Seventy Year Old Man Beats Up Journalist over Bad Article

From the American Scene.

Here's a fun story as far as journalistic fisticuffs go. Henry Allen, a  nearly seventy year old feature editor for the Washington Post Style section, got into a fist-fight with feature writer Manuel Roig-Franzia, who, I'm assuming based solely on his hyphenated last name, is a pretentious jerk.  The fight apparently centered around a lazily put together "charticle" about inadvertent disclosures, drawing on a congressman recently letting slip that several colleagues were under investigation for ethics violations.  The story was said to contain several factual errors- stating, for instance, that Robert E. Lee's battle plans were found wrapped around cigars in Virginia, when the event actually occurred in Maryland- but must have been quite spectacularly terrible to elicit the response it did from Allen.  Upon reading it, he was said to remark, "This is total crap.  It's the second worst story I've seen in Style in 43 years."  This has led to much speculation as to what the worst story may be.  Reports say it was a story on Paul Robeson (who has the improbable occupational listing of athlete/actor/orator/concert singer/lawyer/social activist on wikipedia, someone get that man a "Slashie").

Another Post writer gives his take on it here and gives a link to what is for his money the worst article ever to appear in Style.  I was curious and took the time to read it.  Without having ever read any other Style articles, I can say that this must surely be the worst thing the have ever published; it reaches impressive depths of utter crapitude.  This is the type article that it actually takes a somewhat talented writer to create: a large, sprawling, nauseating mess; as if someone found a fresh steaming dog turd on the sidewalk in front of their house, took a fancy to it, and decided to spend the next week crocheting a neon orange sweater for it to wear, and then upon closer inspection of the finished product decided to screen-print it with a brightly colored image of a family of gay, effeminate, bejeweled dolphins  surfacing before a field of frolicking unicorns and so bring the level of crappiness to new, unimagined heights.  Words really fail to describe how awful this article is, it has everything: mazes; visions of Native Americans dispensing vague, feel-good proverbs; lens flares that are perhaps profound spiritual experiences; ridiculous new-age associations between walking through a labyrinth and improving your child's standardized test scores; and a "moving Native American funeral flute solo and song and dance."  Click the link, entertain yourself, you deserve it.