From a reader:

Jonah,

I wish you would reform your blog post in response to James Wood as a letter to the Newyorker editor.

I’m a fan of James Wood but his strength is textual and stylistic analysis of literary fiction. He is too to smart to have both read your book and made that snide comment about you in the Orwell piece. He needs to be called on it by someone if not his editor (who probably didn’t read your book either).

I’ve recommended your book to many people. I even bought a couple copies and gave them to a liberal friend and to my dyed-in-the-wool liberal father. I have yet to read a substantive disagreement with the simple idea that fascism is on the left because it is a species of statism. In fact many of my friends in academia agree with you and still go to sweaty-red-faced rallies to chant “yes we can.”

Call me naive but it still angers and saddens me when otherwise smart people turn their brains off momentarily to make an ignorant comment like Wood did.

Me: Well, I’ll ponder that. In the meantime the New Yorker is encouraging readers to ask him questions.  If  any LF fans do  avail themelves of that opportunity,  all I ask is that  you be as polite  as possible.