Timothy Noah and Marjorie Williams

Well, technically speaking, your indifference to the financial news is your dirty little secret, not ours. But I digress.

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I like your Gates idea a lot. One other name I hear: the divine Adam Gopnick, supposedly a Newhouse favorite. But it's hard to believe a writer who seems so blissfully guided by his own sensibility has the makings of a happy editor.

Thanks for pointing out to me Salon's collection of famous-people comments on Tina's departure. Can Jamaica Kincaid really have said "It will be a joy to watch her decline.... I hope that Mr. Shawn, wherever he is, is happy. I will dance on her grave for him"?? Yow. I guess their relationship had some little problems.

Okay, no more New Yorker for me. On the GOP-hopefuls account, I note Al Hunt's column in today's Wall Street Journal, which is the first harbinger of Texas Gov. George W. Bush's impending decline as putative frontrunner. I hate this stage of a campaign, in which the boys engage in the entirely fictional exercise of pumping up and then discovering the weaknesses of candidates whom not a single voter will even notice for another year at the earliest. (To make matters worse, this early primary is conducted entirely in sports metaphor.) At the moment, the favored art form is to divide the hopefuls (as Hunt does) into tiers: One (Bush, Alexander, Forbes, possibly Elizabeth Dole or Newt Gingrich or Pat Buchanan), Two (McCain, Quayle, possibly Sen. John Ashcroft or Rep. John Kasich), and Three (Alan Keyes, Gary Bauer, New Hampshire's windy Sen. Bob Smith). The longer I live in Washington and write about politics, the more I'm reluctantly inclined to think that normal people's indifference to the whole show makes human sense.

Jadedly,

Marjorie

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