We at Flypaper??like Alexander Russo. He's a shameless, quirky guy who writes for a blog of much the same temperament. One of his particular quirks, for example, is his insistence that he is an "education reporter" who "covers" news. (I may occasionally wear a red hat and carry bottled water, but this does not a fireman make me.)??And so??Russo takes umbrage today that we at Flypaper did not mention him when we ostensibly wrote "about something [he] covered." That "something"--the "something" that Russo "covered"--is??a recent New York Times Magazine piece about class-based integration.
Several things. First, Russo is not the only person who receives on Sundays the New York Times at his doorstep. This weekly ritual is in fact part of the lives of millions of Americans, and millions of Americans were no doubt aware that the Magazine had in it last week an article about class-based integration. (Russo, it should be noted, is also not the only person to be aware of The New Yorker or Senator Barack Obama. Nor can he call "dibs" on the Iraq War; people know about it.) Second, Russo is wrong. While this blog never "covered" the integration article, we did offer some opinions about the piece, and one of us even wrote a commentary about it, which appeared early Monday morning on National Review Online, well before Russo began his "coverage." Third: We certainly and happily will link to Russo's forthcoming "reporting," the very minute that anything about it is faintly interesting or grammatical.