As you could maybe tell from that last, I'm in a crappy mood. It's mostly because I've been procrastinating for months, literally, on revising this goddam article I originally wrote for Harvard Business Review. They rejected it -- and after reading it again over the "holidays" (hah!), I can see why. What a piece of shit! The reason I keep promising myself to do this is that I've also promised a far shorter version (2000 words) to Perseus, who want to include it in a monster business encyclopedia they're bringing out next year with Bloomsbury (the UK publisher of the Harry Potter books).

So every day for the last couple weeks now I've waked up thinking TODAY I'm gonna fix it. Mother of God! What is wrong with my brain? Why can't I write a single fucking paragraph? Oh well...

I did get pretty excited a couple days ago, enough to put together these two tables, which show at a glance what I'm arguing for. I've renamed the thing "The Case for Business Criticism."

Table 1. Google Search Results





         Query                   Hits

      

      "literary criticism"    223,000

      "art criticism"          29,500

      "media criticism"        22,600

      "social criticism"       19,600

      "cultural criticism"     16,900

      "music criticism"         5,040

      "science criticism"         551

      "business criticism"        170





Table 2. Google.com Search Results

      

         Query                   Hits

      

      "music critic"           45,900

      "art critic"             43,800

      "literary critic"        24,600

      "social critic"          13,300

      "media critic"            9,410

      "cultural critic"         7,340

      "science critic"            178

      "business critic"            85

I included the "science crit" entries as an afterthought -- and it was a lucky one, as through those searches I discovered an article called Why Not Science Critics? by Don Ihde, who is a big gun in the philosophy of science (sorta like being the best basket weaver on Wall Street). Anyway, the parallels in our arguments were pretty arresting, and I got all turned on for a minute. But it wore off and now I'm cranky again because I really do have to finish this today. This self promotion shit is really hard work if you think about it. Maybe I should switch to self-effacing humility. Maybe that'd be easier. You think?