Why, Peter Suderman wonders, are music reviews so often positive, while film reviews seem to be equally split between hosannas and hatchet jobs? Peter suggests it has to do with the different cultures that have grown up around movie and music reviewing—which in one sense almost has to be true as a proximate explanation, but […]

[Read more →]

I’d been meaning to write something along the lines of this post by Yglesias for a while: Conservative pseudointellectuals who want to convince you they have some special scholarly insight into The Muslim Mind by invoking taqiyya as, more or less, a synonym for lying. Now, granted, I only took one undergrad course on Islam, […]

[Read more →]

Figure I should cross-link this post at Ars, since my modal political geek reader probably cares more than my modal tech geek reader about my picking a fight with Michael Lind.

[Read more →]

Median Mean annual wage for a journalist, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics: $43,170 Median Mean annual wage for a plumber: $47,350 Obviously, the TV talking heads and New York Times columnists are in another league altogether, but perhaps it bears noting on occasion that most reporters are also, you know, “working people” in […]

[Read more →]

Here’s what seems especially puzzling about all the whining over the L.A. Times‘ refusal to release a tape of Barack Obama at Rashid Khalidi’s farewell dinner—aside from the fact that what we’ve read of Obama’s remarks there make it fairly clear that Obama found their conversations interesting and useful because they disagree about Israel. The […]

[Read more →]

I feel like I’ve read that line a few times in the last week, as though it counted as some kind of empirical observation about the electorate. Isn’t it just, you know, a tautology?  France is “centrist” too, relative to the distribution of political opinion there. Update: A commenter suggests that “the country is centrist” […]

[Read more →]

I’d meant to write about this back around the time of the last debate, but I’m always puzzled by those little focus groups of the volk the networks put together to watch the presidential contenders spar. They invariably go around beforehand and ask these self-described undecided voters what they’re waiting to hear over the course […]

[Read more →]

First, credit where credit is due to bloggers on the right, like Michelle Malkin, who right at the outset acknowledged that something sounded awfully fishy about Ashley Todd’s now-infamous tall tale about being violently assaulted by an enraged Obama fan. That said, however, I’m a little dismayed by the number of conservative bloggers who appear […]

[Read more →]

Yglesias finds this from an interview with Rachel Maddow: Biggest misconception about pundits: That we all hang out together. I don’t know any of these people. Maybe all the pundits are hanging out and not inviting me. […] By her bed: Comic books. I read comics sometimes and graphic novels. I appreciate that genre. So, […]

[Read more →]

The Media Research Center has just launched an anti–Fairness Doctrine group on Facebook they’re calling the “Free Speech Alliance.”  Yes, that Media Research Center.  Seriously. Satire is dead.

[Read more →]