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Vulture vs. Doree Shafrir and the New York ‘Observer’
In today’s Observer, Doree Shafrir bemoans the end of the New York City blood feud, claiming that today’s literary and cultural tussles — Buzz Bissinger vs. Will Leitch, Leon Wieselter vs. Andrew Sullivan, Dale Peck vs. Rick Moody — rarely reach the great heights of, say, Norman Mailer punching Gore Vidal. “What happened to the days when an enemy was an enemy, till death do they part?†Shafrir writes. She claims that:
The emotions that fuel feuds are still boiling away under the surface. Enemies have gone underground. Which is frankly a much scarier state of affairs. One of the features of classic enemies was that, out of a sense of a kind of mutual fairness, they always had the good manners to broadcast the feud, so that witnesses—colleagues, peers, friends—were always the final arbiters. Publicly known enemies battled with the assurance that the blood was always, ultimately, fake.
You know what we say to that? Go to hell, Doree Shafrir. You and your article and your goddamn pink newspaper are full of crap.
Doree Shafrir, we’re calling you out. Your article may be well written and interesting and all that, but we here at Vulture eat features like that for breakfast. That’s right, we said it: We eat your articles and then poop them out as blog posts by mid-afternoon. You wanna do something about it, Doree Shafrir … if that is your real name?
You claim the feud is dead? Tell that to Ben Silverman and Steve McPherson! Tell that to Santiago Calatrava and the city of Bilbao, Spain! Tell that to Megadeth and the United Nations! Tell that to Maxim magazine and common decency! All that rich, nourishing, well-marbled cultural beef sure tastes good to us, Doree Shafrir! But no, you just have to follow your article’s “thesis,†providing “supporting details†in the form of “quotes†and “examples†like some kind of stupid journalist, don’t you?
You’re a goddamn bastard, Doree Shafrir — a yellow-bellied, lily-livered coward. Every word you ever wrote is a lie, including “and†and “theâ€! You think you can step to Vulture? You write two to three well-researched, interesting articles a week. We write a bunch of posts every day — and as you’ve never held a job at any kind of frequently updating blog, you’d wilt under the pressure. You couldn’t write your way out of a brown paper bag with your hands tied behind your back by a metaphor of solid rope! Your momma wrote your book! Your hair is impossibly shiny! We hate you!
We look forward to your response.
Trash Me, Baby! [Some fucking newspaper]