Maybe I'm amazed

We're in our third day of record-setting traffic here at Restricted View, and in case you haven't heard, the Huffington Post reported that Thursday's honored visitor was, in fact, award-winning journalist and New Yorker staff writer John Colapinto. The HuffPo received no response from Colapinto himself -- perhaps his AOL connection is still on the fritz? -- which makes me wonder what went down, exactly. Did The New Yorker's PR folks track him down to verify? Or did they just recognize the M.O.? ("Knee-jerk defensiveness... name-calling... condescending asides... Oh yeah, that's definitely him"?)

I probably don't need to tell you this is not what I expected when I wrote that post. It wasn't my intention to spark a debate about old vs. new media and their respective uses and limitations, or to challenge the distinction between "blogger" and "writer" (it hadn't occurred to me that I couldn't be both). I didn't set out to expose the allegedly entrenched institutional snobbery of The New Yorker. And I certainly wasn't looking to get into a fight over who's the "truest" Beatles fan, or whether this article's "unprecedented" scoops were, in fact, new. I just wanted to say, for whatever it's worth, that I found the article disappointingly dull. Being a Beatles fan, and having read much more interesting New Yorker profiles of much less interesting people, I expected to be fascinated, and instead I was bored. But the author says, actually, the article is fascinating, I just wasn't reading it correctly. And now that my opinion (and perhaps even my right to have an opinion) has been challenged, I am sorry the article isn't available online; I wish you could check it out and judge for yourself, instead of just taking my word for it. (Or Colapinto's word for it -- you decide who seems most trustworthy.) Still, a few of you have tracked it down (I had to pull it out of the recycling bin myself, just in case I need it for backup), and I'm grateful for your comments, because the discussion here and elsewhere has turned out to be much more entertaining and enlightening than the article in question. So thanks to my visitors old and new for being such careful readers and thoughtful writers. And please, keep it up!