A firm grasp

Bari Weiss has written a pompous self-admiring letter to the New York Times explaining why she is awesome and the Times is pathetic so she quits so there.

I joined the paper with gratitude and optimism three years ago. I was hired with the goal of bringing in voices that would not otherwise appear in your pages: first-time writers, centrists, conservatives and others who would not naturally think of The Times as their home.

Wait a second. Why would the Times want to bring in first-time writers? Why would it be a bad thing that first-time writers would not otherwise appear in the paper? Why isn’t it just obvious that first-time writers don’t just get to appear in the Times as a matter of right, or quotas, or filling a gap? The Times is top of the ladder, and beginners don’t usually get to the top of the ladder just by asking. You kind of have to climb it.

The reason for this effort was clear: The paper’s failure to anticipate the outcome of the 2016 election meant that it didn’t have a firm grasp of the country it covers.

Did it? Did it really mean that? Let’s not forget that Trump only just squeaked through, and that he lost the popular vote by 3 million, and that Comey had more to do with the squeaking through than anything about “the country” – i.e. the populist rage BW wants us to think of when she talks of “a firm grasp.”

The priority in Opinion was to help redress that critical shortcoming.

Listen, Thomas Friedman has been there for decades. What more do you want?

The paper of record is, more and more, the record of those living in a distant galaxy, one whose concerns are profoundly removed from the lives of most people. This is a galaxy in which, to choose just a few recent examples, the Soviet space program is lauded for its “diversity”; the doxxing of teenagers in the name of justice is condoned; and the worst caste systems in human history includes the United States alongside Nazi Germany.

On that one I genuinely don’t understand her point. She appears to be saying the US has not ever had or been one of “the worst caste systems in human history”…but why? The caste system we had was appalling. It didn’t include Auschwitz, that’s certainly true, but on the other hand it lasted a lot longer than 12 years.

So anyway, she’s left the Times, and bets are being placed on what her new gig is.

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