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Caldwell and Shulevitz

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from: Judith Shulevitz

Deep Dish

Posted Thursday, Nov. 19, 1998, at 11:32 AM ET

Dear Chris,

As my personal culture hero, Preston Sturges, would say: That was some deep dish! I've actually never read Walter Lippmann, but he sure sounds like a smart feller.

His/your observation about journalists believing themselves to be the Fourth Branch of government reminds me of a theory I've heard about why the Clinton-hating by even liberal members of the Washington press corps achieved, early on, such an irrational pitch. It also explains why they hate Sidney Blumenthal. It goes back, in a sense, to sex: Clinton seduced and abandoned them, as he does everybody. More than one liberal journalist who covered the 1992 campaign has been heard to reminisce about how wonderfully he thought it would all turn out, how he thought there was a new Camelot in the works. Probe deeper and you discover that Clinton hinted broadly to each of them that they'd be members of his kitchen cabinet, the way James "Scotty" Reston and Phil Graham were for JFK. You can almost conjure up what happened: The National Seducer looked deep into their eyes and told them exactly what they wanted to hear. One journalist was even making plans to move to DC! Of course, Clinton followed through on none of it--except with Sid Blumenthal.

Anyway, as the impeachment hearings progress and I fail to watch them--we have no working TV or radio in this office; Michael Kinsley, take note--I'd like to talk about the National Book Awards, which I was supposed to attend last night but missed for reasons too boring to explain. As a former book review editor, what do you think? I'm happy to see Robert Stone lose to Alice McDermott, though I confess I've never read her either, or even thought I had to. I have read Stone, and think he's wildly overrated--portentous, hackneyed, a sort of parodic caricature of a kind of macho American writing I actually rather like in its non-parodic form. The Tom Wolfe book I thought was great fun to read but not great literature. (Wanna give us a taste of your forthcoming review?) I further confess that I'm in the school that holds that the NBA committee's failure to nominate Philip Roth's I Married a Communist and Ron Chernow's really astonishing biography of John D. Rockefeller Sr., Titan , casts a poor light on the proceedings. As for the non-fiction winner, Ed Ball's Slaves in the Family, Slate panned it, which just goes to show that even if the American public agrees with me on Clinton, I'm not in the mainstream after all.

Two more questions: Did you see that fabulous article about batteries in the Times' "Circuits" section? The gist of it was that batteries are the weak link in the chain holding the information age together--while microprocessor manufacturers have shrunk the size of chips and doubled and tripled and quadrupled their performance, battery manufacturers have gotten virtually nowhere in their efforts to improve their product, because chemistry is harder to streamline than chip technology. This is why, the faster and more powerful your laptop gets, the more certain it is your battery will fail you at the worst possible moment. It was the kind of piece I love--the kind that explains the little daily frustrations that get magnified by your not understanding why you have to endure them. Haven't you had a battery go dead at some utterly inconvenient moment and found yourself thinking that you just don't know why they can't make a better battery? Now you do!

Second question, or set thereof: Do you think Dennis Rodman really got married in Vegas this weekend or what? Is that Carmen Electra chick just a golddigger or is Rodman's manager, who's been going around saying she dragged Rodman to a chapel while he was falling-down drunk, jealous?

Best,
Judith

the breakfast table
entries
123456789101112131415
from: Judith Shulevitz

Deep Dish

Posted Thursday, Nov. 19, 1998, at 11:32 AM ET
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Christopher Caldwell is a senior writer at the Weekly Standard. Judith Shulevitz is the New York editor of Slate.
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