Weiner and Picoult are artists. You may think one or both are bad artists, but art is what they create, and they want their work to be seen and judged as art.

No amount of money is ever going to make that feeling go away, and we shouldn't expect it to.

And isn't it pretty well established here that the NYTimes reviews way more men than women?

All of this to say that, yes, the NYT definitely has a problem in the way it writes about gender and the way it doesn't even write about race. I am stuck in a very white area and would love to be able to learn about the all the interesting new African-American literature coming out, but I very rarely find anything in the the NYT. Good for Picoult and Weiner for using their prestige to call out the Times.

Their racism/sexism charge has been pretty much debunked (http://thefastertimes.com/fiction/2010/08/27/jodi-picoult-thinks-shakespeare-wrote-airport-novels/) and Picoult has since conveniently changed her story to claim that the Times is biased toward literary fiction. The nerve of literary critics!

She has also made some very ignorant comments about the history of literature, in addition to trashing the craft of wordsmithing as Jim pointed out above.

Weiner, for her part, seems to believe that women writers who remain comfortably within traditional gender boundaries should be considered as noteworthy as men who push their writing outside of traditional gender boundaries. Their whole argument is a morass of backward logic, exploited sentiments, and the sort of foregone political conclusions more indicative of activist profiteering than literature.

Let's not misread the entitled tantrums of a couple of Ivy League brats as some sort of Rosa Parks moment. Weiner's smug remark about her royalties makes it abundantly clear where her head is. This isn't about gender equality or advancing literature. It's just sour grapes and selfishness.

As for the rest of their argument I think it is valid but the way it was presented came off petulant. They could have made the same argument without being catty and providing so many reasons to dismiss their position.

*I* could do it– and it would have one of two results.

1) No one would listen, because who am I? I have no platform. I think this is the most likely result because the YA community has been complaining for years that the NYTimes is utterly disinterested in YA until *after* it takes over the world, a la Harry Potter, Twilight and Hunger Games.

Or, 2) people would listen, and then my house would be ticked because their nice little YA author isn't playing nice, people tangentially related to the industry would think I was being a grasping whiner and avoid my books, etc., etc..

The way the story was launched was an accident– I'm sure Picoult had no idea that a couple of snide tweets were going to turn into an Incident. Once it did, I think she and Weiner did an admirable job of pointing out the actual inequities: books that are "women's fiction" get marginalized simply by being about women's issues. Men writing on the same topics get lauded– or at least get reviewed. If Nicholas Sparks were Nikki Sparks, she'd be just another women's fiction author, shelved in the romance section.

But I do feel like Picoult erred when she went after Kakutani. Everybody knows Kakutani is in love with her own reviews and hauls in the kitchen sink, the dishwasher, and the breakfast bar when she gets going. If she weren't over the top, she wouldn't be Kakutani. Furthermore, making people look a word up in the dictionary is NOT a bad thing.