This Slate squib on the current generation of anti-smoking ads seems to me to get it right. Slightly amusing to note, however, that these new and more sophisticated ads manage to be more subtly manipulative by warning teens that tobacco company marketers are subtly manipulative. The message, vaguely evocative of the liars paradox is: Don’t […]

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We’ll know there’s something seriously deranged about the blogosphere if this ridiculous story lasts more than 48 hours. Nutshell version: Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) tells an audience at a Lincoln Day dinner that We don’t do Lincoln Day Dinners in South Carolina. It’s nothing personal, but it takes awhile to get over things. Prompting a Democratic […]

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I did a classic Jon Stewar–style “doi-oi-oi” spring-necked double-take and eye-rub at this one: Matt Yglesias is blogging to take to task the right side of the blogosphere for their silence on democratic progress in Egypt and its potential validation of Bush’s “forward strategy of freedom.”

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Borrowing a page from Andrew Sullivan, I decided earlier this month at Hit and Run to inaugurate the Allan Bloom and Jedediah Purdy awards. Well, this Michelle Malkin column seems like a good first candidate for the Ernest Hemingway Award for Journalists with No Built-In Bullshit Detector. It’s about the practice of “cutting”—you may recall […]

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I already posted a few comments at Hit and Run prompted by Jon Chait’s silly piece in the last New Republic and Will Wilknson’s good reply. But now that I’ve had a chance to read the piece more closely, I notice it’s significantly dimmer than I’d realized. First, kind of a nitpick: Among other problems, […]

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The reactions to Radley Balko’s recent Fox column on blogs are a pretty good illustration of something I mentioned worrying about a couple weeks back—this necrotic, self-congratulatory mind-set wherein anything short of unchecked blog triumphalism is shoehorned into this cartoonish Old Media Dinos vs. Spry Furry Blogger Mammals narrative. Of course, far from being “old […]

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At CPAC this weekend, I got talking with another journalist about the Wall Street Journal‘s dubious choice to hide its content behind a fee barrier, a decision which is gradually making it less relevant—since stories in the Journal are far less likely to be discussed in the blogosphere, to which other traditional media are increasingly […]

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It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—that kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run. . . . My central memory of that time […]

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So, the Eason Jordan business has come to a close by demonstrating conclusively that if a hundred idiots bay at the moon simultanously, they can force the resignation of a network executive over a preposterous non-story. What’s especially telling, though, is the response we’ve seen to people pointing out that it is, in fact, a […]

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I’d sort of hoped to see someone give this moronic Eason Jordan “scandal” the brief puncturing it deserved, and Matt Welch obliges with a nice post this morning. I think some bloggers, especially on the right, have gotten so addicted to the high of feeling like you’ve scooped the lumbering, liberal “MSM” that they’re forcing […]

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