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    Tina Brown Scoops

    Posted Wednesday, October 29, 2008 5:15 PM | By Sara Mosle
    In Rachael's battle between who is speaking more truth to power--Elaine Lafferty or Christopher Buckley--I think the real winner may be Tina Brown. Both articles by Lafferty and Buckley, which have inspired a lot of Web chatter, appeared in Brown's new Web site, the Daily Beast (named after the news outlet in Evelyn Waugh's novel Scoop.) Brown, of course, famously saved or ruined The New Yorker, depending on your point of view, in the early 1990s, after she created the still-successful formula for Vanity Fair. I worked at The New Yorker, briefly, during her reign and was among those who felt she was often unfairly maligned because of her sex. Rosa's insight--that pretty women are typically more successful than their less attractive counterparts but also punished more harshly when they fail--seemed to apply a lot to Brown at the time and may explain why she was eventually drawn to the subject of Diana, Princess of Wales (and is now working on a book about Hillary and Bill). In fact, many of the writers that define the current New Yorker are ones Brown hired and first brought to national prominence: among them, Lawrence Wright, Anthony Lane, John Cassidy, Malcolm Gladwell, Phillip Gourevitch, Larissa MacFarquhar, and David Remnick himself (who became her successor). One of my personal favorites of Brown's discoveries was Nancy Franklin, then a staff editor at the magazine. Previous male bosses had overlooked Franklin's considerable talents. Brown, however, saw a natural wit and born writer and promoted Franklin to critic, a post she still winningly occupies.

    Brown had a keen appreciation of the sexism that surrounded her--especially the ways women were expected to work like dogs (as Brown did) while many of the men got to lounge around being "intellectuals." Upon learning I grew up in Texas, she once joked to me that she loved Texas men because unlike most of her male literary peers in New York, they were still man enough to flirt with her. In today's political vernacular, Texas men were "dudes," unintimidated by a woman who is both attractive and powerful. Brown's quip offered a brief glimpse into how sexually isolating it can be to be a fiercely intelligent woman. (I think this explains, in part, why otherwise seemingly smart women, especially of Hillary's generation, sometimes ended up with the Bills of the world: Bill was probably the first guy sexually acquisitive enough not to be put off by Hillary's own brains and star power.) I wonder if, at the Daily Beast, Brown hasn't found her natural home. She's surrounded by a younger generation of web-savvy male and female editors more used to smart, assertive women, and she always did love the outrageous, counterintuitive piece on which blogs depend. I, for one, am glad to have her back, mixing it up.
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