Page Six Forgets Who Signs the Paychecks
From today's column:
EVERY WRITER'S INNER FAKE
BEST-selling writer Malcolm Gladwell identifies with New York Times fraudulist Jayson Blair. The other night, the "Blink" author was on stage at the Players Club as part of the trendy storytelling session known as the Moth. Gladwell admitted he once got a buzz after he wrote up an earnings report incorrectly as a cub reporter and the affected stock plummeted 10 percent. He also inserted the Australian capital, Sydney, into a story about where an annual AIDS conference might be held because he wanted to go there and thought no one "would mind." His hilarious performance at the Moth, with Harvey Keitel and Moby in attendance, climaxed with a manic description of his competition with another scribe to get the phrase "perverse but often baffling" into print a feat he eventually achieved when writing about the economics of health care.
It's not that the anecdote isn't funny. It's not that it isn't reasonably well told. It's just that Canberra — not Sydney — is the capital of Australia. Which you think someone would know at a paper owned by one Australian and edited by another.
