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(465 words; posted Saturday, Jan. 4; to be composted Saturday, Jan. 11)
And They Lived Happily Ever After
Readers of SLATE's "Diary" column (written this week by our poetry editor, Robert Pinsky) are often plunged into the melodrama of someone else's daily life. Will playwright Wendy Wasserstein ever have breakfast with her mother? (She put it off throughout her week on "Diary" duty, finally succumbing Friday.) Will the contractor ever finish the renovation work on novelist Cynthia Ozick's house? Because this is real life and not fiction, sometimes the week comes to an end without the expected cathartic resolution. In Ms. Ozick's case, she also feels bad that SLATE readers may have been left thinking ill of her contractor long after she and he had resolved their differences. So Ms. Ozick has supplied a real-life happy ending to her diary, which we have added to in "The Compost."
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Old Wine in New Bottles
Speaking of "The Compost," it has undergone a renovation itself, which ought to make it a more joyous experience--both for general rummaging and for finding a specific past SLATE article. You can now request a list of articles by a specific author or from a specific SLATE department. (For that matter, you can request articles from other publications, both online and offline, but we won't give them to you.) SLATE's entire past content, back to our first issue in the hazy distant past of June 1996, is available in the archive. No matter how long our articles stay in "The Compost," they never turn into mulch.
Our skeptical article this week about Amazon.com (CAUTION: The link is to our piece, not to their site) notes that the online bookstore has enjoyed gushing press coverage. The article also notes, somewhat haughtily, that Amazon (OK, it's them this time), like other Web businesses, keeps a file of laudatory clips on its site. SLATE, of course, does not indulge in such a vulgar, immodest practice. We would never dream, for example, of thrusting on our readers that People magazine article listing us as one of the top 10 Web developments of 1996. So you'll just have to take our word for it. We only know about it ourselves, naturally, because of Christmas-season delays in supermarket checkout lines. Nor will we, for that matter, reproduce the similar article in Time magazine that failed to include SLATE but did include Amazon. An oversight, no doubt. Not that we care. Who picks up Time in the supermarket checkout line? Anyway, we're not envious. Not at all. We're way beyond that sort of thing. When we asked Bill Gates what to do about SLATE being left out of Time's list, he did say, "Have them killed." But, unsure whether he was referring to the editors of Time or the editors of SLATE, we decided to let that one pass.
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