Letters to the Editor
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Ancient Assyrian
But if you're going to take on the issue of "argument by anecdote," charity begins at home.
Please start with Salon's own Camille "Rush" Paglia, and Debra Dickerson . . . .
I've never read anything by Debra Dickerson (that I can recall), but I did try to read the two columns published on Salon by Camille Pagila since I moved my blog here, and I just can't get through them. They are so boring and predictable and they seem like archived columms from 1987 -- she traffics in ideas and issues and images that are so empty and obsolete -- like things that would have generated some controversy 15 years ago but now are just almost caricatures of themselves.
I have no involvement with any Salon decisions beyond my blog, so I can only speculate why Salon brought her back. It almost certainly has something to do with the fact that her articles receive a ton of attention. Drudge loves her and links to everything she writes, which generates enormous traffic for Salon -- I doubt there is a more powerful traffic-generating link than one from Drudge -- and lots of large right-wing sites promote her articles, too.
In principle, I don't have a problem with magazines publishing a diverse range of writers and using attention-generating considerations to make decisions, but to the extent she is anything other than completely boring, she is just lazy and cliched and I can't imagine that she's going to generate attention for much longer churning out stuff like what I've seen in the parts of the last two columns of hers that I read.