_______________ SALON STORIES ON THE CLINTON CRISIS
	What fun to watch great reporters on a hot story! Your Starr team is doing real digging, the day-in day-out, well-sourced, enterprising reporting that a writer only gets to do a few times in a career. Good for you for supporting them; and good for you for backing them up in your editorials. I think you're breaking entirely new ground for the Web, and reminding plenty of print reporters and editors what it means to work a story. Keep up the very good work! -- Bill McKibben
_______________ REMOTE FEED BY MICHELLE GOLDBERG (04/21/98)
	Discriminating readers will find reasons to doubt Michelle Goldberg's drubbing of Remote Feed, and make up their own minds about David Gilbert's new story collection, which she recklessly misrepresents in her puzzling and bitter review. Ms. Goldberg falls prey to a sophomoric caveat of book reviewing: mistaking an author's morally flawed characters and their misguided exploits for that author's own nature. Gilbert's characters may lack moral certitude -- his stories are largely about their futile searches for it -- but this flaw does not extend to Gilbert himself, whose writing is challenging and sure. Characters struggling with their shallowness do not imply, as Ms. Goldberg suggests, shallow stories: the history of literature has taught us that this struggle is eminently worth documenting. Though Ms. Goldberg takes Gilbert to task for his numerous references to popular culture, these references arise naturally from the characters themselves, and comprise the stuff they have chosen to take the place of their souls. Gilbert's popular culture is not gratuitous but integral, the horrible ether these sad people swim through, hoping to find a trace of what they've lost. Most disturbing is the readiness with which Ms. Goldberg prises such references out of context to serve her flawed thesis. When a man muses (with apparent pointlessness) about Spiderman, she pounces, but leaves out what we learn in the next paragraph: that comic books were this man's anodyne for a childhood of powerlessness, and are thus important to who he is, and what he does, in the story. It is wrong to joylessly attack a writer because you don't think he is as good as Philip Roth or Saul Bellow. It is wrong to attribute meanness and hubris to a person you don't know. Ms. Goldberg is guilty of these transgressions, along with a shameful reference to creative writing seminars (an old standby for the reviewer who dislikes, but does not understand, someone's book) and a parting implication of anti-semitism that fails to bear even the lightest load of scrutiny. Book reviews should enlighten, not obfuscate. Readers learned nothing from Ms. Goldberg's, except that she hates Remote Feed; good journalism must do more. -- J. Robert Lennon
_______________ AMERICA'S WAR ON CHILDREN BY JOAN WALSH (04/22/98)
	I am not sure what Salon was thinking when it posted the illustration to its story "The War on American Children." What a sick and horrible image to wake up to. Congratulations on an otherwise beautifully and intelligently illustrated webzine. -- Michael Rappa SALON | April 27, 1998

R E C E N T L Y+| FORGET SHORTY BY COURTNEY WEAVER (04/22/98)

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