- Kantor’s piece for the Times first ran online on February 21st; the next day, Britain’s Daily Mail ran an absurd, unsourced, and unreported story that called Sandberg’s “feminist project” a “failure” and compared her to Gwyneth Paltrow, who lends her name and efforts to a lifestyle Web site.
The worst part about that is how many people actually notice and care about the retraction. I'd wager that it's a fraction of the people that read the original article.
I could not fault anybody for having a policy of "no comment" to the press 100% of the time, no matter what subject, and no matter how storied or respected the organization for whom the reporter is working. Not cool.But what was most problematic about the piece was Kantor’s use of a truncated quote that was taken out of context, which prompted a series of hastily written critical pieces about the Lean In project that revealed a reflexive closed-mindedness about the idea of a corporate leader who also identifies as a feminist.
On its own, that quote—“I always thought I would run a social movement”—sounded unappealingly arrogant and naïve about history. But the comment was only part of an interview that Sandberg gave for the feminist PBS documentary “Makers: Women Who Make America,” and her full statement actually conveyed something quite different: “I always thought I would run a social movement, which meant basically work at a nonprofit,” she said. “I never thought I’d work in the corporate sector.”
Reading the book is for sissies, all you have to do is draw your own conclusion from the title and whatever soundbites are being passed around by critics and other pundits who have, fortunately, read it for you. For example, Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate is obviously about how dull a popular online magazine is, F. A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom appears to be a travel guide for medieval village enthusiasts, Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel is clearly about firearm sanitation, Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow is a self-help manual, and I'm sure you can guess what Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is about. And seriously, who ever read Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science all the way through? You've gotta be kidding me. I don't even believe in Homeopathy.