppies, some of whom had been his customers for years. It was a new group who had moved from Manhattan in the past few years, and who could not detach themselves from their communications devices long enough to look someone in the eye or notice the source of a leak. This was a completely new phenomenon in the roofer's world: a mass upper class that was so immersed in symbolic and digital cerebration that it had become incapable of carrying out the most ordinary functions-had become, in effect, like small children with Asperger's symptoms. It was a ruling class that, out of sheer over-civilization, was quickly losing the ability to hold onto its power.
