What's Next?(Brief Article)(Column)

As a longstanding admirer of Florence King, who retired from this space last issue, I tread here with utmost deference, and considerable apprehension. Also, with a collection of uncertainties.

To begin with: What shall we call this page now? Flo made it The Misanthrope's Corner. That won't do. We are a gregarious crowd here at NR, certainly not well enough supplied with misanthropes to offer misanthropy in every issue. In any case, no one could hope to match Flo in this area. She it was who scorned as mere amateurs people who offered, in evidence of their misanthropy, the fact that they had removed the back seats of their cars. Our Flo declared proudly that she generally removed the front passenger seat, too.

And then, what kind of material is suitable to be put here? In search of inspiration, I leafed through the stacks of periodicals silting up my office. How do other magazines fill their back pages, other than with ads, job ads, or "personals"? Let's see.

The Economist. Here you also have to ignore three pages of "Economic and financial indicators" that only Larry Kudlow could love. Short-term interest rates in Poland? 8.15 percent. Zzzzzz. The last actually readable thing in The Economist is always a full-page obituary, usually of someone whose interesting-to-famous quotient is extraordinarily high. They recorded the passing of, for example, Kenneth Hale, an MIT researcher in linguistics who could converse in about 50 languages. ("He apologized to the Dutch for taking a whole week to master their somewhat complex language.")

New York Review of Books. Letters -- frequently the best thing in the magazine, with highly entertaining dust-ups between NYRB contributors and people who feel slighted or misrepresented by something they read. In the current issue, Garry Wills squares off with various aggrieved readers of his piece on "Priests and Boys." Better than Celebrity Boxing.

The New Yorker. Roz Chast's comic strip. "Relationship humor," very Manhattan-neurotic -- smile-funny, rather than laugh-funny.

The New Criterion. Usually, nothing; the magazine just stops. Once in a while, though, TNC deigns to publish a reader letter. The May 2001 issue, for instance, closes with an exquisitely collegial exchange between Adam Sisman, author of Boswell's Presumptuous Task (an account of how James Boswell came to write his Life of Johnson), and the reviewer to whom TNC had assigned Sisman's book, one John Derbyshire.