Driving home from work yes­ter­day I caught a story on NPR about Michelle Obama’s efforts to pro­mote health and nutri­tion among young people. It was a mostly unre­mark­able puff piece, the kind that keeps All Things Con­sid­ered afloat on slow news days. But halfway through the story, Michele Norris asked Joce­lyn Frye, the first lady’s policy direc­tor, a shock­ing question:

But if chil­dren start eating less salt and sugar and fat, won’t those com­pa­nies be head­ing into a less prof­itable future?

For years I’ve been telling anyone who will listen that public radio’s This Amer­i­can Life was ready for a take­down. Some aspir­ing social critic would come along and dig a dirty nail into the rind of every hipster’s favorite radio show, peel it to show how mawk­ish, vain, and gaw­daw­fully sen­ten­tious the whole pro­duc­tion can be, and even pos­si­bly con­vince some­one at NPR or APM or wher­ever they make these things that yes, in fact, you might be able to do better than Ira Glass. After Curtis White went after Fresh Air and n+1 attacked McSweeney’s, TAL seemed the only low-​hanging fruit left for the knocking. 

Well, here it is, cour­tesy of Michael Hirschorn at The Atlantic.

And though I wish it were oth­er­wise, I can’t say I’m impressed. Forget the coarse and unhelp­ful cat­e­gory of “quirk” (Jonathan Safran Foer shar­ing oxygen with Wes Ander­son?) and the for­mu­la­tions (”TAL…is really the oppo­site of doc­u­men­tary reportage. It’s more like sociology,” ”that hoary emo­tion called sentiment”) that sound as silly as TAL’s own self-​congratulations (”what we’re doing is apply­ing the tools of jour­nal­ism to every­day lives”). The major prob­lem is that Hirschorn only scratches where he ought to maim. As Emer­son told Oliver Wen­dell Holmes: if you strike at a king you must kill him.

Alan Shapiro was recently inter­viewed on WUNC’s The State of Things. Shapiro is the author of Tan­ta­lus in Love and The Last Happy Occa­sion and trans­lated The Oresteia.

The Maytrees, Annie Dillard’s new novel, is out. An ever-​expanding list of reviews fol­lows. Annie read a pas­sage of the novel for NPR and talked a little about the book (whose orig­i­nal sub­ti­tle was “A Roman­tic Comedy about Light Pollution”) in a Pub­lish­ers Weekly inter­view. She did another inter­view with the Wash­ing­ton Post’s Daniel Asa Rose. A chap­ter of the book orig­i­nally showed up as “The Two of Them” in the Nov ‘03 Harper’s.

Here’s the list of reviews:

+Wash­ing­ton Post Book World (by Mar­i­lynne Robinson)

+New York Times

+NYT Book Review

+Boston Globe

+LA Times

+SF Chronicle

+Slate

+Book­Page

+Pub­lish­ers Weekly

+New York Observer

+New York Daily News

+Miami Herald

+Seat­tle Times

+Cape Cod Times

+Cleve­land Plain Dealer

+Chicago Tribune

+USA Today

+Hart­ford Courant

+San Diego Union-​Tribune

+Wash­ing­ton Post (where Annie runs neck and neck with Toby Keith)

Buy it from your local inde­pen­dent book­store or sup­port this site by order­ing a copy from Amazon.