Once upon a time I subscribed to the New York Times. I don’t any more. I decided I couldn’t justify the getting the Paper of Record posted to me every day! I still use the website a lot and noticed that Ross Douthat has now joined the NY Times team as a contributor. Douthat is the film critic for the National Review and joined The Gray Lady only last month.
It will be interesting to see how his view on American Life is received by the Times’ readership. Douthat’s latest opinion piece Dan Brown’s America pokes some holes in the current fascination with Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons (along with the slew of copy cat pseudo-historical-religious-conspiracy-revisionist-thrillers those works have inspired).
His sharp assessment of Dan Brown’s approach to novel writing is clear: