Oct 29, 09 | 8:58 AM
I had lunch yesterday with my old friend and former colleague, Chip Bayers, who, 15 years ago this week, after having left my fledgling Internet business in New York, helped start HotWired in San Francisco. This is significant because advertising on the Internet started with HotWired’s launch and because it started with the banner ad, invented by Wired’s editor and founder, Louis Rossetto, and because advertising on the Internet is still dominated by the banner ad, which has never worked all that well. In fact, this very development which, 15 years ago, launched the Internet...
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Oct 28, 09 | 11:10 AM
Wow. Pot. Just like that, on its way to being legalized. Well, just like that after 50 years or so. In order to save itself from financial oblivion, the state of California seems inclined to just do it . Just say yes. To become Amsterdam. It may be the biggest thing to come out of the financial meltdown. We won’t get meaningful reform of the banking system, but we’re going to get legalized pot. This is partly because the Justice Department has just issued new guidelines to prosecutors telling them not to override state laws about medicinal marijuana use. And because California’s...
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Oct 27, 09 | 8:58 AM
So it turns out there’s a reason the president hasn’t wrapped up health care or Iraq, figured out Afghanistan, closed Guantanamo, or found anybody a job. He’s been out raising money. He’s been schmoozing, and golfing, and kissing ass. The Wall Street Journal has outlined in quite excruciating detail just how the president has actually been spending a significant amount of his time and attention. In nine months he’s done 26 fundraisers. Three a month. George Bush, by this point in his presidency, had, according to the Journal, only done...
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Oct 26, 09 | 9:04 AM
Who’s tweaking whom? I have come to believe that the nearly daily back and forth between the White House and Fox News is good for both sides. I have further come to believe it’s good for the political class in general. For one thing, the fight is deeply self-referential and true inside baseball (who is doing what to whom on the basis of what strategy and what future benefit); for another it sets up the ultimate liberal-conservative face-off. In one corner the new young president (with all his promises of bipartisanship) and in the other Fox Chief Roger Ailes, that dark figure...
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Oct 23, 09 | 3:06 PM
I sympathize with the pilots who overshot the Minneapolis airport by 150 miles. It’s so easy to get distracted and forget what you’re supposed to be doing in today’s busy world. Besides, they’re probably overworked or something. One time in a car I got into an argument with a passenger about whether Alfred Hitchcock or Orson Welles directed The Third Man (turned out it was Carol Reed) and I drove past Syracuse and ended up in Cleveland. Couldn’t that happen to any of us? Cleveland wasn’t so bad. I thought it would be a lot worse than it actually...
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Oct 23, 09 | 9:02 AM
The most popular news medium became, over the last 10 years, the computer, effectively putting newspapers out of business and changing the nature of television news. Over the past year, it has become clear that the next news medium of choice will be your phone. The latest iPhone version of Newser launched this week. I think it's great, but we know as little about how miniaturization and portability changes the nature of the news consumer’s behavior as anybody else. In a way, hand-held news might be more like a newspaper than television or the computer screen has ever been. Television...
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Oct 22, 09 | 9:09 AM
One of the big changes that took place in America over the last 25 years was that people at the top came to be paid so much more than the average person in their companies. It was an exponential increase. Where not long ago the top guy made 20 or 30 or 40 times more than the average salary in his company, his pay packages skyrocketed to as much as 1,000 times the average. The relationship between the average and the extreme became impossible to explain. Most people went to work and financed their lives with their salaries, without accruing significant savings (if they accumulated any assets...
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Oct 21, 09 | 8:44 AM
I have never met Bernie Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner and Rudy Giuliani crony and business partner, but he is my Facebook friend. He friended me. This might be because, indicted on a variety of tax abuse and public corruption charges, he’s looking for good press. He was sent to prison yesterday for leaking sealed documents to the Washington Times. Or perhaps he friended me because I have written none-too-flatteringly about Judith Regan, with whom he had trysts in a city-owned apartment and with whom he had a terrible falling out. Or because I have...
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Oct 20, 09 | 12:17 PM
In the rich history of legislative farce, few scenarios are as delightful as this one: Roland Burris kills health care reform. Burris says he’s not going to vote for any bill that doesn’t include a public option. Period. The end. No pussy-foot half-measures, like Olympia Snowe’s “triggered” option, no “non-profit co-ops.” Just the real one. And who the hell is going to talk him out of it? Democrats aren’t about to offer him any kind of political support. Friending him on Facebook would be too close a political connection for them. They can’t...
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Oct 20, 09 | 9:51 AM
Here’s what nobody seems to know: whether we’re a liberal nation or a conservative one. For a long time the conservatives convinced us that we were, largely, in our souls and pocketbooks, conservative (even though the Republicans have, in recent memory, not gotten more than 50% of the national vote). But then we elected a young black president and it seemed that somehow we’d been transformed into liberals. When Wall Street collapsed, we became, suddenly, populists with dual right-wing/left-wing zeal and a rising conservative heartland backlash against statist control....
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