Brows

 In A.O. Scott's review of the movie "The French Dispatch", which appeared in yesterday's New York Times, there is a passing reference to

... Harold Ross and William Shawn, the men who together and sequentially established The New Yorker as a pinnacle of middlebrow sophistication in the decades before and after World War II.

I don't often see The New Yorker, and won't vouch for the loft of its brow. Yet I wonder what the height of The New York Times's brow is.  High, upper-middle? And I wonder whether and how I would recognize a highbrow publication if I saw one. Perhaps the sign would be one that it left me muttering "It's very hard to be up to you intellectual lads", like Flann O'Brien's The Plain People of Ireland.

A Hoax

 At the end of the notes to Chapter III, "Columbus's First Voyage of Discovery", of Samuel Eliot Morison's The European Discovery of America: The Southern Voyages 1492-1616, appears

One of the most amusing hoaxes of our day is the story about Columbus submitting his great enterprise to the Senate of Genoa, all of whom turned it down (in a 964-page report) as impractical, impossible, and incredible, except the junior member, none other than Leonardo da Vinci! After seeing this squib given the dignity of print in the Congressional Record for 28 June 1971, p. S 10, 107, I ran it to ground. Through my friend Robert Sherrod I found that it was written as a satire by Dr. Ralph S. Cooper of the Scientific Laboratory at Los Alamos, to whose dismay it was taken seriously in many quarters.

Though I like as well as the next citizen to make fun of elected officials, I infer from the context provided in the Congressional Record that the Senate was not one of the many quarters that took the story seriously. Senator Sparkman of Alabama read the story into the record during a consideration of the NASA Authorization Bill, in particular whether the space shuttle should be funded.

I had opened Morison to refresh my memory on the date of Columbus's landfall in the Bahamas: it was, as I had thought, October 12, 1492.

GOTS

 Within the last few years, American sportswriters have taken up the term GOAT--"greatest of all time". So for example, one can argue whether Tom Brady is the GOAT among quarterbacks or Tiger Wood the GOAT among golfers. (As far as I know, nobody has suggested that we separate the sheep from the GOATs.) The position of quarterback has perhaps a hundred and fifteen years of history, if we count from the first legal forward pass. I suppose that professional golf has a few more. In any case, "all time" in such sporting contexts is both short and recent enough to be well documented and long enough not to sound ridiculous.

A bookstore that I've bought from sent an email last week, advertising among other books some new novels. Among them was one with a description including

Don’t miss out on maybe the greatest work of fiction published this season.

I can certainly believe in a best work of fiction published this season. But setting aside the mathematical or use of "greatest"--for example, the greatest common divisor of 128 and 198 is 2, and the greatest common divisor of any two mutually prime numbers is 1--one expects the greatest to be great. Is there a great work of fiction published every season?

The major American sports leagues have a Hall of Fame, admission to which ought to certify greatness, and name a most valuable player (MVP) every year. Sports buffs must know whether it is possible to have won an MVP award and not end up in the sport's Hall of Fame. I don't know, but I suspect that it has been done. Then there are arguments every few baseball seasons whether the MVP award should go to someone with outstanding numbers whose team finishes out of the playoffs, or to someone with less gaudy numbers whose contributions take the team to the playoffs, perhaps a championship. The question raised is whether "wins above replacement" count for that much when the team could have traded the star, found a replacement, and finished no farther out of the running. So perhaps GOTS--greatest of this season--would be a useful complement to MVP.