Why professional journalism sucks: Dan "Fake Steve" Lyons quits blogging in Newsweek censorship fracas.

Very sad story about David Levine, the genius New York Review of Books caricaturist. Levine did so many incredible drawings for so long that I took him 100% for granted, and when another illustrator's work started showing up in the NYRB last year it made me weirdly queasy. The story's not complicated or surprising: Levine is 81, and his eyesight's going. He spent his whole life as a freelancer and doesn't have a pension. Go to his gallery on the NYRB site and type in the name of a writer or a politician from the last 50 years. Try the really famous ones -- try Joyce. (There's eight.) Check out Philip Roth: how does he feel to see himself captured like that, eleven times, from 1969 to 2000? Who will replace David Levine?

Wow. Really, Wall Street Journal? Really? (This and just about all other content ever: via DF.)

What is the single most annoying way to return from a medium-length blog hiatus? You might imagine that it's the classic apology-for-the-lack-of-posts post -- and indeed, that was the conventional wisdom until today, when I happened upon a brand new and measurably more annoying way: the rare I-keep-stumbling-into-money post.

On Saturday I went to the track for the first time. (On the train I said, 'We are, quite literally, off to the races!' which is something you would only do if you had never been to the races before.) I put $20 on the special MetroCard-of-gambling thing they have, made some small bets, lost some, won a couple, watched my stake dwindle. And then I hit the exacta in the ninth (one of the best parts of going to the races was saying things like 'Who do you like in the ninth?') and walked away with $75.

Then today I took a bunch of old clothes to the hipster used-clothing store, expecting them to laugh at me, and instead they gave me $81.

And then the mail arrives and there's a tax-rebate check, plus a check from a class-action settlement. Time to fire up the blog again!
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There's going to be more blogging in the next little while. It might be a little different from the RoBros blogging you're used to: I'm not going to link much, because I'm trying to regain some of my short-term-memory/power-of-concentration/general-mental-mojo by not spending as much time on the internet. Maybe it'll be a return to the classic here's-what-I-think-about-Apple/Billy Joel/superhero comics era. Maybe you'll be able to watch my thinking skills return, in real time! Dunno.

In a way my return to the blogodrome is overdetermined: there is, after all, a contretemps going on that involves Barack Obama, The New Yorker, and cartooning. Much of the commentary on Barry Blitt's cover has been along the lines of this, from Time's Michael Scherer. Scherer quotes 270 words from William Rehnquist to make the point that "Despite their sometimes caustic nature ... graphic depictions and satirical cartoons have played a prominent role in public and political debate."

Rehnquist was asserting that cartoons count as protected speech under the First Amendment. Scherer, on the other hand, is arguing with a straw man. Jack Shafer does something similar: "Has the public's taste for barbed drawings waned since the Paul Conrad, Herblock, Pat Oliphant, and Bill Mauldin heydays, or have the voices of the would-be bowdlerizers gotten stronger? Shall we don blinders and erect barriers so nobody is offended or misled? Only weak thinkers fear strong images."

The argument against Blitt's drawing is not that cartooning is worthless, or that there's no place for satirical illustration. The argument is that this specific cartoon is a failure of imagination, and that depicting a calumny is not the same thing as satirizing that calumny. Scherer's attempt to defend cartooning is in fact weirdly patronizing to cartoonists everywhere: if cartoons constitute a form of political expression, if they have any meaning at all, then they can legitimately inspire disdain. The First Amendment protects the right of the speaker to speak, but it also protects the right of the listener to boo.

I'll bet you Blitt's illustration appears, unmodified, on merchandise for sale at the Republican convention.

Name a newspaper columnist at any paper -- daily, weekly, mainstream, alternative -- as good as Dan Savage at his best. Just one.

The A.P. reports on Ty Alper's lethal-injection study: "Nearly all lethal injection executions have occurred in states where veterinarians are not allowed to use the same method to euthanize animals."

Call for a new literary category

Jack Shafer's debunking of a Malcolm Gladwell riff demonstrates only that Gladwell is a talented bullshit artist and Shafer is a scold, both of which we already knew. (An obvious point Shafer misses: when a guy tells a funny story about sneaking humorous fabrications into a newspaper, doesn't the story itself hint that the guy is not to be trusted?)

Gladwell has apparently told the "new and troubling questions" story at dinner parties for ten years. My guess is that it has gotten funnier, and less strictly veridical, over that time. Anyone who heard him tell it at a dinner party would identify it immediately as a hybrid of fact and fiction, just like any other successful dinner-party anecdote. And then it gets played on This American Life, and Shafer spends 3,000 words pointing out that it doesn't stand up to fact-checking.

Why don't we just have a category called "anecdote," to accommodate stories rooted in autobiography but containing exaggerations and emendations for comic or dramatic effect? The ones in magazines like the New Yorker would typically be humorous, but Reader's Digest could use the rubric for those moralistic little fables that illustrate how Jesus is always there when you're not expecting him. Let's stipulate that an anecdote must be relatively short (when it reaches book length, it's a novel), and that it's bad form to use anecdotal license for self-glamorization, just as it would be at a dinner party (Margaret Jones, throw your hands in the air). And then let's stick the word "anecdote" at the top of the page where it used to say "personal history," and Rodney Rothman can write for the New Yorker again, and David Sedaris won't get special treatment, and Shafer can stop stating the obvious.

This post's title notwithstanding, the anecdote -- the tale told around a fire, presented as true but not entirely verifiable -- has a much longer history than the clearly labelled fiction or the thoroughly researched news story. (Homer: [stands up, clears throat] "This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles....") It's no wonder that it keeps returning even when we don't make room for it.

Is it just me, or is it a little weird for the New Yorker to run a review of an NYU bar/restaurant that essentially says it's a crappy college bar/restaurant?

Times staffers (up to and including Bill Keller) answer readers' questions about the McCain story.

I would not have imagined that I could be surprised and disappointed at the critical standards prevailing at Maxim, but somehow I am.

Remember the (very minor) point I made about Nancy Franklin last night? Well, that very same day, Joshua Clover made essentially the exact same point about Franklin's review of Gossip Girl:

Franklin does seem intimately familiar with the zip code in which the show purports to reside.... At the same time, she seems surpassingly oblivious to the culture-consuming world beyond 10028, and what's happening out there. She mentions the show's "primary purpose of marketing pop songs, which are heard throughout." Actually, we're pretty sure that an untested show on the CW isn't marketing "What Goes Around" by a non-New Yorker named Justin Timberlake, and the like. Mr. Timberlake, who comes from a land down under 72nd Street (it's called "Tennessee") may in fact, along with his staff and servants and holding company, be receiving a certain fee for his participation. We are just guessing.

This pattern (two examples is so a pattern) suggests that, to Franklin, whatever's on TV is by definition the white-hot center of the media universe, and everything else (some website, some pop song) is desperate to bask in its reflected glory.

And in case you care way, way more than you probably do: my original point was challenged (by Jossip Jirl herself) in the comments.

New Yorker TV critic Nancy Franklin is often pretty good (she totally gets Friday Night Lights, for instance), but her column this week reveals an amusing old-person misconception. Near the end of the piece, Franklin writes that "the CNN/YouTube debates were a great promotional device for YouTube."

According to Internet World Stats there are 1.25 billion people using the Internet. According to Alexa, 17.25 percent of them look at YouTube sometimes. That means there's a total of 216 million people watching YouTube. Meanwhile, the Republican debate was watched by 4.4 million people. If anything, the debates were a great promotional device for the American democratic process; YouTube certainly doesn't need the help.

Radar has a good summary of the recent Joe Klein FISA bill controversy, for those who don't have time to read 50,000 words by Glenn Greenwald.

This probably shouldn't be as surprising as it is: A Slate intern named David Sessions is an evangelical Christian. He's written a piece criticizing David Kirkpatrick's Times Magazine cover story on the crackup of the Christian right. The "Christian left," according to Sessions, is an overhyped fringe movement that "gets more attention in the press than it does in the mainstream evangelical community," and the fact that younger Christians have other concerns beyond abortion and homosexuality doesn't mean they're poised to abandon the Republican Party. Sessions's piece is kind of depressing, obviously, but I suspect it's closer to reality than Kirkpatrick's rosy take.

It's strange how strange it seems that Slate has an intern who's an evangelical Christian.

Politico-linguistic intervention of the day: Listening to Terry Gross's meaty interview with WaPo's Thomas Ricks last week (web, iTunes), it struck me that serious, knowledgeable people have begun using the term ethnic cleansing to refer to what's going on in Iraqi cities and neighborhoods. Besides Ricks, the author of one of the most important books on the war so far, and Gross, who's usually pretty careful with her words, it's been all over the NYT in recent weeks, appearing in news stories and opinion pieces alike. David Brooks writes,

Second, the worst of the ethnic cleansing may be over. For years, Shiites and Sunnis have been purging each other from towns and neighborhoods.

But the problem, for once, is not Brooks's limited intelligence. Paul Krugman has this:

Oh, and by the way: Baghdad is undergoing ethnic cleansing, with Shiite militias driving Sunnis out of much of the city.

An early example is this Time piece headlined "Ethnic Cleansing in a Baghdad Neighborhood?"

The term ethnic cleansing originated, during the Balkan conflict, as a euphemism for genocide, often used by the English-speaking media with deliberate irony. It's a little strange to watch it turn into a legitimate, unironic term for mass displacement, especially since the word cleansing carries an ineradicable whiff of Nazi ideology.

But if we're going to use the term, can we at least use it accurately? Sunni and Shi'a are not ethnicities, they're religious denominations. For the most part, the people involved in homogenizing their neighborhoods, both Sunni and Shiite, are Arabs (although some are Turkmen, on both sides). The process is more properly called sectarian cleansing, or if you want to get really technical denominational cleansing, or if you want to lose the Nazi stuff sectarian homogenization. The best example of ethnic cleansing during the Iraq War is probably the expulsion of Arabs from Kirkuk, which seems to have calmed down a bit.

American ignorance about Iraq has done enough damage over the past five years; we shouldn't allow sloppy word choices to further cloud our understanding.

Slate joins the struggle to impose order on NYMag's Approval Matrix.

Weird: Joni Mitchell has a poem in the New Yorker. It's, um, not her best work:

We have poisoned everything
And oblivious to it all
The cell-phone zombies babble
Through the shopping malls

So yeah, pretty cool about Zack's new job.

The Observer on James Wood's move to the New Yorker. Interesting fact: Wood has had a standing offer to work for David Remnick for many years.

My #1 intellectual hero James Wood is leaving the New Republic for the New Yorker. I have wondered when this was going to happen. Political correspondent Ryan Lizza made the same move a month ago, which is maybe what's behind this comment from Leon Wieseltier: "The New Republic plays many significant roles in American culture, and one of them is to find and to develop writers with whom the New Yorker can eventually staff itself.” Meow!