Apparently, the folks writing Page Six for the NY Post were so taken with last week's GalleyCat item about Charles McGrath's family connections to Shalom Auslander's publisher that they decided to take it for themselves, blowing the matter up to a full-fledged scandal (in their eyes) and inadvertently restoring McGrath to his old job as NY Times Book Review editor in the process.

I understand why they did it: The Post can never resist an opportunity to engage in a little Times-bashing. And I even understand why they don't want readers circling back to my original post, which was as much about the Lynne Cheney/Rita Braver interview as it was about McGrath's article: "Imagine, if you will," I wrote, "that all this hoopla was over an interview with a conservative HarperCollins author on Fox News." Or, now that we're on the subject, just about every appearance of a HarperCollins author in Page Six ever.

(Thanks to Portfolio's Jeff Bercovici for calling my attention to this. And, okay, I'm perfectly willing to concede the possibility that, instead of p6 being directly inspired by my writing, the same tipster who raised the subject with us could also have run to them with the story...nearly a week later.)