Joe Queenan’s huge glass house

The print version New York Times Book Review has been reformatted, with the curious decision to remove even the one-sentence summary of the book reviewer’s bona fides (they’re still on the online version, however). This is too bad, as it would prove most useful in assessing Joe Queenan’s review of A.J. Jacobs’ The Know-It-All. Queenan trashes the book, and from the excerpted portions, it sounds like he’s got a decent case to make. However, Queenan is aiming at a larger target:

[E]ven after allegedly reading the encyclopedia, Jacobs still doesn’t know who Samuel Beckett is, an admission that is almost criminally stupid, even for someone who has written for Entertainment Weekly. A graduate of the prestigious Dalton School in Manhattan and Brown University, Jacobs is a prime example of that curiously modern innovation: the pedigreed simpleton. Blithely confessing to Brobdingnagian gaps in his knowledge even before he started reading the encyclopedia, Jacobs seems unaware that without some sort of mentor to shield him from his staggering lack of sophistication, he will seem more ignorant when his self-improvement project is over than when it began. Jacobs’s biggest problem isn’t that he doesn’t know much; it’s that he doesn’t realize how much educated people do know. There’s just no two ways about it — people who read Marcel Proust and Bertrand Russell instead of Entertainment Weekly actually do learn stuff…. Far from becoming the smartest man in the world, Jacobs, at the end of his foolish enterprise, wouldn’t even be the smartest person at Entertainment Weekly Not even the great Flaubert could devise a condemnation harsher than that. (emphases added).

There’s probably a lot of insider information about the cultural mediasphere that I’m missing out on (paging Jeff Jarvis), but what on earth is Queenan’s beef with Entertainment Weekly? Jacobs now works (as a senior editor) at Esquire, but Queenan somehow shoehorns three mentions of EW into the piece. Did Jacobs beat out Queenan for a writing gig there or something? This is niggling, but as someone who’s read both Bertrand Russell and is an avid consumer of Entertainment Weekly, I’m genuinely puzzled by Queenan’s hostility. It would be like erroneously blasting watchers of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and assuming that this is where they get all of their political knowledge. In point of fact, Daily Show viewers are better informed than other viewers — not because they watch The Daily Show, but because they gravitate to that program since, as this press release observes, “These findings do not show that The Daily Show is itself responsible for the higher knowledge among its viewers… The Daily Show assumes a fairly high level of political knowledge on the part of its audience – more so than Leno or Letterman.” The same is true of Entertainment Weekly when compared to the other popular culture magazines — such as, say, TV Guide, which is where Queenan wrote a column from 1996 to 1999. A former TV Guide writer bashing Entertainment Weekly as being an attactor of uninformed writers? That’s just too big of a glass house to pass up. UPDATE: Matthew Yglesias points out some of the problems with reading Bertrand Russell. He’s right — if memory serves, Russell’s take on Hegel is pretty distorted.