Month: January 2009

Yglesias puts his finger on one variety of professional insecurity:

Convention dictates that if I sit at a desk and read a transcript of what the press secretary said and then write about the transcript, I’m a lowly cheeto-eater. But if I sit in the White House press room and transcribe what the press secretary said, and then write about the transcript then that’s journalism. Similarly, if I travel around with the president and then read the pool reports that my colleagues write and then write about that: Journalism. But if I read the newspaper account of where the president went and then write about that: Cheetos.

One reason, however, that I blog rather than do cable is that I think I can get at more nuanced, detailed and factual truths online than on TV. I’m as parasitic as they are, but less geared toward pure entertainment – with more links and access to immediate information.

Matt Feeney thinks Hau Hsu is missing something:

I would argue that, over the last twenty years especially, blackness (and also nonwhiteness, of course, both more generally and in its other specific forms) as an identity, an idea, a cultural marker, has been an object of furious constructive labor not just by self-conscious hip hop jesters and personality-artists, but by advertisers and other corporate sales experts, record execs and producers and promoters, lawyers and politicians, policy entrepreneurs and impresarios in the world of therapy and cultural counseling, educators and human resource professionals. The narrative of liberated multicultural blackness is, I would argue, as much a construct as the old definition of blackness as the hobbled other of whiteness. It has been so furiously taken up for purposes of commerce and politics – people have made so much money off of it – you’d think all those suspicious hermeneuts would approach our new celebratory multiculturalism with the same suspicious wince that they bring to the old tables of racial order.

Mark Frauenfelder calls this Obama citizenship video "unintentionally funny." The Dish concurs. The salient Snopes page is here:

Whatever you think of his critique, it’s hard not to be impressed by the bravado prose:

To review quickly, the “Long Bomb” Iraq war plan [Tom] Friedman supported as a means of transforming the Middle East blew up in his and everyone else’s face; the “Electronic Herd” of highly volatile international capital markets he once touted as an economic cure-all not only didn’t pan out, but led the world into a terrifying chasm of seemingly irreversible economic catastrophe; his beloved “Golden Straitjacket” of American-style global development (forced on the world by the “hidden fist” of American military power) turned out to be the vehicle for the very energy/ecological crisis Friedman himself warns about in his new book; and, most humorously, the “Flat World” consumer economics Friedman marveled at so voluminously turned out to be grounded in such total unreality that even his wife’s once-mighty shopping mall empire, General Growth Properties, has lost 99 percent of its value in this year alone.   So, yes, Friedman is suddenly an environmentalist of sorts.

What the fuck else is he going to be?

That’s one of the nicer paragraphs.

The top ten signs of evolution in modern man.

Michael Agger talks with David Glazer at Google:

Glazer believes that everything on the Web is better if it’s social. Checking out a stock? It would be nice to read chatter from other potential investors. Baking a cake? Look at advice from those who have already tried the recipe. Tempted by a new restaurant? See if your foodie friends have eaten there already. The reason we don’t do these things now is that the "barriers to social are too high." It’s still too annoying to fill out all of those registration forms, and there’s no universal way to manage your online identity and networks of friends. Google and its partners want to collapse the barriers to social and give each and every one of us an entourage.

There’s just one hiccup in this plan: Facebook, the place where many of us already have our entourage.

And he’s getting his shoes cleaned in Paris – sitting still for ten minutes while the Daguerrotype captured him. More photographic firsts here.

Nate Silver rounds up leading economists’ views on the stimulus.

One of their own just cast the deciding vote to make himself Speaker of the state House – backed by all the Democrats. A real ruckus ensued. But I was most struck by how a leading Tennessee Republican framed his opposition:

"Action will begin immediately to address the actions of Rep. Kent Williams," said Smith. "His commitment today was not to Republican principles, but to the blind and shameless pursuit of personal power. He cast his vote for a pro-tax, pro-gay, pro-abortion, anti-gun liberal Democrat to preside in leadership against all 49 of his Republican colleagues."

Notice that the Southern GOP is now getting more honest. It has a problem with anyone who can be called "pro-gay."