In a classic example of biting the hand that feeds you, Steve Almond uses the Huffington Post to slam Gawker, after his editor told him about a post they'd run around the time his new book, Not That You Asked, hit bookstores. "As it turned out, they'd been talking shit about me for a while," he says—conveniently leaving out the fact that the actual post Julia Chieffetz was telling him about was a reasonably positive endorsement of one of his essays, where the term "bonkers" was clearly used to describe his anti-Oprah tirade semi-approvingly. Almond's essay is a fairly standard, unimaginative rap on Everything Wrong With Gawker ("a flagrant symptom of the culture of grievance that has overtaken our national discourse"), and Emily Gould's response is just witheringly sarcastic as you'd expect ("keep up your impressive and fruitful struggle against the evils of our time"). But, really, now, Gould's only been ragging on Almond since January, and I haven't been able to stand him since late 2005. Where's my recognition, dammit?

Personally, I find it highly amusing that a guy who spent nearly 4,500 words implying that the bookblogger who dared to criticize him online was doing it out of homosexual jealousy has the nerve to accuse anybody else of indulging in "emotionally convincing ad hominems" rather than rational discussion, but it takes all kinds to make a literary culture. As my friends at FishbowlLA point out, Almond is "his own worst enemy and best publicist," not to mention "a cottage industry of grievance."