Snowspinner wrote
Not going to go into the bulk of this here, but I
think this is the heart
of the disagreement here - yes, the Cambridge degree and the de Man
controversy are, from an academic perspective, largely gossip. But
they're gossip that has generated a tremendous amount of generalist
interest, and it's irresponsible of us not to focus on them.
Agenda slip! Agenda slip!
I mean, 'populist' is _not_ necessarily well written. Jimbo's point about
the Gates and Fonda articles was not that that they were arcane and
highbrow, but that they were done in such a poor style that you wouldn't
want to tread in them, let alone read in them.
_Just adding in 'what everyone knows'_ to an article does not make for good
writing. This is entirely clear with celebs. It is trivially easy to
research stuff about high-profile people and munge it all together. That's
the enemy here.
So, I think 'irresponsible' is off-beam here.
Charles