Editor’s Note: We’re off for the holidays and will return the first week of January.
The Chefs have already weighed in on their favorite books for 2016, but with the holidays fast approaching, I wanted to add a stocking stuffer. No, this has nothing to do with scholarly communications; I made my holiday request in that category in 2009, and my pleas to Santa have gone unanswered. I simply want to call attention to an extraordinary short story that recently appeared in The New Yorker. The author is Joseph O’Neill, he of Netherland fame; the story is called “Pardon Edward Snowden,” but it has nothing to do with Snowden or “intelligence” except in a different sense of that word. It’s simply a gem, the finest literary piece I have read this year. Sophisticated, allusive, satirical: a perfect piece for readers of The New Yorker.
If you read The New Yorker in print (still the best version of this publication), you can find the story in the December 12 issue on page 64. That’s the issue with a big Christmas tree on the cover, seen through the windows of a Manhattan apartment house.
Seasons greetings to everyone.
