Talented comics people seem to be dying off faster than sympathetic corner boys on The Wire. Now comes word that Rocketeer creator Dave Stevens has died of leukemia, aged 52. Stevens was a craftsman of a kind they don't make much anymore: in love with his own idealized physical world and beautifully drawn line. As a teenage boy I had this poster up on my wall, for obvious reasons.

Quick hit of nostalgia: David Plotz lists his thirteen favorite scenes from The Wire. My all-time fave is number 11, but I'm not going to quote it here because it's a spoiler for season three. In the next post, Jeffery Goldberg adds "Clay Davis' magnificent turn on the witness stand earlier this season," which was indeed awesome.

Stuff White People Like weighs in:

If you need to impress a white person, tell them you are from Baltimore. They will immediately ask you about The Wire and how accurate it is. You should confirm that it is “like a documentary of the streets,” the white person will then slowly shake their head and say “man” or “wow.”

Entertainment Weekly has its own list of best moments. Slate links to recent radio interviews with cast members. And NYMag's Vulture blog has a shot-by-shot recap of the final montage.

Hendrik Hertzberg on how Obama should have responded to the Samantha Power "monstergate" flap:

Before people judge her I suggest they take a look at her book ‘A Problem from Hell’: America and the Age of Genocide. It deserved the prizes it won—the Pulitzer, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Arthur Ross Prize for the best book in U.S. foreign policy. You can’t read her firsthand reports on the horrors in Darfur without realizing that this is a woman of great moral and physical courage. She may be quick to anger, but here’s a news flash: nobody’s perfect. Samantha’s skills and expertise are a potentially valuable resource not just for this campaign but for our country. I’m not about to cast her into the outer darkness because of a single naïve and stupid instance of bad judgment.

Long, satisfying Terri Gross interview with The Wire's David Simon (web, iTunes). Spoilers for season five and previous seasons, but not for tonight's final episode.

Yglesias:

Samantha Power is a Pulitzer Prize winning author, and a brilliant and original thinker and advocate for the intelligent deployment of American power in order to build a more just and humane world. But she's supporting Barack Obama, she made a gaffe, she promptly and rightly apologized, and then she resigned. And now this afternoon, the Clinton campaign has continued to push out Power-bashing material in order to prove, I guess, that there's nothing and nobody they won't try to destroy if they think that will provide them with some slender additional shot at getting themselves and their clique back in power.

I'm sure I'm not the first to make this point, but: Both of the campaign advisors who have caused trouble for Obama lately, Austan Goolsbee and Samantha Power, are young academics rather than seasoned political pros. I think it's great that Obama is bringing in new thinking on economics and foreign policy, and Goolsbee and Power are two of the smartest people alive. But can you imagine Robert Rubin or Madeleine Albright getting into one of these distracting messes?

Fun fact I learned from Goolsbee's Wikipedia page: he and Slate's Dahlia Lithwick were debate partners at Yale, and were national runners-up in 1990.

Parodies of David Foster Wallace are usually unsuccessful. Here is an exception. Scroll down to the bottom of the first page. [via Gawker]

James Fallows, who I think of as a pretty cool customer, is clearly furious at Hillary Clinton.

Today's best point about the fact that this primary campaign is going to go on forever comes from Matthew Yglesias:

Yesterday Josh Marshall had a complaint: "Let's note that Sen. McCain has decided to hang tough with his embrace of anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic Pastor John Hagee. And the major papers and cable news outlets have decided to give him a pass."

I've been Hagee-bashing since before it was cool, so this pisses me off, too. But realistically it's not the press and the cable networks that gave McCain a pass, it was Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. They gave him a pass because, of course, they were arguing with each other. For a little while during the Wisconsin-Texas interregnum, Obama did pivot in the direction of McCain and it gave Clinton the opportunity to smack him over the head with a frying pan. I assume neither campaign is going to make that mistake again until this thing is actually wrapped up. But that means that there'll be nobody effectively pressing the media with anti-McCain talking points. It also means that Clinton will continue re-enforcing whatever good lines of attack McCain comes up with against Obama, and if McCain starts delivering good anti-Clinton lines, Obama will probably start re-enforcing those, too.

In fact, of course, the primary campaign is not endless; it just feels that way.

Wikipedia edit of the day: Nicholson Baker's mom is a wikipedian as well.

Gary Gygax, the cocreator of Dungeons and Dragons, is dead. The obituaries seem to be identifying the game genre he invented as "a bridge between the noninteractive world of books and films and the exploding interactive video game industry," as the NYT put it, and that may be right from a historical perspective, but I don't think it captures the man's achievement.

For non-initiates it's hard to see past the sword-and-sorcery surface, but at its core D&D and the other role-playing games that followed are vehicles for imaginative play. Kids make up stories together all the time. Thanks to Gygax, my friends and I did it into our teens. I miss it.

TNR's Noam Scheiber, citing former Texas congressman Martin Frost, makes two points that suggest Texas is looking better for Obama than polls suggest. The first is this:

1.) Don't overlook early voting, which has been significant here. (More than one million people voted early in Texas, versus only 800,000 who voted here overall in 2004.) Unlike the February 5 states, the demographics of early voting seem to favor Obama. That means a chunk of his now-vanished lead in the polls has been locked in.

The same argument was made about Clinton before some of the earlier primaries, and it's based on a misunderstanding of how polls work. Pollsters take account of early voting by asking, "Who are you planning to vote for on Tuesday or, if you've already voted, who did you vote for?" So early voting doesn't change the math, and the later polls are more reliable predictors than earlier ones.

Scheiber's second point is a bit more cheering.

Nicholson Baker on "The Charms of Wikipedia."

Is Philip Roth having cybersex? Surely that's the implication of these remarks, from an interview with Der Spiegel:

SPIEGEL: You have email and don't use it?
Roth: I use it with one person, one person only, because I don't... I don't want to be bothered.
SPIEGEL: May we ask who the one person is?
Roth: One person. I have to have some fun.

William F. Buckley Jr., 1925-2008

More strange new respect for Bill Buckley, this time from James Kirchick at the Plank. Kirchick cites Buckley's famous riposte to Gore Vidal -- "Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered” -- in order, rather oddly, to praise Buckley for refraining from personal insults except in that one uncharacteristic instance.

I leave it to the reader to measure the distance between "you queer ... I'll sock you in your goddam face" and the remark I quoted yesterday: "I wonder how these self-conscious boulevardiers of protest would have fared if a platoon of American soldiers who have seen gore in South Vietnam had parachuted down into their mincing ranks?"

I'm sure Buckley was nice to black people too, even as he wrote things like this, in 1957:

The central question that emerges ... is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.

Buckley later said he regretted opposing civil rights legislation, and supported the establishment of a national holiday on the birthday of Martin Luther King. He changed his mind, in other words, after the battle had been fought, with him on the wrong side, just in time to be in the right on a matter of pure symbolism. He was by all accounts a charming and generous man, and he propagated a worldview that consisted largely of sympathy for the overdog. He was certainly more amusing and less odious than Sean Hannity or Dick Cheney, but that's a judgment that leaves a lot of room for odium. Now he's dead, and his decency and fairness are gone with him. What survives is the movement he built, which reflects not his personal manner but the actions he took and the positions he chose, and which stands athwart America, shouting Fuck you, you queers and blacks and poors! in language that Buckley used only in occasional slips but that expresses his meaning more than adequately.

Slate's Taylor Clark on the disappearance of Neutral Milk Hotel's Jeff Mangum.

Various liberals (Hendrik Hertzberg, Joe Klein, James K. Galbraith) have nice things to say about the late William F. Buckley, Jr. Buckley was evidently generous, eloquent, cultivated, intellectually honest, and ecumenical in his friendships. In that spirit, let's take a moment to recall Buckley's comments on antiwar demonstrators in 1965: "I wonder how these self-conscious boulevardiers of protest would have fared if a platoon of American soldiers who have seen gore in South Vietnam had parachuted down into their mincing ranks?"

Hertzberg writes that "he could not have been happy with the vulgarity of the movement he did so much to spawn." Maybe so. Perhaps Buckley disliked hearing Ann Coulter call John Edwards a faggot. But one suspects he opposed the syntax more than the sentiment.

Massive balls award: So this guy writes and draws a webcomic called A Rusty Life for six years, and no one really reads it, because it's not very good. So he posts on Reddit, with the heading "Dear Reddit: What is it about my webcomic that no one likes!? I've been drawing it religiously for 6 years and I can't manage more then 100 hits." And then everyone on Reddit tells him what sucks about his strip. I doubt that this will enable him to make the strip any better, but you've got to admire the effort.

Obvs I'm in a full-on swoon over Obama, and I'm sorry to inflict that on you, the loyal readers of RoBros. But take a look at this speech he gave to a bunch of Cleveland Jews on Saturday, and the Q&A that followed. Is it not a model of direct, reasonable, adult discourse? Is this not the sound of a man who thinks of his listeners as thoughtful, mature humans, rather than as some constituency to be assuaged? Is it not incredibly weird to hear this kind of talk coming from someone who is at this moment the front-running candidate for president of the United States?

Sweet pedagogical technique of the day: lie.