When I say that Hirshorn demonstrates a specific ignorance of the form, I’m referring both to his analysis of This American Life and of (for lack of a better list of terms) features/literary/narrative journalism. Writes Hirshorn:
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Hirshorn gives an example, but it reflects more on his methods than Glass’s.
One of the reasons that I like This American Life is that I fell in love with literary journalism at a young age, long before I’d ever heard of the show. TAL‘s particular aesthetic, intentionally or not, comes from a very, very long tradition of short narrative journalism about the everyday, the picaresque, the odd. The New Yorker‘s Talk of the Town section is the most famous purveyor of the form, and much of the magazine’s coverage is simply a longer variation. Richard Preston’s famous article on the Chudnovsky Brothers, which inspired Darren Aronovsky’s Pi, is pretty damn quirky, the account of two brilliant mathematicians who built a supercomputer in their apartment to find patterns in the number. Susan Orlean was doing TAL-esque stories when Ira Glass was just a dude at WBEZ.
