Whiff+SB

Shannon Billings

"Whiff" by John McPhee

I was surprised how short this article was. Most of McPhee’s articles require a lot of time to read them and that can be really draining. It is not hard to lose your focus when you are reading an article that feels like it is never going to end.

With that said, I really liked "Whiff." It featured ample amounts of humourous passages and it was drenched with sarcasm. This piece is about a magazine editor named William Shawn that discourages McPhee to never write about the future. It is hard to write about because it is unpredictable. Most of the time, predictions are wrong and the writer feels like a fool. Once the article is in print, it is permanent. It will always exist and the writer will be haunted by the embarrassing predictions that she chose to write about.

Basically, McPhee opted to write about three things that he predicted would occur in the future. He completely missed the mark on all of his predictions and so he thought about writing his last prediction about George W. Bush to kind of redeem himself.

The entire article leads up to a slam against Bush. McPhee pretty much says that he is a terrible president without coming right out and saying it exactly. Things may have been different if he would have written this article about Bush and it would be interesting to know the controversy that it may have caused, as a result.