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the breakfast table: An e-mail conversation about the news of the day.

Daphne Merkin and Christopher Caldwell

the breakfast table
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from: Christopher Caldwell

One Paper of Record, With a Tabloid Chaser

Posted Monday, July 12, 1999, at 10:22 AM ET

Dear Daphne,

For some people, it might be a mere convention to use "Breakfast Table" to describe an exchange that runs all day long. Not for me. I start the day in a fog that doesn't lift until ... oh, roughly the time I leave work. Everything works backwards. My days are relaxing, idle, chatty. Come Miller Time, I'm finally ready to settle down to work. The dream husband!

Two things have wrecked my daytime concentration. First is Washington's capricious smoking laws (not as bad as yours, I'll grant), which leave one's brain shutting down at the most awkward possible times:

("The ambassador will see you now, Mr. Caldwell."
"Um, in a sec. Tell him I'm just going to take a walk around the block.")

Second is the lack of a tabloid newspaper, which makes it impossible to really read the papers through. For some reason, you can read a tabloid and a "paper of record" in less time than you can read just the paper of record, and get more out of it. I think I figured out why when I was living in Boston. A Globe story like "Keverian Lays Out Revenue Estimates for Utility Hike"--how can you read that? But if you've already read Howie Carr's Herald column ("Fatso Wants More Pork for His Pals"), then you can read through a story on the legislation as if it were a novel.

Tabloids actually bring balance to the news, restoring to it an inherent passion that other papers purge. This bloodlessness becomes something of a mission. In this morning's Washington Post, for instance, correspondent Leonard Shapiro--in Pamplona for the Running of the Bulls on the 100th anniversary of Hemingway's birth--alluded to animal-rights politics before adding: "But that is hardly the most troubling element of this so-called religious festival that has become an excuse for a massive display of public drunkenness and boorish behavior."

Next to such lugubriousness, the New York Times reads like a love letter. I particularly liked this morning's front-page story on Pedro Martínez, "A Maestro of the Mound, Working on a Symphony." Is that a sports headline, or what? There is a kind of bardic language that all sports fans speak, unself-consciously. I remember reading an article on ex-Bruins great Phil Esposito on the Boston subway. A guy tapped me on the shoulder "They shoulda never got rid of Espo. He was a real master craftsman in the slot."

The only place outside of sports where there's such a tendency among nonspecialists to echo specialists' jargon and metaphors is politics. Last week I followed Hillary Clinton around upstate New York for a longish piece. I'd ask people in diners and on street corners what they though about her. And some retired nurse would say, "Her education message sounds poll-driven, but a large ad buy could give it some resonance among swing voters." But you're the New Yorker here: Any thoughts on Hillary?

Best,
Chris

the breakfast table
entries
12345678910111213141516
from: Christopher Caldwell

One Paper of Record, With a Tabloid Chaser

Posted Monday, July 12, 1999, at 10:22 AM ET
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Daphne Merkin is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she writes "Reckonings," a column on personal and cultural life. She is the author of Dreaming of Hitler, a collection of essays (click hereto buy the book). Christopher Caldwell is a senior writer at the Weekly Standard and a columnist for the New York Press.
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