"If God had meant Harvard professors to appear in People magazine, She wouldn't have invented The New York Review of Books"
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A sly little grenade tossed at two kinds of American status: the glossy, face-forward celebrity ecosystem and the credentialed, brain-forward prestige economy. Quindlen frames it as divine design, then tweaks the theology just enough to make the joke do double duty. God is “She,” a quick feminist correction that also signals the speaker’s tribe: liberal, literate, amused by pieties but not allergic to moral claims. The punch line lands because it treats media formats as habitats. Harvard professors don’t belong in People; they belong in the New York Review of Books, that cathedral of long sentences, footnotes, and reputations built on being right in public.
The intent isn’t really to mock academics; it’s to protect a boundary. In the 1990s and early 2000s, when celebrity culture ballooned and “public intellectual” started to blur into “famous person with opinions,” the fear wasn’t that professors would be in People. It was that everyone else would start writing like People. Quindlen’s wit defends the idea that there should be at least one mainstream-adjacent space where seriousness isn’t punished for being slow, where the reward is argument rather than charm.
There’s also a subtle jab at Harvard itself: an institution already saturated with prestige doesn’t need the extra sugar high of mass-market visibility. The joke flatters readers who know NYRB, but it also dares them to choose a side: do you want your smartest minds optimized for a cover photo or for a considered essay?
The intent isn’t really to mock academics; it’s to protect a boundary. In the 1990s and early 2000s, when celebrity culture ballooned and “public intellectual” started to blur into “famous person with opinions,” the fear wasn’t that professors would be in People. It was that everyone else would start writing like People. Quindlen’s wit defends the idea that there should be at least one mainstream-adjacent space where seriousness isn’t punished for being slow, where the reward is argument rather than charm.
There’s also a subtle jab at Harvard itself: an institution already saturated with prestige doesn’t need the extra sugar high of mass-market visibility. The joke flatters readers who know NYRB, but it also dares them to choose a side: do you want your smartest minds optimized for a cover photo or for a considered essay?
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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