The Left Hand Doesn't Know What the Left Hand Is Doing
If the cover story in this weekend's N.Y. Times magazine seems familiar, that's because the paper ran essentially the same piece on its front page in November of 2007.
It's nearly impossible to imagine what the editors were thinking when they commissioned the current article. For sure, Steven Pinker is a brand-name author, but it's not as if the first go-around failed to grab attention: it was part of a series that earned the reporter, Amy Harmon, a Pulitzer Prize.
Perhaps the most astonishing part of the whole thing is that both articles share identical headlines.
Clearly, the paper's institutional memory spans less than 14 months.
In the bad old days when a newspaper archive was kept on paper--in a filing cabinet, in the morgue, in the basement--such a thing might be understandable. But a blunder as big as this one makes me wonder: don't they have Internet access in the newsroom?
It's nearly impossible to imagine what the editors were thinking when they commissioned the current article. For sure, Steven Pinker is a brand-name author, but it's not as if the first go-around failed to grab attention: it was part of a series that earned the reporter, Amy Harmon, a Pulitzer Prize.
Perhaps the most astonishing part of the whole thing is that both articles share identical headlines.
Clearly, the paper's institutional memory spans less than 14 months.
In the bad old days when a newspaper archive was kept on paper--in a filing cabinet, in the morgue, in the basement--such a thing might be understandable. But a blunder as big as this one makes me wonder: don't they have Internet access in the newsroom?
posted by DO at 10:41 PM
1 Comments:
Those headlines aren't identical. One has "My Self" and the other has "Myself." The Times is clearly seeking to spur more discussion, not just about people learning about their genomes but also about the stylistic pros and cons of splittingmyself into two words. One has parallelism with My Genome, whereas the other echoes Our Bodies, Ourselves. I'm torn.
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