The Good . . . .

Here are my picks for this month’s best bits of writing.

In the New Yorker, Peter Schjeldahl, reviews a “Degas and the Nude,” a “wonderful and weird show at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.”

Viewing his work, we breathe the dizzyingly thin air on the snowy peak of the capital “A” in Art.

Paul Krugman, my favorite NYT columnist, apparently never sleeps: In addition to writing a twice-weekly column, he does Nobel Prize-winning work in economics and manages to update his blog five or six times a day. He is also an excellent writer who has come up with the best description of the federal government I’ve ever read. Pointing out that the money lost in the Solyndra debacle amounts to “a rounding error on a rounding error,” he writes that “the vast bulk of . . . spending goes to the big five: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, defense, and interest on the debt.” The clincher:

Your federal government is basically an insurance company with an army.

In an article in the UK newspaper The Guardian, author Will Self recounts his experience with a rare blood disease. The personal essay also delves into his history of intravenous drug use, and is far grittier than anything a U.S. paper would run. His language reflects his state of mind without being cutesy or using puns. He describes a skyscraper as

“. . . a vast hypodermic needle lancing up into the cloudy tissue of the sky.”

Adam Kirsch, writing on H.G. Wells in the New Yorker:

A malnourished childhood had left him short and slight, until he became short and stout with age.

Dan P. Lee’s article in New York Magazine describes Harold Camping’s life in the aftermath of the non-apocalypse. Two of his sentences stand out for the terrific, descriptive word choice:

The Bible is perfect—the literal word of God—infallible and utterly precise,” 89-year-old Harold Camping reminded them each weeknight, his slow, sonorous voice spilling from radios across the world.

At any minute, he was sure, trumpets would sound as Jesus Christ, flocked by angels, surfed the billowing clouds.

James Wood, writing in the New Yorker on Alan Hollinghurst’s novel The Line of Beauty, pairs an elegant sample of prose with his own analysis:

“Above the trees and rooftops the dingy glare of the London sky faded upwards into weak violet heights.” We can suddenly see the twilit sky of a big city afresh, and the literary genius is obviously centered in the unexpected strength of the adjective “weak,” which brings alive the diminishing strata of the urban night sky, overpowered by the bright lights on the ground. The effect is paradoxical, because we usually associate heights not with weakness but with power or command.

Those were the highlights of the month. Moving on . . . .

The Day They Fired the Entire Copy Desk

For your enjoyment (or irritation, or maybe just severe apathy), a roundup of the news media’s latest fist-to-forehead typos and proofreading errors:

The AP not only commits grievous copy-editing sins but neglects to correct its mistakes even days after they appear. I can understand rushing a breaking story onto the wires, but neither of these examples are particularly time-sensitive — and both are still live on the AP’s website.

Yes, Catholics in Brazil are losing inches as we speak. The archbishop is a veritable Tom Thumb. And when did “secular” become a noun? The author (or whoever put this headline together) is obviously attempting to say that Catholicism is on the decline in Brazil, but only the number or percentage of Catholics — not, presumably, Catholics themselves — can “shrink.” Replacing the word “secular” with “secularism” would help the sentence, but not by much. “Secularism rises” makes for an awkward statement; what the author really means is that “secularism is on the rise.”

The religion beat apparently doesn’t attract many proofreaders, because we also have this headline:

Apostrophe, anyone? If “Mormons’ beliefs” takes up too much space, “Mormon beliefs” would also work.

Moving on . . . . What exactly is The Atlantic trying to say in this headline?

Are we looking for “Do Tax Cuts or Spending Cause the Deficit?” That version isn’t much better, however, considering the awkward combination of a plural noun (tax cuts) and a singular gerund (spending). The parenthetical “Or Both” doesn’t really work either; it’s a separate question, not part of the first. A suggestion for rephrasing: “Is the Deficit Caused by Spending or Tax Cuts? (Or Both?)”

The latest edition of Newsweek is an even more dismal production than usual. Perhaps all the copy editors got pink-slipped after the Daily Beast merger, because this article on the economic and political mess in Italy has more grammatical errors than a bad SAT essay:

Italians are no different from other nations: like squabbling families, whatever they may say about their faults, they deeply resent it when outsiders start to list them.

Italy may be no different from “other nations,” but the last time I checked, “Italians” were not a nation.

As recently as July, as the storm that is Greece spread through the Mediterranean, people hoped that the ill winds might do Italy some good. . . .

Granted, the writer is speaking metaphorically, but the so-called “storm” is Greece’s debt crisis, or possibly the shakiness of the Greek economy, not Greece itself. No one has spotted bits of Greece drifting around the Mediterranean. (Then again, Crete making an appearance off the Italian coast would certainly be news.)

Italy’s real economy, they protest, is even today far healthier than Spain’s, which has huge private as well as public-sector debts, banks that are badly compromised by its massive property bubble, and more than 20 percent unemployment.

Again, a modifier problem. A country can have “huge private as well as public-sector debts,” but an economy cannot. The subject of the clause about debt is “Spain’s” (shorthand for “Spain’s economy) when it should simply be “Spain.” It doesn’t make much sense to say that Spain’s economy has massive debt or at-risk banks, but by beginning the sentence with “Italy’s real economy,” the writer is forced into an awkward parallel.

Stay tuned for more carping about petty style mistakes. The media will never be perfect, and I will certainly never run out of things to whine about.