The Dish

Don’t miss the best analyst of South Africa out there: R.W. Johnson. Jeff Weintraub has more. Mugabe is one of the worst thugs out there: what he has done to his country is worse than a crime. A David Frost interview with the winner of the recent elections, Morgan Tsvangirai, is here.

Having vaulted the shark, Mark Penn jumps the plank. Worth noting, perhaps, that the Colombians fired him before the Clintons did.
 

One last look back:

I can’t be the only blogger who recognized a few home truths from this piece. And taking a week off the blog certainly underlined how addictive and compulsive and draining it can be. It’s as much like detox as vacation. You stop blogging and it’s not as if you can start reading books. You just need a rest from all words and arguments for a while. Music helps; walks; dancing; sleeping; movies; beagles: anything but words. And then there’s the regaining of personal space. It’s a queer thing – in the older sense of queer – to rarely have a thought unexpressed, an observation not noted. And it’s not good for the soul. The physical hazards of blogging are nothing compared to the spiritual ones.

All of which is throat-clearing to say a public thanks to Patrick for doing such a diligent, wide-ranging, eclectic job of keeping the Dish al dente for seven days. Over the last year and a bit at the Atlantic, I’ve been able to bring interns and support to the blog and Patrick is now the veteran of the alums. He helps daily, hourly, and through the weekends. It also happens that I seem to have come down with some kind of flu/fever bout just as I was about to start back up tonight, so I’ve asked Patrick to co-blog with me for a few days until I feel back to normal. His posts will be marked with his signature, mine as normal. I’ll be bed-blogging, but might take a while to get back to the normal pace. Thanks for the break.

By Patrick

I’ve had great time filling in for Andrew this last week. Your comments and criticisms have been wonderful.

Andrew should be back any minute now…

If you like this kind of thing:

… then you’ll love the rest of this site.

By Patrick
Historians really don’t like George Bush:

A Pew Research Center poll of 109 leading historians found that 61 percent of them rank Bush as “worst ever” among U.S. presidents. Bush’s key competition comes from Buchanan, apparently, and a further 2 percent of the sample puts Bush right behind Buchanan as runner-up for “worst ever.” 96 percent of the respondents place the Bush presidency in the bottom tier of American presidencies. And was his presidency (it’s a bit wishful to speak of his presidency in the past tense–after all there are several more months left to go) a success or failure? On that score the numbers are still more resounding: 98 percent label it a “failure.”

This marks a dramatic deterioration for Bush. Previously he wasn’t viewed in the most positive terms, but there was a consensus that he wasn’t the “worst of the worst” either. That was in the spring of 2004. In the meantime, Bush has established himself as the torture president, the basis for his invasion of Iraq has been exposed as a fraud, the Iraq War itself has gone disastrously, the nation’s network of alliances has faded, and the economy has gone into a tailspin–not to mention the bungled handling of relief for victims of hurricane Katrina. In 2004, only 12 percent of historians were ready to place Bush dead last.

By Patrick
Unlike coffee, blogging may be hazardous for your health:

Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.

Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.

To be sure, there is no official diagnosis of death by blogging, and the premature demise of two people obviously does not qualify as an epidemic. There is also no certainty that the stress of the work contributed to their deaths. But friends and family of the deceased, and fellow information workers, say those deaths have them thinking about the dangers of their work style.

(Hat tip: Karl)

By Patrick
Coming soon:

At speeds about 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, “the grid” will be able to send the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds.