"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)?

"Reese Witherspoon, Scarlett Johansson and Jessica Chastain among the front-runners to play Hillary Clinton in 'Rodham.'"

"Rodham - about the younger years of the former First Lady and senator..."

"Rodham"... based on a true story. That reminds me: When I was a kid, I thought "Rodan" was based on a true story. Here's the 1957 trailer. I was 6 years old and could not discern the difference between that and the news:



"Nothing escapes this monstrous beast of evil."

Bill Richardson says "maybe I’m a Neanderthal" and "Scarlett Johansson is beautiful."

On "Meet the Press" yesterday, there was a panel discussion about Obama's saying that Kamala Harris "happens to be by far the best looking attorney general in the country," and the lumbering, bumbling former governor of New Mexico came out with this:

You know, maybe I’m a Neanderthal, but I thought that the president’s comment was harmless. It was a political speech. He talked about her accomplishments, he talked about her competence. And then he threw in that line, you know, you are at a political event. What are you going to read her resume? So my point is this, you know, political correctness has reached a point, you know, it’s out of control. Am I going to be criticized for instance if I say that a movie star like Scarlett Johansson is beautiful? Are they going to go after me? Probably.

Does anyone really feel like going after Richardson? We were watching the show yesterday, and when he said this, I just laughed. I said something like: Why do they even have Richardson on the show? Why doesn't he know better than to go on and display himself like this?

Scarlett Johansson is beautiful... Bill Richardson is dumb.... What else is obvious?

(By the way, did you notice that Richardson went to North Korea this past January?)

"Scarlett Johansson Nude Photo Hacker Sentenced to 10 Years in Prison."

10 years?!