I’m going to have to side with (my friend) Ezra Klein against (our mutual friend) Conor Friedersdorf on the question of whether D.C. is somehow toxic for journalists and thinkers. Here’s the nub of his concern:
But inside the world of many ideological magazines, think tanks, foundations, and other intellectual movement operations, a different dynamic [...]

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A little happy-hour jawboning about politics and comic books sounds like a pretty great way to spend a Tuesday after work.  This admittedly makes me a huge dork, but fortunately, D.C. is full of huge dorks. So I hope those of you in the area will join me tomorrow at the Laughing Man Tavern from [...]

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I’ve said something similar before myself, but this from Conor Friedersdorf jibes with my own experience:
There is this idea among movement conservatives—especially the rank-and-file—that Washington DC journalism is populated by a lot of disingenuous, careerist sell outs. These elites write to enrich themselves, to inflate their sense of self-importance, and to garner social capital, invariably [...]

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The federal government’s first Chief Information Officer, Vivek Kundra, used to be the District of Columbia’s top geek. He caught the Obama administration’s eye by, among other things, finding innovative ways to put public data online, and especially to make it more easily accessible through the use of third-party apps. A prime illustration of the [...]

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It’s that time again.

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So, until Wednesday, I hadn’t taken much notice of the whole “Tea Party” phenomenon.  Like about 98 percent of public protests, it had struck me as little more than a stunt, guaranteed to reduce a legitimate argument to a spectacular competition for the dumbest, craziest slogan. Protests may—occasionally—make sense when either you need to draw [...]

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I always feel like I  ought to try to make it out to these “Twin Tech” events for professional reasons but dear God, if an evil genius designed a venue with the goal of driving me to shoot myself in the face, they’d come up with something like this place.  Would anyone with a scintilla [...]

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Yglesias finds this from an interview with Rachel Maddow:
Biggest misconception about pundits: That we all hang out together. I don’t know any of these people. Maybe all the pundits are hanging out and not inviting me. […]
By her bed: Comic books. I read comics sometimes and graphic novels. I appreciate that genre.
So, actually, lots of [...]

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Fleeting thought spurred by anticipation of Built to Spill doing Perfect from Now On at 9:30 Club tomorrow: This apparent trend of long-running indie bands performing classic albums in their entirety (Mission of Burma doing Vs. at Black Cat a while back was stellar) is presumably partly a function of a new generation discovering seminal [...]

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