McSweeney's spat
You know, rereading this stuff, Dave Eggers and Neal Pollack are actually quite genteel, given that Pollack made up a quote attributed to Eggers.
Here’s the exchange as published on McSweeney’s.net.
And here’s the Pollack essay, as brought to us by FC reader Jordon.
(If you don’t have a Times registration . . . well, what do you do at work?)
I hope folks realize how often non-reporters make up quotes. 95% of the time, though, the made-up quote captures what the speaker said generally, meant, intended, etc. But I suppose people—I do—think quotations in the New York Times go through some sort of fact-checking scrim. (Don’t you remember the scene from Almost Famous when the Rolling Stone fact-checker phones up the band to confirm the whole story? You mean that isn’t true?!) To the Times, the Eggers quote probably looked harmless. But in the context of the McSweeney’s goals, it’s anti-snarking campaign along with the Believer, and its apparently less-ironic-than-at-first-blush taste, it really is an incredible quotation to assign to Eggers.
