Guest essay for Andy Holloman

Jane Austen wrote for herself, not her contemporaries. Her earliest reviewers were less than fully gung-ho about her fiction. Among other things, if you go by a recent book by Claire Harman, certain critics felt Austen’s writing wasn’t fresh enough. Talk about critical blunders! It took decades and decades, but the world finally caught up […]

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Jonathan Franzen’s ‘Freedom’: Enjoy the amusing Washington novel inside

As if the stolen glasses weren’t enough, Jonathan Franzen is in the news for not making the final cut in the National Book Awards. I myself have mixed feelings about Freedom, but mostly like it. Granted, events and outcomes happen with a little assist from coincidence. But you can accuse Dickens of the same. What’s […]

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The Washington Post, Sally Quinn and the Mink Stole Ladies: How much VIP-watching is too much?

How closely should the world follow VIP journalists and politicians and—for that matter—celebrities in general? “Newspapers spend too much time explaining themselves.” So  said Marcus Brauchli, executive editor of the Washington Post; and a media watcher even gave the pronouncement a name—the Brauchi Doctrine. Look, Marcus. Your paper is in decline for the moment despite […]

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Sally Quinn’s ‘Party’ column dropped from print: Shades of LBJ’s Hoover surprise for her husband?

LBJ was about to replace J. Edgar Hoover as FBI director when word leaked to Newsweek. So what did the White House do to spite the Ben Bradlee, then at Newsweek’s Washington bureau? Reappoint Hoover, of course. Now the reverse has happened in a sense to Sally Quinn, Bradlee’s wife and doyenne of the Georgetown […]

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