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