Appearing Soon on the Letters Page

 The New York Times Book Review today includes a review of Louis Menand's The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War.  At about the three-quarters mark there appears

... The New Yorker, a publication, Menand notes, that catered to well-educated, culturally insecure folk "eager not to like the wrong things, or to like the right things for the wrong reasons."

 I expect to see a snide letter in the edition of May 30, suggesting that the description could as well apply to to The New York Times Book Review. A dozen years ago, an article on George Steiner included the passage

Though Sontag published in highfalutin journals like Partisan Review and The New York Review of Books, she expounded radically democratic notions of pleasure and power. Steiner, on the other hand, used the solidly middlebrow New Yorker (or the equally bourgeois Times Literary Supplement in Britain) to examine and ultimately uphold the sacredness of the very high culture Sontag was attempting to deflate. Both writers, consciously or not, appealed to their audience’s vanity: Sontag allowed her intellectually aristocratic readers to indulge their contempt for middle-class Kultur, while Steiner enabled his middle-class readers to feel empowered by aristocratic ideas of truth and beauty.

A snide reply appeared promptly on the Letters page that time.