pav dot quest

Whether you read it online or hold the physical object in your hands, this issue of Newsweek is best viewed as an archaeological artifact that is certain to embarrass us in the eyes of future generations. Its existence surely says more about our time than the editors at the magazine meant to say—for the cover…

The loss is there, an old wound never fully healed. My disappointment was certainly personal, made deeper by the awareness that many thousands of young Americans, and far more Vietnamese and other Asian citizens, were going to and did lose their lives with the Nixon administration’s continuation of the war. And I was upset that…

Is such a mode sustainable, over the long haul, and not just for one project, by people other than the handful of Special Cases like Doctorow and Coulton and Zoë Keating? That’s what we’re all waiting to find out. We need more data points to plot this graph, to see what shape the line makes…

Craig Mod, in an essay reflecting on how we come to know ourselves through our networked collected data, discovers a new kind of tragedy as he uses a Fitbit to track his steps and stair-climbs through Paris: Staring out, I traced my walk from so far above. I thought of the staccato data at the…

Here’s some breaking news: the kind of people who choose to watch a vice-presidential debate instead of baseball or football or a cooking show are not sensitive souls who curl up into a ball at the first sign of disagreement between politicians. People who choose to watch political conflict can deal with it. Those who…

The e-ink Kindles are designed to do one thing really well: display long-form text. Page-turning is at the heart of the Kindle reading experience. An active Kindle reader is going to go to the next page hundreds — in some cases, I’m sure, even thousands — of times every week. There should not just be…

I am sorry that the president finds debating before the public to be annoying. And I am very sorry that more Americans don’t delve into the footnotes of position papers. And I am very sorry that Mitt Romney was mean to the moderator, and lied to the viewers. And I am especially sorry that Barack…

Thousands of Years of Religious Slaughter in One Cartoon You know what’s hilarious? The idea that for millennia, various religious and ethnic factions have slaughtered each other over the right to claim a small strip of arid land in the Middle East because they think God wants them to have it. I mean, come on,…

The problem with “I’m entitled to my opinion” is that, all too often, it’s used to shelter beliefs that should have been abandoned. It becomes shorthand for “I can say or think whatever I like” – and by extension, continuing to argue is somehow disrespectful. And this attitude feeds, I suggest, into the false equivalence…

One final debate note: I’m not a fan of “both sides do it” journalism, but to be fair, while there’s no equivalent of economic birtherism on the left, there is a kind of ”debate trutherism,” where fervent Obama supporters, especially on Twitter, explain that the president was once again playing 18th-dimensional chess and intentionally blowing…

The president seemed unable to concentrate or focus throughout the debate, mouthing occasional numbers and assorted caveats to points he could never really complete. When it came to the issues, he offhandedly conceded much of the Republican worldview, something he is now apt to do at anytime, without warning. What caused the financial crisis? Well,…

On The Page this morning, Mark Halperin (disclosure: he was my boss when I was an intern at ABC News, and I’ve defended him on this site) asks some basic and important “Questions After Denver” following Mitt Romney’s drubbing of President Obama in the debate last night. For shits and giggles (well, more shit, less…

David Frum on the first debate: Obama, by contrast, rarely looked at Romney. He looked down at his podium, which meant that the audience saw closed eyes and a frowning mouth. Again and again, Obama allowed himself to be dragged into a tangle of facts and figures – failing to realize that confusion is Romney’s…

Dana Milbank Belittles the Atheist Movement and Edwina Rogers

So the Afghan army is trying something new: a guide to the strange ways of the American soldier. The goal is to convince Afghan troops that when their Western counterparts do something deeply insulting, it’s likely a product of cultural ignorance and not worthy of revenge. The pamphlet is intended to “strengthen our understanding of…