Word: reader
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Preposterous? Absolutely. Yet there is virtually no factual claim in Lifton's book that is not supported by the public record or his own interviews, many of them with the lowly hospital and military bystanders whom official probes had overlooked. Even the reader who does not accept Best Evidence's sensational conclusions-and there is no logical reason for doing so-is likely to admit that Lifton has turned up intriguing new evidence of some strange doings with Kennedy's body in the twelve hours following the shooting. The reports by the Bethesda corpsmen, Custer and David...
Closer to home, the problems are often more mundane-but no less thorny. Last spring a reader asked Landers if toilet paper should unroll over or under the spool. Landers said under; thousands of readers wrote in to set her straight. Sniffed one: "Obviously you do not use the expensive kind of toilet paper with decals." No column was more painful than the one that appeared on July...
...magazine in which the reader is only an onlooker has to be pretty special, and The New Yorker is. Too special for many, who dislike its cozy affectations and mannerisms. But those who do admire it, or who once did, regard it as the gathering place of the best writing and cartooning in America, a final arbiter of sophistication. With such feelings, the current magazine generates two kinds of strong responses: an admiration that comes close to uncritical leniency, or an angry sense of betrayal that it has become windier, more boring, less inspired and more complacent than it once...
...smiles: "If it did come up, I'm afraid we'd do it.") He recognizes that some pieces are "so special, so idiosyncratic" that few will read them, but sighs: "If I think it's good, I have no right not to offer it to the reader." Other readers, turning page after page, can feel like trapped eavesdroppers to a long and abstruse private conversation. It is no longer a browsing magazine for the casual reader. Those long pieces demand a reader's application, and he is sometimes rewarded, as in a two-part series...
...anticipation among the staff of a transition that will have to come. After 28 years of Shawn's dominance, a new editor will undoubtedly favor different writers, show less interest in some of Shawn's pet subjects, introduce other tastes. Might he even decide that the general reader can be taken into account, just a teeny bit, without jeopardizing the integrity of the writer? Might he change the magazine drastically? Discussions usually end with writers reassuring one another that the magazine's habits and attitudes are now safely institutionalized. At heart, The New Yorker is very pleased...