Back Monday:

10/24/2002 11:08 PM  |  Comment (13)

When Good Writers Go Glib: Here’s a snappy little squib of wisdom about the IHT deal, care of Slate’s Jack Shafer:

No great newspaper was ever published by a committee, so with the Post out of the way, the Times is on solid footing to produce a great international newspaper the world needs. Surely its readers are the winners in this deal.

In other armchair snarking news, the Weekly Standard’s zeitgeist-hunter David Brooks attempts to make a funny about the differences between Giants and Angels fans, in a column parodistically entitled “Birkenstock Man vs. The Sprawl People.” Here’s his take on the Anaheim crowd.

The perfect Orange County resident lives in a $4 million oceanfront McMansion in Newport Beach. His interior decorator selected his furniture for him and it's all named after Ivy League colleges, so that the sectional couch in his four-story, 4,500 square-foot great room is from Ethan Allen's Harvard line and the sleigh bed in his tray-ceilinged master bedroom suite is called the Dartmouth Bed. He drives his gold Lexus (the same color as his golf bag) inland a few miles each day to his office at DRC Technologies, which provides IT solutions to boxcar manufacturers throughout the Far East. That means he is often out of town and his wife has to work off her unused sexual energies by walking for the dead and dying. She does walk-a-thons for breast cancer, leukemia, lupus, MS, PMS, and heart disease. She's done more bike-a-thons for more tumors than anybody west of Phoenix. When she learns that a friend has the flu, she puts on her lycra exercise pants and her cross trainers and she's striding around the block raising money. You go into her walk-in closet and there stuck in the cork wall liners you see enough awareness ribbons to clothe an army of compassion. There are pink ribbons, green ones, blue ones, yellow ones, and red, white, and blue ones so it looks like a wall of flags inside the United Nations.

I know, I know, save us from the literalists. But cocky glibness and pop-culture caricaturization can have their drawbacks, one of which is that they can easily create received wisdom that turns out to be false.

10/24/2002 02:14 PM  |  Comment (11)

Odes to Los Angeles: Moxie takes pictures, Scott Rubush uses words.

10/23/2002 04:02 PM  | 

Anil Dash Delivers Thoughtful, Lengthy Reaction to LGF Flap: I am as disinterested as can be in the various blog-wars currently being fought on several fronts, but this was a stimulating read. (Via Nick Denton.) UPDATE: Charles Johnson responds. Reading the comments on both posts is an interesting experience.

10/23/2002 02:04 PM  |  Comment (14)

It Is Time for You to Stop All of Your Sobbing: Rapacious media capitalist Jeff Jarvis rejects my gloominess about the IHT deal, and explains why he thinks a change was long overdue.

10/23/2002 12:35 PM  |  Comment (3)

A Brief Note About Euro-Atlantic Relations: The worst thing about European America-bashing -- something I’m pretty familiar with -- is not that it’s offensive, or ungrateful, or cheap, or even that it’s predictable (and, therefore, boring). No, the worst thing about it is that it’s frequently just flat wrong. It’s hard to respect someone who looks you in the eye and tells you, for example, that George Bush is just as bad a person as Osama bin Laden.

The exact same concept (substituting “ungrateful” with “un-magnanimous”) is threatening to hold true with American European-bashing, a sport that seems to be more popular nowadays than even girls soccer. Something to think about, next time you feed your surrender monkeys more cheese.

10/23/2002 11:53 AM  |  Comment (8)

Bennett Jumps Ship: Richard Bennett, with whom I have a World Series bet, is so disgusted with the Giants’ performance that he’s switching allegiances mid-Series.

Meanwhile, here’s a good Eric Neel column from Friday, here’s a column by the L.A. Times’ Diane Pucin arguing that Angel fans are out-fanning Giants fans by a wide margin, and here’s another L.A. Times story about how the city of San Francisco is in the doldrums.

10/23/2002 11:15 AM  |  Comment (8)

Bad News About My Favorite Newspaper: The New York Times has bought out the Washington Post’s 50% stake in the International Herald Tribune, I learned today via IHT lover (and former contributor) Henry Copeland. It had been an awkward but endearing partnership, losing a drip of money but combining the best of the two papers’ international coverage with more than 100 years of expatriate quirk. It always looked and felt like no other newspaper you knew, using its limbo to produce enough features in its 24 pages or so to grab 30 minutes of attention from just about every type of wandering American you could conjure -- backpacker, multinational lawyer/accountant/ad exec, Monaco gambler, kinky academic, Peace Corps kid, diplomat, trustafarian poetry dropout, military dude stationed in Germany, military dude’s wife shopping for crystal in Prague, etc. The breakup of the joint agreement would be bad (in my view) regardless, by simple virtue of eliminating half of the paper’s best coverage and features, but it portends even worse given the disappointing turn the Times has taken in recent months.

And no, I’m not talking about Rainesian politics, or whatever the hell -- but rather the surprising nosedive in basic quality. Take this ungrammatical nightmare of a sentence from Sunday’s Times, pointed out to me yesterday (in Mexico!) by Ken Layne:

Webber has criminal case in which he has been charged with obstruct of justice and lying to a federal grand jury.

How the permissive capitalism of the boom destroyed American equality

There’s a chance that this might all turn out for the good, with a rejuvenated ownership adding some direction and zip to the old product. But on a pessimistic day like today, I rather doubt it.

10/22/2002 02:56 PM  |  Comment (2)

Ideological Sniping: Minor but worthwhile point by James Pinkerton: Watching people speculate about the sniper is an exercise in witnessing ideologies on parade.

10/22/2002 01:23 PM  |  Comment (4)

Hi! What are you doing down here?