Joe Strauss to Joe Six-Pack

Taking a cue from our own J.M. Tyree (see here), David Brooks writes in the New York Times:

I was emptying some boxes in my basement the other day and I came across an essay somebody had clipped on Ernest Hemingway from the July 14, 1961, issue of Time magazine. The essay was outstanding. Over three pages of tightly packed prose, with just a few photos, the anonymous author performed the sort of high-toned but accessible literary analysis that would be much harder to find in a mass market magazine today…

The sad thing is that this type of essay was not unusual in that era. If you read Time and Newsweek from the 1950’s and early 1960’s, you discover they were pitched at middle-class people across the country who aspired to have the same sorts of conversations as the New York and Boston elite.

More here.  [Thanks to Asad Naqvi.]