At 4 pm on Monday, May 22, Inigo Thomas posted an item in Slate wondering whether New York magazine’s Michael Wolff’s pan of Inside, the new website about the media not yet officially launched by former New York editor Kurt Andersen and former Spin editor Michael Hirschorn, was Wolff’s way of repaying Andersen for snubbing Wolff’s media conference because he refused to cross a picket line at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. But does former George senior editor Thomas, who does not mention the picket line, have his own agenda?

There, I did it. What appears above, however brief, is, I am pretty certain, the first-ever piece of media criticism of media criticism of media criticism of media criticism. Not since A.M. Rosenthal achieved the previously unimagined feat of quoting himself quoting himself on the New York Times Op-Ed page has journalistic solipsism enjoyed such a red-letter day.