by Mark Jay Mirsky

As a novelist, I read one way, and as I suspect as a teacher, I read another. There is a third way I occasionally read—as an editor. (I once was privileged to read as a critic, but since a change of editors at The Washington Post’s Book World and the extinction of Partisan Review, and various other publications whose editors knew me, I have lost a ready access to a soapbox.) Every now and then, however, some stunning stupidity, in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, or The New Yorker takes my breath away.