Last weekend, The New York Times’s normally stately and uncontroversial Sunday Book Review became the unexpected platform for a surprising journalistic skirmish. In her assessment of Vanessa Grigoriadis’s new book, Blurred Lines, an examination of the ever-heated debate surrounding consensual sex on college campuses, writer Michelle Goldberg offered some praise before descending into a forceful critique of Grigoriadis for allegedly not having her facts straight. Goldberg’s accusations were unequivocal and, at times, savage. “When Grigoriadis moves away from individual dramas to broad cultural pronouncements, the book falters,” Goldberg wrote. “Occasionally she makes baffling errors that threaten to undermine her entire book.”

Grigoriadis’s response was fierce: she in turn chastened Goldberg for being the one with an insufficient grasp of the facts. “Not one charge she makes in her review is correct,” Grigoriadis wrote in a blistering, point-by-point rebuttal on her Facebook page. “Michelle performed some of her own (incompetent) journalism here.” Indeed, before the fracas went public, Goldberg’s piece had been appended with a monster correction.

The bizarre episode quickly became a subject of intense fascination within journalism and media circles. Washington Post media writer Erik Wemple published an exhaustive account of the contretemps on his blog, and various womens’ sites weighed in as well. In a statement on Twitter, Goldberg confessed that she would “give a kidney and five years of my life” to take back the erroneous assertions. Summarizing the affair, and expressing some frustration with the manner in which it was depicted, she wrote: “This whole thing is turning into a round robin of fuckups.”

Many journalists and media observers have sympathized with Grigoriadis, who appears to have suffered an authors’ worst nightmare—she spent years writing a book only to sustain an unfair skewering at the hands of a reviewer who didn’t appear to fully comprehend the work. But the review of Blurred Lines has itself set off a drama within the halls of the Times, where the hand-wringing this week has been considerable, sources there told me. “It’s being talked about a whole lot,” said one. Another said, “It’s sloppiness, and also a question of whether or not the public response was adequate. It’s a significant error.” A third journalist described the fallout as “humiliating.” The Times, after all, is a place where big mistakes are seldom forgotten, and the most egregious ones can quickly become epitaphs.

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To make matters more interesting, Grigoriadis is on the masthead of The New York Times Magazine as a contributing writer. (She is also a contributing editor to Vanity Fair. An adaptation of Blurred Lines ran on the Hive.) And Goldberg, most recently a writer for Slate, was hired just a couple weeks ago as a columnist on the Times’s Op-Ed desk. She was the latest splashy appointment made by James Bennet, the paper’s august editorial page editor, who returned to the Times from The Atlantic last year and was regarded as a contender to one day succeed executive editor Dean Baquet.