Today on the Dish, Andrew repeated his call for Obama to address the madness of prohibition, as well as his disbelief at the MSM’s credulity throughout the Manti Te’o saga. He offered a full-throated defense of Lena Dunham’s Girls, and recommended Marty Lederman’s work on the upcoming SCOTUS cases on marriage equality. Andrew also pointed to his new interview at The Awl, and joined Michael Moynihan in drawing attention to one of Piers Morgan’s more unpleasant habits of late.
On the political beat, we continued to round up inauguration reax, Ezra Klain bemoaned the ongoing specter of the debt ceiling, and we spotted a snag for Democrats in the realities of immigration reform. Elsewhere, Charles Kenny tried to figure what citizenship is worth, Shamus Khan noticed the sickening thing about some Americans’ work schedules, and Bouie called out the side effects of increased school security. Roger Kimball tried to wax historical but just earned a Malkin Award nod, while, on the other end of the spectrum, Mike Mallow jumped in the running for a Moore Award. We studied the regional divide in access to abortion as Joanna Blythman worried about the effect that demand for grain might have on less developed countries, before readers pushed back.
In foreign affairs, we questioned whether Gaddafi’s downfall sparked the chaos now engulfing Mali, gaped at the candid journal of an American in North Korea, and received a jolt from a video on Mexico’s drug warfare. Meanwhile, Mairav Zonszein let an Arab stranger vote for her in the Israeli elections while we wondered if Palestinian leadership would ever get its act together.
In assorted coverage, Harry Enten doubted that Lance Armstrong’s Oprah moment will have any effect on his sinking reputation or other dopers’ choices, Mark Kermode served Naomi Wolf on her hot air over Zero Dark Thirty, and a reader chimed in on our discussion of the inaugural poem as literature. As Jesse Hicks gazed up at Vegas casino security cameras, we caught a glimmer of hope in technological remedies for carbon pollution and discovered that even jihadis need to report their expenses to HQ. Later, we explored the dos and don’ts of cover songs, surveyed the literary history of puns, and tracked the transformation of “ye” to “you.”
We marked off the robot apocalypse as unlikely, Elizabeth Preston debunked detox, and Andrew Marantz found that many Americans prefer to see dogs, rather than grown men, play ball. Readers paid a visit to Ho Chi Minh City in solving the latest VFYW contest, and we watched a young lad give his xylophone the Keith Moon treatment before letting the sunlight through in Pittsburgh during today’s VFYW.
– B.J.
(Photo: An Israeli woman rides her bicycle past campaign posters for Likud’s Binyamin Netanyahu and Labour’s Shelly Yachimovich in Tel Aviv. By Jack Guez/AFP/Getty Images)
The Dish 