The problem with writing about the NY Times Book Review on the blogosphere is that it's too easy for reasonable criticisms to get lumped in with—or, worse, hijacked by—the crackpots who just seem to have a personal grudge against everybody who works on the section from Sam Tanenhaus on down. To the extent that other media outlets bother looking closely at the Review, writers there have an easier task of it; witness the savvy article Jim Sleeper wrote two weeks ago for the Nation website about the public intellectuals who supported the war in Iraq, particularly the NYTBR's status as "a neoconservative damage-control gazette":

"As storm damage rose, the Times's Tanenhaus published a steady stream of put-downs of dissenters. Some critics were simply ignored: Al Gore's The Assault on Reason wasn't reviewed... Others received prissy put-downs, as has Times columnist and economist Paul Krugman's The Conscience of a Liberal... His The Great Unraveling, too, got condescending treatment, from Peter Beinart, in May 2003. Not all reviews of 'political' books were unfair. But more typically we've had Berman sneering at Francis Fukuyama's apostasy from neoconservatism, Brooks lampooning an academic psychologist for urging Democrats to get tough, Klein coronating Beinart's term-paperish The Good Fight, Henry Kissinger coronating himself in a review about Dean Acheson and Brookhiser ruling that Hendrik Hertzberg's time had passed."

Sleeper also notes my favorite example of this phenomenon, Leon Wieseltier's crazy-grandpa review of Nicholson Baker's Checkpoint—and I'm not surprised, since Sleeper was one of the people whose complaint about that travesty was published in the Review letters column at the time. And then, unwilling to drop the subject, Sleeper wrote an article earlier this week for the Guardian elaborating Tanenhaus's neocon agenda, including a penchant for using conservatives to beat liberals over the head.

Sleeper's analysis makes it worth considering whether or not the Review functions as a sort of "shadow op-ed," and whether or not that would be such a bad thing if it were true. Such an entity would have the potential to be a more organic melding of opinions on books and on current affairs than the emergency graft at the LA Times, something like The New York Review of Books, only, you know, with snappier prose. But if a book review section were to attempt that model, it ought in all fairness to be completely upfront about it. Maybe that was the message we were supposed to take from Tanenhaus's enthusiasm for "news about the culture." Maybe not. It definitely feels like a conversation worth having.