Fascinating nugget in the latest docu-dump from the U.S. Census Bureau. Around 8 percent of blacks under the age of 18 cited themselves as multi-racial, compared to 2 percent of blacks over 50. Could be a function of the end of miscegenation laws in the 1960s; or more evidence that Robert Byrd was onto something; or, better still, a shift away from rigid racial identities in the younger generation. Here’s hoping it’s the latter.
WHY I’M NOT THE HARVARD CRIMSON: Digging out from under the blizzard of angry emails after my piece in defense of the estate tax, I can’t help but be amused by the Harvard Crimson’s defense of its decision not to run David Horowitz’s ad on slavery reparations. “The ad was written in a style that seemed as though it sought solely to aggravate our readers, and we didn’t feel comfortable running it unedited,” said Crimson President C. Matthew MacInnis ’02. Rest assured that every now and again, I will write something designed specifically to aggravate my readers. And everything you read here is always unedited. Unless you count my own, amateur page-proofing.
OUTSIDE.COM: Couldn’t help but notice that after zillions of dollars’ worth of hype, marketing, ad copy, editorial stars and on and on, Inside.com, according to today’s New York Times, only gets about five times as many readers as this site. Hmmm. I’m not criticizing Inside.com as journalism. It just strikes me that the lesson of the past few years on the web is that smaller, quirkier and freer is better.
FINALLY: My own magazine wakes up and smells the coffee on the current consequences of Clinton. Check out the splendid editorial calling for the Dems to dump McAuliffe. It finishes with these wise words: “If Democratic bigwigs force McAuliffe out, it will spawn a week of stories about the party’s disarray–and then give the Democrats a real shot at a post-Clinton identity. If they don’t, the whiff of scandal will follow the party for the next four years, handing the Bush administration a patina of moral superiority that it doesn’t deserve and a political advantage the country can ill afford.”
The Dish 