Salon's worst calls

You see, there are no bad calls, only imperfect universes.

Salon's staffers were asked to volunteer their own worst calls for this story, and they responded by scurrying off to suddenly remembered dentist's appointments. But a few were caught at the elevators.

Editor in chief Joan Walsh pointed out that a mere six weeks passed between her bittersweet appreciation of the outgoing President Clinton and a withering attack on him for the "last-minute bacchanal of bad judgment" that made up his final days in office.

The subheads on the two pieces say it all. "As the newly liberated president travels the country to cement his legacy, he reminds us we'll miss him as much as he'll miss us," read the first, on Jan. 13. The second, on Feb. 23, about Clinton's orgy of crony-pardoning, read, "Former President Clinton's disgraceful exit raises an awful possibility: Maybe he was as morally bankrupt as his right-wing enemies said."

Rebecca Traister recalled congratulating Martha Stewart for avoiding jail -- before Stewart went to jail. To be fair, Traister acknowledged that all that had happened back in February 2004 was that the most serious charge against her had been dropped.

"Not so much a bad call as jumping the gun -- also known as bad reporting," Traister says now. "I would say, in retrospect, that one sort of smart thing to do when writing about legal verdicts is to maybe wait for the full verdict to be handed down before analyzing them."

Andrew Leonard, who writes about technology and culture and for years edited Salon's Tech site, called a piece he assigned praising Microsoft's .Net initiative in a contrarian move "a really bad call."

"All Hail .Net!" didn't go over well with readers, who declared themselves "speechless with shock and horror" at a piece that brought "simplistic sycophancy to a new low."

"I had originally planned to run both a pro- and an anti-.Net piece to mark its official unveiling," Leonard says now. "But the con piece fell through, and I went, What the hell, it will be a contrarian piece praising Microsoft from a notoriously anti-Microsoft Salon Tech section.

"But readers saw it, correctly, I think, as a very weak piece written by the author of .Net how-to books that undermined everything the Salon Tech section stood for."

Table Talk host and sometime movie critic Mary Beth Williams answered the call for bad calls by saying, "I think I should win something for being the only person ever who gave a good review to the Gus Van Sant remake of 'Psycho.'"

Now, with some distance, Williams is philosophical about her take on the remake. "I still say an awful lot of people were predisposed to hate it because they thought it shouldn't have been made in the first place," she says warmly. "So bite me!"

And Salon's advice columnist, Cary Tennis, sent an e-mail that read, "I dunno about absolutely terrible calls. Pretty much whatever I say there's at least one person who thinks I'm nuts -- including recently more than one letter saying I shouldn't advise somebody to fire a gun randomly (it was a metaphor!)."

But he gamely came up with a few favorites:

"One was telling the woman whose boyfriend spent too much time with his dogs to just get a dog herself, to just 'become a dog person! Surrender to the delights of man-dog love!'

"Another one was where the married woman slept with somebody at work and then found out she was pregnant and wasn't sure which partner had made her pregnant. I advised her to just say nothing for the time being. Most people who wrote in response begged to differ.

"Oh, and this one -- I should never have let on that, yes, sometimes these very delicate matters that readers entrust to me do get discussed over fabulous meals. Henceforth, I don't include the recipes with the responses."

A few minutes later, another e-mail came in from Tennis about that last one.

"The more I think about this column, the more I like it as a candidate," he wrote, "because if you read the first paragraph of my response, you know, we're talking about guilt, and it's like I'm talking with my mouth full, utterly sated, sitting around a big holiday table. We're all stuffing ourselves with gluttonous abandon, actually, and this poor guy is asking, 'How do I try to heal the wound that this abortion has caused?'

"And I'm like, 'Your unenviable predicament was discussed at length over a dinner of roast goose, sweet and sour cabbage, green beans with toasted walnuts, and mashed potatoes in a goose gravy whose preparation required the patient reduction of two cups of a good merlot to a fragrant, unearthly nectar ...'

"And I conclude: You have nothing to feel guilty about, my son!"

And neither do we. As we sit around our anniversary table, stuffing ourselves with memories of our first 10 years, there's no shame in the odd licked doorknob, the occasional evil Microsoft initiative praised to the heavens, the random bad prediction about an election or a football game.

The best part of putting Salon out every day is just as true about the good stuff as it is about the not-so-good: There's plenty more where that came from.

"Some may point out that not all of Salon's risks have stood the test of time, and that's true," says Talbot, the founder. "But to tell you the truth, I'm even fond of our mistakes. You can't do anything special if you're always afraid of falling on your face. Long live Salon's wild spirit!"

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