Mail from Taranto

Had the following email exchange with James Taranto of Best of the Web Today of opionjournal.com (the WSJ opinion pages website). He is a smart man with a great sense of humor.

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My Mail

Sent: Tuesday, April 05, 2005 11:32 PM
To: Opinionjournal
Subject: Pulitzers and Larry Summers

Dear Mr Taranto,

Your first item for Apr 5 2005 says

"Congratulations to our Wall Street Journal colleagues Joe Morgenstern and Amy Dockser Marcus for their Pulitzer prizes."

Now I wonder why you named the lady after the gentleman. The Pulitzer website you mention has Ms. Marcus's name before Mr. Morgenstern's, and an alphabetical arrangement of the names will place the lady's name first too. All the more surprising, the news stories I could google search all had Ms Marcus's name first.

So either you know Mr. Morgenstern better than Ms Marcus, or it must be reason number (3) on Larry Summer's list given below.

"1) Women want to have children, and as a result they don't put in the 80-hour work week that would make them competitive with their male peers;
2) the innate differences between men and women lead men to outperform women at the top end;
3) discrimination discourages women from pursuing science and engineering past their undergraduate education."

Maybe discrimination extends to the field of Journalism too.

With sincere thanks for your witty column.

-Rajat Prakash

Reply from James Taranto

Nothing to do with sex. I listed Joe before Amy because his reviews fall under the editorial page rubric, as does my Web site. Amy is on the news side. Same reason I listed Dorothy Rabinowitz before Ian Williams in 2001: http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=90000454

Cheers, James