"Maybe because it’s hard to write a drama in which the villain hasn’t done anything terrible yet, Greenhouse makes an uncharacteristic misstep in a brief excursus that compares the new justice to the late Phyllis Schlafly."

"To be sure, Schlafly was an important figure in the early anti-abortion movement. But her anti-feminist crusade against women in the workplace sits oddly with Barrett’s lifelong pursuit of a full-time career as a law professor and judge while raising seven (no, that’s not a typo) children. The only motivation for the invocation of Schlafly seems to be that, as Greenhouse notes, she was the subject of a television mini-series in 2020, and that both were lawyers with large families. 'Forty years later, more than a few people looked at Amy Coney Barrett and saw Phyllis Schlafly,' Greenhouse writes, with no indication of who those people were. 'And how could they not, given the similarity in the two women’s biographies?' This isn’t even guilt by association. It’s guilt by free association. "

That's a hilariously well-written paragraph in Noah Feldman's review (in the NYT), of Linda Greenhouse's book "The Death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Rise of Amy Coney Barrett, and Twelve Months That Transformed the Supreme Court."

I haven't read Linda Greenhouse's book — nor will I — but it sounds like she indulged in a style of writing that Maureen Dowd uses so much lately. She's watching TV shows and movies and they come up in her stream of consciousness thoughts about current events, and if you let that flow into you're writing, it feels interesting and conversational. 

Ironically, it is not unrelated to the way Donald Trump talks at his rallies.