"I had some dim intuitive feeling that what was wrong with all journalism is that the reporter tended to be objective and that that was one of the great lies of all time."

Said Norman Mailer, quoted in this subscribers-only article by Louis Menand in The New Yorker. As Menand puts it, Mailer "made the way in which events are reported part of what is reported."

ADDED: You could say something similar about law: I had some dim intuitive feeling that what was wrong with all judicial opinions is that the judge tended to be objective and that that was one of the great lies of all time. But what then? No judge can switch to writing the judicial equivalent of New Journalism.

(20 years ago, I tried to write about this problem, here (PDF) — with some quotes from Mailer's "Executioner's Song.")

AND: From that link, above, on New Journalism, which goes to Wikipedia:

How and when the term New Journalism began to refer to a genre is not clear....

But wherever and whenever the term arose, there is evidence of some literary experimentation in the early 1960s, as when Norman Mailer broke away from fiction to write Superman Comes to the Supermarket. A report of John F. Kennedy's nomination that year, the piece established a precedent which Mailer would later build on in his 1968 convention coverage (Miami and the Siege of Chicago) and in other nonfiction as well.

And here, you can read the full text of "Superman Comes to the Supermarket" (at the Esquire website, Esquire having once been a monumentally important magazine). It begins:

For once let us try to think about a political convention without losing ourselves in housing projects of fact and issue. Politics has its virtues, all too many of them -- it would not rank with baseball as a topic of conversation if it did not satisfy a great many things -- but one can suspect that its secret appeal is close to nicotine. Smoking cigarettes insulates one from one’s life, one does not feel as much, often happily so, and politics quarantines one from history; most of the people who nourish themselves in the political life are in the game not to make history but to be diverted from the history which is being made.

Convenient sidebar chez Esquire: 



Are we doomed? Did you go to my link and read the sentences that followed those 3 mindbendingly interesting sentences that began "Superman Comes to the Supermarket," or did you go over to click through to the explanation of why Miss Johansson in the sexiest woman alive (or what a "brutally frank" 98-year-old woman might say about sex)?

Rap Genius explains "Everything Rush Limbaugh Gets Wrong..."

"... about Beyonce."

Fine. I agree that he misunderstood the lyrics of the new song "Bow Down Bitches." (Limbaugh thought Beyonce was advising women to bow down to their men, but Beyonce was advising women to bow down to Beyonce.)

But you don't understand that he's only talking about Beyonce to get what he calls "low information voter" to pay attention to his show, which he explains here:

This Beyonce thing has just blown way out of proportion. Normally, I would let this go. It's pop culture, but, as you know, we're in the middle here of a vast outreach to low-information voters and this is right up their alley. It is a golden opportunity here.  You're just gonna have to trust me on this. Stick with me on this. I'll try to get through this as quickly as we can. It isn't health care. It's not Obamacare.  We're not going to be talking about any of that. We're talking about what low-information voters are talking about today....

The Drive-Bys do not like me venturing outside of my own area of expertise.... They are not going to allow me into pop culture. They are not going to allow me access to low-information voters. They are afraid of that. So there are all kinds of efforts out now to discredit me on this Beyonce story which, between you and me, I could give a rip. But it's all part of the low-information outreach.

This "low-information outreach" has been going on for months.  Here's the place, in yesterday's show, where Rush throws out another huge chunk of bait for people who don't much care about important economic and political issues but will, like Rap Genius, engage over the right pop culture tidbit. In this new bait, Limbaugh claims that — via some old parody song — he's "The Father of 'Chop and Screw.'"

Is Rap Genius going to write another long column in Esquire explaining, in words and pictures, how Rush Limbaugh is actually not the Father of Chop and Screw? That would be taking Rush's bait, but it's probably also in Rap Genius and Esquire's interest to publicly heartily chomp on this bait. Everybody can win, I say, as I link to both Rush and Rap Genuis/Esquire, who presumably want, more than anything else, traffic.