We had almost forgotten about James Atlas's New York mag article on failure. The anti-depressants were finally working and we had just stopped sobbing into our chai lattes. Then Jack Shafer had to bring it up again:

The piece boils over with specificity about Atlas' life—he writes of sobbing in front of his children at a showing of the treacly Mr. Holland's Opus; he notes that he once worked at the New York Times; he names his son, Will; he names the scotch he drinks at a New York Rangers game (Dewar's); he names the soda his editor drinks as he dumps him (Diet Coke); he names Saul Bellow's sad-sack best friend (Isaac Rosenfeld).

But he never names the magazine editor who sacked him or the magazine itself, an odd oversight seeing as the episode takes up 1,200 words of his 3,900-word piece...The editor is David Remnick of The New Yorker.

Related: Failure, loser or jackass? [FishbowlNY]