That was the subject line of an email that came ot me this morning from pal Brad: "Mario Batali and Michael Bauer need Public Square." If you know what a crazed foodie I am, you know that hit home.
Reading Batali takes on bloggers
I am in Batali's camp when it comes to anonymous comments by unknown parties. I've taken many hits on my blog from people who accuse me of certain things, and it's hard to know how to respond. However, if someone who uses his or her name, I take the comments more seriously.
Well yes, we can help with that. Personally I think anonymous comments should just be stricken form the web-- bloggers shouldn't permit them. It allows for drive-bys and *ssholes to not even have to raise a finger in the effort of perpetuating their drivel. Moreover, a content reputation system makes it easier for tired bloggers and publishers to enlist the help of the readership to weed out the armchair critics.
Adam Gopnik, one of my favorite New Yorker Writers, brings us this lovely literary look at how two letters can make all the difference: Annals of Biography: Angels and Ages: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker
Coming to the end of the book, to the night of April 14, 1865, and Lincoln's assassination, I reached the words that were once engraved in every American mind. At 7:22 A.M., as Lincoln drew his last breath, all the worthies who had crowded into a little back bedroom in a boarding house across the street from Ford's Theatre turned to Edwin Stanton, Lincoln's formidable Secretary of War, for a final word. Stanton is the one with the long comic beard and the spinster's spectacles, who in the photographs looks a bit like Mr. Pickwick but was actually the iron man in the Cabinet, and who, after a difficult beginning, had come to revere Lincoln as a man and a writer and a politician—had even played something like watchful Horatio to his tragic Hamlet. Stanton stood still, sobbing, and then said, simply, "Now he belongs to the ages."...
For the flight home, I picked up James L. Swanson's "Manhunt," a vivid account of the assassination and the twelve-day search for John Wilkes Booth that followed. Once again, I came to the deathbed scene, the vigil, the gathering. The Reverend Dr. Gurley, the Lincoln family minister, said, " 'Let us pray.' He summoned up . . . a stirring prayer. . . . Gurley finished and everyone murmured 'Amen.' Then, no one dared to speak. Again Stanton broke the silence. 'Now he belongs to the angels.' "Now he belongs to the angels? Where had that come from? There was a Monty Python element here ("What was that? I think it was 'Blessed are the cheesemakers' " the annoyed listeners too far from the Mount say to each other in "Life of Brian"), but was there something more going on?