Postmodern Journalism

David Cohen writes a scathing rejoinder to a Slate piece that’s critical of Michael Jordan almost entirely because Jordan’s personality on the court wasn’t flashy enough for the writer:

A couple of decades back, academia killed that great American art form, the short story. Plot, in the sense of something actually happening, went from a requirement of a good short story to taboo. Characters were to be limned, and the essential banality of modern American life, particularly in middle-class suburbs, must be illustrated, but nothing was to happen on penalty of scorn. As a result, the only good short stories today are genre stories, mostly science fiction or mysteries, and they aren’t what they once were, either.

Now, apparently, the same aesthetic that killed the short story is oozing into Journalism. In fact, this piece is all aesthetic, which might be ok if it weren’t a winding, mish-mash aesthetic that, in interior decorating, would be called “eclectic” if one were being polite.

As for the man who tried–successfully for a time–to cajole journalists into breathing new life into their genre, he’s interviewed this week in The American Spectator.