Newspapers

As I always say, Scoop isn’t really fiction. From John Gaskell’s obituary in the Telegraph today: Plagued by ill-health, Gaskell reduced his commitments to working half a week   so that he could write a novel about obituaries. Unfortunately, he mentioned   this to a man he was interviewing, and the man then sold the idea to a   publisher as his own. The shorter hours, however, saved Gaskell’s bacon when   there was a cull of staff. Some weeks later he went to have his contract   renewed, and was told that the management had forgotten him: “We meant to   sack you.” Sadly, I suspect that these days

Good lord. Thanks (er, I think) to Kevin Drum for pointing me to today’s Maureen Dowd column. It is, as they say, a doozy. Even though people at diners kept trying to fatten up Obama — he drew the line at gravy — he looked increasingly diaphanous, like anti-matter to Hillary’s matter. She’s more appealing when she’s beaten down; he’s less imposing… Obama is like her idealistic, somewhat naïve self before the world launched 1,000 attacks against her, turning her into the hard-bitten, driven politician who has launched 1,000 attacks against Obama. As she makes a last frenzied and likely futile attempt to crush the butterfly [Obama], it’s as though

Since I’m too young to have seen Dennis Lillee in his absolute prime, Malcolm Marshall is the greatest fast bowler I’ve watched in my lifetime. He would have been 50 this month, but for the colon cancer that killed him. Pat Lynch remembers the great Barbadian here. One fine story that has just a hint of the Golden Age about it: What he said, he meant, as he did at Pontypridd when playing for Hampshire. With two days remaining, Glamorgan were 13 runs ahead in their second innings with seven wickets left. Just before the start of play in front of a full dressing room Marshall rang his Southampton golf

Matt Yglesias is absolutely right: The newspaper, as an institution, is an odd one — an enormous bundle of disparate kinds of content whose rationale for existing has to do with the economics of printing and distributing cheap paper and ink on a daily basis. In an online world, the economics are different and argue in favor of specialization and niches. And this is also almost certainly better for editorial quality. It would be extremely odd for one person to be well-qualified to supervise coverage of all the different things The New York Times tries to cover. Why not get political news from a political news outlet, movie reviews from

Glenn Greenwald, elitist scourge of the modern media’s cosy elitism, has been on a tear lately. He complains that the media focuses too much on trivial froth and not enough on serious issues. Why, he asks, does the media, ignore (relatively speaking) John Yoo’s now-infamous (and rightly so) “Torture Memo” while devoting acres and hours of attention to Barack Obama going ten-pin bowling in Pennsylvania? The crux of Greenwald’s argument is: And as Eric Boehlert documents, even Iraq — that little five-year U.S. occupation with no end in sight — has been virtually written out of the media narrative in favor of mindless, stupid, vapid chatter of the type referenced

The Scotsman today: Page 1: Mystery of Severed Head Found on Arbroath Beach Page 18: The Awe Inspiring Beauty of Scotland’s Beaches

Homophobia Rife In British Society, Landmark Equality Survey Finds screams the Guardian’s headline. Really? Well, up to a point: Britain’s 3.6 million lesbian, gay and bisexual people see themselves confronted by huge barriers of prejudice at every level of society, according to the first authoritative poll of their views. The poll, commissioned by the equality charity Stonewall, which said some public bodies were too “smug” about their record on discrimination, indicates that the schoolyard is the most entrenched bastion of prejudice. The YouGov poll of 1,658 gay adults found homophobic bullying in schools is more prevalent now than in previous decades. Around 30% of lesbian and gay people expect to encounter

From today’s edition of The Scotsman: AS A town steeped in its common riding* traditions, the Royal and Ancient Burgh of Selkirk has tended to concentrate on reliving its past. It proudly proclaims itself as being the venue where William Wallace was declared Guardian of Scotland and on the second Friday** of June the streets reverberate with the sound of 500 horses inspecting the boundaries as part of the annual festival celebrations. Change is not something readily accepted by the 6,000 inhabitants of the Borders town. But as from today, Selkirk traders are looking to the future and creating their own piece of history by becoming Scotland’s first plastic bag-free

If Furman Bisher (great name!) is typical of the sports staff at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution then, you know, newspapers probably do deserve to die. Baseball used to be a game played with nine men to a side, two managers, four umpires, and the major-league season always opened in Cincinnati. Come to think of it now, that would be sort of like “Gone With the Wind” opening in Valdosta. But Cincinnati had a deal, see. The first “major league” baseball game was played in Cincinnati on June 1, 1869. The locals, the Red Stockings, eked out a 48-14 victory over Mansfield, whoever Mansfield was. So, several years ago — even the