The New York Times opinion section, like the Senate, has this rule where you aren’t allowed to call out a colleague by name when you think he or she is full of shit. As in the Senate, this rule is silly and anachronistic and enforces a strained phony cordiality at the expense of honesty. It doesn’t ever stop Paul Krugman, though, who simply responds to his columnist peers’ dumb arguments without ever referring to them by name.
For example: David Brooks, whose most annoying schtick is to write something that sounds reasonable until you realize what he’s actually arguing (like, for example, “people often don’t intervene when they see something horrible happening” is a very interesting point, unless your real point is that this is because of hippies and the terrible ’60s), wrote earlier this month that American income equality is overstated, and that the real income gap worth examining is that between the college-educated upper middle class, who are doing well, and those with only a high school education, who have been left behind by our post-industrial economy. (In this case Brooks’ “actual” point is that “Blue inequality” is merely the resentment of educated liberals who hate success while “Red states” have the real authentic American inequality.)
Krugman, in a column published three days later, wrote:
Anyone who has tracked this issue over time knows what I mean. Whenever growing income disparities threaten to come into focus, a reliable set of defenders tries to bring back the blur. Think tanks put out reports claiming that inequality isn’t really rising, or that it doesn’t matter. Pundits try to put a more benign face on the phenomenon, claiming that it’s not really the wealthy few versus the rest, it’s the educated versus the less educated.
So what you need to know is that all of these claims are basically attempts to obscure the stark reality: We have a society in which money is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few people, and in which that concentration of income and wealth threatens to make us a democracy in name only.
Hah, I wonder who those “pundits” are, don’t you? He went on:
In response, the usual suspects have rolled out some familiar arguments: the data are flawed (they aren’t); the rich are an ever-changing group (not so); and so on. The most popular argument right now seems, however, to be the claim that we may not be a middle-class society, but we’re still an upper-middle-class society, in which a broad class of highly educated workers, who have the skills to compete in the modern world, is doing very well.
It’s a nice story, and a lot less disturbing than the picture of a nation in which a much smaller group of rich people is becoming increasingly dominant. But it’s not true.
Oh, those usual suspects!
In today’s New York Times, Krugman’s column on the doomed supercommittee contains what I would characterize as a slightly off-topic tangent:
Oh, and let me give a special shout-out to “centrist” pundits who won’t admit that President Obama has already given them what they want. The dialogue seems to go like this. Pundit: “Why won’t the president come out for a mix of spending cuts and tax hikes?” Mr. Obama: “I support a mix of spending cuts and tax hikes.” Pundit: “Why won’t the president come out for a mix of spending cuts and tax hikes?”
You see, admitting that one side is willing to make concessions, while the other isn’t, would tarnish one’s centrist credentials. And the result is that the G.O.P. pays no price for refusing to give an inch.
These so-called “centrist” pundits sound pretty dumb, right? Here’s New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, earlier this week:
Here we are in America again on the eve of a major budgetary decision by yet another bipartisan “supercommittee,” and does anyone know what President Obama’s preferred outcome is? Exactly which taxes does he want raised, and which spending does he want cut? The president’s politics on this issue seems to be a bowl of poll-tested mush.
How funny, this sounds a lot like what Paul Krugman’s unnamed idiot “centrist” pundit keeps saying.
To my knowledge, no one bothers to do this with Maureen Dowd columns, because she rarely makes arguments worth engaging with.
[Second example via Weigel]
This article originally appeared on
Imprint.
On Nov. 3, the New York Times opened its doors, and its heart, for an exhibition of illustrations by Brian Rea and Christopher Silas Neal. Culled from their fruitful output for “Modern Love” — a much beloved column in the paper’s Sunday Styles section — the work speaks for itself, of course, but also for the talent and intelligence of the art directors. The illustrations are strong enough to stand on their own, even divorced from their newsprint context; and when they’re collected together in a new setting, a rich tapestry of experiences and stories emerges.
As Modern Love’s creator, Dan Jones, writes in the show’s introduction:
“For readers who come to the column fresh each weekend, I imagine the illustration mostly presents itself as a beautiful riddle to solve, a poignant mystery. Who are these people? What are they doing? What does it mean? Why is the scene so melancholy or menacing or celebratory? As you read and take it all in, the essay begins to unravel the mystery of the drawing just as the drawing serves to heighten your emotional response to the essay, and in the end both are better for it.”
Nicolas Blechman, the art director of the Sunday Book Review, and Kim Bost, an interactive designer at the paper (and a Print RDA judge), curated the show, which took place at Gallery 7 in the Times’ headquarters as part of a semiannual exhibition series. By day, the gallery is a hallway; by night, it’s a very crowded hallway.
If you couldn’t make it to the opening, here’s our long scroll of picks from the happy couple (of illustrators).
Inside the gallery (Photography by Jeffrey Henson Scales)
At the opening…
Illustrations by Christopher Silas Neal
Illustrations by Brian Rea
Copyright F+W Media Inc. 2011.
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Katie Roiphe may disdain blogs, but she was born to troll them. Exactly 20 years after erupting into the public consciousness with a piece that argued that hysterical feminists were unwisely legislating the brawny, intemperate sexual impulses of men and casting women as victims (with anti-rape activism, on campus), she’s back. In the same space, the Op-Ed page of the New York Times, Roiphe argued Sunday that, yes, hysterical feminists are unwisely trying to legislate the brawny, intemperate sexual impulses of men and casting women as victims (with sexual harassment laws, in the workplace).
“The Morning After” – the book that first rape-hysteria piece became – has given way to “Groundhog Day.”
Roiphe, of course, sometimes writes about other things. This year alone, she has written at least two 1,000-word columns about people mocking her. Just as it takes 20 years of repetition to polemicize away sexual violence, it takes at least two tries for Katie to indignantly convince us that her critics haven’t hurt her feelings.
But some things never change, including Roiphe’s blithe refusal, when it comes to making these claims, to look anywhere but her own navel and cocktail party circuit for evidence. (Sure, she has been on her share of campuses. But there’s no indication Roiphe has been in any other type of workplace.) Sunday’s piece is pegged to the accusations against Herman Cain. Even Roiphe sounds bored when she says, “After all these years, we are again debating the definition of unwanted sexual advances and parsing the question of whether a dirty joke in the office is a crime.”
We are? Last I checked, one of the two women with settlements from the National Restaurant Association hasn’t gone public with her story. Karen Kraushaar, who has, can’t legally divulge details, but has alleged that what Cain did was more serious than joke about his wife’s height, as he says he did. Roiphe complains that “sexual harassment includes both demanding sex in exchange for a job or a comment about someone’s dress.”
Let’s recap. Sharon Bialek says Cain groped her and shoved her head towards his crotch with the words, “You want a job, don’t you?” In other words, Herman Cain allegedly demanded sex in exchange for a job. No word on what he said about Bialek’s dress.
Roiphe also suggests workplace creativity might blossom if we removed legal safeguards that protect employees from bosses who exploit their power differentials. Maybe we can blame sexual harassment law for the fact that Cain allegedly used such a cliche.
It’s not clear what Roiphe’s excuse is, though. Back in 1993, in a devastating New Yorker review of Roiphe’s “Morning After,” Katha Pollitt wrote that the “message is one many people want to hear: sexual violence is anomalous, not endemic to American society, and appearances to the contrary can be explained away as a kind of mass hysteria, fomented by man-hating fanatics.” That message is clearly still resonant to the assigning editors of our nation’s large publications, since they keep paying her to repeat it — despite the rhetorical retreads, despite Roiphe’s reporting skills on the topic not having shown improvement since Pollitt first scolded her for not doing her homework. Meanwhile, even her colleague at Slate, where Roiphe has a column, finds her discussion of the issues wrongheaded, reductive and boring. “Is it really still contrarian to worry about the ‘capaciousness’ of the concept of sexual harassment, or the inherently amorphous nature of its definition? These are old arguments, made by defensive men and by women who prefer to sound, and maybe even are, confident that no environment is hostile to them,” asks KJ Dell’Antonia today.
Clearly, someone out there still finds this daring and brave. Luckily, what has changed in the last 20 years is that now we have blogs to tell Roiphe just how and why she is so wrong. In the same vein, there’s already a response to her demand that one show her “a smart, competent young professional woman who is utterly derailed by a verbal unwanted sexual advance or an inappropriate comment about her appearance, and I will show you a rare spotted owl”: The Spotted Owls Tumblr, formed Sunday night in response to Roiphe, will collect firsthand stories of harassment.
Yesterday, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof live-tweeted a brothel raid in Cambodia. Kristof’s novel approaches to international women-rights reporting have previously included purchasing two Cambodian underage prostitutes for the purpose of liberating them and naming a 9-year-old Congolese rape victim. After those generated criticism from victims’ advocates, Kristof shouldn’t be surprised that not everyone was cheering along his recent outing.
The narrative proceeded in a familiar fashion: There were villains, even some with military ties; then there is a rescue. Kristof tweeted, “Girls are rescued, but still very scared Youngest looks about 13, trafficked from Vietnam.” And then, “Social workers comforting the girls, telling them they are free, won’t be punished, rapes are over.” He was accompanied by Cambodian anti-trafficking activist and forced-prostitution survivor Somaly Mam. Post-presidential niece Lauren Bush chimed in perkily, “Awesome reporting by @NickKristof as the (sic) raided a brothel in Cambodia with @SomalyMam this morning!”
The trouble is, nothing involving sex work is ever quite as cut-and-dried as a sweeping rescue. For one thing, as writer and sex workers’ rights activist Melissa Gira Grant pointed out, Human Rights Watch has exposed serious abuses at the government centers where sex workers are detained, including “beatings, extortion, and rape at the hands of authorities.” In other words, there’s no guarantee that just because they’ve left the brothel, their lives are going to improve. Somaly Mam is a Cambodian, but her proposed remedies to improve the lives of sex workers aren’t necessarily universal; Matthew Greenall, who described himself as an advisor to “AIDS & sexual health programmes in low income countries,” noted that it came in the same “week cambodian sex workers set up a legal support & human rights monitoring centre.”
Though Twitter can allow for change over time and even, in its unpredictability, jar us out of our complacency and first-world problems, it does not traditionally provide any nuance for what happens after a dramatic and inspiring moment. Form matters, as was clear in the discussion following Mother Jones reporter Mac McClelland’s decision to live-tweet her day with a traumatized Haitian rape victim. That raised questions not just of storytelling, but of safety and consent, with the latter still in dispute. Yes, telling the story of a victim meant an alternative to silence and invisibility, but it could also put her back into jeopardy.
“Trauma stories require the writer to consider the reader, listener, or viewer as a partner in the creation of ethical journalism. Our choices as craftsmen — about identity and attribution, about detail, about writer’s voice, about structure and style, and even about medium — do more than simply tell the story. They tell readers about our values,” wrote Rwanda-based journalist Jina Moore in the Columbia Journalism Review earlier this year. What values can we yield from Kristof’s series of communications? That the breathless sense of heroic risk-taking, one simultaneously authentic and swaggering, trumps all.
I don’t believe Twitter is necessarily trivializing, but it isn’t a mode that fits every story. Lindsay Beyerstein wrote of the McClelland incident, “Ethical journalists balance (the) public’s need to know against potential harms to innocent people. In this case, there was no compelling need to know the these details of [McClelland's subject]‘s rape instantaneously,” adding, “the allure of Twitter is that it’s instantaneous and unfiltered. That’s all very well for color commentary under controlled conditions, like press conferences and sporting events.” Sex trafficking victims presumably fall under a different category from those in-the-moment events.
To Kristof’s significant credit, he doesn’t bloviate from afar and he writes about things that other people ignore. But leaving it at that is a low bar indeed. At the end of the day, he reported on his Twitter page that he was ordered to leave the site of the raid out of fears for his safety. “I’m safe & my live-tweeting of the raid on brothel in northern Cambodia is over. You can see them all on my Twitter page,” he wrote. Perhaps we’ll learn in his column what comes next for the girls and women.
This originally appeared as part of a post on Alex Belth's
Bronx Banter.
One of the things I most loved in Brian Kellow’s terrific new biography of Pauline Kael was her open contempt for professors of English and film studies! Although she was very well-read, before and after her college years at Berkeley, she rightly detested pretension and pomposity. It was a revelation to me, thanks to Kellow’s ace research, that Kael (who had been born on a chicken farm in Petaluma) emerged from a bohemian San Francisco milieu suffused with Beat radicalism.
As I told Kellow on a recent panel on Kael at the New York Film Festival, this helped explain for me Kael’s emphatic use of the colloquial American voice—which I have also striven to do in my writing on popular culture. I despise the phony, fancy-pants rhetoric of professors aping jargon-filled European locutions—which have blighted academic film criticism for over 30 years. Kael socialized with poets in San Francisco. On the same panel, film critic David Edelstein called Kael’s writing “jazzy”—which is exactly right. It must be remembered that the Beats were heavily influenced by be-bop and cool jazz. Kael often uses abrupt, surprising syncopations in her writing that I would classify as Beat. I remain stubbornly attached to the Beat movement, which hugely influenced me in college. It’s one reason I ruffled so many feathers (to continue the chicken-farm trope) by my book on poetry, “Break, Blow, Burn,” which promoted the Beat style and rejected the cringingly artificial, pseudo-philosophical meanderings of grossly over-praised contemporary poets like John Ashbery.
Browsing through the Library of America’s massive new collection of her writing (called “The Age of Movies”), I was stunned at Kael’s range and power. Her voice, shaped by the American idiom, is still utterly fresh and dynamic. She is a superb role model for young writers. She has a keen eye for crisp detail and a lust for both attack and celebration. This is a perfect moment for the release of the Kellow and Library of America books. Cultural criticism is in the dumps. Nothing important is coming out of academe, and the “serious” general magazines are insular and verbose. Film criticism has waned, and the Web is overrun with gassy, sniggering, solipsistic snark.
As I said at the panel, the two new Kael books struck me with special force because I have just completed over four years of work on a book on the visual arts for Pantheon. In the process of my research, I was horrified by the degeneration of arts criticism in the past four decades. What excited me anew about Kael’s work is that, even though she was writing solely about movies, she was constantly inventing fascinating paradigms and templates for talking about the creative process as well as the audience’s imaginative experience of performance. Because most of my career in the classroom has been at art schools (beginning at Bennington in the 1970s), I am hyper-aware of the often grotesque disconnect between commentary on the arts and the actual practice or production of the arts. Kael had phenomenal intuition and gut instinct about so many things—the inner lives of directors and actors, the tangible world of a given film, the energy of film editing.
I find Kael stimulating and provocative even when I disagree with her. That’s the entire point of good writing!—to force the reader to think independently. For example, I loved the decadent European art films that she mocked—above all, ”La Dolce Vita.” But her scathing satire of those films was hilarious and persuasive in its own way. I am also very fond of “Rich and Famous,” George Cukor’s last film, over which Kael got in big trouble because gay activists thought her review homophobic. Preparing for the panel, I viewed that film again via Netflix and was startled to see that YES, there is indeed a glaring male-hustler moment in there that makes no sense whatever in heterosexual terms. So Kael was right about that. But I can’t understand why she failed to appreciate how well Jacqueline Bisset and Candice Bergen work together as a quarreling comic duo. They are fabulous!
And then there is Kael’s hostility to Alfred Hitchcock, which seems inexplicable in a major film critic—particularly since she was so enthusiastic about Brian De Palma’s “Dressed to Kill,” which is a Hitchcock tribute. Because Hitchcock is one of my favorite directors (I wrote a book on “The Birds” for the British Film Institute’s Film Classics Series), I have always been mystified by Kael’s attitude. When I raised this issue at the Film Festival, it led, I think, to a breakthrough. On the panel, director and screenwriter James Toback replied that Kael loved De Palma’s active camera and that she tended not to like static, long-held shots, such as Hitchcock was known for. Eureka! One of the main reasons I am so drawn to Hitchcock is that he planned his shots way in advance on story-boards, which he designed like classic paintings (he was an art connoisseur). It’s why he found shooting on set boring—because he had already composed the film in his head.
Then at the Film Festival dinner afterward, David Edelstein, who like Toback was a close friend of Kael’s, told me in passing how he had often tried to get her to appreciate Mahler and Bruckner, whom she actively disliked. (Kellow describes how her memorial service ended with her favorite Baroque music.) Second eureka of the night! I instantly said to Edelstein that this must be another reason Kael disliked Hitchcock—because of Bernard Herrmann’s lush, insistent, immersive, Mahler-like scores, which I adore and would describe as ecstatic and visionary. Edelstein remarked that, in general, Kael was not interested in the transcendent. This is just one example of the exhilarating train of associations triggered by a daring, opinionated, and sometimes cantankerous writer like Kael. We are in desperate need of original minds and voices like hers!
The New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic won’t be stopped from using “limn” — which means to depict or make a portrait of in words — despite giving birth to a parlor game among publishing types and book bloggers who love to note its overuse.
“Limn” returned in Tuesday’s review of Amy Waldman’s anticipated first novel “The Submission,” in a comparison between Waldman and the work of Tom Wolfe. “Unlike Mr. Wolfe, Ms. Waldman tends to favor sympathy over satire when it comes to limning her characters’ feelings and motivations,” Kakutani observed.
Limn-spotters had noticed that Kakutani’s usage had trailed off — this is just the second time we could find it in one of her reviews this year, and the first time since a March review of a book about the myths of George Washington.
The last laugh, however, might go to Kakutani — perhaps she has propelled the once-archaic word back into the vocabulary. (A minor lexicographer’s tempest kicked up last year when “limn” appeared in a Baltimore Sun headline.) Double-clicking on any word in a Times story brings up its American Heritage dictionary definition, and “limn” did not appear on the new 2011 list of the top-50 most frequently looked-up words on the site.
Either way, now that limn has returned, Michiko obsessives can go back to hoping for her late-summer crazy — it has been a few years since she’s written in the voice of a character like Austin Powers, Holden Caulfield or “Legally Blonde’s” Elle Woods. But when she does, it is almost always this time of year. Our money is on a review of Chad Harbach’s baseball-drenched “The Art of Fielding,” one of the fall’s big fiction debuts, in the voice of Derek Jeter.
Paul Krugman, David Brooks and Thomas Friedman (Credit: AP) 
(Credit: Christopher Silas Neal) 
Katie Roiphe (Credit: Deborah Copaken Kogan/Little, Brown) 
Nicholas Kristof amd Somaly Mam (Credit: Twitter/Wikipedia) 
