June 27, 2007
From the desk of Jane Galt:Best thing I've read all day week month year
Ezra on Thomas Friedman:
It's of course inevitable that Tom Friedman would fall solidly under the spell of a book entitled "How." The man is a human airport nonfiction table -- he can't help himself. Give him a single-word title with an overeager thesis and he's set.
He has captured the man's essence in a single, well crafted sentence. It's like how primitive islanders used to believe that a camera could steal your soul. Ezra Klein: soul stealer!
Okay, don't look at that metaphor too closely.
Here's me on Tom Friedman, a while back.
Posted by Jane Galt at June 27, 2007 9:47 AM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound linksFriedman - Overdrive on LSD...he can't help it, things keep morphing into other images even as he speaks. If you like clarity, don't read it.
Ezra did hit a good, concise descriptive.
Taibbi doesn't seem to much like those morphing analogies, and they ARE pretty wearisome. However, maybe he wrote his piece before there was such a thing as Pay TV?
Taibbi's takedown of "The World Is Flat" is even funnier:
http://www.nypress.com/18/16/news&columns/taibbi.cfm
I realize that columnists get more autonomy than reporters, but does that mean their submissions go completely unedited? How is it that this well-publicized flaw in Friedman's writing keeps appearing? If I were his editor the first thing my red pen would be circling would be these notorious metaphors.
Speaking of the airport nonfiction table (of which I am a big fan of), why do most non-fiction books these days seem to be titled:
"(blank): the story of some trivial little thing and how it controls the world"
Any book people care to comment?
Klug,
"Should Have Been Remaindered: how the airport nonfiction book table came to control the world of thought"
Thanks for the link to the Taibbi piece. That is funny stuff. Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Black Swan) would label Friedman's schtick "narrative bias". Friedman lays down a narrative that appeals so the 110 IQ crowd, and they eat it up. Dude knows his audience. The challenge here is coming up with a better explanation with wider appeal. Rise to it.
I used to see blog posts all the time, referring me to something by Friedman, as insightful, definitive, whatever. Then the results of that Lexis/Nexis search showed up, the one where every 3 months Friedman said "The next 3 months will tell the tale in Iraq." But 3 months later, he never said what the tale was. Instead, he said "The next 3 months will tell the tale."
Since then, I don't see blog posts referring me to Friedman any more. Is it just me, or have others noticed that?
Comments are Closed.