"'We tell ourselves stories in order to live,' Joan Didion wrote in 'The White Album.'" —Man, did she ever! Look, Joan Didion is great and all. I'm glad her genius has been acknowledged in her lifetime, so that she is aware of just how appreciated she is. And it's terrific that her ability to transform our seemingly ineffable motivations into pithy expressions of undeniable truth is so [...]
Harper's has just posted-in what reads to me as a big extending of the middle finger to the New York Times, in light of this morning's Times piece on Harper's- Renata Adler's fantastic "A Court of No Appeal," from 2000, which addresses her interactions with the Times in specific and also the idea of a media contretemps in general. It is a must-read if you have never had the pleasure.
Michael Kinsley, Time-firee and bombed LA Times editorial page editor and current Washington Post opinionator, turns his eye to the ridiculousness that is the New York Times correction page. "Who can take facts seriously after reading the daily 'Corrections' column in the New York Times? Although the purpose of this column is to demonstrate the Times's rectitude about taking facts seriously, the facts it corrects are generally so bizarre or trivial and its tone so schoolmarmish that the effect is to make the whole pursuit of factual accuracy seem ridiculous." And where have we read all this before, except much better?
