Slate (no spoilers, only brief TRP reference)

[Bill Millard]

Hi again, Murthy:

These I should consider in reverse order.

> PS: I cc'ed to pynchon-l a copy of my previous mail to you (just to
> publicize Stale on the list, really). So please be sure to forward
> your reply to the list also, if you want to.

Good idea; thanks.  I've just retrieved it & posted it.

> You left out slate's penchant for meta-crit: I think they refer to art,
> culture and political events only so that they can talk about (and one
> up) what other magazines are saying. 

This strikes me as a potentially useful function, a kind of 
commentary that could give readers something of real value -- if only 
the Slaters were better at it, less inclined to sneer at the 
competition.  

Obligatory disclaimer: Slate's idea of "metanews," as MK mentioned in
an early editorial, in fact comes awfully close to (i.e., is
identical to) a term I coined for 21stC's media analysis department,
back during our initial brainstorming sessions about what form our
publication would take.  Our Metanews feature has been online since
our first issue, Spring 1995, discussing how research-related stories
are handled in the press.  I don't bear them a grudge about this
overlap: the internal logic of the term makes its independent coinage
by two parties (or maybe more) completely plausible, and MK by all
reports (including mutual acquaintances in his field) is far too
ethical a journalist to 'borrow' an idea from a tiny research
magazine at a university... and in any event I'm sure we're just too
obscure to have been a source for this.  Still, I tend to view
Slate's metacommentaries as practicing, on a much larger scale,
something similar to something we do here, and occasionally, even,
to think "there but for the grace of huge quantities of Bill Gates's
money go I" . . . .

> Another big turn-off is the
> mindless and banal unconventionality just to be different from anyone
> else. It's like the evil twin of Time and Newsweek - anyday now I expect
> to see a slate article titled: "Oxygen: why it may not be as good for
> you as you think". Although I won't see it as I stopped reading slate a
> few months ago :-). But it sure is a good place to get an idea of what
> the national media are obsessing about this week.

Love the "Oxygen" headline -- and I'll footnote you as the very
prescient source when it inevitably appears somewhere.  This
contrarianism is definitely a practice worth objecting to.  New
Republic, back when I read it regularly, was often guilty of the
same perverse tendency; maybe they still are.  Corporate-funded junk
science (e.g. studies that claim global warming is mythical,
tobacco's harm is unproven, etc.) thrives on this mindset.  And
pointless contrarianism in academic writing -- especially among the
theory-drunk francophile pseudoleft -- is practically mandatory:
come up with a clever enough 'trick reading' of a text, contort one's
logic strangely enough, and someone somewhere, perhaps a journal
editor or even a tenure committee, will think it's brilliant (and
this is how I'd describe the Alan Sokal "quantum gravity" incident in
a nutshell -- Sokal knew exactly what sort of wool could be pulled
over certain eyes -- but that's a whole separate topic for
digressions, best left alone here).  

I'd better leave off & get back to Work before I start provoking 
Flames (if that hasn't happened already), closing with the thought 
that Slate Writers and others would do well to emulate our good 
Jeremiah Dixon in assuming a combative and contrarian Tone only when 
there's a sound Reason for't, grounded in Common-Sense and a good 
clear Conscience,-- elements quite different, and readily 
distinguishable, from foppish Posing and narcissistick 
Self-Regard....

--Bill

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Bill Millard, Editor
21stC: The World of Research at Columbia
millard at cuadmin.cis.columbia.edu
212/854-9474
fax 854-9476
online edition: www.21stC.org
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