Only a few months past its inauguration, the Remnick Administration has unveiled a New Deal for The New Yorker. Judging by recent output, the magazine is making economics its first priority. The past several weeks have seen, in addition to former Labor Secretary Robert Reich frequently Talking of the Town, no fewer than three fat financial features — all revealing a very visible hand.
The first credits John Maynard Keynes — the liberal architect of the Bretton Woods currency and trade agreement — with postwar economic expansion. The next extolls J. P. Morgan for staving off 1906’s impending world financial meltdown. Finally, there’s a profile praising Harvard Brahmin John Kenneth Galbraith, whose book The Affluent Society condemns the Newhousian penchant for “private opulence and public squalor.”
The link is that all three articles are pro-intervention: intervention to steady the free market’s intrinsic swooning volatility, intervention by some large, central force who pays the bar tab while mere mortals threaten to start a drunken brawl over who gets the last pickled egg. While it’s possible this new interest in poverty-defying sugar daddies (and distrust of the logical ends of the free market) is an honest outgrowth of David Remnick’s status as a man of the people, we suspect Condé Nast’s legions are more willing than most to snuggle up to free-spending Santas. After all, when Si Newhouse is providing a Greenspan-like correction to your every expense-account folly, laissez-faire pretty much means being free to do whatever you want, knowing that there will always be some supernally wealthy New Yorker around to bail out the spendthrifts, be they turn-of-the-last-century banks or our own esrtwhile cousin Wired magazine.
We’re tempted to write a pro-barter-economy letter to the editor at The New Yorker, but we’re worried that our note might end up like poor Jeff Gustafson’s.
According to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, Gustafson dashed off a response to a bomb-Iraq editorial in The New York Times. When Gustafson’s letter appeared in The Times‘ letters column, however, his citation of UNICEF figures on malnutrition in Iraq had been changed to a bogus-sounding quote from “Iraqi officials.” Understandably, the letter writer believes the change was made in order to discredit his argument. But, really, what was he expecting? Where probability of an intelligent response is concerned, writing a letter to the editor ranks just below writing a letter to Socks. We know of only one letters column that doesn’t edit letters with an eye toward embarrassing the writers, and that column takes it easy only because the writers do a good enough job embarrassing themselves. The Times might consider putting the kibosh on it own soothsaying. Reporting on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s avoidance of a no-confidence vote Tuesday, Times front-pager Deborah Sontag reported that the unlovable lug had not merely given his coalition a breather or paved the way for Bill Clinton to rock the West Bank this week; he had “succeeded in delaying his destiny.” Even knowing The Times‘ fabled knack for next-week-in-review reporting, this destiny stuff seems pretty impressive. Who else but a Times writer could know what the future holds for a foreign head of state in a notoriously unpredictable political system? Maybe it’s the demonstrated ability of another philandering cigar aficionado to avoid endless press-decreed death sentences that has prompted the oracular tone toward Netanyahu, but we really want to join in. Though our old prediction of an impending Yakov Smirnoff revival has so far failed to pan out, we confidently predict that next week The New York Times will report that time waits for no man, that the future’s not ours to see, and of course, that you can’t hurry love.
As it turns out, the one place where editors seem to be doing their jobs is the one place we least expected it. When our spiteful friends began chattering about freelancer Hariette Surovell’s no-holds-barred rant against Salon, we were eager to dive right in. Normally, of course, there’s nothing we like better than eyeballing the dirty laundry of our cross-town comrades. Unfortunately, the one thing Surovell’s ramblings prove is how eminently suited she is to a lifetime of editorial rejection.
Here’s the gist: Over several months, Surovell tirelessly pitched story ideas to various Salon editors, only to be put off, passed along, ignored, and finally advised that her writing was “somewhat unfocused” and “not strong enough.” Maybe it’s just our short attention span, but somewhere around the 73rd discussion of how much her kill fee was originally supposed to be or the 82nd complaint about how so-and-so hadn’t returned her email, we started to understand why Surovell was unable to fob off material “originally written for another magazine” on the Bay Area libertines. The great Salon-busting article, of course, still needs to be written, but on the evidence so far, we believe it won’t be written in crayon.
In the meantime, we have some tips for both Surovell and the NY Press editors who passed along her story, apparently without changing a word: When an editor says a gay filmmaker’s anti-Jesse Helms movie isn’t exactly news, that’s called “sound editorial judgment.” When people ignore your calls and emails, it means they’re trying to get rid of you. If you can’t do a convincing hatchet job on Salon, you ought to get out of the business.
