Nicely Done

Kelefa Sanneh’s essay about how music critics have become too nice rings true to me (A Critic at Large, September 1st & 8th). But he skims over one of the key reasons that readers might be drawn to criticism, which is that it can be tremendously entertaining—especially when it’s snarky. Consider the former Times restaurant reviewer Pete Wells. I cannot remember a thing from any of the positive reviews that he wrote. What I do remember, though, are examples of him punching high and low. When reviewing Guy Fieri’s American Kitchen & Bar, he described one of its beverages as glowing “like nuclear waste” and tasting of “radiator fluid and formaldehyde.” After visiting Daniel Humm’s Eleven Madison Park, he wrote that a beet he ate there tasted “like Lemon Pledge” and smelled “like a burning joint.” It was delightful prose like this that kept me coming back to him.

Art Steinmetz
New York City

Not even Lester Bangs at his most witheringly corrosive was as tough a critic as some of the old guard of entertainers—Frank Sinatra and Jackie Gleason among them—were when, in the mid-nineteen-fifties, Elvis Presley arrived on the scene. “He can’t last. I tell you flatly, he can’t last,” Gleason opined. Sinatra’s fangs were particularly sharp. Rock and roll, he said, is “sung, played, and written for the most part by cretinous goons . . . this rancid-smelling aphrodisiac, I deplore.”

David English
Acton, Mass.

Mistakes Were Made

Zach Helfand, in his loving essay about the art of fact checking, speculates that Harold Ross might have been inspired to start a checking department in order to compete with Henry Luce, who started hiring fact checkers at Time in 1923 (“Vaunted,” September 1st & 8th). In my time as a writer and an editor in Luce’s empire, I heard a legend about the origins of the department. Apparently, Luce—an old China hand—instated it after the magazine accidentally printed “King Koming” in a story on ancient Chinese history. “Koming” was not Chinese but “Timese”—a word that editors used to signal to one another that a name was coming, but not yet known.

Dalton Delan
Potomac, Md.

To me, the most famous New Yorker fact-checking story involves the character actor Eric Blore. In the February 23, 1959, issue of the magazine, Blore was referred to as “the late Eric Blore.” This did not please him, as he was still alive. His lawyer insisted upon a correction, which was promised for the March 2nd issue. However, Blore died shortly after that issue was printed, right before it went out for delivery.

Roger York
Richmond, Va.

I very much enjoyed reading Helfand’s essay. It became even more enjoyable when I found a fact-checking error! While discussing an article by John McPhee, Helfand states that a Japanese incendiary balloon disabled “a reactor that enriched plutonium for the atomic bomb.” A reactor does not enrich plutonium—it creates it from uranium-238. “Enrichment” refers to the process that increases the fraction of fissionable uranium-235 in a sample of uranium. I apologize for any emotional toll my letter might take on Helfand and his fact checker, Anna. The article was great fun—even apart from what finding the error did for my ego.

Joel W. Cannon
Emeritus Professor of Physics
Washington & Jefferson College
Washington, Penn.

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