Deborah Solomon

Deborah Solomon (born August 9, 1957) is a journalist and cultural critic with a weekly Q&A column in The New York Times Magazine. Her "Questions For" column is known for its frank, sometimes acerbic tone and has appeared in the newspaper's Sunday magazine since 2003. Solomon was born in New York City and was educated at Cornell University, where she majored in art history. She received a master's degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Solomon began her career writing about art for various publications. For most of the 1990s, she served as the chief art critic of The Wall Street Journal. She has written extensively about American painting in particular, and is the author of several biographies of American artists. In 2001, she was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship, in the field of biography.

She is married to Kent Sepkowitz, a physician at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and they have two sons.

Books

• Jackson Pollock: A Biography" (Simon & Schuster, 1987, ISBN 978-0815411826)

• Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997, ISBN 978-0878466849)

• Forthcoming biography of Norman Rockwell, to be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, in 2009.

Criticism: interview tactics and veracity

In 2006, NBC television host Tim Russert, who was interviewed by Solomon for her "Questions For" column, publicly accused her of distoring his comments. The interview was scheduled for Mother's Day, and, in the published version, Solomon repeatedly asks Russert to describe memories of his mother, only to have Russert evade her and talk about other topics. Russert charged, among other things, that Solomon combined two questions, skipping his answer to the first entirely and jumping straight into the second, in order to fit her intended characterization of him as evasive to certain queries. Russert made his allegations in a letter to magazine, but the editors chose not to print it until over a month after the interview was published and after the magazine had printed a number of negative-toned letters from readers angered over his apparent evasion regarding questions about his mother.

NPR's Ira Glass and advice columnist Amy Dickinson have also alleged that Solomon's interview methods were duplicitous and, in some cases, entirely fraudulent. Both Glass and Dickinson alleged that, in the published versions of their interviews, Solomon made up questions after the fact, in order to match certain answers that they each gave to entirely different questions. In particular, Glass alleged that Solomon plucked such answers from their rightful place and inserted them after the made-up questions, a process that, by nature, changed the context and meaning of those answers.

Dickinson and Glass disclosed to Matt Elzweig of the New York Press certain exchanges from her printed interview with Solomon that actually "didn't happen." They explained that Solomon created these false exchanges by combining and editing selections from her interview and coupling that with questions that either hadn't preceded them or, in some cases, that she made up after the interview was over.

Trivia

Solomon appears as the crush object of a 15-year-old Canadian boy in the novel "The Flying Troutmans," which was published in 2008 by the Canadian novelist Miriam Toews.

External links

Interviews by Deborah Solomon for the New York Times [1]