19th
Brown and Smith go all Slate
Here is how time gets wasted. I am reading Spencer Ackerman’s blog. It is a fine blog, to be sure. But reading blogs at work is already a waste of time, particularly when you compulsively return, throughout the afternoon, to the list of blogs (which I call “USA”) on your bookmarks toolbar, in the vein hope that Josh Marshall or Andrew Sullivan or The Plank has updated, so that you might waste your time a bit more satisfyingly.
In any case. Back to “Attackerman” (where, I might add, I found myself wasting more time later on, at 3 am, still at my office, watching a video of animatronic bears performing an Arcade Fire song). He mentions that some other blogger (Lindsey Beyerstein) is joining what, for lack of a better word, you might call his blog crew (you know, the site that hosts many blogs, one of which is his). So I click on the link to her site.
And there I find a lengthy attack on the architecture writer Philip Nobel, who Beyerstein calls the Worst Person in the World for the sin of cheating on and then leaving his wife for a 22-year-old, and, perhaps more to the point, writing a long apologia in Elle, in which he appears to revel (if somewhat self-deprecatingly) in the fact that some guy at his local pizza joint calls him “Danger Man,” presumably because there’s a veritable parade of messy-haired young blondes walking out his front door (perhaps they’re wearing his shirts, like in the movies?) every morning. I don’t know anything about Philip Nobel, other than that his book on the rebuilding of the World Trade Center, published by Metropolitan Books, sits unread on my bookshelf. (I also recall Martin Filler’s review in the NYRB, though I couldn’t tell you what Filler had to say about it.) (I also know that he should not be confused with the similarly named Philip Nobile, the questionably sane writer famous for leading the jihad against Don Imus, hating Doris Kearns Goodwin, and writing “Intellectual Skywriting,” a milestone in the neglected genre of highbrow insider New York literary gossip.)
Intrigued, I read Beyerstein’s attack on Nobel, and followed that up with a jog over to Jezebel, where similar lines of condemnation were laid out. Finally I read Nobel’s piece, all too many words of it. Then I endeavored to find out the identity of the research assistant for whom he left his wife. (Searching inside Sixteen Acres on Amazon.com, this took all of 15 seconds. Then, for no particular reason, I read articles by the research assistant, and happened upon some pictures of the two of them on some architecture blog.) So first and foremost it is established that the internet renders moot the use of ludicrous pseudonyms to protect the identity of people whose privacy you have already disregarded when writing publicly about private matters. (By which I mean, if you’re going to air it all out, don’t feign concern in hiding things that are so easily uncovered.)
But what of Nobel? And his strange article, which the classy Elle editors splashed on their cover like so:
I LEFT MY WIFE FOR A YOUNGER WOMAN…AND RUINED MY LIFE
THE MIND OF A CHEATER
My questions for Smith (or is it Brown?) are many. But let’s start with the easiest one: what is Nobel’s greatest sin, if he may be said to have one. (And we can speak of sin in the absolute sense, or merely sin in the eyes of his now-many online haters.) Is it the leaving of the wife and kids? Or the lengthy defense of same in the pages of a glossy magazine? Does the Elle tell-all (the Elle-all?) represent a form of contrition? Or proud defiance of social mores?
Next question: When did these embarrassing displays of public self-abasement become a profitable sideline for intellectuals? (I blame James Atlas, who, without further research, I accuse of starting it all.)
I open the floor. And with luck, we will negotiate our way back to Cubs Path before long.
–Smith
