1. Our annual “Best of New York” bonanza cover package highlighted the city’s finest dumplings, bulk dry cleaner, gay highbrow night out, and several dozen other very particular, obsessively vetted picks—and generated surprisingly few squeals of protest (March 12–19). “I adore you, @nymag,” tweeted @vishy. “Was just thinking about it today and, boom, you come through w/ the ill coat re-lining spot in Best of NY. #mindreaders.” “Just took what @nymag calls the number one tour in the city,” wrote Manhattan Borough president Scott Stringer on Twitter. “The #Brooklyn Navy Yards are truly eye opening.” “Reading @nymag’s Best of New York Food section is giving me anxiety,” tweeted @jessmarati. “May pick up a part-time gig specifically for restaurant splurges.” At Brokelyn, Tim Donnelly praised the attention paid to his borough. “Brooklyn gets lots of love overall in the list, but Williamsburg earned a particularly starring role … As you might expect, BK shines in categories that involve Brooklyn-y things like ‘best farming class,’ while we let Manhattan handle fancier things like ‘best doorman substitute.’ ”
2. Three lawyer-crusaders are rallying recent graduates against their own law schools, charging the institutions with making false promises about employment prospects, Matthew Shaer wrote in a story on what might be the most inside-baseball class-action lawsuits ever filed (“The Case(s) Against Law School,” March 12–19). Readers had a hard time sympathizing—with either party. “Just so I get this right, despite the economic downturn in 2008—which led to burgeoning unemployment, rampant home foreclosures, loads of restructurings, and some big ole government bailouts for various industries—people going to law school should not have seen their employment outlook affected in any way because they believed they were guaranteed jobs,” wrote one commenter at nymag.com. “As my 4-year-old would say, ‘Because why?’ ” Another had a simple answer: “Law-school grads are a pretty delusional bunch.” Added a third: “While they may have a consumer-fraud case, this is really about whining and blaming others for bad choices.” But plenty of readers said that focusing on the plaintiff’s sense of entitlement meant missing the central story. “The plaintiffs are not suing because they don’t have a job now. They are suing because they would not have invested in massive loans in the first place had they known they had only a 40 percent chance of landing employment … after working like hell in law school.” Another wrote in with his own story: “I graduated from a top-ten law school in 2007 and spent thirteen months looking for work … I’m not going to sue my school,” he promised. “That said, I’ll never give them another dime.”
3. “If we want people who are great leaders in our country, why is it that we demand they be good-looking and charismatic and seem like movie stars?” asked the actress Julianne Moore in a profile, by Noreen Malone, in which she meditated on the difficulty of being Sarah Palin, whom she played sympathetically in HBO’s 2008-election movie Game Change (“I Can See Alaska From My Backyard,” March 12–19). “Sounds to me this woman was seriously miscast,” wrote one Palin-lover at nymag.com. “They needed to get someone that looks like Sarah Palin, so she wouldn’t need two hours of makeup every day. And the part that Palin didn’t have leadership abilities is a farce. She changed the way Alaska does business. The left keeps having to step away from the truth to continue their strange narrative of Sarah Palin.” On Twitter, readers ignored the role and gushed over the actress. “I can’t quit you, Julianne Moore,” wrote @RonMwangaguhung. Added @gunaratna: “I could not love Julianne Moore more.”
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