I’ll Take “Who Gives a Shit?” for $300, Alex…

Wingnuts are so stupid.

Also, this.

Obviously, though, basketball doesn’t count as a sport in which athletic prowess can be evaluated. I’ll let the gallery ponder the reasons why.

Working Hand in Hand

It’s hard to take seriously people who form elaborate conspiracy theories about coordination of coverage/reporting between the Democratic Party and the mainstream media and scream “liberal media bias!” at any given opportunity when they engage in this sort of behavior.

The Uselessness of Op-Ed Pages

I see today that the Washington Post decided to hoist upon the unsuspecting masses the latest in a series of uninformed remarks from a soon to be retired governor of Alaska. Today’s topic is cap and trade and you read an effective throttling of the column here and here.

But I don’t really want to talk about the substance of the column as much as I want to consider what the utility is of a page that would print such a thing in its pages.

I’m taking my first formal class on opinion writing this fall with Peter Beinart, a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a former editor at The New Republic. I’m very much looking forward to it as I have visions of pursing a career in opinion journalism. I expect it will be rigorous and that a great many of my ideas might fall apart under critical examination. But that’s ok! I’d rather have my half baked ideas knocked down early so I can reexamine the issue and produce a stronger article rather than produce an ill-considered piece of shit.

But to zoom out for a second, there should be a general expectation that a college graduate, and certainly a governor of a state, should be able to articulate a cogent, factual opinion on some subject or another. Indeed, that’s really all a good op-ed should be: a written argument that seeks to inform, advance a point of view or influence discussion by deploying facts in support of that particular point of view while also using facts to rebut contrary claims. So it becomes quite maddening to read editorials about cap and trade that don’t mention obviously related issues like pollution or to see editorials about global warming that misinterpret or manipulate data in the service of advancing an ideological point of view.

One thing the blogoshpere does much better than the mainstream media is that it generally identifies and kills specious arguments before they’ve taken hold and become received wisdom. The ability to link to experts and primary documents greatly speeds up this process, allowing for almost real time debunking. Comment sections and crowd sourcing also aid in this process and that’s why a lot of the more honest bloggers affix updates or strike through and correct incorrect information when they encounter factual data that run counter to their assertions.

This kind of correction rarely happens in a traditional news paper, though. It’s exceedingly rare to see a newspaper ombudsman or editorial board directly confront, retract or disavow a piece that has run on its pages. Yes, you’ll see a fact corrected here or there, but the general premise of the piece, which could be fatally flawed, will be allowed to stand. This makes sense because acknowledging that they’d allowed a factually challenged piece into the paper speaks badly about their judgment. But this is obviously a bad practice for institutions that trade on their reputations as honest, unbiased brokers of information, as publishing these things gives them an air of legitimacy. It also sends a bad signal when newspapers continually hire writers who have a track record of playing loose with the facts.

As a person who reads a great deal of opinion journalism, I value the benefits that come from being exposed to differing points of view. But that value is diminished when you can’t trust that the info you’re reading is accurate. So what can be done? For one, newspapers should obviously employ fact checkers with some sort of requisite knowledge in a given field. I know that newspapers are struggling with layoffs and the like, so hiring might not be a choice available to all outlets. If that’s the case, use the expertise of the reporters on hand to help prevent embarrassing mistakes. If you have a top flight science reporter or editor on staff, at least allow him or her to give the piece a cursory going over. I suppose this might be a violation of some written rule of the newsroom, but I think it’s worth it.

Something else that might be even more useful would be allowing columnists (or outside experts) to directly engage each other on the op-ed page. I know the New York Times has an informal prohibition against this, but I think that in certain instances this should be allowed. I remember the David Brooks/Paul Krugman dust-up referenced at the link and the whole exchange came off as junior varsity to me. I get that it might seem like the height of journalistic narcissism and navel gazing to allow for a couple of talking heads to square off all “Dueling Banjos” style on the Times very valuable op-ed page, but this situation was crying out for it. It played out over a few weeks, other Times columnists got involved, and the entire dialogue manifested itself in a barely veiled code, even though it was painfully obvious to anyone following the exchange what was going on.

Why not let the readers see the sausage being made in this case? It would have given the Times audience insights into how some of it’s most prized assets think and formulate arguments, which surely would have been good for the paper’s visibility. To some extent, the paper has addressed this in a limited fashion with its editors’ “Room for Debate” blog, but an open roundtable with the op-ed writers would be much more useful.

Opinion pages can have a lot of value if they’re done the right way, but all too often they simply serve as launching pads for junk that eventually clutter our collective understanding of important issues.

Pretty Much

Via the High Definite

Look At Me…I’m Reading Kurt Vonnegut, Damn It!

A week or so ago, I read James Walcott’s essay in the August Vanity Fair* about how the rise of devices like the Kindle and the iPod will end a certain sort of cultural signaling.
In the last few days, several bloggers have weighed in on the topic and I have to say I kind of agree with everyone!

I certainly take note when I see someone working through a magazine I’ve read. I find myself occasionally jealous when I see someone reading a book I’ve been wanting to get my hands on. Like Matt Yglesias, I will occasionally change my Adium or gchat status to let people know what I’m listening to. So, like a lot of people, I’m guilty of signaling

On the flip side, Conor Clarke points out that this kind of cultural signaling often leads to a wasteful form of conspicuous consumption. And he’s right. A ton of well-intentioned people are attempting to slog through the Infinite Summer challenge. David Foster Wallace’s massive novel currently goes for $17.99 on Borders’ web site (before shipping and handling). The book is over 1,000 pages and I’m sure people are riding buses and subways across the country, trading smug glances and knowing smiles when they see a fellow commuter haul out their copy. But I’m willing to bet that the vast majority of these folks will utterly fail to get through the book. So while $20 or so might not seem like a big deal, it leads to the kind of thing Clarke warns against and it’s one of the reasons I didn’t seriously consider joining the fray. The book can double as a great doorstop, though.

Derek Thompson points out that we may be better off without these advertisements of our intellectual or cultural tastes, but Ezra Klein and Julian Sanchez note that existing social networking tools or forthcoming technological advances will still allow for this sort of thing. Like Klein, I attempted to use Visual Bookshelf for a while, but got lazy and stopped doing updates. I’d call that an active form of signaling. What Sanchez mentions is almost like a passive form of signaling (actually, inadvertant over sharing) that also happens to be much more invasive. It still requires a bit of active work (loading your books into your profile), but after that, viola! Anyone who happens into your physical proximity could find out what tunes you like, what books you read, etc. and you wouldn’t have to do a thing. At least as it’s currently constituted on Facebook, you’re only broadcasting to a pre-screened group of people. If the future that Sanchez imagines comes to pass, then you won’t have the ability to filter. That seems deeply disturbing and possibly even dangerous.

(*I know. I’ve mentioned VF in every other post for the last week, but it’s been a long time since one issue of any magazine had so many good pieces. I even convinced some lady who was in front of me in the checkout line at Mollie Stone’s to buy it the other day).

Give Me the Numbers

Via the Atlantic’s Ideas blog, Ezra Klein calls for fast food/chain restaurants to post their calorie counts.

As Klein notes, NYC already has this, and I can say that it’s given me pause on more than one occasion, and I consider that a good thing. I’ve actually been surprised when I’ve walked into a Starbucks here in San Francisco and not seen the calorie counts listed. It’s one thing for you to go into McDonalds’ and order a Big Mac combo, knowing it’s bad for you and packed with calories, but it’s somehow justified because you don’t know how many calories you’re scarfing down. It’s something else altogether when you can see very easily that the whole combo is upwards of 1,000 calories. They put the caloric intake pretty much right next to the price, so you can’t miss it. I can’t say that it’s stopped me from making a poor decision every time, but it’s certainly altered the equation more than once. I’ve pushed back from that 800-1000+ calorie burrito and gotten the three tacos, coming in at a comparatively svelte 600 calories or so, at Chipotle a few times because of this.

If we really wanted to scare everyone into eating better, though, they’d post the grams of fat in a dish, like Men’s Health does in their annual survey of the worst food in America. It’s enough to keep you out of an Outback Steakhouse for the rest of your days.

History’s Great Villians

I’d like to echo Ezra Klein’s thoughts on Michael Lewis’ Vanity Fair piece on A.I.G./Joe Cassano. I was thinking about this on Saturday as I worked my way through Megan McArdle’s response to Matt Taibbi’s Rolling Stone article on Goldman Sachs.

The problem with pointing the finger at one person (or organization) as the cause for something as big as the worldwide financial crisis is that in doing so, it excuses the actions of thousands, if not millions, of people who, in their own way, contributed to the current situation: the prospective home buyers who borrowed well beyond their means; the loan officers who failed to do their due diligence; the “quants” who devised all sorts of exotic new ways to trade assets; the incurious bank executives who didn’t know what kind of things were being bought and sold in their name; the regulators who allowed the system to get so large and complex that few understood what was actually going on; everyone for believing that home prices would continue to rise, etc.

Passing the buck is nice because people can rationalize their involvement by saying it was somebody else’s fault or that they were just doing what they were told, but nobody learns a lesson that way.

Sure, It Tastes Like Crap, But Does It Work?

I found this story on the front page of the New York Times Business section about the increasing use of energy drinks by college kids rather odd because you don’t find out until the 23rd paragraph that nutritional experts are skeptical of the supposed effects of the supplements:

Nutritionists were skeptical of such claims, however.

Marion Nestle, a nutrition professor at New York University, said that while some of the nutrients in 5-Hour Energy were known to play a role in the body’s metabolism, most people got enough of those nutrients in their regular diet and that ingesting elevated amounts had not been shown to have any beneficial effect.

“It sounds like a great placebo to me,” she said. “You can gulp this down and you feel like you’re doing something. And I’ll bet you ask people and they say they feel better. It’s got caffeine — why not?”

Wouldn’t it have made a lot more sense to do a story about whether or not these things actually work and are worth $5 a pop rather than waste a lot of ink on a lazy trend story that doesn’t really tell us much of anything?

More or Better?

The question of quality vs. quantity is one I’ve struggled with since I started blogging several years ago, so I found this bit from a good Felix Salmon post about journalists blogging very interesting:

As always, there’s a trade-off between quantity and quality. Should you write more, with lower quality, or less, with higher quality? Fortunately, the blogosphere has been around for long enough that we have a simple empirical answer to this question: given the choice, go for quantity over quality. You might not like it — I certainly don’t — but I defy you to name a really good blogger who doesn’t blog frequently.

I think this is correct. I often carry around the idea for a grand post on some subject (I have a draft post on the whole Sarah Palin situation rotting away in a folder, for example), but then never get around to publishing it because I’ve thought about it for too long and several news cycles have passed, making it less timely and less worth my time to complete. It’s like the law of diminishing returns for bloggers or something.

I’m now starting to believe that just getting something up is, in a lot of cases, more important than the quality of what’s up. If nothing else, linking to a blogger you like who has written something you agree with is still a good way of getting a discussion going on amongst your readers on your site.

Gay Talese on Writing Nonfiction

A long excerpt from a Paris Review interview conducted with one of the master of the form (H/T kottle.org).

By now I’m sure it’s trite for aspiring long-form nonfiction writers to say this, but “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” really is mind-blowing stuff. It’s one of those stories that I kept stumbling across but never could quite bring myself to read because I was sure it couldn’t really be as good as people said it was.

I was wrong.