Stop Picking on the D.C. Elite!

I've been having an argument with a friend of mine, a veteran Washington journalist, about whether it can really be true that where I live (an apartment building on the Upper West Side of New York, all of whose residents are Columbia faculty members), people aren’t talking about This Town. My friend thinks I’m playing the country bumpkin, but I swear it! This Town has a powerful infinity-of-mirrors quality: it’s proudly, defiantly obsessed with a particular Washington subculture, which it persuasively portrays as being self-obsessed, and the subculture obsesses over This Town right back, because the book plays into the subculture’s self-obsession. Since members of this subculture spend so much of their time around the edges of consequential events, it’s hard for them to imagine that the rest of the world could proceed unconcerned with their doings.