The New Yorker is special. I grew up with it around and was a subscriber until about a year ago; lots of my friends and family are addicts. There’s a sense that if you make it through the magazine every week you’re up to speed on a sort of bare minimum of intellectual life. (I …
UPDATE: I originally posted the only lightly edited email from which this post originated. Later, I decided to tighten it up and post it to Medium. That edited version now appears below. One of the more bizarre responses to the ongoing Reinhart-Rogoff controversy is this one by sociologist Peter Frase, who takes the opportunity to “use it as …
Conor Friedersdorf has a very smart piece at The Atlantic calling out The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein for characterizing himself as data-driven and Paul Ryan as ideological. It’s impossible to disagree with the central claim of the piece: I’ll never demand that Klein self-identify as a movement liberal or progressive. But he is deeply mistaken …
I’ve been following a very interesting back and forth kicked off by legal scholar and author Tim Wu in The New Yorker on the merits of open vs. closed, and countered by author John Gruber. To catch you up… Wu: Accuse me of overreading, but I propose a revision of the old adage: closed can …
David Brooks has a quirky column today saying we should do better at suffering fools: Smart people who’ve thought about this usually understand that the habits we put in practice end up shaping the people we are within. “Manners are of more importance than laws,” Edmund Burke wrote. All I can think of is the …
Pitchfork has an interesting post by a musician complaining about the stingy payments made by companies like Pandora and Spotify, even though in Pandora’s case, at least, those payments are rendering the company borderline unsustainable. Here’s the gist: When I started making records, the model of economic exchange was exceedingly simple: make something, price it …
It’s been a year and a half since the New York Times introduced its paywall (I criticized it on day one at The Atlantic) and my feelings about it have largely stayed the same. I don’t see myself paying for it. And it really does pain me to say that, as I love the Times. …
I’m catching up on my RSS reader today and found myself on this Reddit AMA with Matt Yglesias. Here’s an abridged version of a fascinating question and answer: localtaxpayer 15 points 9 days ago* What, if any, solution could there possibly be to the current media and cultural environment in which there are basically two separate realities in …
Just a quick political vent here. I’ve got fairly strong views about economic policy, but even those with whom I don’t agree recognize a lot of our contemporary political debate on the subject is detached from reality. Here’s a quick outline of how I’d structure a sane debate on economic policy. 1) Remind everyone in …
This past week I got a pitch in my inbox about a group that would be fact-checking half of the Scott Brown / Elizabeth Warren Senate debate. And by half of it I mean the Scott Brown half, because the organization pitching me was a progressive advocacy group. Of course, when I tweeted about how …