Brooke Magnanti is Belle de Jour

The weekend's most bizarre story is that British cancer specialist Dr. Brooke Magnanti has revealed that she is "Belle de Jour," the pseudonymous blogger who managed to get several bestselling books and a television movie out of having paid her way through graduate school as a high priced prostitute. Jon Ungoed-Thomas for The Times. Her identity has been one of ...

Shipping Off

The Atlantic Council is sending a delegation of us out to the USS Eisenhower for the next couple of days. Barring unforeseen access to a computer, the Internet, and free time that means no posting from me until Saturday morning.  My OTB colleagues will, however, be slavishly posting away as usual if not at a slightly higher opstempo.

Grading Obama’s Foreign Policy

The editors at Foreign Policy magazine used the occasion of the first anniversary of Barack Obama's election as president to ask a "a group of experts" to grade President Obama's foreign policy performance.   I was honored to be among the graders. My B-minus was exactly in line with the consensus:  "Obama scored only an average of a B-: five As, nine ...

Obama’s Europe Neglect Could Bring Bush Nostalgia

My first piece for ForeignPolicy.com, "Europe's Obama Fatigue," is online. Despite George W. Bush's defiant "you're with us or you're against us" public stance, he actively solicited advice and input from his NATO partners. Obama, by contrast, is saying all the right things in public about transatlantic relations and NATO but adopting a high-handed policy and paying little attention to Europe. [...] It would ...

Twitter Memes

Becks observes, "I suspect many Twitter memes that I find annoying (one letter off movie titles, failed children's books, etc.) would have been quite hilarious Unfogged threads." The post title, "The Medium Is The Message," is appropriate.  Several Twitter memes  (created by adding a hashtag such as #failedchildrensbooks) of the sort mentioned can be amusing if one is in the mood.  ...

Jessica Cutler a Mom!

Longtime denizens of the blogosphere will recall the strange case of Jessica Cutler, the one-time Senate staffer who briefly dished sex gossip as "Washingtonienne" and launched into 15 minutes of fame. Now, she's a mommy. Five years ago, Jessica Cutler's anonymous Washingtonienne blog was the hottest thing in town. Make that hotttt! So hotttt! -- spicy details of the Hill ...

Brevity is the Soul of Wit

Heebie-Geebie offers some sage advice on story-telling and blogging: First, cut way more details than you want to. Cut almost everything. Cut so much that you're staying ahead of the person listening. Only fill in extra details if they're still fascinated and you're going back to flesh out the situation. Second, if your audience isn't quite captivated, don't hang on to ...

Bush 41: Incivil Politics ‘Just Not Right’

President George H.W. Bush says presidents are "entitled to civil treatment and intellectual honesty when it comes to critics" and that harsh criticism "should not be par for the course. To the degree it turns off one student or one person from serving that's bad." Now, I fully agree that the 24/7/365 political combat that is the byproduct of cable news ...

Hierarchy of Words

Dan Drezner observes that, "One of the biggest mistakes traditional academics make is to take all words equally seriously.  That is to say, academics who do not write for a non-scholarly audience tend to assume that it takes an equal length of time and effort to compose a journal article, an op-ed, or even a blog post.  In reality, it's kind ...

2 Million Protestor Myth

Brendan Nyhan does a good job of documenting the spread of an Internet meme, the "2 million" figure that briefly circulated among conservative blogs about the size of Saturday's Tea Party protest.   What's amusing, though, is that he himself [bases his post on a Media Matters analysis that] falls for the "the DC Fire Department gave the official total of ...

Conservative Media Scoops Mainstream Media

A series of scandals uncovered by conservative outlets and ignored by the mainstream press are starting to raise some uncomfortable questions. The right-wing media’s single-minded focus on a handful of targets over the past months and its success in pushing those stories into the mainstream have underscored the sharp divide between traditional news organizations and the bloggers and talk show hosts ...

Evolution of Blogging

Scott Payne has an interesting interview with Kevin Drum on the evolution of the blogosphere since the days when dinosaurs roamed the earth circa 2002.    I joined the fray about six months later and think he's dead on. A couple of excerpts: But the political blogosphere did have a bit more of a clubby feel to it back then.  Mainly, this is ...

Getting it From Both Sides

I alternate between being amused and depressed when reading comments on blogs. Of late, I'm simultaneously being lambasted by conservatives who've read me for years and can't believe what an apologist I've become for Obama and denounced by liberals who used to respect me as fairminded and can't believe what a stooge for the GOP that I've become. Sigh. I'm not sure ...

NYT Disappears Blog Post

Rebecca Ruiz of the NYT Media Decoder blog wrote a post titled "NYTPicker Revealed. A Blogger With A Cause: Us," revealing David Blum as the anonymous blogger behind NYTPicker, that got picked up on Memeorandum. It has disappeared.   Presumably,  this is because -- as The Editors inform us in a subsequent post -- the information contained in said post ...

Magazine Format Blogs

Jayvie Canono has a useful discussion about the magazine-style format that has taken the blog world by storm over the last couple of years. Among the non-technical issues he raises is this: Will your readers like it? Maybe they would prefer that they just keep scrolling down to keep reading your posts. Maybe you should ask them when you play-test ...