By now, it's not much of a secret that I love a good literary slapfight. It's even better when the New Yorker gets involved, so I was pretty delighted to read a very entertaining "Talk of the Town Piece" by Lauren Collins in this week's issue. Kobe Beef
All these people who assume that the best way to get justice by writing a nasty editorial letter after a bad review, or calling someone out in the media, or taking out a $40,000 ad in the Times...has anyone ever gotten a satisfying measure of flesh that way? It just makes everyone look jerkier.
Anyway, besides being amusing, the article was interesting for a couple of other reasons. First, Lauren Collins is really growing on me. Her writing is always good, but for a while she was doing fluffy socialite-type pieces about shoes and museum parties. Not that this one is deep journalism, but it shows she can bring her style to different areas.
Second, I had no idea that Frank Rich and Alex Witchel are married. She mentions her husband occasionally in her columns, but I'd probably have paid more attention had I known that the cute, homey anecdotes were about one of the OpEd columnists. I wonder if things were ever muy scanduloso at the Times building.
I also think it's hilarious that the paper practically edited the ad for Jeffrey Chodorow. They had self-interest in the content, of course, but there's a kind of sublimity in the fact that they were haggling over language while being willing to sell the space directly opposite Frank Bruni's column.
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