Maddow and Malcolm

Talk show host and commentator Rachel Maddow. All of the am 1090 Progressive Talk (am1090seattle.com) hosts (from Air America and Nova M Radio) held a 3 hour town meeting in Seattle. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

From Vanity Fair:

Janet Malcolm’s most famous (notorious?) work involved journalist Joe McGinniss, the author of Fatal Vision, his account of Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald, convicted of killing his wife and daughters. There will be no sense of trust betrayed in a very solid Rachel Maddow profile in The New Yorker.

It’s inescapably engaging and offers a sense of a self-constructed high-wire that Maddow labors on with great intellectual honesty each evening via a long opening monologue that makes Sean Hannity’s opening a virtual tweet. Maddow is refreshingly candid about the perils of it all, as well as her own personal demons, such as depression. She’s reached the point where celebrity, and her likely encirclement by admirers and sycophants, can bring a distinct homogeneity to interview responses and a self-indulgence to one’s work. But even if you’re not a fan, take a look and you might be won over.

BongReads: Janet Malcolm Editon

There is not a writer out there who's better at producing work that simultaneously elucidates its subject and interrogates its own form than Janet Malcolm, the reporter and critic who writes primarily for The New Yorker and happens to be my favorite writer in the universe.

Malcolm literally wrote the book on journalism — The Journalist and the Murderer, which since its 1990 release, has become a staple of Journalism 101 syllabi — by slyly scoffing at its conventions, breaking the rules so that she may point out the artificiality of the form. Her prose is acerbic, able to cut her subjects (often overeducated egotistical man-babies who more than probably deserve whatever snark's coming to them) down to size in half a line. She inserts herself into her stories, discussing her processes and impressions in a way that makes each piece about its own construction as much as it's about the actual subject. And, unlike many of the journalists who take her to task for her contradictions, she's uninterested in befriending her subjects, instead using their foibles to point out the weaknesses and outright failures of the institutions that her subjects represent. All of this is to say that she's everything a journalist ought to strive to be — honest, discursive, fearless, and fair in her own unique ways.

So without further adieu, here's a selection of my favorite pieces Janet Malcolm has written for The New Yorker. They are all long, and together they will break your brain.

Rachel Maddow: Trump's TV Nemesis (2017)

To paraphrase Biggie, Malcolm dropped unexpectedly like bird shit on Monday with a new piece in tow, a profile of Rachel Maddow which on its surface seems to fawn over the MSNBC star but that, when we peel back a layer or two, becomes something much more complicated. As Malcolm sees it, Maddow is less a commentator and more of a rhetorical magician. By unsuccessfully mimicking Maddow's methods in an unexpected left turn towards the piece's conclusion, she both exposes her trick as something specious and only tangentially tied to the truth while praising the skill required to pull it off.


Somebody not so happy:

"Her performance and those of the actors in the commercials merge into one delicious experience of TV."

Dearest darlings, it's delicious! Delicious all the way down! 

Be honest just this once! Doesn't that sound exactly like the type of experience we liberals have mocked, for many decades, as the quintessentially dumbnified "Amerikan" TV experience? Doesn't it seem that something is odd, off, peculiar, wrong when we find this peculiar experience lauded in our brainiest high-end magazine?

We aren't quite finished with our account of what our best writer said in that third paragraph. In that third paragraph, she makes statements about the Maddow Show which echo the things we ourselves have long said—but she's praising the show as she makes these remarks, while we have long offered these assessments as condemnations....

The Canister Apology