Now here's an instructive feature in the New York Times Magazine about the cultural and mass psychological ruin being wrought by the Internet. Mattathias Schwartz becomes a Jane Goodall among the "trolls," those anarchic misfits of the binary world who live to toy with other people's emotions (sorry, they elicit…
The failure of imagination that is John McCain's new "Celeb" ad against Obama has yielded unintended results in the form of exaggerated reactions to it. The most salient comes from Obama himself, who, speaking in Rolla, Missouri yesterday, said this: "John McCain right now, he's spending an awful lot of time talking…
Sofia Coppola slouches in a red damask banquette so battered and torn it's practically held together by duct tape. She twists the end of her "Go Metric" t-shirt around her forefinger, staring blankly into the middle distance. Finally, as the flash of yet another polaroid camera goes off and Yo La Tengo's "Deeper Into…
Ehud Olmert is resigning as premier of Israel due to corruption charges and a universal displeasure with his governance, but the real news from the holy land is that Morrissey has arrived. Oh, the things Obama could learn about pop superstardom from the Pope of Mope, who landed at Ben Gurion Airport on Sunday for his…
Slightly late to the game of fond remembrances of the late William F. Buckley, Jr. is Fox News correspondent James Rosen's essay on how the founding editor of National Review was a frequent contributor to Playboy. Many of the details Rosen digs up about this sideline beat, so to speak, are fun, but the association…
Leon Neyfakh at the Observer reports on David Carr's fastidiously investigated druggie memoir The Night of the Gun and thinks it's just the rehab an ailing genre needs: "After years of abuse, the memoir has found its white knight, galloping in to show how a personal story can be engrossing, shocking and true. Mr.…
Political thinking, wrote Orwell, suffers from a universal problem. "People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome." You'd think by now that sentence would be printed and tacked above every editorial desk in every…
