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WILD MISREPRESENTATION: Following up on Scott's incisive takedown of Reihan Salam's recent piece in Slate, I'd just like to point out that Salam egregiously misrepresents a great piece by Michael Kinsley. Salam writes:
Two years before Fletch infected movie theaters nationwide, Michael Kinsley boasted in Harper's that he was a reverse-snob: Not only did he self-consciously eschew the shmancy Lacoste alligator -- he and his friends sported decidedly down-market discount polo shirts emblazoned with the J.C. Penney fox.This gets Kinsley's point precisely backwards and contains an outright error. First, it wasn't Kinsley who wore those shirts, it was an unnamed friend (later revealed to be James Fallows.) Second, Kinsley's whole point was that this reverse snobbery is just as pernicious as the old-fashioned kind of snobbery.In fact, Kinsley made the same argument about reverse snobbery more recently, also in Slate. Salam should at least try to understand an article before he tries to use it to make a larger point. --Ben Adler
