Feb 01 2010
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But can you really blame them?
Point of clarification: Maureen Dowd is based in the newspaper’s D.C. bureau, not in New York.
Jan 31 2010
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[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Charlotte Gainsboug— “Time of the Assassins”
I ‘discovered’ this song via the “Morning Becomes Eclectic” session Gainsbourg and Beck did— beautiful.
Love these lyrics:
“I sift through the ash
I look for a sign
I open the wound
That keeps me in line
The shoulder that turns
The flame that goes out
The chapter I close”
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“ We are, collectively, much like eight-year-olds chasing a soccer ball. Instead of finding ways of creating fresh, original, high-impact journalism, we’re way too eager to chase the same story everyone else is chasing, which is too often the easy story and too often the simplistic story—and too often the story that misses what’s going on.
—
The above is from the New York Times’ White House correspondent Peter Baker, the kicker to a fantastic New Yorker article by Ken Auletta (not online).The article has a fantastic look at how the White House press corps is perhaps too consumed by minutiae and answering the question of “who won today?,” as opposed to probing deeper into policy issues.
This quote is almost beautifully framed by an unnamed “young White House reporter,” who likens Obama to her parents: “My mom used to constantly say, ‘We can do better!’ Oh, shut up! We get it, Mom.” Ugh.
Also worth noting here, against all this, is this Gallup poll from this past week.
Jan 25 2010
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Via James Fallows and Andrew Sullivan, here’s what the U.S. map might look like if the Senate was based purely on population…
Matt Yglesias breaks down the implications:
In some ways, even the sparsely populated areas currently overrepresented in the Senate would benefit from this arrangement. Consolidating several big empty square states into a “high plains” unit would allow these areas to cut down on some inefficient duplication of effort. With just one state capitol, you’d have a wider population pool from which to recruit really good people to run your state agencies. And with only one capitol to cover, it’s much more likely that you’d have first-rate reporters figuring out what’s happening. You could focus on creating one really good flagship state university campus instead of struggling to maintain six middling ones.
Jan 20 2010
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“ And now, a word to the budding (and established) comedians, writers, editors, publishers, entertainers, actors, musicians, poets, dancers, teachers, professors, philosophers, ministers, scientists, mathematicians, businesspeople of this country who struggle every day to nurture their own odd ways of doing things, their own unconventional or unusual designs or artistic notions, their own original, risky approaches, to those who look at what America currently believes, enjoys, expects, embraces, and say, “I have a different idea of what this could look like”? Keep sticking to your guns. The day you listen to the know-it-all in the gray suit is the day your soul dies.
The most brilliant and original novels and works of art and theorems and discoveries of recent history were all greeted as idealistic, impractical, bizarre, delusional or utterly wrong at one point or another. This is how good things come into being: Someone listens politely to the opinionated blowhard, shakes his hand, and forgets all of that priceless advice within seconds.
The most brilliant and original novels and works of art and theorems and discoveries of recent history were all greeted as idealistic, impractical, bizarre, delusional or utterly wrong at one point or another. This is how good things come into being: Someone listens politely to the opinionated blowhard, shakes his hand, and forgets all of that priceless advice within seconds.
— A really smart effort by Heather Havrilesky over at Salon, deconstructing the NBC/Conan O’Brien confrontation after Dick Ebersol’s comments earlier this week. Go read.
Jan 13 2010
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“ Maybe America just didn’t want to look at a redhead at that hour.
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The above is the lede from Maureen Dowd’s column today, focusing on Conan O’Brien’s travails and how Jeff Zucker keeps on falling upward.
I think this comment may be true, though, sigh.
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One more day of NBC, etc., then vacation.
Are you channeling Conan himself here, Mr. Stelter?
Jan 06 2010
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“
[C]onsider the caper of [longtime editor Jim] Naughton and the columnist he tried to recruit in the 1980s with a baby blue ‘67 Mustang.
As Naughton tells it, he decided to hire the writer Rheta Grimsley Johnson by driving the vintage vehicle to her Iuka, Mississippi, home and parking it in her driveway, with a note suggesting she drive it back to the new job he dangled in Philadelphia.
But before he could execute his plan, members of his own newsroom—“with the approval and connivance” of police—stole the car from Naughton. They didn’t return it for months, until after his 50th birthday party.
After all that, Naughton did drive the car to Iuka and leave it for Johnson. Unfortunately, as he tells the story, she kept the Mustang (“eventually she sent me a check”) but declined the job.
Johnson, now living again in Iuka and a columnist for King Features, confirms that an impressive amount of Naughton’s tale is true, although she does note that he almost blew the whole thing by parking the car at the wrong house. And she says she sent him the repayment check as soon as she could.
She was flattered (“It was like being rushed for a sorority at Auburn”) but also taken aback because when she tried to register her new car, it was still listed as stolen from the prank by Naughton’s staff.
— One thing that continues to surprise me as I visit newsrooms — and I always seem to have this reaction, no matter the newspaper or magazine — is how staid it is. Carl Sessions Stepp, a senior editor at American Journalism Review, writes a love letter to those olden time and nails what it used to be like here— some great, funny stories. Love the tidbits about the “word of the day” they tried to slip into print and the tale of how one journalist found his new office filled with golf balls.
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CNET News: "Vanity Fair on Twitter Fame: Twembarrassing"
Only one thing to say to this: Spot on, Caroline. Had the same reaction you did when I read the Vanity Fair piece on the Twitter ladies. (And, no, that doesn’t make you wrong at all.)
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The Wrap: "The Great Muppet Comeback"
From 1979’s ”The Muppet Movie”: You can’t live with ‘em, you can’t live without ‘em. / There’s something irresistible-ish about ‘em. / We grin and bear it ‘cause the nights are long. / I hope that something better comes along.
Great article by Brent Lang highlighting all the groundwork now being laid for a big comeback by the Muppets in the months (and years) ahead…
(Edited to add: By the way, if you want to start the day off right, click on this.)
