Joan Acocella is an American journalist who is a staff writer for The New Yorker,. She has written books on dance, literature, and psychology.
Education and career
Acocella received her B.A. in English in 1966 from the University of California, Berkeley. She earned a Ph.D. in comparative literature at Rutgers University in 1984 with a thesis on the Ballets Russes. Acocella has written for The Village Voice, has served as a senior critic and the reviews editor for Dance Magazine, and was the New York dance critic for the Financial Times. Her writing also appears regularly in the New York Review of Books. She began writing for The New Yorker in 1992 and served as its dance critic from 1998 to 2019. Her books include Creating Hysteria: Women and Multiple Personality Disorder ; Mark Morris, a biography of modern dancer and choreographer Mark Morris; and Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints, which explores the virtues common among extraordinary artists. She also edited The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky: Unexpurgated Edition, André Levinson on Dance, and Mission to Siam: The Memoirs of Jessie MacKinnon Hartzell, her grandmother. Her New Yorker article "Cather and the Academy," which appeared in the November 27, 1995 issue, received a Front Page Award from the Newswomen’s Club of New York and was included in the “Best American Essays” anthology of 1996. She expanded the essay into Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism.
Criticism
Acocella received both critical and mainstream negative feedback for an article she contributed to the May 2008 Smithsonian magazine. The magazine featured a monthly two page spread where authors write about their hometown, and Acocella wrote about New York City, despite having been born and raised in California. The article was written in the style of a "day in the life of a New Yorker." She described going to the post office and seeing a mail clerk refusing to allow another customer to waste a copy of the Village Voice as packing in a box that was being mailed. Acocella then claimed that numerous people surged forward to offer up a copy of the New York Times. Many online comments on the article wrote that this was an attempt to get freelance work from the Village Voice. Smithsonian magazine also received feedback on the way Acocella started and finished the article. The first paragraph was "In my experience, many people believe that New Yorkers are smarter than other Americans, and this may actually be true". The final paragraph ended with Acocella arguing that life in New York was like "being a child again and that, I believe, is another reason why New Yorkers seem smarter." In between the less than objective opening paragraph and the "life in NY is like being a child" ending she wrote at length about an elevator ride with Paul McCartney. This article was, of all published in Smithsonian magazine in 2008, the one that received the most feedback. Her New Yorker review of Henry Hitchings's The Language Wars drew criticism. Among critical responses were those of Jan Freeman, Mark Liberman and Deniz Rudin. John McIntyre of the Baltimore Sun wrote an entire article about the episode.
