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March072008

Katha Pollitt and Ben Yagoda Tell It Like It Is

Filed under: Headline Shooter   Tagged: , , , , , ,

In the Washington Post, Katha Pollitt handily dismantles Charlotte Allen’s recent piece about dumb broads, “We Scream, We Swoon. How Dumb Can We Get?” And the editorial philosophy behind it, too.

And Ben Yagoda, who’s written books about (among other things) both New Yorker history and wily parts of speech and is therefore permanently OK in my book, asks in Slate, “But is it such a terrible thing that so many lying memoirists have been exposed? On the contrary: It’s evidence that the system works.” And he continues (internal link is mine): “In the wake of the Frey and now the Jones scandals, there’s been hand-wringing about the need for fact-checking—or lie-detector tests or something!—at publishing houses. But you’re never going to stop people from making stuff up.”

Comments

I hadn’t seen Charlotte Allen’s piece before, but I was dumbfounded by it. Go, Katha Pollitt!

I agree with everything Katha Pollitt wrote in that piece, but I must reserve the right to mock women who bake cookies for their dogs. That’s just very silly. You can’t blame me.

By the way, men can sure be dingbats too. Humans are mostly dingbats, actually. I think that’s what we all need to come to terms with: our shared dingbattitude.

Carolita suggests a new way for people to check in with each other: “What’s your dingbatting average?”

Ha, just saw these. Yes, some days I’m so muddleheaded I think I’ve taken a dingbath. That’s the best time to retreat to my Dingbatcave and hope the dingbats in the belfry will let me be.

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