Joan Didion vs. the Political Insiders

Joan Didion has had a startlingly active afterlife. A star-studded memorial, a pricey estate sale, an underselling Upper East Side co-op: In the almost two years since her death at age 87, much has been said about the queen of New Journalism—good, bad, and unctuous. The lifestyle coverage can be both a distraction and a deflection from the serious substance of Didion’s reporting on topics from the Central Park Five to wartime atrocities in El Salvador. More than the sunglasses or art collection, this journalism—for publications from The New Yorker to the Los Angeles Times, but mostly in The New York Review of Books—is a major part of her legacy. Her thoroughly researched and meticulously written analyses of the politics, personalities, and issues of her day should be studied as antidotes to the punditry of the 24-7, 280-character news cycle, in this age when truths are even stranger than “political fictions.”