critics and commentators you would read no matter what they wrote about

- tom carson

Jackie Harvey

marina hyde

really?

joan didion

st. paul

BBC2 baseball commentators

James Wood
William Logan

Adam Rapoport

DJ Martian

"james wood on [lil wayne]" is an "incongruous actor in unlikely role" thread waiting to happen.

Real answer: James Surowiecki

joan didon otm

basically any writer i listed on the 'stan' thread

yeah for sure. so also: luc sante

James Surowiecki

^^^ yeah for sure

michael lewis

ta-nehisi coates

joan didon otm

― max, Friday, January 30, 2009 4:57 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

^^^^^^^OTM

Joan Didion still my favorite living writer, so yeah. I'll also read William Gass no matter what he's writing about, even though I'm never sure if I actually love his style or am just impressed by it.

I'll read jenny diski and rebecca solnit too but increasingly I dunno why

mark twain

dfw

sort-of george saunders

Freeman Dyson
Steve Weinberg

Couple of physics badasses who can now afford to be somewhat crazy about stuff outside their paygrade in the NYRB

is george saunders crit. any cop?

its iffy. not as good as his fiction. but i always read it no matter what, so he goes in this thread

jonathan gold

a lot of ilx posters

yeah I can't imagine having any inclination to read any g.saunders outside his fiction following his routinely awful guardian column jus saying

yes that column is terrible. i always recommend his fiction and people who have read the column but not the fiction look surprised.

for all the ppl i read regularly i have an 'except for this' clause

dfw

jessica harvell

eco

PAUL EDWARD WAGEMANN
GEIR HONGRO

malcolm gladwell
matthew parris
quite a few others from The Times
possibly even boris johnson

Paul Berman
Daniel Mendelssohn
Joan Didion
David Thomson
Jonathan Rosenbaum
David Kehr
Christgau

george orwell

I am a total stan for Charles Taylor (the philosopher, not the dictator). He counts as a critic, I think, since he publishes very occasionally in the NY Review.

most of these choices are batshit insane, but the idea that there are commentators who can write about *anything* well is itself batshit insane.

hey there negative naancy

sup

the idea that there are commentators who can write about *anything* well is itself batshit insane.

Oh come on. Mark Twain is a great answer. There are writers who can do it. They are special.

Anyway that's not the question -- it's who would you READ no matter what. You may well be irrational to do so.

the idea that there are commentators who can write about *anything* well is itself batshit insane

You're not reading the thread title.

this thread is contributing to the watering-down of the term "batshit insane" and should cut it out, reserve that shit for shit that is actually batshit insane

Louis Menand
Jenny Diski
Hendrick Hertzberg
Surowiecki
James Wood
Michael Wood
Alex Ross
Allesandra Stanley
Matt Bai

post your list or shut up, fool

i don't have a list. it's ridic. who'd read david thomson on macroeconomics, or marina hyde on the the role of protestantism in the english civil war?

i think one of the points of the thread is that these are writers we like not because of the specific kind of knowledge they bring to the table so much as their style of thought & writing

ya nrq you are being deliberately obtuse and silly

WHY WOULD I WANT TO READ A BUS SCHEDULE BY DAVID FOSTER WALLACE. THAT MAKES NO SENSE.

no, the thread is silly.

your understanding of the thread is silly

or should i say non-understanding

im just taking the thread literally.

i would not read you on this thread, that's for sure.

i think all of us are taking the thread literally? for example: i would read a joan didion article about macroeconomics.

well, joan didion i see as one of the more reasonable choices.

now youre just being stubborn

I would read Anthony Lane write about pretty much anything - it would probably make me chuckle.

samuel johnson
roland barthes
sontag
mailer

samuel johnson

this is a pretty dece pick.

otm

coates is king, here's why

I'm white, military, from alabama, mostly, a little bit georgia and a little bit tennessee and now I'm a little bit DC area. In all of that, I don't think I've ever been as mindful of what color and class really mean until he started blogging. I've been lucky, I think, to read him from day one. He's made me realize that color always matters, and will matter for a long time. No matter the efforts I make to try and ignore certain things, my color vs. anybody else I interact with defines the semiology available for a given exchange, and he's made me conscious of that, where I don't think I was particularly conscious before. For the average college white boy, I think you adapt and just think of yourself as a little superior to the country boys when you get to check a rap record in a mixed crowd. On the whole, though, his public introspection about his own attitudes to class, color and vocation have made me a lot more thoughtful than I ever was, and I like to think I'm a better person than I would be otherwise. Fallows is still excellent, he makes me feel smarter for reading him, but a lot of other bloggers can do that too, atlantic or otherwise. I don't know anyone who does what Ta-Nehisi does, and his constant efforts to avoid solipsism (which I used to think were tedious, before I got terminally irritated with all the other shrillboats) make him even more exceptional.

also he's basically the only blogger who I can't get mad at for repeatedly talking about the stupid gates thing, because as far as I know he's the only one who didn't bother with media criticism so much as "let's explain how this goes down from a human perspective, cop to black guy and so forth."

lol I thought this was the atlantic bloggerz poll thread. whatever.

yeah ta-nehisi is a peach

gavin mcinnes

Certainly the below-the-line commenters at Coates' blog are less obtuse than oh anywhere.

Coates, Didion, Ehrenreich, Zadie Smith, Rachel Maddow if she wrote stuff. If I think of a bunch of white guys to add, will be back.

this thread would be better with some links to representative articles

Nah, let's just talk about Coates some more.

(Different perspective that Tombot's obv but for all the many reasons he describes, Coates pretty much is the man.)

I should say, *I* have a different perspective etc. Solipsism!

and Coates DID (and does) criticize media all the time, and does a consistently engaging job of it.

Love Coates, probably wouldn't want to read him on the fireworks trade or Leibniz or whatever though, if that makes sense. Only writer I can think of whose intuition and process I trust enough in itself to validate any subject would be Richard Meltzer (on a good day). I'd also read a lot of my friends writing about anything (&do, in fact), and for similar reasons to Meltzer - their personality is strong and interesting enough to me that even when they're out of their depth it's worthwhile. Don't really know why I like Meltzer enough to give him this pass, he just feels like good conversation.

i'd love to read coates on the fireworks trade

matt taibbi

Joan Didion
Daniel Mendelssohn
Louis Menand
Garry Wills
Martin Amis
Hitchens
Ian Buruma
Jonathan Gold
James Wolcott
Alex Ross
Paul Krugman
David Ulin

on deck: Dwight Garner (newish NYT book reviewer) is killing so far

Rachel Maddow if she wrote stuff. If I think of a bunch of white guys to add, will be back.

awesome

talkingpointsmemo is too smug for you but youll read anything taibbi writes, tracer?

yep

TPM generally goes along with the herd, tabbi doesn't (he hates HCR and cap and trade, for instance)

and if josh marshall has ever written something funny, i haven't seen it

taibbi is unbearably smug

hes not wrong about a lot of things, but putting curses in your political writing doesnt make it "funny"

i think there's a distinction - possibly quite subtle - between smug and arrogant. taibbi's the latter and not the former, imo. TPM and its ilk have the smugness of believing they belong to the right tribe, are the right "sort of people". at least that's how they come off to me. taibbi probably is concerned about being the smartest guy in the room - which i can totally understand being insufferable, though it doesn't really bother me - but he doesn't appear to particularly care what team he belongs to, which makes a huge difference to me.

plus yeah I think he's funny

Don't like Taibbi live - something about his face and voice equals punchable.

No beef with his blog or writing.

walter monheit

Charlie Brooker

argh NO

srsly

idk if he even qualifies as a commentator tbh

he's a TV critic for the Guardian

yeah

so i wouldn't read him about "no matter what"

I'm sorry I spoke on your behalf

oh wait, I didn't

I keep looking at this thread title and really there isn't a single critic or commentator out there whom I would read no matter what; I don't even have any I regularly follow.

At one point it would have been David Ansen but then I graduated from high school and lost regular access to a free Newsweek.

i didn't say you speaking for me musically, just that u mad, u maaaaad

u mad is more effective when someone is actually mad js

yeah no im just saying charlie brooker is a terrible choice because his whole thing is "i don't know much about anything rude word earnest bit rude word"

haha how come you get to attack his choice AND use "u mad" on him?

andy rooney

Not really critics and (current event) commentators, but authors who've ranged widely I'd read anything by:

I've enjoyed book length treatments by DFW on the varieties of mathematical infinity and by Carl Sagan on consciousness and superstition, both of which aren't their areas of expertise. Mary Roach has been entertaining covering the fates of human cadavers, sex research, and the afterlife. Jennifer Michael Hecht does these great historical surveys of happiness and doubt. Others who've ranged widely are Will Self, Kirkpatrick Sale, John McPhee. I wish Lewis Thomas had written outside of biology, he's the best essayist of the 20th century.