I rely on Slate for the no-nonsense insight into every popular news story. The online-only magazine always finds the question the average newsreader is asking and gives an authoritative answer. Accustomed to trusting that authority, I felt kind of silly reading a Slate commentary on the Imus scandal when writer Stephen Metcalf admitted, “I usually caught him at about 7:40, for the 20 minutes when he had a Beltway muckety on to flog a book, or just as often, to flog his own muckety self.” Twenty minutes of a four-and-a-half-hour show and he’s the expert? All right, whatever, I guess this is a commentary, not a show review. It’s be silly to have a reviewer who wasn’t familiar with all the material, right?
Like, you know, the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie reviewer who “caught the show” (from which the movie spun off) “a few times.” Yeah, Dana Stevens says she’s paying homage to the show by giving a lazy review. That’s great. But I assume the ATHF movie is for fans of the show, and as one of those fans, could I please have a review by someone who likes that style of humor? This review tells me nothing — plenty of people could be bored by ATHF. It’s a screwed up style of comedy. Come on, Slate, be a little less lazy than the Aqua Teens.
1. Emily Gould is no Jessica Coen. The former Gawker editor could jab out from a tight spot. She’s like a cornered puma. (Fellow alums Choire Sicha and Elizabeth Spiers? Other, similar pumas.) But when Kimmel criticizes the user-submitted “Gawker Stalker” celebrity-sighting feature, Gould acts like a flustered, wide-eyed audience member from The View. She gets a bit of the Gawker party line out (”You get an unfiltered — the way that people see celebrities in real time”), but then she lets everyone walk over her. (Oh no! Someone called Kevin Costner fat!) When Jimmy “least-deserving husband of Sarah Silverman ever” Kimmel says “I think you need to think about your life,” strike back! Dammit Gould, get some balls!
2. Why hasn’t anyone else cloned Gawker Stalker? It’s a cash cow; it doubled Gawker’s traffic in its first month!
I’ll skip all the “Oh my god, this takes me back to freshman year communications class” commentary and just assure everyone that after watching this, ABC News must be so proud of having Amanda on board.
After reading blogger Alex Blagg’s “Vote for Sanjay” manifesto (thesis: We can expose the inanity of American idol by making this charming but untalented performer win), a commenter remarked, “Alex Blagg is the new Chuck Klosterman.” You know what, the Best Week Ever blogger is better than Klosterman, the tired pop-culture reviewer who wrote Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs. Compare Blagg’s stirring plan for televisual deconstruction with Klosterman’s sloppily written thoughts about the “amnesia pill” in the latest Esquire. Where the latter relies on the momentum of his name and irrelevant cultural references to push out unresearched swill, the former puts out one theory at a time derived from a single relevant piece of Americana. Klosterman is dead, long live Blagg!
RSS godfather Dave Winer announced that his blog Scripting News, the longest-running known blog on the web, turned 10 on Sunday. That’s despite Winer’s habit of promising to quit (the last fake deadline was 31 December 2006). Why has he kept it up so long? Well, when your blog is just a string of one-liners written on the fly, it’s a harder habit to break than to keep up.
Dave’s relations with bloggers hasn’t been the cuddliest — he exchanges abuse with bloggers Mark Pilgrim and Shelley Powers, and he threatened to withdraw his “endorsement” of Valleywag after I made something that’s not even quite a gay joke — but his drama mostly arises when he takes things too seriously. It’s not that Winer is a dick; it’s more that his brain can’t process irony.
So hard feelings aside, even I must applaud the Shaker-like simplicity of Winer’s blog. Every discrete thought is linkable, the text is readable, the page loads in a jiffy. Winer reliably chimes in about every major political event, and he unabashedly expresses his feelings in the open. To do that for a year behind a pseudonym would be simple. To keep it up for ten years is an admirable achievement. I’d send him cookies if I didn’t know he’d throw them out.
After reading blogger 
