More proof that this Internet blog isn't (only) a waste of my time. My article in the latest New Yorker � One Billion � had its origins in this post, where I challenged the claim that the Oscars are watched by a billion people worldwide.
Close observers will note that the particular citation I was questioning on the Internet blog was from an article in The New Yorker � a fact my own New Yorker article omits. I wanted it in there � partly for full-disclosure, partly to innoculate the magazine against carpers with Internet blogs � but I was told that the magazine almost never references itself unless it absolutely has to (for example, I guess, to write puff pieces about people who were there under Mr. Ross) and that since the magazine didn't actually claim the billion figure as a fact, a mea culpa was unnecessary.
Anyway, it's not a finger-pointing kind of piece, so it's not that important.
