Dear NYT: how can an ‘almost forgotten magazine’ also have ‘the largest paid circulation in the world’??

That’s what I asked on Twitter this morning, after reading an article they penned on the history of Reader’s Digest.

I also congratulated the Times on the sentence in the same story about an “exhibit that opened on February 13 and runs through January.”

Anyhow, James Fulford was inspired by my tweet, and the Times story, to post an uncharacteristically accurate observation made by Susan Sontag back in 1982.

Which in turn reminds me of my favorite bit in this instant classic — John Podhoretz’s memorial to his recently deceased friend, Arnold Beichman:

Arnold’s great issue was anti-Communism; it was the animating intellectual and political force in his life, and he was wise and tough and immensely knowledgeable and completely without illusions and totally without fear of the views of those who claimed his passion was vulgar and overheated. He knew evil when he saw it and he called it by its name…