mr kaplan's List: TSIS

If you want to be a successful writer, Allan Metcalf says, watch your Buts.

I think anytime you come across a "Critic At Large" piece in the New Yorker, it's going to be an examination of an idea through several sources. Jill Lepore, Joan Acocella, Adam Gopnik, Elizabeth Kolbert, Judith Thurman, Louis Menand, Richard Brody, David Denby, Anthony Lane, Malcolm Gladwell, etc. write these pieces, but those aren't the only pieces they write for the magazine. Those others follow a different model, but A Critic At Large is more overtly They Say, I Say.