We Don't Like Your Altitude
We Don't
Like Your Altitude
One of our goals at
Slate
is to provide what we call "intelligent synthesis" of the
news of the week. Through features such as "Frame Game" (see
William Saletan's analysis of the dismissal of the Paula Jones lawsuit), we
hope to provide a deeper understanding than a conventional news summary would
enable, but without the time-wasting encrustation of quotations and anecdotes
that clogs the typical newspaper or magazine story.
We like to think that in our
small way, we're having some influence on the conventional media, too. For
example, a few days ago, the New
York
Times ran this
headline: "Plane's Altitude Blamed in Crash That Killed 33." There, in
remarkably few words, the Times gets to the essence of a complicated
story. Altitude problems caused the crash! What more, after all, does one need
to know? Pedants may quibble that the problem was, more precisely, a lack of
altitude, but that is a small point. The larger conceptual breakthrough is the
Times ' discovery of the single factor--altitude, or the lack
thereof--that can explain all plane crashes past and future. Solve the altitude
problem, and no one need fear boarding an airplane ever again.
We who
write headlines as part of our jobs are used to being underappreciated for the
contribution we make to human betterment. We are ordinarily happy to labor in
anonymity: No one ever gets a byline for a headline, however brilliant. But
this is a special case. Some toiler on the Times copy desk has completed
the great work begun by the Wright Brothers. They lifted humankind up; he or
she has figured out how to keep us there. It all depends on having the right
altitude. Surely a Pulitzer is called for, if not a Nobel.
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We'll be
trying a few new editorial features next week. Watch out for them:
As announced last week,
"International Papers" is now attached to the Tuesday and Friday e-mail
deliveries of "Today's Papers." And starting in a couple of days, your Monday
morning delivery of Today's Papers will include our fruitcake of the Sunday
Washington talk shows, "Pundit Central." To sign up (or to sign up again if you
were cut off during the sign-up process), click here.
We invited Gertrude
Himmelfarb, the historian, to exchange e-mail for a week with journalist Andrew
Sullivan about whatever struck them as interesting in the news that day.
Himmelfarb (who is married to Irving Kristol, the neoconservative thinker)
tortured us by saying it sounded like a good conversation over the breakfast
table--which is just what we have in mind--but that she'd rather keep her own
views to her own breakfast table. Damn. But that did give us a name for this
experimental dialogue--"The Breakfast Table"--and we did line up Nation
columnist Katha Pollitt, who is no mean consolation prize, to share
cyberkrispies with Sullivan starting Wednesday, April 8. And we hope neither
the vigorously conservative Himmelfarb nor the vigorously left-wing Pollitt is
offended at the notion that they are what used to be called "moral
equivalents."
"Chatterbox," our frequently
updated column of gossip, speculation, scuttlebutt, and philosophical
reflection on politics, has been so popular that we're initiating "Culturebox,"
a similar feature on, well, culture. We define culture broadly to include
almost anything except Monica Lewinsky, who is adequately covered, we hope, by
Chatterbox.
--Michael Kinsley
