"Everyone wants to suck up to the editor of The New Yorker."

If by "the editor" you happen to mean THIS editor, you can include me in that group. He's a great man.

What Gore Vidal thinks can't possibly matter in the eyes of literary and journalistic history. What I want to know is, what does Renata Adler think? Also a writer much to be admired.

SE

PS. I think it was Remnick who said -- but I also think he was quoting someone else -- that he writes better than anyone who writes faster, and faster than anyone who writes better. (Or was it the other way around?) A real gift -- see also, perhaps, in the current-events rather than great-magazine realm, bloggers like Glenn Greenwald, Digby; and see also Paul Krugman. Like Remnick, although of course on a smaller scale in the bloggers' case, these are people of accomplishment. Speed DOES matter.

SE
 

No, Standing Eagle, you're finally wrong. That was AJ Liebling - probably quoted by Remnick in his admiring intro or article or whatever it was about AJL.

I think Vidal is and will be for some time, a greater name in American letters than Remnick. Wit alone will do that for you.
 

I'm with EADW here—for all of Remnick's many gifts, he doesn't hold a candle to Vidal, who is one of a kind.
 

EADW, didn't I say that I thought he was quoting someone else? Perhaps I'm wrong that Remnick has applied that saying to himself -- but I'm pretty sure that I'm right about that, though I might have heard it word-of-mouth, and he might have been speaking aspirationally to my source.


Willing to learn, about Liebling and Vidal; but not likely to agree with Vidal about Tina Brown --

Standing Eagle

-- who believes (and regrets, for his own sake) that wit isn't everything
 

Ok, that "his own sake" comment makes me return to my original assertion (re your sex), SE...

-Squatting Egret
 

The fact remains, if you are going to read one general interest/political/social commentary magazine in this country -- and those of us with lives and jobs realistically only have time for one -- it is going to be David Remnick's New Yorker.

The Atlantic has seriously gone downhill under James Bennett, I mean it is dull as dust now. Harpers is interesting from time to time but not worth subscribing to. TNR hasn't been a must read for years. And for those of us who don't live in NYC (and I know it is hard to believe that anyone does who reads), New York magazine is just not that important. Well done, and smartly written, but just not indispensable.

It seems very odd to compare Vidal and Remnick. DR is an editor and journalist, Vidal is a novelist and essayist. It is like saying who is more important Ahmet Ertegun or Iron Butterfly. (I'll let you mull on that one for awhile.)
 

Somebody watched the season premier of American Masters (PBS) last night.
 

What's the last important thing Gore Vidal has written? It's been awhile. He would not be on the short list of living great American writers, I'm afraid. Maybe not even the long list. He's nowhere near the ones at the top of that list -- Updike, Roth, McCarthy, Delilo.

Maybe he's on par with Mailer (the thought of which must drive him nuts) who is also not aging well.
 

By the way, it's not even true that Adam Moss is the new David Remnick. He's the old Adam Moss. He's been around forever and is a great editor in his own right.