Miscellaneous
— Another cautionary tale: if you assume the most cartoonishly evil motives are driving your political adversaries, you’ll continue to be perplexed by the world.
— Julian Sanchez takes the illustrative graphic to a whole new level. Your move, lefty blogosphere.
— James Fallows captures something about what makes The Atlantic a great institution.
— I am still accepting advice questions. A paragraph or two is the right length. Write conor dot friedersdorf at gmail dot com.
— Publius argues that Thriller wasn’t Mike at his baddest. I agree.
— Charles Homans has an interesting think piece on the way government data can be utilized, and the obstacles to doing so. He really is a talented long form journalist. When the right has publications that regularly put out journalism of this quality it’ll be a lot better off.
— Noam Millman asks in comments, “Mark Levin is like your Moby Dick, isn’t he, Conor?” Nah. Off the top of my head, I’d say he’s my Tom Friedman, and I’m his Matt Taibbi, but that doesn’t seem quite right either. I’ll get back to you with a more apt analogy. Incidentally, I laughed my ass off to the comments in that post.
“what makes the Atlantic a great institution”
When I was in New Haven, someone commented that the econ department spanned the entire gamut of neo-Keynesian thought. I think the Atlantic similarly spans the entire gamut of bien-pensant liberalism.
— y81 · Jul 15, 10:19 PM · #
Since Sanchez is a pretty doctrinaire libertarian (as much as such a creature can exist), he is already ‘lefty’ in the cultural context. Does this mean that he must make a move after himself? Is he, in fact, playing both with and against himself? That’s a bit Wallacian.
— sidereal · Jul 16, 12:40 AM · #
Assuming they’re not is pretty perplexing, too.
— Chet · Jul 17, 04:30 AM · #