Jonathan V. Last's Blog, page 43
August 9, 2013
Weiner Night at the Improv
Call me crazy, but Anthony Weiner may have just won my vote.
Seriously–he’s really good here. I don’t quite get what’s supposed to be scandalous about this.
Leo Johnson: Hero
A sensational piece by Mark Hemingway about a man who saved a lot of lives a year ago. Do not miss.
August 8, 2013
For the Yglesias Clip File
Courtesy of Galley Reader E.E., an item from CJR which begins:
Writing about newspapers and the Internet, Matthew Yglesias manages to be both crushingly obvious and wrong at the same time. Quite a feat.
The New Republic in the Facebook Age
Chris Hughes explaining his vision for TNR, March 9, 2012:
It seems that today too many media institutions chase superficial metrics of online virality at the expense of investing in rigorous reporting and analysis of the most important stories of our time. When few people are investing in media institutions with such bold aims as “enlightenment to the problems of the nation,” I believe we must. . . .
In the next era of The New Republic, we will aggressively adapt to the newest information technologies without sacrificing our commitment to serious journalism. We will look to tell the most important stories in politics and the arts and provide the type of rigorous analysis that The New Republic has been known for. We will ask pressing questions of our leaders, share groundbreaking new ideas, and shed new light on the state of politics and culture.
The New Republic has been and will remain a journal of progressive values, but it will above all aim to appeal to independent thinkers on the left and the right who search for fresh ideas and a deeper understanding of the challenges our world faces.
Julia Ioffe in TNR, August 8, 2013:
Tonight, I went on Lawrence O’Donnell’s show, and Lawrence O’Donnell yelled at me. Or, rather, he O’Reilly’d at me. That O’Donnell interrupted and harangued and mansplained and was generally an angry grandpa at me is not what I take issue with, however. What bothers me is that, look: your producers take the time to find experts to come on the show, answer your questions, and, hopefully, clarify the issue at hand.
I was invited on the show to talk about Obama’s (very wise) decision to cancel his Moscow summit with Putin, about which I wrote here. I am an expert on Russia. In fact, it is how you introduced me: “Previously, she was a Moscow-based correspondent for Foreign Policy and The New Yorker.” I’m not going to toot my own horn here, but I was there for three years, I’m a fluent, native speaker of Russian, and, god damn it, I know my shit.
Which is why I wish you’d let me finish answering your bullshit question . . .
[Giant Snip --ed.]
Otherwise, don’t waste my fucking evening.
From Ioffe’s byline: “Julia Ioffe is a senior editor at The New Republic.”
August 7, 2013
Honest Question
Does the new Doctor Who count as a micro-aggression?
Like Christmas in August
I know what you’re thinking:
Gee, I’ve always wanted to read What to Expect When No One’s Expecting but the book is soooo long and has so many numbers. It just puts me to sleep. I wish I could just listen to those long passages full of statistics. Because that’s not boring at all and certainly won’t put me to sleep while I’m driving, causing to me drive into a tree.
Well do I have a treat for you. The audiobook version of What to Expect is out now.
Warning: Aural consumption of demographics may lead to sudden onset of narcolepsy. Combining alcohol and aural consumption of demographics may cause hallucinations or loss of consciousness. Do not operate heavy machinery while listening to What to Expect When No One’s Expecting.
August 5, 2013
On Nate Silver and Bill Simmons
A very smart and interesting set of observations from Colby Cosh:
Silver’s fans suspect that the real grievance of the old Times hands is that our hero got ahead and stayed ahead of the news cycle using nothing more than mathematics, a language that might as well be Old Church Slavonic as far as 19 of 20 journalists are concerned. The Silverites may be on to something, although it should be said that the New York Times employs and publishes the world’s best data visualization specialists, and I do mean the world’s best: the U.S. Army, the Fortune 500, and the European Union combined couldn’t lick them, although the National Postmight make them hustle right up to the finish line. The Times’ data artists did a lot to make the paper’s election coverage a success, and this included making Silver’s own work more reader-friendly. They didn’t get invited onto The Daily Show for it.
For better or worse, Silver is an independent media power now, a man who has dragged his own audience from place to place as it increases inexorably. He is said to have been recruited to ESPN with the help of Bill Simmons, who is becoming one of the defining figures of a media era. Simmons started his own “Boston Sports Guy” website in 1997 with little more than a decent sense of humour, a short but blessed lifetime of watching the Celtics at the Garden, and a bookish lad’s deep knowledge of the canon of American sports books, sports magazine articles, and sports movies, both fictional and documentary. In 2013 he is an honest-to-God magnate: bestselling author, NBA television commentator, hands-on executive producer of his own superb documentary series.
He still plunks references to 1979 basketball movie Fast Break into his columns three times a month, yet there is every likelihood that the man will win an Oscar within the next five to ten years. A Pulitzer is not entirely out of the question. The words “only in America” are called for one-thousandth as often as they are uttered, but Simmons’ career demands them.
ESPN wisely decided two years ago to turn Simmons loose on his own ESPN-owned website—Grantland.com, effectively an independent online magazine edited by Simmons. Indeed, they periodically cram the whole thing between covers and print it as a dead-tree magazine. The corporation did for Simmons what is hardest for corporations to do, and relented on its instinct for corporate homogeneity: Grantland has its own freestanding URL—you don’t have to go to http://espn.com/content/grantland or anything to find it—and its own distinct design. The site publishes much of the best sportswriting now being executed in the United States, but it covers pop culture well, too: it has room for pretty much everything but electoral politics, which, it occurs to me, might actually be one unstated secret to Simmons’ success.
By all means, read the whole thing.
August 2, 2013
Miss America Runs for Congress
Over at the Standard I have a reasonably long piece about Erika Harold’s challenge to Rodney Davis in the Illinois 13th-District.
July 31, 2013
More Juicebox Kremlinology
Honestly, I barely follow any of this stuff myself–I’m pretty much Superman-Batman full time for the next 36 months. So I’m just passing this along for your enjoyment. More from Galley Reader X:
Not to my critique, specifically, but to the complaints that he took Richard Fisher’s comments out-of-context. (Which is implicitly a response to the NYT correction on his wife’s piece, yes?)
His argument is still ridiculous. He suggests that the discussion of Yellen’s sex began with her critics. In fact, it began with her proponents! See, e.g., John Cassidy in April, the Money’s Annalynn Kurtz in April, the FT’s Robin Harding in May, and the WSJ, quoting one of Yellen’s supporters, in May.
Oh, and Matthew Yglesias in April!
Not to mention Binyamin Applebaum — a/k/a, Annie Lowrey’s co-author — who favorably nodded toward Yellen and the gender issue back in April, too.
In other words, when Fisher acknowledged the gender issue in his May interview, it’s not because he was conjuring it out of thin air. It’s because it’s what everyone had been talking about for the last two months!
So when Klein’s headline reads, “Funny how gender never came up during Bernanke’s nomination. Or Greenspan’s. Or Volcker’s,” the answer is, it only came up this time because your friends have been blathering about it since April.
Seems kind of interesting to me. Not Superman-Batman levels of interesting, though.
