Milder Despotism

What Paul Krugman Never Does

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 10:17:31 -0500

It’s what Paul Krugman always does.

But wait: who is Kevin Warsh, anyway? Well, he’s a lawyer turned investment banker turned Bush appointee to the Fed turned Hoover fellow — not an economist at all. Now, I hate credentialism: there are plenty of fools with Ph.D.s, some fools with fancy prizes, and a fair number of first-rate economic thinkers without formal qualifications. Still, if someone is going to make pronouncements about how the whole nature of the business cycle has changed, you’d like some sign that somewhere in his life he has thought hard about, well, anything.

Krugman, today:

Notice that he is doing precisely what I never do, and making it about the person as opposed to his ideas.

Paul Krugman has learned a lot since two days ago though, so it’s okay that he’s completely flipped his position and forgotten everything he used to say.

WaPo Phrasing

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 09:22:27 -0500

WaPo Phrasing:

The put-up-your-dukes attitude has made the Daily Caller a rising star among the new Washington media, particularly the conservative kind. Although Carlson, 43, eschews that label — he says the Caller is “practicing pretty traditional journalism” — many of its biggest hits have been aimed at liberal targets.

…implying that “pretty traditional journalism” tries to pull its punches when it comes to “liberal targets.”

Wear the Crown

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 10:07:51 -0500

In Bill Simmons’ recent mailbag on Grantland, he published an e-mail from a reader that seems obviously correct:

City: Philly
Name: Dan C.
In The Wire when Marlo is about to begin his war with Avon to become the top dealer, he is warned “Anyone that wore that crown either ends up in jail or dead.” Marlo’s response is one of my favorite lines from the series, “At least they got to wear it.”

We question why athletes take PEDs despite the risks of getting caught, suspended and losing lots of money and fans, but is it possible they have that same mindset? To them, maybe they know full well they will get caught eventually, but the Bonds, A-Rods and Armstrongs of the world just don’t care and simply want to experience that joy of being on top of their game, even if it is just for a moment? If so, at least to me it makes them to appear more human instead of being dumb and naive, thinking they are invinicible and would never be caught.

[Ashamed side-note: I have not seen The Wire. Yeah, I’m working on it.]

The case of Barry Bonds is an incredibly fascinating one. One of the most common criticisms I hear from Bonds-hating purists is that he was a surefire Hall-of-Famer without steroids, so why did he ruin his body and his baseball legacy in pursuit of history? After all, he was already destined to be an all-time great. He already had history.

This seems to diminish what Barry Bonds accomplished while using performance-enhancing drugs. He went from a surefire Hall of Famer and one of the best players in the game to one of the most devastating offensive forces that the league has ever known.Check out his career comparables by year, per Baseball Reference:

Now I’m no baseball historian, but up until age 31, his career was, even with three MVP awards in the bank, pretty middle-of-the-road for a future Hall of Famer. Then look what happens: Duke Snider - a Hall of Famer, but kind of an unimpressive one. Frank Robinson. Ken Griffey. Mickey Mantle. Willie Mays. This is history.

I can’t name every Hall of Famer. I’m a relatively plugged-in baseball fan, though admittedly pretty ignorant of the history of the game. I didn’t know who Duke Snider was before performing this exercise. Ken Griffey and Frank Robinson are great players who will be memorialized more by baseball purists than the casual fan. Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays are all-time greats.

But Bonds’ greatness, at least as an offensive player, surpassed all of them for a period of time in the early-’00s. He inspired academic papers by statisticians about the wisdom of the intentional walk. He was intentionally walked to lead off an inning five times, surpassing the total of every other player since World War II combined. He got on base six out of every ten times he came to the plate for an entire season. If a player has a single month comparable to what Barry Bonds did for four seasons in a row from 2001-2004, he probably wins a “player of the month” award and is in consideration for that season’s MVP award.

So why did Barry Bonds take performance enhancing drugs? For the chance to evolve from an all-time great to a God of baseball. He succeeded and, Hall or no Hall, will be talked about for the next hundred years.

jazzhate is a lie

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 08:00:00 -0500

jazzhate has a ringpop spray paint stencil on the wall. WHAT

“It’s just the internet,” Jame tells Hannnah Horvath, Struggling Writer™, when telling Hannah about jazzhate.com’s editorial submissions policy. This brings up the question: what the hell is jazzhate?

The best signs, going by Jame’s editorial pitches to Hannah, point to jazzhate as a New York lifestyle/culture website that cultivates the image of a start-up: desks huddled together in a loft warehouse space, no business attire dresscode, and a hip editor whose ideas of a good story are kind of bland but would be very interesting in the hands of the right writer.

Something sinister is afoot.

jazzhate pays two hundred dollars for freelance pieces to unknown first-time writers, which should be thrilling to Hannah. This is in line with some of the most lucrative gigs at some of the most established outlets known to writers. Courtesy of Who Pays? at whopays.tumblr.com, The New Yorker pays $250 for a blog post. xoJane (rumored to be the site jazzhate parodies) pays between nothing and $50. Elle Online pays between $40-75. The Awl pays $50. These are the outlets you’ve heard of, and while it may be intuitive that lesser-known publications would pay more in order to lure better writers and become more established, this largely isn’t the case. Many of the outlets you’ve never heard of don’t pay at all.

So where is jazzhate getting this cash? They’ve clearly got some funding infrastructure beneath them. It could be that they’re a vanity project from a few different investors, willing to put in the time, money, and image to make jazzhate a competitive start-up publication in the online space. What throws me, however, is Jame. Whatever kind of editor she is, she slings pseudo-corporate managementspeak that seems aspirational to middle-aged middlemanagers who lost the cool years ago. To wit, her “sign” that she seems proud of displaying to Hannah:

We all rolled our eyes at that, right? The show’s target audience all thought that was pretty ridiculous? Maybe I haven’t worked in enough newsrooms, but are there zany, hip editors who have clichéd slogans like that where the younger workers don’tjust think it’s a whole big bullshit ploy?

The only conclusion: Jame is not a hot-property writer/editor who’s managed to secure investor funding for her lifelong dream project. No, she’s a corporate middlemanager shill who’s been assigned the vanity project of a board member who thinks this publishing house needs to compete in the hip online lifestyle space. Maybe it’s Condé Nast. Or the Hearst Corporation.

Do not be snookered by Jame, Hannah, but know this: you need to do whatever she tells you to do.It’s unclear how Hannah scored this in-person interview with this corporate journalism gatekeeper, but she needs to nurture that relationship. Hannah has no prospects, no future, and her pure talent as a writer is unproven to us, the audience. As Grantland’s Molly Lambert writes, paying “a first time writer with no credentials and 26 Twitter followers two hundred dollars for a post about a personal experience is an urban fairy tale.” Hannah wisely takes Jame’s advice, does some coke and gets a pretty good episode about it.

Hannah needs a pretty solid slice of keepin’ it real here. She asks if Jame is “hiring” her when Jame merely lays out jazzhate’s submissions and freelancing policy. Does Hannah not know what freelancing is? Does she know how to write? Does she even know how to exist as a Struggling Writer?

Tie your boat to Jame, Hannah. It’s really your only option right now.

Lena Dunham Probably Has Some Republican Friends

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 09:01:00 -0500

In a flash of political ignorance and immaturity, the lone Republican character was gone from Lena Dunham’s Girls. But despite the typical conservative view of the HBO comedy as emblematic of all the social values they abhor, the ignorance and immaturity was on the part of Dunham-portrayed protagonist Hannah Horvath. And Sandy, Donald Glover’s Republican character who served as Hannah’s love interest through the first two episodes, was most definitely the good guy.

That a Republican would be portrayed sympathetically might come as something of a surprise to fans of the show, who generally share the cosmopolitan liberal politics of Lena Dunham and might share the general attitude of the show’s characters towards Republicans. But Dunham’s characterization of a Brooklyn-dwelling Republican was an apt response to early critics of the show and an important challenge to the worldview of her own fans.

A miniature firestorm swept through the critic industry during Girls’ first season, as there appeared to be a dearth of minority characters in Hannah Horvath’s world. While it’s certainly believable that a group of four recent college grads from elite liberal arts schools could settle in Brooklyn while maintaining a paucity of diversity in their social circles, this criticism was meant not an assault on the believability of Hannah’s world, but on the diversity-blindness of its creator.

Dunham maintains that Sandy wasn’t a response to this diversity-based criticism, but nevertheless, she chose to make her black love interest into something actively abhorrent to many fans of the show: she made him a Republican. After all, when going for minority representation, why not go all-in and make him a Republican from Brooklyn?

Within the show, Sandy didn’t serve as much of a vehicle for political commentary. Indeed, the viewers know little to nothing about his politics. He owns a copy of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. He thinks policy issues surrounding gun control are complicated. And that’s about it. To Hannah and her friends, however, he’s a Republican, and that’s all they need to know about it.

At first, Hannah dismisses Sandy’s politics as inconsequential. “People are different,” she says to her roommate Elijah, “You were with George for a very long time and he’s still on Hotmail.” Hannah swings wildly from this sentiment to telling her friends she broke up with him because of his politics. Now, a potential romantic partner’s politics aren’t as light as choice of e-mail server, but the way Hannah and her friends treat Republicanism ensures their collective ignorance.

It’s way more complicated than that.

Sandy’s politics are under almost constant assault from Hannah’s friends, both when he’s in the room and when he’s not around. Despite the time we spend watching the characters talk about Sandy’s views, we never actually learn anything about them. He weathers assaults on topics from gay marriage (there are pro-gay marriage Republicans, of course) to the disparate impact of crime policy (there are even some Republicans enthusiastic about criminal justice reform). By all means, it could be that Sandy is a doctrinaire Republican who holds every policy view that the typical progressive finds noxious (owning guns is okay sometimes, perhaps). His actual politics are secondary to the fact that he illustrates Hannah and her friends, like many Brooklyn-dwelling twentysomething liberal arts graduates, don’t particularly care what Sandy believes about anything. They merely care that he generally chooses to align himself with the wrong national-level coalition. They can’t get past the R-word.

The way that Sandy interacts with his peers is likely familiar to many city-dwelling liberal fans of the show. Think about when you go home to your insanely conservative families in red states during the holidays. Think about how even the mention of your dissenting opinion on political topics sends them into a frothing rage, refusing to give a fair hearing to ideas they disagree with and refusing to even characterize the views you hold accurately.

In these situations, the best course for Sandy to take is the one that he takes with Hannah’s gay roommate, Elijah: ignore the unfairness, say something witty, disarm and walk away. Add alcohol (or, for example, literary criticism) and you’ll get a more explosive situation, but for the most part, Sandy is so used to people who wouldn’t even attempt to understand him that he’s learned it’s best not to even engage.

Dunham must actually know some Republicans who run in educated New York social circles, because the way Sandy’s character acts is exactly as a Republican in those situations would. I speak from personal experience! There’s often an attempt made to explain away traditional center-right coalition politics. “The hipster conservatives that I know are Libertarians,” for example, or “he doesn’t seem to be a practicing social conservative,” as if these caveats make his center-right politics more palatable. The default attempt is to explain away how someone so personable, so smart, so nice, would possibly self-identify as a Republican. Doing so robs Sandy of agency and makes the show’s characters come off as the ignorant naval-gazing twentywhatevers they are.

Sandy’s character exposes a fault line in the personal politics of the Girls constituency: is it better to be an ignorant Democrat or a thoughtful Republican? Surely the choice of political alignment is more of a moral stance than the choice of e-mail server, as Hannah attempts to explain it away as. But is it more important than being generally rude to strangers? More important than donating time or money to charity, no matter the political cause? More important than being a good person?

This line of thought was kicked off by a Gawker commenter, of all things:

Supposedly Sandy is a “mythical rational Republican” that Gawker constituent NinjaCate yearns to meet and debate. But, again, we know nothing of Sandy’s actual views. He could be the mythical Gawker stereotype of a Republican: anti-gay marriage, pro-life, perhaps even (gasp!) someone who thinks Sarah Palin ain’t the worst. All of those are tangential, however, to the fact that he’s a pretty good guy who treats strangers with respect and is considerate of his friends and love interests. (Not that he’s perfect; he handles his critique of Hannah’s personal writing with kid gloves, and in a bit of an insulting way.) Gawker commenter NinjaCate seems to have a strange idea of what a “real Republican” is, and it’s possible NinjaCate just imagines every single one to be an intemperate, intolerant jerk who treats friends and acquaintances with the callousness typically ascribed to elected Republican politicians. But that’s not actually the way the world works; Red America isn’t a dystopia where common courtesy doesn’t exist. Treating everyone with whom we have major political disagreements as a potential Sandy would make the world a much better place than the current polarized status quo.

Hannah’s ignorant breakup rant ends in her coming off like a Stephen Colbert caricature. “I never thought about the fact that you were black,” she says. “I don’t live in a world where there are divisions like that.” (“That’s insane,” he replies.) There’s likely a large cohort of fans of Girls who believe it’s better to be ignorant and vote the right way, like Hannah, than to have given serious thought to politics and come down on the wrong side. The episode also brings up the question: what political issues are dealbreakers? Being anti-gay marriage? Being anti-gun control? Being pro-tax cuts? No two people agree on everything - the line must be drawn somewhere.

You can tell a man by the people who blocks him on Twitter

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 21:14:43 -0400

…I guess.

Over the past three days, I discovered that Keith Olbermann (@keitholbermann) and Brad Delong (@delong) had joined the very exclusive club of those who blocked me (@kevinwglass) on Twitter. There will be those who think that this club is inhabited of the kind of people one doesn’t particularly wish to engage with - it also includes Megan McCain (@mccainblogette) and very few others - but it’s certainly best to strive to kinda-sorta-not-be-an-asshole on a public forum, or at least remain tolerable enough that others accept the attention.

This may be a product of the news cycle. Election season can bring out the most combative and defensive sides of people who want to score points for “their team.” Now, I identify as a conservative and a Republican, which might contribute to getting caught up in team politics. As Will Wilkinson wrote awhile ago,

Politics makes us stupid. This is one of my recurring themes. This is the principal reason I refuse to be a partisan or ideological team player. People call me libertarian but I don’t in part because I’m not one, but mostly because I suspect that accepting any such label dings my IQ about 15 points. It turns out politics not only makes us stupid. It also makes us callous.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been preparing to cover the GOP convention, which unfortunately has left little time to follow the parts of politics - actual policy - that is interesting. Which is a shame, because the selection of Paul Ryan as Mitt Romney’s running mate has led to some great back-and-forth on nuts and bolts of Medicare reform. (See Peter Orszag, Jonathan Cohn, Reihan Salam.)

This is combined with reading Left Turn by Tim Groseclose. It’s a book that unabashedly uses some red-meat rhetoric but is backed up by an academic rigour that I hadn’t seen from a book discussing media bias before. It’s no doubt colored my view on how the media treats “both sides” of the conversation lately and - considering that I have MSNBC on almost exclusively at my desk during the workday - has likely contributed to an unacceptable defensiveness.

So, while there are many conservatives out there who proudly list the left-wingers who have blocked them on Twitter, I’m not one of them. Election season can bring out the worst in politics-watchers. I’ll apologize to Keith Olbermann, Brad Delong and Megan McCain - I probably trolled you a little too hard, even if I do think that your jobs partially consist of professional trolling. (And if I think whatever I did to get DeLong upset was probably on the light side of things.) Twitter kinda brings out the troll in all of us, and that’s not necessarily a good thing.

In the meantime, go read my piece on Obamacare for National Review or my cover story on Michael Bloomberg’s mild despotism in New York for Townhall Mag.

Walled gardens and tech ecosystems

Thu, 24 May 2012 15:36:00 -0400

Tyler Cowen has a post describing his “tech ecosystem” - the devices he carries around and uses for business and pleasure. These include devices many people are familiar with - iPhone, iPad, Kindle, laptop - and it’s useful as far as advice goes for carrying devices that function everywhere from someone as well-traveled as Cowen.

I was more interested in a specific query from the commenter Cowen was responding to, however: “Any apps you love or use a lot?”

While this probably was at least partly covered in Cowen’s “what I read” media diet piece for The Atlantic Wire, I’m fascinated by how people use the walled garden device environment to both collect news and waste time. It can be implied that Cowen uses RSS reader and Twitter apps on some of those devices, but how else does he gather information? How else does anyone? I use an AT&T Android phone and an iPad as my carry-devices as well as having Windows netbook and a laptop. (Currently in the market for a new “base” PC as well.)

But beyond that, I use a good number of apps synched to various accounts across these platforms. In addition to RSS reader and Twitter apps, I use Pulse News, Zite, Taptu and Flipboard, which are all forms of curated and aggregated news content based on an algorithm that uses both user-entered interests and social media platforms. As opposed to RSS and Twitter, these kinds of apps expose me to things that I haven’t curated for myself. While obviously I consider RSS and Twitter as news gateways, this introduces a kind of second-level curation as well. I’m not sure exactly how these algorithms work, but I suspect it’s similar to Netflix and its “recommended for you” list. I’m directed more and more to places like NPR Online, The Daily Beast and GOOD - places that I wouldn’t otherwise be visiting.

Brands still matter online, and since Cowen has forgotten more than I’ll ever know, I wouldn’t begrudge a news diet that consists of reading The Washington Post front-to-back. (I have lots of friends who do this who are more informed than I as well.) But I haven’t read a newspaper front-to-back on a regular basis since high school, and even then it was the much-maligned International Herald-Tribune.

With the sheer amount of information available online, I tend to wonder what the “best” way is to get reliable news that one cares about. I’ve read that the death of RSS is nigh, but it seems to still be used by many news consumers, and Twitter, despite its name as a social network, is primarily a news gathering medium. But how else do tech-savvy gatherers of news get it? Are these aggregation apps doing it wrong?

Surprisingly charitable take from @GOOD on tea partiers

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 10:31:00 -0400

I would have added a “yet” to the end of the sentence “But the warnings haven’t panned out.” The CBO had projected that output will be up to 1% below the non-stimulus trend line starting around 2017 - something that seems eminently believable. The 2009 stimulus was an act of borrowing from the future to mitigate current pain; the only question is if the mitigation was worth the cost.

But it is nice to see a publication typically unsympathetic to tea partiers describe them as something other than maniacal Christian racists couching their theocratic racism in small-government rhetoric. So, good show.

Jezebel discredits themselves on every story involving D.C....

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 08:49:25 -0400

Jezebel discredits themselves on every story involving D.C. botany. Dogwood?! Really?!

It’s a goddamn cherry blossom.

The most Politifact-y politifactcheck ever

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 10:36:40 -0400

For a quicker and more polite version of this, see the Tax Foundation themselves.

What is this map a map of?

You’d say it’s a map looking at excise taxes by state, right? Well it is! Let’s bring in Politifact:

Tax Foundation rankings show Tennessee beer taxes among lowest
The map itself purports to show only “State Beer Excise Tax Rates” and correctly lists Tennessee’s beer excise tax at $4.29 per barrel. Since there are 31 gallons in a barrel, that translates to about 14 cents per gallon — pretty low.

The Tax Foundation map showing that Tennessee has among the lowest beer taxes in the country is flawed because it ignores hefty local wholesale beer taxes required by the state.

Emphasis added - what the what is that “purports”? The map shows excise tax rates on beer. There is no confusion here except by Politifact, which writes “the Tax Foundation figures do not fully capture what the beer-drinking Tennessean pays in taxes.” Nor does the Tax Foundation purport to. The Tax Foundation created a chart of excise taxes on beer by state. Politifact willfully misread a chart and, based on other media willfully misreading the chart, fact-checked a misrepresentation of the chart.

Politifact is a joke.

On the CPAC dress code (spoiler: there isn't one)

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 16:41:00 -0500

Spoiler: there is no dress code at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Nonetheless, we have a little controversy that makes me embarrassed to be a conservative and a big fan of the conference. Erick Erickson and Melissa Clouthier wrote articles scolding the young men and women, respectively, who attended CPAC for their behavior and manner of dress.

It’s no wonder that the conservative movement has trouble attracting young people when people with established voices on the right attempt to shame them out of the movement. The condescension is particularly palpable in Clouthier’s piece, and my friend Laura Donovan had a great response.

Really though, why label CPAC females as “whores”? When did it become acceptable for women to talk about each other like this? I’ve always found Tina Fey to be a bit overrated, but she’s spot on in “Mean Girls” when she tells her catty female students, “You have got to stop calling each other ‘whores’ and ‘sluts’…It just makes it okay for guys to call you ‘whores’ and ‘sluts’.”

It disappoints me to see women tear each other down over something as petty as clothing.

The worst part of this is that certain behaviors were being implied merely by the way people were dressing. Tons of people came to CPAC. Most of them had a good time. I’m sure that a very small percentage of people embarrassed themselves, but I didn’t see it and it’s not emblematic of the massive number of young people who attended.

It would be easy to write a post regarding the sloppy dress of bloggers who attended CPAC. The number of collared shirts and ties that I saw was pathetic, and the number of bloggers and reporters running around in cross-trainers instead of proper dress shoes was embarrassing. The conservative movement should dress respectfully for the occasion, and the failure of conservative bloggers to dress appropriately was horrifying.

Except it wasn’t. I don’t care how you dress. CPAC is a long conference at which everyone works extraordinarily hard, and the movement was perfectly represented. The bloggers who covered the event did a great job. The college students made it a fun atmosphere. And the best way to absolutely decimate the next generation of conservatives is to tell them how to dress, and to call them whores for their choice of outfit.

Postscript: What was particularly galling was an idle question from “A Lonely Conservative” that Clouthier later picked up on:

Here’s a passing thought that’s probably unrelated – when Red State ran the bloggers lounge I was granted access. If I were to dress up like a ho and post photos of myself prior to the next CPAC will I be allowed in?

Take it from someone who had experience running the bloggers’ lounge: this is ridiculously offensive to all the people who put in countless hours of hard work trying to get that place to run smoothly, and in particular to our doorwoman doing her best to make sure that the bloggers’ lounge was not over-capacity and to stick to the credentialed bloggers set by the ACU. The ACU set a strict limit on bloggers based on first-come, first-serve and ability to drive traffic because, in past years, the lounge was overflowing and caused many internet outages. This year, over 600 bloggers were credentialed, but the bloggers’ lounge could only hold 150. Cuts were made. The organization that went into the conference took some figurative years off of organizers’ lives. Even in jest, it’s offensive to question in this manner the people who had to manage some of these logistics of running the bloggers’ lounge.

My appearance on The Alyona Show. I kind of love their YouTube...

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 13:49:01 -0500

My appearance on The Alyona Show. I kind of love their YouTube commenters:

Kevin looks a bit like Mark Wahlberg.

and

Is Kevin related to Rachel Maddow?

and

Kevin Glass looks looks like Kevin Peira

Thanks guys.

Paul Krugman Is Honest About Dishonesty

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 14:57:00 -0500

Karl Smith over at Modeled Behavior flags two statements from Paul Krugman that seem to be in conflict with each other: Krugman simultaneously says that it’s not his responsibility to put forth the best argument of his opponents, yet attacks Mitt Romney for the same attitude. Smith then writes,

But, if this is not a game, and if consequences really matter, then why is it wrong or even cowardice for Mitt Romney to Say Anything to be elected.

Smith then lays out the kindest case possible for Romney: if he’s a consequentialist who is cynically determining what he has to say to get elected, he’s merely following the same philosophy Krugman advocates. Smith says Romney’s thinking goes as such:

Which is more important to me: avoiding sullying my hands with unsavoriness or preventing the country from being run by nuts.

Let me defend Krugman now: his criticism of Mitt Romney is driven by the exact same sentiment. Krugman admits that “I’m trying to move policy in what I believe to be the right direction,” and that direction surely entails the re-election of Barack Obama. What’s more important to Krugman - avoiding sullying his hands with slightly dishonest attacks on Republicans, or preventing the country from being run by nuts? (All Republicans, in Krugman’s estimation, are nuts.)

The more that Krugman can discredit all Republicans, the more he can attain his broadly overarching goal of moving public policy debates leftward. Since Krugman won’t adhere to the Cowen Standard of public debate, he allows himself the moral space of dishonest attacks on his ideological opponents.

TOTES INAPPROPES CSPAN

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 16:10:06 -0500

TOTES INAPPROPES CSPAN

Online Journalism is Complicated

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 11:39:00 -0500

Fishbowl DC brings us two stories of how difficult it is to conform to old journalism standards in the interconnected online world.

First, the NYT got its knickers in a knot over Ezra Klein’s liberal borrowing of their own material:

The tense discussion began on Twitter last night when NYT Graphics Editor Alan McLean questioned Klein. McLean’s former title was interface engineer for Interactive Technology group at The New York Times. He wrote, “What’s with the regular hot linking of NYT content? I’m sure we appreciate the linkbacks, but you’re including the whole graph? Taking competitor content, pasting it in your own site with minimalist attribution.” Klein had excuses: He attributes. Check. He links to the NYT. Check. Everybody’s doing it. WHAT?
The problem here is that Klein is posting the graphs in their entirety, which, ahem, makes it kind of pointless to visit the original source of the graph, even if it is just a click away.

McLean continued, “LOVE your blog, but taking a competitors graphic and including it IN your post hardly seems to do much for us.” Klein, meanwhile, says he tries to be a “good citizen” with his linking. “I also, in Wonkbook, try to do an enormous amount of linking out — much of it to NYT. I try to be a good citizen on this stuff,” he wrote. “And surely there’s some value to getting the graph (and credit) seen more widely? That’s how I view my graphs getting used.”

I’m pretty decisively on Klein’s side here. There is definitely a value to the NYT spreading graphs like the one Klein posted more widely, and it’s very unlikely that the Times is losing out on even a small amount of traffic due to Klein embedding the graph on his blog. It’s also highly unlikely that Klein would blog about the graph at all if he can’t use the visualization. Bloggers love to write with visual aids, and if one is writing solely about a piece of data visualization that they wouldn’t be able to show their readers, they’re not going to write the same post sans-graph.

However, there does sometimes come a bit of confusion as to whose material deserves credit with some of this linking. As Fishbowl points out, DC gossip blog Glittarazzi missed out on a Drudge hit due to some confusing intra-site linking and crediting done by Politico.

Way back on Dec. 7, a lesser-known D.C social scene blog called Glittarazzi wrote up a story on Snoop Dogg’s radio interview. They didn’t get a Drudge link. The next day (half a month in Politico time), CLICK’s Karin Tanabe aggregated the story, giving proper credit to Glittarazzi for originally writing it. CLICK didn’t get a Drudge hit either.

Here’s where it gets weird. On Jan. 8, Jezebel, a site owned by Gawker Media, aggregated the month-old story, giving credit to Glittarazzi. No Drudge hit for Jezebel. The next day, Patrick Gavin writes the story again for Politico, except this time on the front page. BINGO. He gets the coveted Drudge link.

Even weirder: Gavin’s story linked to CLICK’s original blog post of the story from December. What?!

There are a lot of websites out there whose traffic depends heavily on getting links from the Drudge Report every month. Politico is one of them. They market themselves aggressively to aggregator sites like Drudge. And Politico is very good at being first on stories that are going to be written up by a large pool of reporters (White House press conferences, Capitol Hill announcements, etc). Those things combined give Politico a very strong standing with places like Drudge. The problem comes when Politico does the aggregating themselves and report based on that, as in this Glittarazzi case. Glittarazzi is a medium-sized gossip startup that definitely could use the traffic, and doesn’t have the marketing department that an org like Politico has.

Anyway, this latter case seems a case of honest work on all parts, and just highlights how the web has become different. Politico freely admits they didn’t break the news on Snoop Dogg, yet they’re the ones who get the big traffic hit. Many bloggers can relate to this, but the proper reaction is to just shrug your shoulders. It’s a new media world out there.

Everyone on the internet who uses “shocked face”...

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 10:16:57 -0500

Everyone on the internet who uses “shocked face” .gifs, you should be using this one. Always.

Yo! Sushi - And other British Chains in DC

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 10:02:40 -0500

yfiles:

I see something called Yo! Sushi is coming to my neighborhood. What’s Yo! Sushi? It turns out to be a British chain just like Ping Pong Dim Sum which is already in the neighborhood. What’s the deal with UK-based Asian chains moving to DC?

Yo! Sushi is an Asian-style conveyor-belt sushi place. It’s not great.

Yglesias also forgets about the perennially-“Coming Soon” Wagamama in Penn Quarter.

What I wish would be “Coming Soon” is a Nobu. Alas.

Today in Firefly explains everything: Paul Krugman is The Operative

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 15:56:22 -0500

In the little tiff between Paul Krugman and the guys at Marginal Revolution (though, most importantly for this post, Tyler Cowen), Krugman let loose this little gem that explains a lot of his worldview:

Cowen apparently wants me to make the best case for the opposing side in policy debates. Since when has that been the rule? I’m trying to move policy in what I believe to be the right direction — and I will make the best honest case I can for moving in that direction.

There would be two interpretations of this. One, that Paul Krugman has to make the case for the opposition better than the opposition actually makes it, because it’s best to engage with the strongest arguments of your opponents. Two, though, that Krugman isn’t actually portraying his opposition honestly - and I think this is the more likely case, due to various factors but perhaps no more glaring than his often steadfast refusal to link to his opponents.

That would mean that Krugman is arguing in a world that he regards as so beyond-reasonable that he doesn’t think it’s important for himself, a tenured academic at one of the most highly-regarded institutions in the world, to engage his critics honestly. Because honest engagement is a form of legitimizing your opposition.

Which is all well and good, if that’s the belief that he has. Krugman, then, is like Serenity’s The Operative: he wants so badly to live in a world with a different center that he argues from a position we’d all agree is intellectually dishonest.

THE OPERATIVE: Did you think none of this was your fault?
MAL: I don’t murder children.

THE OPERATIVE: As you can see, I do. If I have to.

…

THE OPERATIVE: I believe in something that is greater than myself. A better world. A world without sin.

MAL: So me and mine got to lie down and die so you can live in your better world?

THE OPERATIVE: I’m not going to live there. How could you think — there’s no place for me there, any more than there is for you. Malcolm, I’m a monster. What I do is evil, I’ve no illusions about that. But it must be done.

Paul Krugman’s work is to take intellectually rigorous and valid argumentation, then misrepresent and dismiss it, all so we can move the public policy debate leftward. At which point that kind of work will no longer be needed.

Also, if only Krugman would admit to his monstrosity.

*Obviously child murder is not morally analogous to dishonest public debate. As if that needed to be said.

The Rapper Spelling Bee

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 10:40:56 -0500

The Rapper Spelling Bee

Tim Tebow is the Ned Flanders of the NFL

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 08:58:42 -0500

It’s beyond parody:

Tebow showed far more grace in his postgame comments than Urlacher, Briggs and Peppers combined. He specifically praised all three players by name. Tebow also didn’t fire back when told of Urlacher’s “running back” comment.

“Coming from a really good player, that means a lot,” Tebow said without a hint of sarcasm.

Following his media responsibilities, Tebow left to spend time with Zac Taylor, a 9-year-old with a life-threatening illness who was a guest at Sunday’s game through the Tim Tebow Foundation and Dreams Come True.