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Katha Pollitt and Ben Yagoda Tell It Like It Is
Filed under: Headline Shooter Tagged: Ben Yagoda, books, checkers, feminism, grammar, Katha Pollitt, memoirs
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."
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A few clips
- Report: Learning to read with comic books edited by Françoise Mouly (for Print)
- Interview: Designer Eleanor Grosch (for Print)
- Review: Charles Addams: A Cartoonist's Life by Linda H. Davis (for Newsday)
- Review: The King's Gambit: A Son, a Father, and the World's Most Dangerous Game by Paul Hoffman (for Newsday)
- Review: Does The New Republic's recent redesign mean a change of tune? (for Print)
- Proposal: A more attractive MetroCard (for A Brief Message)
- Interview: James Surowiecki on what's next for the wisdom of crowds (for Assignment Zero)
- Report: Eustace Tilley spruces up for The New Yorker's website redesign (for Print)
- Feature: Muslim immigration iconography in the Netherlands (for Print)
- Review: books about various New Yorker cartoonists by Liza Donnelly and Iain Topliss (for Newsday)
- Profile: screenwriter and novelist Joe Keenan (for Newsday)
- Review: The Complete New Yorker (for Print)
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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.