A reporter on the BBC World Service just noted that the date of the attack on Nagasaki was determined in part by the worry that typhoons coming in over Japan left only a short window for a sortie. His conclusion: “So, frighteningly, it was the weather that was determining politics rather than the other way […]

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So, much as I’m weary of western politicians who couldn’t tell the Ka’ba from a peach cobbler going on about how extremists are “perverting” Islam—how the hell do they know?—this article, which got its author suspended from his radio talk show hosting job for its claim that “Islam is a terror organization,” is truly, profoundly […]

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Now, I’m as weary of smug blog triumphalism as the next guy, but good lord is this Doonesbury strip clueless. Gary Trudeau speaks via his radio host character (whose name escapes me) reporting from “the tail end of the media’s fascination with blogging.” Which is probably a fair description only in the same sense that […]

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Reason’s Burton Gray intern for the summer, Dan Koffler, has a smart blog: Finnegans Wake. (Which, if you share Tim Cavanaugh’s opinion, will be more rewarding than the book.)

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I’m in serious envy of NR‘s Andy McCarthy for coming up with the headline: “I’ll see your flush and raze you a mosque.”

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CNN’s running a teaser about various people who’ll be “sharing memories” of the late JP2, and the voiceover is done in exactly the same style as it would be if he were hinting at the hijinks that ensue on the next Full House.

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So, one of my jobs at Reason is to be the first (and, fairly often, last) pair of eyeballs on unsolicited article submissions. In case anyone cares, here are a couple things I tend to see over and over that influence whether I pass the submission on for further review. I have no idea how […]

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With apologies to some perfectly lovely people I know who work there, I’ve decided that so long as the Washington Times preposterously insists upon referring to gay “marriage” in scare quotes, I’ll adopt a parallel practice with respect to that “newspaper” and the “journalists” it employs.

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I wonder if the accumulation of scalps in the blogosphere’s trophy room hasn’t finally driven a few bloggers a little ’round the bend, to he point where they’re hallucinating scandals everywhere in hopes of collecting their own. Even while I thought the Eason Jordan scandal was overblown, at least there what he was supposed to […]

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Jon Stewart’s interviewing Tom Fenton, author of Bad News. Fenton confirms that he thinks the news media’s hit an “all time low” and Stewart, apparently totally seriously, says “you don’t often hear people in the industry standing up to say so that boldly.” Right. Breaking The News : How the Media Undermine American Democracy by […]

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