Ars Brevis, Criticus Longa

Russell Banks’s new book of stories got a breathtaking review from Michiko Kakutani in the Times the other day. It wasn’t the review itself that took my breath away. It was the match of writer and critic. Because Kakutani was the critic who wrote the Times review of Banks’s novel Continental Drift that I remember reading over breakfast in the cafeteria at Fordham in the spring of my sophomore year: Wednesday, February 27, 1985.

That’s right: almost twenty-nine years ago, same novelist, same paper, same critic.

(Also in the paper that day: TIp O’Neill chided President Reagan for claiming that the U.S. “does not impose its will on other countries by force” while urging Congress to aid the contras in Nicaragua. Oh, and Bruce Springsteen won his first Grammy. That’s how long ago it was.)

We hear so much about the waves of change in the media business: Jeff Bezos buying the Washington Post, Newsweek closing and opening and opening and closing, New York magazine shifting from a weekly to a biweekly. We hear less about the people who (for whatever reason) manage to stay where they are, writing for publications that have figured out how stayed more or less in place. Jon Pareles has reviewed live music for the Times since I was in high school. So has David Fricke for Rolling Stone and Robert Hilburn for the Los Angeles Times. James Fallows has written several hundred pieces for the Atlantic since serving as a White House speechwriter during the Carter Administration. Robert Silvers has edited the New York Review of Books since 1963. Anna Wintour has been running Vogue since the days when punk was punk.

What are the effects of such Supreme Court-rivalling stability? That’s a discussion worth having.

• 11 December 2013