Time to gripe about Things that Annoy Me in Periodicals!
1) Claire Messud's enthusiastic NY Times review of a Leskov collection says of the author: "he emerges as a literary missing link, a writer who brings the metafictional playfulness of Sterne into the Russian tradition..." Leskov is a wonderful writer, but he started publishing in the 1860s, seventy years after Karamzin, the "Russian Sterne," brought that playfulness into the Russian tradition starting in the 1790s (see this post). Karamzin was followed by a whole passel of writers influenced by him and Sterne, including Veltman (see this post), Narezhny, and Senkovsky, and doubtless others I haven't read. It's not fair to blame Messud for this, since she probably took it from Pevear's introduction (and of course I'm always happy to blame Pevear and Volokhonsky for things), and the real blame goes to the distorting lens through which we all view pre-Tolstoy Russian literature.
2) This is a simpler case, but more unexpected and therefore more aggravating. In Rebecca Mead's New Yorker piece on dementia care, "The Sense of an Ending," we find the sentence "Residents may choose when, and if, to bathe, provided that they maintain basic hygiene, and there is no compunction among staff members to get uncoöperative residents spiffed up for visitors." She obviously means something like "staff members feel no compulsion to..."; I don't know how the inappropriate "compunction" got in there, but even after years of watching the magazine's standards slip, it still somehow shocks me that their once-famed editing staff didn't root it out.