(via katiebakes)
My money’s on Layne/Newell.
When I was at New York mag, I did a series where people would submit letters to the New Yorker, which I would then answer. (Total SPY ripoff, btw.) I began by intimating that the New Yorker had tried to get rid of Denby after his autobiography came out—in a number of increasingly absurd and wildly implausible ways—but he kept mailing himself back into the building disguised as an enormous fan mail package for Malcolm Gladwell. The number of contributions to that feature went up precipitously after that post, and several of them were coming from inside the building.
Denby’s autobiography, American Sucker, had been published shortly before. It’s mostly about Denby’s bad dot com boom stock picking, and the fiscally painful aftermath. An excerpt from the New York Times review:
”I listened to those I wanted to listen to,” he writes. ”I wasn’t lazy, exactly, but I thought the study of fundamentals was a waste of time.”
As a former equity analyst—a.k.a., stock picker—I find this sort of hilarious. It’s like suggesting that you thought it would be perfectly okay to try perfoming heart surgery without going to med school. And sorry, dude. It is lazy. (If you can’t do basic securities analysis—which is not that hard to learn, really—you should never do your own stock picking. You might as well just take that money, go to Vegas, and actually have a good time losing it.)
And Denby’s laziness permeates the Snark book as well. Aside from the mistakes that Jim Newell pointed out, there are lots of silly generalizations that Denby seems to have gratuitously manufactured. Apparently, Gawker is knee-jerk negative about everything, and nihilistically so. I wasn’t negative about everything and I’ve never been nihilistic about anything. But then I wouldn’t gather from any of Denby’s critiques that he ever actually read Gawker—unless of course, it mentioned him.
Denby also cites Nick Denton’s mandate that the ideal Gawker item “exposes hypocrisy or turns conventional wisdom on its head” and describes this mandate as “indolent parasitism as a work ethos.” I can only assume that Denby’s reading of Denton’s statement stems from Denby’s annoyance that sites like Gawker bounce off of mainstream media stories (otherwise, parasites to what?) because the only other alternative is an inability to understand basic English, which I’m fairly certain isn’t the problem. And Gawker does break news and does have original content (less than I’d like, FWIW, but still…) all of which exists without any help whatsoever from mainstream media.
The rather unbelievable factual errors Newell pointed out are ironic in light of Denby’s charge that the Gawker bloggers and bloggers like them are guilty of critical laziness. The only demonstrably lazy party here is Denby.
But I suppose that will inevitably be construed as knee-jerk negative nihilistic pseudo-criticism.
