Week of May 20, 2002
[Note: Some now-dead links have been removed from archived items.]

SCOOP!: Is it just me, or is this very odd? From the NYT announcement that Rick Berke is the new Washington editor: "[A]s editor of the high school newspaper, he and a co-author wrote an article disclosing that in 1959, Richard M. Nixon, then vice president, was exposed to microwave radiation beamed at the United States Embassy in Moscow when he was staying there for the 'kitchen debates' with Nikita S. Khrushchev." And the point of that high school article was what exactly? (NYT piece via Andrew Sullivan.)

ANDREW'S GOOD MANNERS: In his most recent postings, Andrew Sullivan is clearly making a real effort to give sources credit. As a faithful reader I'm glad, if only because I got to discover that Privateer's Savage Warblog, a formerly uncredited source, calls this site DynaMistress. Why didn't I think of that? [Posted 5/24.]

TERMS OF USE: If you're an InstaPundit reader (and who isn't?), be sure to check out Glenn's new Terms of Use. [Posted 5/23.]

MAXIMIZING REVENUE: Steve at HappyFunPundit wonders how he got an invitation to a Republican fundraising dinner. He checks the label to see what magazine subscription the GOP took his name from and discovers... Well, it's not The Weekly Standard. [Posted 5/23.]

MORE FUN WITH NAMES: The NYT decided to publish a (pretty cute) cartoon rather than the Top 10 names charts I'd sent them, but here's something even better than a list. Kevin Shay sends this link to an interactive feature he developed for the Parenting.com website. You plug in a name and it gives you bar graphs, based on the Social Security Administration data, showing where the name ranked in each decade of the 20th century. [Posted 5/23.]

TECHNICAL GLITCH: My apologies to readers who tried to use the vpostrel.com alias earlier today only to get a Register.com page saying the site was coming. Emulating InstaPundit, I installed one of those nifty unique-visitor counters, but it somehow screwed up the alias. The counter is gone for now, but at least people can get to the site. I'm making some adjustments in the way I set up the counter and will try again later. [Posted 5/23.]

FASHIONABLE NAMES: My latest NYT column is on what we can learn about fashion cycles by studying the patterns in baby names. (Hint: You don't need advertising to have fashion.) It's a fun column, related to my aesthetics book and even more directly to Stanley Lieberson's A Matter of Taste. It even has a couple of jokes. Be sure to check out the Social Security Administration's lists of the most popular baby names over the decades. [Posted 5/22.]

RATIONAL IGNORANCE: Thanks to Eugene Volokh and Will Wilkinson quoting Eugene Volokh, many blog readers have recently discovered the political science concept of "rational ignorance." In a letter about Big Media and blogs, reader Lawrence Krubner puts both into the perspective of rational ignorance:

Scale is relative. Your view of blogosphere is similar to my view of Big Media—that it happens in a walled-off world that only some people know about. I agree with you that Big Media is orders of magnitude more influential than the world of blogs. But that's not to say the reach of Big Media is infinite. I'm constantly amazed at the number of "big stories" my friends never hear of. Most Friday nights my friends and I go out, find a nice restaurant, and indulge in some wide ranging coversations. Charlottesville, Virginia, where I live, is a college town, it is full of well-educated, though very busy, people. Plenty of "big stories" get filtered out by the lack of time. What stories do get through is my measure of what is truly a "big story".

As of last Friday not one of my friends had heard of Sylvia Ann Hewlett or her report. [No big loss there—vp] I'd read her article in the Harvard Business Review and lent the magazine to a friend who seemed interested in the story when I told her of it. The stories in recent months that have gotten through—that John Ashcroft is a threat to civil liberties (my friends don't know the details, they just have the broad picture), that something really bad is going on between Israel and the Palestinians, and that stem cell research is the best hope for curing Parkinson's (some of my friends saw Michael J. Fox when he was on David Letterman's). When I tell them that the Senate is thinking of outlawing therapeutic cloning, they, a bit shocked, ask me if I'm sure I've got all the details right.

Rational ignorance, which is to say having better things to do with your time than bone up on every public issue, also explains why those who do pay attention to what's going on, either because they have a large stake or because they're just weirdly interested, have a disproportionate influence on both particular policies and the general climate of opinion. Recommended reading: Jonathan Rauch's Government's End (no, it's not about anarchy). [Posted 5/23.]

UNMENTIONABLE: Michael Lind and I have what can best be termed an uneasy relationship. He's been an ally on therapeutic cloning, but we disagree on most things and, beyond politics, our personal exchanges are civil but cool. When Lind enjoyed a burst of fame in 1995, mainly for coining the term overclass, I went after his illiberal, anti-meritocratic, and misogynist agenda in Reason. The editorial's themes will be familiar ones and it is, if I do say so myself, still a pretty good read.

So I'm not a Lind booster. But at least I didn't write nearly 4,000 words on "the overclass" and pretend I'd come up with the term or the idea it represents. Someone not known for crediting other people's work did that in this recent piece in the Sunday Times of London. Mickey Kaus's End of Equality also deserved a nod, since the piece mines many of Mickey's ideas. But only the famous Bell Curve got a mention. Only quote people more prominent than yourself, remember? The overclass comes in many forms.

Of course, maybe the Sunday Times writer didn't steal "the overclass" from Lind. Maybe he stole it from Dinesh D'Souza, who stole it from Lind. Second-hander or third-hander? You make the call. [Posted 5/23.]

MY MANAGERIAL GENIUS: My most brilliant moment as editor of Reason was when I was suddenly struck by the thought: "I could hire Chuck Freund!" Here's the latest evidence (via InstaPundit). [Posted 5/22.]

WHY BLOG? Reader John Scalzi writes with a sound observation in response to my various depressed posts about blogging:

Been following your commentary on blogging and its influence (with the tangential commentary on the Olsen/Sullivan) thing. One of the things I've noticed on the whole is the schism between those who see blogging as a means, and those who see it as an ends. I expect Sullivan and others like him (and I say that in a positive sense) see it as a means—another tool to extend their reach and their mindshare in a general sense, while the great mass of bloggers see their blogging as an end to itself; i.e., the right medium for them to express their views.

Working writers and journalists tend to be agnostic about their platform; they don't care how they get their message out, as long as it gets out, whereas people who started off or at least primarily identify as bloggers tend to think that the medium is at least as important as the message, hence the concern about "community" and who owes who what and so on. When one focuses on the medium rather than the message, it can create an inflated sense of its importance, which is a bit of what you're addressing when you discussed Lindsay's books (and what I commented on in April when I wrote about blog numbers and what they boiled down to in terms of actual visitors).

I do expect the schism to continue, since there will always like be bloggers who blog in addition to doing other professional writing (or media) work, and bloggers who only blog.

John did not include the link to his earlier article (shame on him) so I had to Google it. There's more to it than the fight over statistics. Speaking of which, this site (dynamist.com) had 102,147 successful requests for pages and visits from 29,672 distinct hosts in the past 30 days. This page (The Scene/vpostrel.com) had 60,422 page views, or a bit over 2,000 a day. Small numbers, but an engaged audience: Before I quit for the summer, I'd sold 181 autographed copies of TFAIE. Since January 1, readers have bought 48 copies of Against the Dead Hand from this site via Amazon. [Posted 5/22.]

GLENN GLOATS: Glenn "Tenured Full Professor" Reynolds gloats that he's doing fine, because he's not a professional journalist. He thinks I was talking about workaday reporters in my discussion below of how Andrew Sullivan adeptly plays the fame-and-influence game. I wasn't. Workaday reporters don't worry about fame or influence. They worry (and gripe constantly) about deadlines, sources who don't return phone calls, and their bosses. I was talking about people who aspire to have their ideas influence the public debate. Influencing the public debate is different from getting your name mentioned in articles about blogging. Glenn's intellectual influence has little to do with his blogging, most of which is of the "linking" rather than "thinking" variety. (And mighty fine and abundant links they are.) Glenn's influence comes from his legal scholarship, for which he gets paid. Blogging is his hobby. No wonder he's smug.

My challenge to bloggers who think the blogosphere is immensely influential is the same as it has been for months: Oh yeah? Then why isn't anyone outside the blog world talking about Brink Lindsey's book? Why hasn't it been reviewed in the NYT Book Review? Why did The Washington Post kiss it off in one nasty paragraph? Why isn't Brink on NPR all the time? Why haven't Time and Newsweek quoted him? It hasn't even been reviewed in National Review or The Weekly Standard. All these places have plenty of room for far less worthy authors. Check out the full list of reviews here. This is ridiculously scant treatment of a good and thoughtful book, the sort of serious work that public intellectuals are supposed to do.

Trade and globalization are huge, timely issues. Brink is a bona fide expert on both the technical aspects of trade law and the intellectual history and context of globablization. But he isn't from the right crowd and works at the wrong, very wrong, place (that libertarian label is poison for public intellectuals, which is why Fukuyama loves to throw it around). Brink's not complaining—he's writing great blog entries—but I find this depressing, and depressingly typical. All the blog hype in the world will not make the ugly truth go away.

Connections-driven buzz isn't sufficient, as the failure of Sylvia Ann Hewlett's moans about motherhood demonstrates, but it's damned hard to sell a book no one has heard of. Even Andrew Sullivan's book club only selects already-famous books by already-famous authors. Just being smart and interesting isn't enough. But maybe Andrew will surprise me. There's always next month. And trade is, as I said, a big issue. [Posted 5/21.]

FUKUYAMA DISSECTION: Isntapundit (not a typo) does a thorough dissection of Fukuyama's latest spin. Maybe it's the way the Salon interview was edited, but I'm genuinely surprised to see Fukuyama, who used to be a serious intellectual (I even gave his previous book a good review in the LATBR), engaging in such shoddy discourse. I applaud the blogosphere's many serious responses to his work. I only wish they'd been published someplace with more readers. [Posted 5/21.]

SUMMER SLOWDOWN: The aesthetic theme in the two items below is no accident. Having just turned in my NYT column for this Thursday, I'm going into full book-concentration mode and, except for a trip to my 20th college reunion, expect to stay there most of the summer. (Even Thursday's Times column is fashion-related.) Posting will be light for the next several months.

To fill the gaps, I recommend Brink Lindsey and the Volokh Conspiracy, which you should be reading anyway. Dan Pink's Just One Thing is also worth a peek. Low commitment—just one item a day. [Posted 5/21.]

HOUSE FIGHT: Thanks to Louisville blogger Caleb Brown for putting me on to this interesting story about an aesthetics brawl in his town. It seems a family built a too-contemporary house in neighborhood of traditionalists. With no city ordinance to turn to, the traditionalists dug up an old and apparently unenforced deed restriction.

"Deed restrictions in the Lakeside subdivision, which was designed by the Olmsted Bros. firm, say that houses there must be built of brick, brick veneer, stucco or stone," reports Marth Elson of the Louisville Courier Journal. "Nevertheless, some houses in the neighborhood have siding of vinyl, wood or other materials." (The article is nearly a month old, but I'm just now getting around to posting it and trying to find out more about the case.)

There's a long discussion, airing many of the key issues and a lot of strong emotions, on the Dwell Magazine bulletin board. (Dwell ran the original quotes that got the homeowners in trouble and published a feature on the case in its April issue, but neither article is online.) [Posted 5/21.]

JAPANESE STYLE: Another fascinating blog-spotted article is this Foreign Policy piece on Japan's emergence as a cultural superpower. (Via Mike Ray, who actually liked Attack of the Clones.) Amy Spindler, the NYT Magazine's sharp fashion editor, did a related piece back in February, declaring Tokyo the "real international capital of fashion." But this one covers a lot more than clothes. Well worth reading.

If you get too optimistic about Japan's future, you can always visit the ever-gloomy Ron Campbell's musings on the Shoutin' Across the Pacific blog he shares with Charles Oliver and Chuck Watson. (I'd offer a specific link, but the archives have disappeared.) I enjoy this blog a lot, though I can't tell whether that's because Charles is my good friend and I like to hear what's going on in his quirky mind. In other words, check out the blog, but be warned that I'm not objective. My NYT column on Thursday will help explain why all his cousins seem to suddenly be Jewish. [Posted 5/21.]

CLONES IMPLICATIONS: Reader Chris Huttman suggests one possible political implication of Attack of the Clones (and, indeed, the entire series): "Joe Lieberman looks like and will remind Americans of the evil emperor Palpatine. Thank God." [Posted 5/21.]

FACTS OF LIFE: Eric Olsen at Tres Producers has raised a minor ruckus by noticing that Andrew Sullivan almost never links to other bloggers and generally fails to give credit where it's due. Eric might have also noted that Andrew is the rare blogger who never identifies readers who send him letters, regardless of what those readers might wish. (Obviously, some would prefer to be anonymous. But they're almost certainly a minority.) A single byline keeps the focus on the Main Man. It's a savvy media strategy.

This is the way the professional media world is. You become prominent, first and foremost, by knowing the right people and then, secondarily, by attacking or crediting people more prominent than yourself. (They stay prominent by not responding to you by name, a tactic well-honed by neocon intellectuals who almost never identify, much less quote, the objects of their criticism. Exhibit A: Francis Fukuyama.) If you must mention someone less prominent than you are, make sure it is someone much less well known, so you can be recognized for your wide reading or noblesse oblige.

In short: Promote your friends. Mention your (more famous) mentors. But don't be a fool. There is no career-enhancing reason ever to cite someone who might prove a competitor, make a cogent argument against you, or get credit for an idea you could have claimed. Andrew Sullivan is so good at this strategy that he probably doesn't even realize he's following it. (Maybe it's in the water at Harvard or TNR. Then how do you explain Mickey Kaus? He doesn't do this stuff.--ed. Mickey's a mutant whose nice-guy genes will eventually ruin his career.) I can't fault a talented writer who plays by the rules, and that's what Andrew does, brilliantly. [Posted 5/21.]

FUKUYAMA AGAIN: Interviewed in Salon, Francis Fukuyama acknowledges, but mischaracterizes and doesn't address, the many blog dissections of his WSJ piece. (There's no sign he's actually read them, just that he knows they exist.) If you came here from Brink Lindsey, via Salon, looking for my response, it's down the page here. [Posted 5/21.]