Hilton the Huckster

By Richard Cohen

Tuesday, May 31, 2005; Page A17

Arthur Aufderheide is something relatively new under the sun -- a paleopatholgist. His specialty, a recent issue of the New Yorker tells us, is the dissection of mummies to study ancient diseases. I, too, have an odd specialty. It is the study of contemporary culture by carefully noting the number of citations in the computer database LexisNexis. For instance, I am here to tell you that when I searched in the category of major newspapers, John Bolton, the president's choice for U.N. ambassador, got 110 hits for the past week. In the same category, Paris Hilton got 158. As a LexisNexisologist I can only conclude that America has lost its mind.