Bono, as Megan anticipated Friday, made his first appearance in yesterday’s New York Times as a guest columnist. Rather than filing the piece we probably all expected (a global poverty/AIDS activist’s rallying cry), Bono did it his way and wrote about “malt joy and ginger despair” in a Dublin pub and Frank Sinatra and “sentimentality” and “duality.”
Is it, to quote two of the many online comments on the column, “poetry” or “a load of pomp?” (I can see a bit of both in the column, but more of the former, context and company considered).
UPDATE: So, would you pay 99 cents (or pay, at all) for a newspaper with Bono’s byline? In today’s Times, David Carr calls on someone to “Please Invent iTunes for Newspapers.” (And: ready, set, react!)
Liz Cox Barrett is a writer at CJR.