Finding Saint Hillary

I get compulsive when I can't immediately find something online.

This morning brought me an example, which serves as an interesting illustration in the free- versus paid- content battle.

We begin with Charles Krauthammer's op-ed in the WaPo. He refers to a "brilliantly detached, coolly ironic" Michael Kelly piece on Hillary Clinton, from the NYT magazine in 1993.

Sounds good; Kelly was an angel with the pen. Let's Google it.

Not at the top, though I see excerpts from the piece.

Giving up too soon, I try the NYT in-house search, reverse-date-sort.

Not there at all! Did the NYT lose the rights to the piece? Did Sidney Blumenthal delete it from their database? This is interesting.

Through a grad student I have access to Factiva, the news aggregator. They only had an abstract of the piece. A search on Lexis-Nexis Academic turned up nothing.

There Must Be a Pony in This Internet*, I thought.

Back to Google. Not too far down the list, we see this. A solitary blogger, who has scanned or somehow scraped the full text of the article from Kelly's anthology.

Score one for the free web. (And copyright violation, I know.)

Postscript: Fusty old Dialog had the article.

* Reagan's favorite joke. The abridged version:
...Next the psychiatrist treated the optimist. Trying to dampen his outlook, the psychiatrist took him to a room piled to the ceiling with horse manure. But instead of wrinkling his nose in disgust, the optimist emitted just the yelp of delight the psychiatrist had been hoping to hear from his brother, the pessimist. Then he clambered to the top of the pile, dropped to his knees, and began gleefully digging out scoop after scoop with his bare hands. "What do you think you're doing?" the psychiatrist asked, just as baffled by the optimist as he had been by the pessimist. "With all this manure," the little boy replied, beaming, "there must be a pony in here somewhere!"