Random Notes

POLITICS OF FASHION: Over the years, women’s magazines have made a place for themselves in American culture not only as trendsetters in regard to clothes, makeup, and accessories, but as purveyors of what it pleases their editors to think of as “advanced” ideas—about sex, politics, literature, whatever. Only a month ago. the hugely popular teen magazine Sassy had advanced so far that it was nearly forced out of business altogether: advertisers, it seems, had begun jumping ship in response to parental complaints about a series of articles exploring the pleasures of masturbation and miscellaneous other hijinx conventionally forbidden to teenage girls. So, if not particularly surprising, then it is at least piquant to announce the ascension of Elizabeth Pochoda, longtime literary editor of that vaguely Stalinist weekly The Nation, to her new job as senior editor at Vogue. There, Miss Pochoda’s province will remain more or less what it was at The Nation: books, theater, and politics. (She’s a writer, too, her most recent contribution to The Nation being a four-page denunciation of Norman Mailer’s decision to allow squishy-soft statesman George Shultz, that “architect of abhorrent policies,” to speak at a conference of International PEN.) As to what her appointment says about the ideological inclinations of her new employer, Miss Pochoda pleads a not-very-convincing ignorance. “I really don’t know,” she says. “Vogue has always been a place where a lot of interesting things get said. I think they’re open to a lot of things.”

COLD WATER: Gary Taubes is an investigative science journalist whose last book, Nobel Dreams (Random House), exposed the shoddy research habits of 1984 Nobel Prize-winning Italian physicist Carlo Rubbia. Recently Taubes signed on with Random House to investigate another scientific dispute: this spring’s debate over the possibility that chemists at the University of Utah had succeeded in producing cold fusion. According to Taubes, when his book comes out (sometime in 1991), it will demonstrate that the ensuing worldwide controversy was all the result of a “ frightening misunderstanding” between Brigham Young University and the University of Utah.

About the Author

David Klinghoffer

David Klinghoffer, a former literary editor at NR, is a senior fellow at Discovery Institute and co-author of The Gift of Rest: Rediscovering the Beauty of the Sabbath, and other books.

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POLITICS OF FASHION: Over the years, women’s magazines have made a place for themselves in American culture not only as trendsetters in regard to clothes, makeup, and accessories, but as purveyors of what it pleases their editors to think of as “advanced” ideas—about sex, politics, literature, whatever. Only a month ago. the hugely popular teen magazine Sassy had advanced so far that it was nearly forced out of business altogether: advertisers, it seems, had begun jumping ship in response to parental complaints about a series of articles exploring the pleasures of masturbation and miscellaneous other hijinx conventionally forbidden to teenage girls. So, if not particularly surprising, then it is at least piquant to announce the ascension of Elizabeth Pochoda, longtime literary editor of that vaguely Stalinist weekly The Nation, to her new job as senior editor at Vogue. There, Miss Pochoda’s province will remain more or less what it was at The Nation: books, theater, and politics. (She’s a writer, too, her most recent contribution to The Nation being a four-page denunciation of Norman Mailer’s decision to allow squishy-soft statesman George Shultz, that “architect of abhorrent policies,” to speak at a conference of International PEN.) As to what her appointment says about the ideological inclinations of her new employer, Miss Pochoda pleads a not-very-convincing ignorance. “I really don’t know,” she says. “Vogue has always been a place where a lot of interesting things get said. I think they’re open to a lot of things.”

COLD WATER: Gary Taubes is an investigative science journalist whose last book, Nobel Dreams (Random House), exposed the shoddy research habits of 1984 Nobel Prize-winning Italian physicist Carlo Rubbia. Recently Taubes signed on with Random House to investigate another scientific dispute: this spring’s debate over the possibility that chemists at the University of Utah had succeeded in producing cold fusion. According to Taubes, when his book comes out (sometime in 1991), it will demonstrate that the ensuing worldwide controversy was all the result of a “ frightening misunderstanding” between Brigham Young University and the University of Utah.

About the Author

David Klinghoffer

David Klinghoffer, a former literary editor at NR, is a senior fellow at Discovery Institute and co-author of The Gift of Rest: Rediscovering the Beauty of the Sabbath, and other books.