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December 02, 2004

These Kids at The New Yorker Have No Sense of History

by Ron Hogan

It's not so much that the folks running the "Briefly Noted" section reviewed Robert Gottlieb's "brief but energetic" biography of George Balanchine but didn't even mention Terry Teachout's concurrently published book on the same subject. That is surprising, but since my objectivity about Teachout is somewhat constricted by acquaintance, I can't really speak to that. No, what really shocks is that nowhere in the paragraph devoted to the book does the anonymous reviewer acknowledge Gottlieb's five-year tenure as the magazine's editor.

Comments

They just assumed we knew that Gottlieb was a former editor. I adore the New Yorker, but it seems to be run under the assumption that its readers are well-versed in its storied history. Rarely does an issue go by in which they don't blithely drop the name of a former New Yorker luminary or two.

Posted by: Max at December 2, 2004 11:31 PM
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