April 17, 2007

incompetence is no barrier to achievement

Don't read the cover article of this week's NYT magazine. Or if you do, don't say I didn't warn you. To summarize: Thomas Friedman would like us all to know that he has a big dick, and it likes the environment. But not in a "sissy", "vaguely French" way. No, this is a "muscular and strategic" "Geo-Green" sort of dick that considers "the First Law of Petropolitics" in its quest to ravish the world.

Instead, you should read a review of Friedman's book. By the time the Mathemagician was done reading it to me, I was lying on my kitchen floor, convulsing with laughter, tears streaming down my cheeks, whimpering.

3 comments:

amelia said...

i had the same conversation with my housemate yesterday! (about the dick, i mean.) also, and somehow even more offensively, his writing just...sucks. not red and blue states, but fifty nifty united patriotic flag-waving green states.

barf.

Laurel said...

Yeah, I'm just kind of shocked and also irritated that this is somehow worth publishing on the front page of the NYT magazine, not to mention in 400+ page books. Bestselling books, no less!

Give me that column space. I guarantee I'm a more serious and nuanced thinker and a better writer.

THE FIRE BOSS (aka EFF BEE) said...

op ed columnists should in general not be trusted with magazine features, let alone books. they are paid to say roughly the same thing about nominally different topics for their entire career. we probably shouldn't be surprised when the lowest common denominator between said same thing and different topics winds up being a rhetorical dick.