“It’s not clear what the Audubon Society did to piss off Jonathan Franzen.”

This is quite possibly my favorite sentence that I’ve ever read. If you missed it this weekend because you were busy Easter/Passovering (I personally had my first Passover as a married woman, and made chopped liver like a good, grateful shiksa), the Audubon Society is now in a feud with Jonathan Franzen.

tl;dr, Franzen wrote a piece for the New Yorker arguing that climate change has made people stop caring about conservation, and calling out the Audubon Society. And then the Audubon Society CLAPPED. THE HELL. BACK.

In order to gin up that caricature, however, Franzen, who has no journalism experience that I know of, was forced to ignore or actively distort a great deal of inconvenient truth. In fact, the very examples he cites in his piece of the kind of retail, grassroots protections we should be offering to birds (and the very kind that would presumably be subsumed in a wave of climate neurosis) were spearheaded by . . . Audubon.

Full disclosure: I come from a family of birders, and I actually don’t hate Franzen with the fervor of much of my new media brethren. I don’t know if I could choose sides, but I hope someday I am forced to. I hope we all are, fifty years from now as the great Franzen/Audubon wars escalate, pitting friend against friend, family against family, hawk against falcon. I predict great things.