I'll be on vacation until July 2 and, barring national emergencies, do not expect to be blogging. If you subscribe to Reason, be on the lookout for my Buffy article in the August/September issue, which should be arriving shortly.

On Jonah's point, my comments here apply. They're especially relevant to the Southern Baptists' new initiative to be nicer to gays--by trying to convert them to both fundamentalist Christianity and heterosexuality. Hard as it may be to believe, that initiative represents a (very small) move toward greater acceptance of gays.

Aside: I don't even want to think of how much productivity the Microsoft antitrust case drained from the U.S. economy. Forget Microsoft itself. Consider what the distraction cost Sun--which favored the litigation to the point of obsession.

Viacom yesterday lost its latest legal appeal to carry out its plans to rename its TNN cable network Spike TV. The filmmaker Spike Lee...won an injunction against the name change last week, arguing that Spike TV was an infringement on his name and reputation because viewers would associate the channel with him. The Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court yesterday rejected a motion by Viacom to lift the injunction....

Executives at MTV Networks, the Viacom division that oversees TNN, expressed outrage at the court's decision yesterday, saying that the ruling had already cost the company more than $17 million in wasted promotion and advertising fees. If the channel can never use the name Spike TV, they said, it will cost more than $47 million.

Time and place. Depending, either kid crawling or grim caffeine warriors. Quick and dirty guide: does the cold-case stock the Horizon flavored milk boxes, Chocolate, Vanilla, and the rare Strawberry? If so, then SOME time during the day features the brat pack attack. (These are know as "cow milks" to my 2-year-old, who will helpfully point out every "caw-pee place" you encounter, which can be quite a few.)

The wonder of Starbucks is that it can be so many things to so many people. Early AM, all tool-belts and Nextel, later blending into the gray and white-collars who have to hit the office by 9ish to check email. Later still students and cops. Banter between the skate punks and the young patrol officers is always good for a listen. Does it happen anywhere else? Mid-morning is prime toddler time, that's grocery-getting time. The older siblings are at school and a quick energy boost is in order to avoid the dreaded CHECKOUT MELTDOWN. Lunch is again the adult swim. But by soon after 2 the parade of tween and above girls looking for their various mocha fixes begins.

Correct for location--office buildings or strip center--and I'd bet the pattern is universal.

But that comment is not nearly as strange as the commenter who thinks I don't believe in externalities or bounded rationality, when I not only believe in both but devote an entire chapter of the book to the limits of human knowledge (hence, btw, the value of specialization). I even quote Mr. Bounded Rationality himself, Herbert Simon, though on a different subject. I think what he actually means is that I don't believe Joseph Stiglitz should run the everyone's life.

The review makes the correct point that my book mostly discusses the United States--which is why I never even sold British Commonwealth rights. That, too, is something I chalk up to bounded rationality. Rather than spend a couple of decades learning about the rest of the world--or, worse, doing what a lot of writers do and pretending to know things I don't--I stuck to what I knew. But, no, I don't think French technocracy is a particularly attractive model, though the French can have it if they're willing to pay the price in lost liberty, prosperity, and, ultimately, power.

Thanks to Julian Sanchez on Hit and Run for the heads-up.

So shouldn't he be the ace of clubs?

"Before the war I was practicing my work freely. It was quite normal for me to stay out late after midnight but now I have to be at home before 6 in the evening," said 27-year-old Siri, who lives in a small apartment in a poor Baghdad suburb....

For women, the streets of Baghdad are a more dangerous place, and an upsurge in religious fervor means they must stick to Islamic dress if they want to be left alone.

"It is difficult for me now to walk on the streets wearing jeans. There is no security on the streets and especially for someone who was known as a dancer," said Siri, a chain smoker.

"I do not like the abaya and the head cover. I usually wear them when I visit holy shrines but now I am obliged to wear them all the time. They restrict my freedom," she said.

Siri misses dancing for one of her best customers, Saddam Hussein's son Uday.

She said that she used to get 500,000 dinars for one hour dancing at public parties but more when she danced at events organized by Uday, known as a womanizer who threw wild parties

"I danced many times in parties hosted by Uday at his Hunting Club, and I danced once in a party of his brother Qusay," she said.

Sometimes I stayed to chat with Uday after I ended my dance. He had an easy manner. He never did anything to offend me," she said.

For a more balanced look at the situation of women in postwar Iraq, see this article by Sharon Waxman of The Washington Post. An excerpt, which directly contradicts the Reuters version of life in Baghdad:

 It was just over a week ago that Jalil, 46, made the decision--as she puts it--"to liberate myself from the veil."

"I should have freedom to wear or not to wear the veil," she says. "I don't want to let these people dictate my thoughts. I am an educated woman. I am a religious woman. I know my duties to God. I fast in Ramadan."

Jalil is sitting with friends in an otherwise empty ice cream parlor in central Baghdad. It is one of the few times she has dared to leave her house since the end of the war. Now security seems to have improved and she is willing to take the risk.

But not, as before, with her head and neck covered by the traditional hijab. Jalil says there is no need for her to prove her modesty or her decency to strangers. "A woman is purer, higher than these low things, in her thoughts, in her good works, in her beliefs." She smiles, but the expression beneath it is worn. The hollows around her eyes are deep and dark.

The article is fairly long and quite interesting. Read it all here.

Since the 1980's, American corporations have been disintegrating--not falling apart, but becoming more specialized. Revenues or production volumes may be as large as ever, but even big companies tend to combine fewer stages of production under the same corporate ownership.

This trend presents a puzzle. As the business historian Alfred Chandler famously chronicled, the modern corporation succeeded in large measure by bringing many different stages of production under central ownership and control.

Why did vertical integration seem like the way to efficiency, predictability and riches? Was Mr. Chandler wrong?

Naturally, I think you should read the whole thing.

For more info on Dick Langlois's research, including a downloadable version of his paper, look here.

There is no shortage of diarists these days, not with billions of blogs on line. But will bloggers find immortality? No. This is not just because there are so many of us. The trouble is we assume the things readers will want to know in 100 years.

There are, for instance, countless blog entries from people experiencing the flu.   But what history will care about are all the details that struck us as too obvious or banal to mention.

What the "flu" was like, what we took as "medicine." The "pharmacy" we got the medicine in. The conversation we had with that man in the lab coat. The advice we got from friends. What we wore while recuperating. What we watched on TV. What was illuminated by that faint light in the "refrigerator."  The idea, for instance, of "comfort food." (What was it? What comfort did it give?) What we talked about on the "phone." What "emails" we wrote. What happened to personhood?   What was it like to be us, as we lost momentum, as our affairs went into suspension, as our life began slowing to come undone. Where did the mind turn in this rare inactive moment. What fretting did we do?

In 100 years, the flu will be an exotic experience.   (We read Pepys for his accounts of the plague; we know longer know what this was like.)   Historians will hold conferences on the experience of sickness and curing.   And they will consult our blogs mostly with unhappiness.

For the sake of future anthropologists, explain the flu! It's a fascinating proposal, if only as a thought experiment. Grant's full posting, worth reading in its entirety, does a great job of making the familiar strange and of reminding us how different the world will be sooner than we think.

The policy "makes a stance for science," Dr. Michael Goldrich, incoming chairman of the committee that drafted the report on which the new policy is based, told the Associated Press.

The policy emphasizes the physician's freedom of conscience. Media reports have portrayed that emphasis as a protection for those who oppose cell cloning--no physician will be ethically compelled to participate in a practice he or she deems morally wrong. True enough. But that isn't what the policy says. It says something much more sweeping: "An individual physician must remain free to decide to participate in this research."

In other words, neither Congress nor state legislatures should make this research a crime. Let's hope the AMA backs its policy with political clout.

Dubbed a monthly for libertarians ("free minds and free markets"), it's not surprising that Reason has a small list of subscribers. But this magazine does everything well: culture, politics, religion, philosophy, and while other mags redesign to simplify and commercialize, Reason's redesign actually made it better.

More significant, I think, is how the surging importance of Internet publishing has finally gotten Reason into the "evoked set" of political journals. You no longer have to be on TV to count. You can be an active participant in the conversation led by blogs and websites. Congratulations to everyone involved.

Must beg to differ with you on the lack of kids/strollers in Starbucks. At least here in Pasadena.

I remember remarking to friends that one weekday during my freelance life last year I found myself crowded around a Starbucks table with about five other mothers from Evie's kindergarten class planning the class Valentine's party. They came armed with dog-eared copies of Martha Stewart's Living and a bunch of other "motherhood" magazines I had never heard of, and yes, a couple of them had strollers with their younger kids in them. I, like David Frum's wife, asked in my best David Byrne voice, "How did I get here?" A far cry from studio filmmaker meetings, to be sure.

Also when freelancing, I found myself incapable of working in my office due to the distraction of the internet, and so worked in Starbucks frequently. As there's a Starbucks a stone's throw literally in every direction from my house, I found myself in a variety of them and there were often moms and babies in them, along with the Cal Tech and Fuller Seminary students.

I guess I just frequent the wrong Starbucks. But even in Plano, the moms are in the mall and the Starbucks is full of men in business attire (some of whom appear to be looking for jobs).

Fresh from the scandal of being caught abusing ellipses to twist President Bush's words, she is now using other people's work to pad out a column when the deadline clock is tolling.

Yesterday, Dowd wrote one of her trademark gaseous columns about popular culture turning its back on the accomplishments of feminism, etc., etc.

As the column trudged wearily to its end, there unexpectedly appeared an unusual thought, vividly phrased: "There's even a retro trend among women toward deserting the fast track for a pleasant life of sitting around Starbucks gabbing with their girlfriends, baby strollers beside them....

Now compare Dowd's words to these, broadcast on National Public Radio's "Morning Edition" two weeks ago:

"You see them at Starbucks at two o'clock on a weekday afternoon, pushing a stroller and balancing a latte, with a slight look of bewilderment on their faces, as if to say, 'How did I end up here?'...Yet forty years after the launch of the women’s movement, this is exactly what many former career women find themselves doing."

The broadcaster in question happened to be my wife, Danielle Crittenden, and the "trend" to which Dowd refers (in the late 1990s, the percentage of mothers of young children who worked dropped for the first time in a quarter century) provides the theme for Danielle's new novel.

If you hear something on the radio and then work the same idea into a column, that action may or may not be "plagairism." But it certainly isn't originality.

It's unlikely that Dowd came up with this idea herself, for a very simple reason: You hardly ever see a mother with a stroller in Starbucks.

I'm not saying it doesn't happen; the Starbucks in the Frums' neighborhood could be atypical. But Starbucks is the touchstone example in my own new book, and I've spent a fair amount of time hanging out in their stores. The typical Starbucks store is remarkably, and blessedly, child-free--the last non-alcoholic environment without the squeals of kids who haven't learned the meaning of "Use your inside voice," the last place adults (or teenagers) can have peaceful conversations without being carded.

At two o'clock on a weekday afternoon, the typical Starbucks is in fact a work environment, with business meetings in progress and free agents and students typing away on their laptops. Amanda Bright and her friends are pushing strollers through the malls, whose wide aisles and play amenities are kid-friendly. Starbucks is for the rest of us.

One piece of advice to Apple buyers: Always get the AppleCare. You're buying expensive hardware from a company that's best at software. Your computer almost certainly will need service. AppleCare covers advice from the store's Genius Bar and it also covers most repairs. (I did have to pay $54 for the data backup.)

The conference is extending a special discount to Dynamist.com readers--$400 off the early-bird price of $1495. The catch is that you have to register by June 30. Here's Andrew's pitch:

The PopTech conference program is shaping up, and we have an opportunity to offer a special rate to readers of Dynamist.com! The discount is *substantial* - $400 off  the $1495 admission fee. For the experience participants are going to have, this is a steal.  

To be fair to everyone else, the offer is good only until June 30, at which time the rates will increase. That's why we want to get the word out right away.  

Who is going to be there? Folks like...
* Geoffrey Ballard, the 'father' of the hydrogen fuel cell
* Constance Adams, the first architect to be hired by NASA to build 'liveable' spacecraft.
* Larry Lessig, head of the Stanford Center for Internet & Society
* Thomas Barnett, Leading theorist on the future of warfare at the Pentagon
* Juan Enriquez, author of As The Future Catches You and head of the HBS Life Sciences Program
* Golan Levin, digital artist extraordinaire
* Aubrey de Grey, pioneering Cambridge University anti-aging researcher
... and most importantly: Virginia Postrel! The final program will have more than 30 amazing speakers that I know will be mind-blowing.  

To register, go here, where you'll see a special $1095 rate. If you run into any problems, email Andrew at andrew-at-zpluspartners.com. The current list of speakers is here.

I spent the rest of Thursday on my latest follow-up visit to the infamous Boothe Eye Care and Laser Center, where they take your money, fix your eyes, and waste your time. Lots and lots and lots of your time. I was lucky. I got out in four hours. Others were not so fortunate. The patients are a good-humored but aggravated lot. Dr. Boothe is careful to keep the new patients in a different suite from the returning ones, who might scare new people away with their tales of multiple four- and five-hour post-op visits.

At the end of July, I will be having a second procedure--an "enhancement," they call it--on my right eye, which is currently at 20/50. My left eye isn't quite 20/20, but it's close; with improvement in my right eye, my binocular vision should be 20/20 or very close. My appointment is for 5:30 a.m., which means I have to be there by 4:30 a.m. They wouldn't want me to make them late, after all.

It really was a *truly remarkable* programme, and I strongly urge you and your IPers to see if you can get to see it somehow, perhaps via PBS.

It was called "Dan Cruickshank and the Raiders of the Lost Art", and was screened on BBC2 at 9pm on Sunday, 8 June. Don't let the cute title put you off. This was a one hour long documentary, by a serious historian, well-experienced in TV presentation, showing day by day during a return trip to Baghdad just after the war (he'd also made a trip there a few months before the war) how he gradually came to understand what must have happened at the Museum, and what sort of people were (and I fear still are) running it.

Unfortunately I cannot find the programme, or (at least yet) anything based on it, in the BBC's very comprehensive web-site - though I did come across a series of articles, by Cruickshank, based on one of his earlier programs about Afghanistan:

Afghanistan: At the Crossroads of Ancient Civilisations Once a cultural crossroads, Afghanistan has been ravaged by 22 years of war and the Taliban regime whose systematic destruction of the country's cultural heritage culminated in the blowing up of the Bamiyan Buddhas. Early in 2002, Dan Cruickshank travelled to Kabul to investigate what treasures remain and find out how Afghanistan's people have dealt with attempts to destroy their culture and national identity.

This will give you some idea of Cruickshank's talents.

Cheers
Brian Randell
School of Computing Science, University of Newcastle

This indictment of world journalism has caused some surprise to those who listened to George and others speak at the British Museum meeting. One art historian, Dr Tom Flynn, now speaks of his "great bewilderment". "Donny George himself had ample opportunity to clarify to the best of [his] knowledge the extent of the looting and the likely number of missing objects," says Flynn. "Is it not a little strange that quite so many journalists went away with the wrong impression, while Mr George made little or not attempt to clarify the context of the figure of 170,000 which he repeated with such regularity and gusto before, during, and after that meeting." To Flynn it is also odd that George didn't seem to know that pieces had been taken into hiding or evacuated. "There is a queasy subtext here if you bother to seek it out," he suggests.

On Sunday night, in a remarkable programme on BBC2, the architectural historian Dan Cruikshank both sought and found. Cruikshank had been to the museum in Baghdad, had inspected the collection, the storerooms, the outbuildings, and had interviewed people who had been present around the time of the looting, including George and some US troops. And Cruikshank was present when, for the first time, US personnel along with Iraqi museum staff broke into the storerooms.

One, which had clearly been used as a sniper point by Ba'ath forces, had also been looted of its best items, although they had been stacked in a far corner. The room had been opened with a key. Another storeroom looked as though the looters had just departed with broken artefacts all over the floor. But this, Cruikshank learned, was the way it had been left by the museum staff. No wonder, he told the viewers - the staff hadn't wanted anyone inside this room. Overall, he concluded, most of the serious looting "was an inside job".

Cruikshank also tackled George directly on events leading up to the looting. The Americans had said that the museum was a substantial point of Iraqi resistance, and this explained their reticence in occupying it. Not true, said George, a few militia-men had fired from the grounds and that was all. This, as Cruikshank heavily implied, was a lie. Not only were there firing positions in the grounds, but at the back of the museum there was a room that seemed to have been used as a military command post. And it was hardly credible that senior staff at the museum would not have known that. Cruikshank's closing thought was to wonder whether the museum's senior staff - all Ba'ath party appointees - could safely be left in post.

Furious, I conclude two things from all this. The first is the credulousness of many western academics and others who cannot conceive that a plausible and intelligent fellow-professional might have been an apparatchiks of a fascist regime and a propagandist for his own past. The second is that - these days - you cannot say anything too bad about the Yanks and not be believed.

But I don't want it, and I get hundreds and hundreds of spam messages a day. I'd like to have a way to charge for this junk--especially since my hard disk is already too full to download the newest upgrade of OS X. The combination of SpamAssassin at the server and Entourage's next to highest setting mostly works, except Entourage still misclassifies a lot of my NYT reader mail as junk.

Five years ago, a campaign to rescue cats, dogs and even pot-bellied pigs from a hasty death in animal shelters sailed through the Legislature. Now, the state is on the hook to pay at least $79 million for the housing and medical care of strays at a time when California faces a multibillion-dollar budget gap.

The animal shelter tab is just one of 85 state mandates on local government that exacerbate California's financial crisis. In flush times, the state picked up the cost for such mandates. This year, faced with a mounting pile of IOUs, Gov. Gray Davis and the Legislature are considering shelving dozens of these demands on cities and counties to try to close a $38.2 billion shortfall.

The costs generated by the requirement that animal shelters keep strays for two or three extra days -- ranging from computer software in Palo Alto to a new shelter in San Jose -- illustrate the hidden costs of state-mandated programs. How many and which programs are rolled back will be part of the debate when budget writers meet this week.

Sacramento already owes cities and counties $700 million for bills from mandates the state put off last year when California's budget woes first emerged. The Davis administration estimates the cost will swell to $876 million before next June. The legislative analyst and Republican leaders peg the number closer to $1.2 billion if the state continues to allow IOUs to local government to grow.

Local officials would welcome the outright repeal of many mandates instead of amassing IOUs. Suspending the requirements another year just means cities and counties continue to offer services without being paid.

For the non-commercial significance of Buffy DVDs, see Emily Nussbaum piece from Sunday's NYT: "Using such tools, viewers can delve into 'Buffy' the way we dig into a novel like 'Great Expectations' (which was also originally distributed in installments)--without the cliffhangers, the larger themes rise to the surface." I did my first serious Buffy DVD watching while researching my forthcoming Reason piece on the show, and Nussbaum is absolutely right (though I far prefer Buffy to Dickens, especially Great Expectations).

But ideological diversity aside, there is a huge, gaping hole in the Times opinion lineup--and, for that matter, on the news pages. The Times lacks a genuinely sophisticated, Washington-based political writer, someone who understands both the mechanics of practical politics and the nuances of the many components of both the liberal/Democratic and conservative/Republican coalitions. The Times alternates between casting politics as an utterly cynical contest between phony image consultants and as a battle between the monolithic Forces of Light and the Forces of Darkness. Neither view is accurate, and both portraits make the nation's leading newspaper look like its political reporters just rolled off the cabbage truck. The Washington Post is, not surprisingly, far more sophisticated. But so, though not at the Post's level, are the WSJ, the LAT, and the politics-loving Boston Globe. So is USA Today.

If I were the boss of the Times, I'd try to remedy this egregious failing by hiring not one but two smart, sophisticated political columnists: Michael Barone of U.S. News and Ron Brownstein of the LAT. Michael is what passes for a conservative in Times Square--I'd say he's more accurately called a dynamist centrist--while Ron's a liberal. But what they have in common is more important to remedying the Times's current weaknesses than their differences in politcal views: They're both independent thinkers who don't simply repeat Upper West Side prejudices. They both understand that the political landscape is complex and interesting. They both write well. They both live in the political world of the present day, not some fabled past. And they both say what they think, not what they think someone thinks they should think.

Times staffers are willing to put up with the paper's ridiculous hours and extreme office politics for the same reason I put up with the paper's demand for all rights to my articles: Because the benefits outweigh the costs. As long as the staff felt proud of their work, and of working for the Times, they put up with abusive management. But when the Times became a laughing stock, the tradeoff was no longer worth it, and a revolt was inevitable.

As befits a business paper, Friday's WSJ report (subscription necessary) emphasizes how bad management stifled needed internal feedback and led to a degraded product:

In less than two years as executive editor -- the second-shortest tenure in the Times's 152-year history -- Mr. Raines did two things that in hindsight proved to be a volatile combination. He consolidated power and control within a coterie of confidants and pet reporters, intensifying a culture that discouraged dissent and occasionally gridlocked the paper's operations. At the same time, he pushed his 1,000-person news staff to move faster and more aggressively to get stories into the paper -- raising its "metabolism," he said. Mr. Boyd was a close lieutenant of Mr. Raines and was widely seen in the newsroom as the executive who enforced his boss's demands.

The newsroom's unhappiness wasn't a priority for Times management until the paper wrote in painstaking detail on May 11 about how Mr. Blair, a rising star, repeatedly made up facts and plagiarized. Two weeks later, Pulitzer Prize-winner Rick Bragg quit after being suspended for taking credit for a story with substantial reporting by his unpaid intern. Messrs. Blair and Bragg were vilified internally. But because they were seen as favored by Mr. Raines, their resignations crystallized complaints about his leadership and systemic problems at the paper -- including some that predate the Raines regime.

"There is an endemic cultural issue at the Times that is not a Howell creation, although it plays into his vulnerabilities as a manager, which is a top-down hierarchical structure," Linda Greenhouse, a veteran Times reporter who covers the Supreme Court, said in an interview last month. "And it's a culture where speaking truth to power has never been particularly welcomed."...

Mr. Raines's activism included picking and assigning stories for the front page very different from the Times's usual serious fare. Both editors and reporters alike were reluctant to report back that the story wasn't correct or interesting, staffers say. One staffer dubbed Mr. Raines's interest in pop culture as "charge of the lite brigade." Two reporters spent five days reporting Mr. Raines's contention that Britney Spears's career was over without feeling confident they could prove his hypothesis, according to a person involved with the process. The resulting story ran on the front page on Oct. 6 headlined, "Schoolyard Superstar Aims for a Second Act, as an Adult."

Mr. Raines's management style and that of Mr. Boyd have "created an environment where it is often seen as more important to get the story when and how you want it rather than to get it right," deputy investigations editor Julia Preston told Times staffers at last month's mass meeting.

One beneficiary of Mr. Raines's support was the paper's chief correspondent, Patrick Tyler. The Times hired him in 1990 at Mr. Raines's recommendation, and when Mr. Raines became editor he gave Mr. Tyler choice assignments. Recently, his stories have drawn some high-profile corrections. An Aug. 16, 2002, story, which Mr. Tyler wrote with Todd Purdum, said many senior Republicans, including Henry Kissinger, opposed a war in Iraq. Mr. Kissinger hadn't said that. Mr. Tyler says the story should have elaborated Dr. Kissinger's position further and that he agreed with the correction that appeared in the paper.

Maybe the next executive editor of the Times should take Andrew Sullivan a bit more seriously. Definitely the next executive editor of the Times should take Andrew Grove seriously. Read Only the Paranoid Survive. Pay attention to what Grove says about internal email and what the guys in the field knew that headquarters missed until it was almost too late. And realize that the news business is at an inflection point. If the Times is going to remain the Times, its management will have to change in ways that make the organization nimbler and the product better.

My two cents' worth--and I think it is the two cents' worth of everybody who worked for the Clinton Administration health care reform effort of 1993-1994--is that Hillary Rodham Clinton needs to be kept very far away from the White House for the rest of her life. Heading up health-care reform was the only major administrative job she has ever tried to do. And she was a complete flop at it. She had neither the grasp of policy substance, the managerial skills, nor the political smarts to do the job she was then given. And she wasn't smart enough to realize that she was in over her head and had to get out of the Health Care Czar role quickly.

So when senior members of the economic team said that key senators like Daniel Patrick Moynihan would have this-and-that objection, she told them they were disloyal. When junior members of the economic team told her that the Congressional Budget Office would say such-and-such, she told them (wrongly) that her conversations with CBO head Robert Reischauer had already fixed that. When long-time senior hill staffers told her that she was making a dreadful mistake by fighting with rather than reaching out to John Breaux and Jim Cooper, she told them that they did not understand the wave of popular political support the bill would generate. And when substantive objections were raised to the plan by analysts calculating the moral hazard and adverse selection pressures it would put on the nation's health-care system...

Hillary Rodham Clinton has already flopped as a senior administrative official in the executive branch--the equivalent of an Undersecretary. Perhaps she will make a good senator. But there is no reason to think that she would be anything but an abysmal president.

The post points up two aspects of the role of blogs and blog-loving online writers. First, exaggeration and overstatement pay. They get attention. Second, somebody will eventually come along and correct the exaggeration. That someone will probably not get quite as much attention, but at least the correction will exist.

Come to think of it, blogs have no monopoly on these two phenomena. They're pretty much the rule in most media. The influence of the generally nuanced Volokh Conspiracy suggests that blogs may, if anything, have the edge.

Yes, "media are," in isolation. But there are other grammatical patterns pushing it to become, like "opera," an English word construed as singular.

One is its frequent use as an adjective, e.g., "media bashing." English adjuectives don't inflect, so when a noun is used in an adjective slot, it is used in the singular. We say, "most journalists are college graduates" rather then "most journalists are colleges graduates" even though there are obviously multiple colleges involved. But there's an exception to the rule, for English nouns with irregular plurals, such as "woman." People write, "women entrepreneurs," not "woman entrepreneurs," although they are quite likely to opt instead for "female" because neither the singular nor the plural sounds quite right.

Over time, languages tend to flatten out irregularities. "Media" is very commonly used as an adjective. Furthermore, the singular is really quite impossible: "Bloggers indulge in a lot of medium-bashing" (too many other possibilities - psychics? a fondness for extremes?). So people are constantly hearing "media" in a slot they know (not consciously) is reserved for singular words, and after a while it starts to sound singular.

I don't believe I've yet seen "medias" (as an English plural, not the Latin word) but I could see it happening, first as a neologism in a context where many different kinds of media were being discussed (as with fish and fishes). "To win an election, you must master all the different medias" and eventually without notice, as with operas.

Oddly enough, all the educrats seem to have settled on "criterion-referenced" for their favorite kind of test, even though few of them seem to know in other contexts that "criteria" even has a singular.

I have indeed seen "medias" used as the plural. To read Linda's column on blogs, click here.

Those of you who really can't wait can now order a copy from Amazon. (I'd recommend waiting unless you think you'll forget. Amazon has a list price that's a dollar too high. It's supposed to be $24.95.)

If this had happened 10 years ago, when the Internet didn't exist, Raines would still be running the place. The Times staff would be just as unhappy, but they'd be unable to instantaneously organize and vent their displeasure on Romenesko and elsewhere. It was this suddenly-transparent internal opposition, more than the constant pummeling from bloggers, that brought Raines down.

On Monday evening, May 12, Col. Gregg Martin, commander of the 130th Engineer Brigade, had received an assignment. Lt. Gen. William S. Wallace, commander of V Corps, in charge of Army operations in Iraq, wanted to make an immediate difference in the lives of the people in Baghdad's poorest neighborhoods. Long neglected or actively repressed by Saddam's regime, they now were despairing because their trash was gathering uncollected in the streets, their police force had vanished, or was powerless to protect them from crime, drains were backing up, pure water was impossible to find and many other things were just going wrong while the governing occupation authorities promised much, but delivered little improvement. Wallace's assignment was for Martin, as the corp's engineer, to apply the Army's engineering capabilities to help solve some of the people's problems.

"I want this to be a neighborhood strike force," Wallace said. To counter the impression that the authorities favored talking over doing, "we need to get Americans working with the Iraqi people. This an offensive action. We have the maneuverability to go anywhere we want to go in Baghdad. We want to exploit that." He wanted the project to start Thursday, May 15.

A meeting was quickly scheduled for Tuesday to plan the first task-force action. Wednesday was devoted to further refinement and rehearsal of the plan with V Corps staff members.

"Everyone wanted to say, "we're moving too fast; we need more reconnaissance and planning," says Martin. He answered that the operation would suffer paralysis by analysis, and offered what he calls the example of Legos.

"If you give a set of Lego blocks to a group of engineers and another to a group of kids, the engineers will draw up plans and designs and spend a lot of time preparing to do the job. The kids will just jump in and start building things. We need to be like those kids," he said. Armed with that logic and reinforced by the corps commanding general's order for quick action, Martin carried the day.

I wonder if the anti-biotech conservatives--by wallowing in vague, moralistic language about human nature and society in order to guilt-trip us all into agreeing with their policy recommendations--aren't risking becoming the victims of a hoax like the one that physicist Alan Sokal pulled on leftists in 1996, when he wrote a nonsensical article and got it published in Social Text by larding it with jargon from fashionable literary criticism? A hoax conservative anti-biotech argument would require references to the ancient Greeks and the Pope instead of Lacan and Derrida, but it shouldn't be hard to whip up, perhaps with a title like "Retaining the Fundamental: Cystic Fibrosis as an Essential Human Travail."

What is particularly pernicious is that the feds would have been very hard put to convict [Martha] Stewart of criminal securities fraud. Dumping your stock on another unsuspecting member of the public (remember, there was a buyer, even if he or she is anonymous) based on a tip may be a sleazy think to do, but that does not make it a crime. To be a crime the "tipper" (securities law slang for the person passing on the inside information) must have received the information under a fiduciary duty not to disclose it, must have passed it along in knowing violation of that fiduciary duty and the "tippee" must have known that the "tipper" was acting in violation of a fiduciary duty. This sort of knowledge and intent is very, very hard to prove, particularly in a case where the only written evidence (an e-mail) said something to the effect that "your broker thinks the stock is trending down and you should sell." Much easier to nail her for lying. Easier to nail you and me too.

The worst case of this in public memory was Henry Cisneros. In his background investigation he disclosed the whole sordid tale: the extramarital fling, the dumping of his wife and family, his moving in with his mistress, their breakup, the humiliating return to his long-suffering wife, the pay-off to the mistress. How humiliating it must have been to tell this story to two suits from the FBI. For some reason he just couldn't bear to tell them just how much he had paid his mistress. Perhaps that was just too embarrassing. Perhaps he was afraid to let his wife know how much of their family savings he had given to a woman she must have regarded as a home-wrecker and hated like poison. In any event, he lied. And they crucified the poor bastard for it.

Not fraud, lying. That rang a bell. At the last advisory board meeting of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), I had a conversation with FIRE co-founder Harvey Silverglate about the expansive tools federal prosecutors can use to snare just about anyone. (Harvey is both a principled civil libertarian and a criminal defense attorney.) Number one on the list is the infinitely pliable 18 USC sec. 1001, which makes it a crime to lie to a federal agent.

Last night, I emailed Harvey to see if he had written anything about the statute that I might link to. His articles on the subject aren't online, but he sent the following:

I consider this statute to be one of the most pernicious of all. Here's why. The crime is committed by making a material false statement to any federal official, not under oath. Mind you, the federal official can lie his head off to the citizen and it's no problem. This turns liberty on its head. Some "government of the people" where "the people are sovereign."

Worse, federal officials rarely get the statement in writing or on tape. So it's the word of two FBI agents who conducted the interview and then wrote-up their version of the interview in an FBI 302 form report. If the agents' memory conflicts with those of the interviwee, guess who wins?

Worse yet: Here's how the feds abuse this statute. They interview a witness; they write up the Form 302 report claiming that the witness said stuff helpful to the Feds' investigation or prosecution of the chosen target; the witness is then told he/she has to testify against the target; the witness says that what the 302 report says is not an accurate summary of what the witness actually told the agents (it's not on tape, of course); the feds tell the witness that unless he/she testifies consistent with the 302, the witness will be charged with a 1001 "false statement" violation (i.e., either the earlier version supposedly told to the feds was true, or the new version is true, but both cannot be true, so one is false -- hence the witness must now testify consistent with what the 302 report says he earlier told the interviewers).

When the feds cannot prove a substantive crime, they proceed to entrap the defendant, or potential but unhelpful witnesses, with this pernicious statute and these pernicious techniques.

Add up the number of government officials to whom we may not lie! Awful.

Update: Thanks to reader Joey Gibson for directing me to The Smoking Gun's posting of the indictment, which does indeed include charges under 18 USC sec. 1001.

That's right, folks, no one has heard of Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling. Certainly not the Nightline audience.

Honestly, Pam Anderson would be a more intelligent interview.

I was staring powerlessly into the black hole of media futility. But then I remembered something: My local newspaper, the very one I'd just thrown aside (the very one, as it happens, in which Shales had announced the Apocalypse), used to own a local TV station here in Washington when there were hardly any TV stations to own. In fact, it used to own the very radio station that was still droning away in the background. Indeed, it used to own one of the two-and-a-half newsweekly magazines when newsweeklies mattered. It owned all these things at the same time. I realized that, for decades, this media monster had been the gatekeeper to my brain. For me, it was too late! If media consolidation is an informational threat, then I was already its victim. Could I trust anything I thought?...[a big cut here--vp]

The usual portrait of the pre-1975 media scene is that those were the happy days before cable speeded up the news cycle and before the Internet created Drudge. Everybody listened to Uncle Cronkite at dinner, and a handful of tweedy critics could make or break a book or movie. Thoughtful editors had the luxury of carefully considering whether to run a story, and careful reporters understood that they had to pile up their sources. Politicians were articulate, network TV took journalism seriously (say, "Edward R. Murrow"), and nobody had ever thought of the concept of "infotainment." Etc.

This is a pretty familiar refrain. The short version is that American journalism's best days were spent as the midcentury gatekeeper, and that the advent of new media has turned what was once a comfortable media hierarchy into a fast-lane mess. You can't very well evoke the period as one of market dominance without undermining both the mythology and its usefulness as a truncheon against the new media. Your best option is to ignore the historical fact that the supposed golden age coincided with an era of market dominance.

UPDATE: Virginia Postrel doesn't think this is a positive account. I disagree. The story we're hearing is that Iraqis hate us, and crazy Shiite clerics are in charge. This says Iraqis don't hate us, and crazy Shiite clerics are having to threaten people to get any traction. That seems better than the conventional wisdom to me.

Virginia seems a bit miffed about Tim Blair's New York Times jokes, too. But if the Times had more writers like Virginia, people wouldn't be joking.

First of all, the Times is full of smart, conscientious, hard-working people who don't deserve to be bashed every day because sundry bloggers don't like their bosses. Second, this incessant sniping is coming from people who don't do reporting and rely every day on the reporting of the people they're trashing. Third, even the Times's annoying political bias is as much a function of its readers as it is of its editors, possibly more so. In my experience, the editors are far more open-minded and thoughtful than the readers who write them letters. Finally, the Times would be a disaster if it were full of writers like me, because I despise trying to get sources to tell me things they don't want me (or the public) to know, and I'm not especially good at it. I love learning new stuff, but I consider even easy reporting, like the stuff I do for D Magazine, to be a time-consuming pain--too much waiting by the phone, too many dead ends. That's why I got out of the newspaper business at an early age. The blogosphere is full of commentators, because commentary is easy and quick, and media commentary is the easiest and quickest of all.

In an email, Glenn referred me to his reply to Jeff Jarvis's sophisticated and freedom-loving post on big-media bashers. I'm with Jeff on this one, except I always use a plural verb with "media." It's not just a copy-editing tic. It's a point. The media are not one thing but many.

The greatest fear of the man on the street is that the Americans will tire and leave. "We pray that they stay and stay forever" is the feeling of the vast majority, but they look both ways before they say it.

Why? The answer is quite simple. The following is the translation of a letter being given out throughout Iraq in various forms.

"'In the name of God the most merciful and compassionate'

"Do not adorn yourselves as illiterate women before Islam (From the Koran)

to this noble family,

We hope that the family will stand with brothers of Islam and follow the basic Islamic rules of wearing the veil and possessing honorable teachings of Islam that the Muslims have continued to follow from old times.

We are the Iraqi people, the Muslim people and do not accept any mistakes.

If not, and this message will be final, we will take the following actions:

1. Doing what one cannot endure (believed to be rape)

2. Killing

3. Kidnapping

4. Burning the house with its dwellers in it or exploding it.

This message is directed to the women of this family.

Signed."

This message from a Shiite Islamic organization says it all and explains in a nutshell why, though finally liberated, the Iraqi people still live in fear.

"Despite lapses of taste (Extreme Makeovers) and common sense (skyrocketing rates of teenage plastic surgery), it's good that the public is waking up to the ways caring about design can improve our lives. Cheers to Ms. Postrel for explaining how separating style from substance is an unnatural cleavage."

Marie Dolores Gerardo and Angelo Dominick Iannaccone were married yesterday by Msgr. Joseph J. Granato at St. Lucy's Roman Catholic Church in Newark.

Mrs. Gerardo-Iannaccone, 60, retired from the First Avenue School in Newark, where she taught second grade. She graduated from Seton Hall University. Her parents, the late Josephine and Nicholas Gerardo, lived in Newark.

Mr. Iannaccone, 72, retired as a supervisor in charge of production and shipping at the Coastal Steel Company, a former manufacturer of steel wire for cages, shopping carts and other products, in Woodbridge, N.J. His parents, the late Elvira and Joseph Iannaccone, also lived in Newark.

This is a first marriage for the bride and bridegroom, who met in Newark over 50 years ago through members of their families.

The anti-globalisation movement, a regular if uninvited guest at world economic conferences, is wondering which way to go after its disappointing show at the Group of Eight summit in Evian....

"It's problematic, disappointing, because we've done other counter-summits, in Genoa for example, where there were a lot more people," said Christal, a protester who said she was a teacher from the French city of Grenoble."

We thought (people) would turn out in huge numbers to protest this globalisation, but in fact you get the impression there are divisions everywhere," she said."

There were maybe fewer people than in Genoa...partly because the strikes against pension reforms in France limited the presence of the trade unions," said Helene Ballande of Friends of the Earth, who was in Annemasse, south of Geneva at another protest camp.

Posted by Virginia at 02:15 PM