David Brooks writes in the NYT:
New York magazine had a very good year. In “Everybody Sucks,” Vanessa Grigoriadis describes the “creative underclass.” These are young, smart people who work at the bottom of the opinion-forming food chain. They work at places like Gawker.com and spew venom at everybody above.
The Gawker writers are far from the first to play on their readers’ status anxiety (by telling them that people who are more famous are actually frauds). But Grigoriadis gets inside the creative underclass. In her description, Gawker is an information-age sweatshop. The bloggers on staff are compelled to produce 12 blog posts a day, and under the old compensation system they were paid the munificent sum of $12 per post. Now it’s worse. Owner Nick Denton is going to pay them per page-view. No views, no food.
Matt Labash of The Weekly Standard is consistently one of the best magazine writers in the country. Since amoral blackguards bring out his best, his profile of political dirty tricks artist Roger Stone was bound to be good. Stone cut his teeth with Nixon, loved Roy Cohn, works with Trump, advised Sharpton and has laid a barrage of fire into Eliot Spitzer. One of Stone’s maxims is: “Hit from every angle. Open multiple fronts on your enemy. He must be confused, and feel besieged on every side.”
