pixelmonkey

I fell in love with your writing back when I lived in NYC and you worked at NY Press. I loved, especially, your take-down of Thomas Friedman's "The World is Flat" (the post was called "Flathead"). It was the first time I spit out coffee in laughter from reading a book review. In the years since that piece was published, I shared it with so many friends.

So, my question(s): Can you give us a little insight into why you found Friedman to be such a delicious target? And also, whether, now that NY Press is defunct-ish, there is any chance that "Flathead" could be republished somewhere so it can live forever on the Internet?

I just re-read Flathead via the Alternet link. As good this time as the last 10 or 15 times I've read it. My goodness... that book has a lot of bizarre metaphors.

I love what you're saying about "the notes being off" in his writing. There is so much bad business writing out there, but Friedman's is so, so, comically bad.

Having just re-read the piece, I'll also mention -- this is my favorite line of yours: "It is a tale of a man who walks 10 feet in front of his house armed with a late-model Blackberry and comes back home five minutes later to gush to his wife that hospitals now use the internet to outsource the reading of CAT scans." That mental image has never left me -- now every time I read a bad business book like this, I imagine Friedman outside his house reading something on his Blackberry.

Thanks for the answer! Cheers for all the awesome work you do!

(did some sleuthwork via Google on my own question about re-publication: apparently Alternet has a well-formatted copy of Flathead available here!)