When I was first reading the NY Times Sunday Magazine, I would see articles interviewing e.g. Nick Nolte and leaving it to be understood that he was the greates

When I was first reading the NY Times Sunday Magazine, I would see articles interviewing e.g. Nick Nolte and leaving it to be understood that he was the greatest mind in the acting business since William Shakespeare. I thought them odd, and I took a while to understand that these pieces were timed to appear before the subject's next movie. A bit later, I noticed that the same magazine would now and then pick out some other figure--the columnist Lewis Grizzard or the singer Robert Goulet--for a good beating that seemed out of proportion with the space they took up in the readership's psyches, perhaps out of proportion with their demerits. Do we need figures to think poorly of to reassure ourselves of the value of our positive judgments? I imagine also that some of the critics who looked down on McKuen had good words for singers and writers equally forgotten now.