The Host with the most (footnotes)

The Atlantic’s April cover story is a 1,286,368 word (we’re estimating) piece by David Foster Wallace on political talk radio, replete with David Foster Wallace Footnotes™.¹ If nothing else, it’ll feed the Clear Channel conspiracy theorists. A sample passage:

Clear Channel Communications Inc. now owns KFI AM-640, plus two other AM stations and five FMs in the Los Angeles market. It also owns Premiere Radio Networks. It also owns the Airwatch subscription news/traffic service. And it designs and manufactures Prophet, KFI’s operating system, which is state-of-the-art and much too expensive for most independent stations. All told, Clear Channel currently owns some 1,200 radio stations nationwide, one of which happens to be Louisville, Kentucky’s WHAS, the AM talk station from which John Ziegler was fired, amid spectacular gossip and controversy, in August of 2003. Which means that Mr. Ziegler now works in Los Angeles for the same company that just fired him in Louisville.

¹ Like this. And sometimes there are even footnotes to the footnotes^1a They’re occasionally interesting, but most of the time they’re just annoying.^1b This, incidentally, is why we never finished Infinite Jest. The footnotes were amusing initially, but at some point—for the sake of argument, let’s say after the 148th footnote—they started to feel like a cheap gimmick that was being gratuitously shoved down the reader’s throat.^1c
1a Like this.
^1b Like this.
^1c Like this.

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