Thursday, July 10, 2003

Spoonbread Too. Good stuff. Once I taught my Yankee colleagues to put vinegar on their collards, they were happy, too. 10:02:28 PM    comment []

Last year, the Baseline staff meeting was held in a basement conference room of the Ziff Davis building on East 28th Street. This year, it’s on the 11th floor. Beyond providing a nice view of the Flatiron building, this upward progress seems a hopeful metaphor for our little start-up, conceived in the worst publishing market in the history of magazines and launched the month after 9/11. Encouraging words from ZD muckety-mucks on our financial position added to the sense of cautious optimism. Emphasis on “cautious.”   The Mad Genius, who signs off every email with the words, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough,” offered two new slogans for the staff: “The best turn of phrase is an incontrovertible fact,” and “The best adjective is a number.”   Now we’re all off to Harlem for soul food. At home, soul food is also branded as “country cookin’” and served to white people who don’t want to eat in soul food restaurants. Let’s see how the corn bread is up here. 5:55:22 PM    comment []

Won't UNC ever learn? They keep assigning books that threaten to make freshmen think. 5:36:58 PM    comment []

Nothing like being in New York and…sitting through a full day of meetings. I miss the bubble, when our staff retreats were held at nice resorts and we got comped for golf. Then again, ZD lets me live in North Carolina, and this is the price of that arrangement. Viewed that way, it’s a bargain. 8:08:19 AM    comment []

Chris Lydon digs the intellectual energy of the blogosphere: “The adrenal elite is here.”   The dynamism sensed by Chris is a key to the power of weblogs. Traditional media is static, bound by brand and convention even when put online or broadcast on TV and radio. Weblogs are dynamic – not just as oft-updated personal pages, but as peer-edited components in a constant conversation.   One of the smartest people I’ve ever interviewed was Clay Struve, a little-known financial wizard who helped take the Black-Scholes option-trading model from theory to profitable practice. One of Struve’s tenets is that hedging strategies need to be dynamic, not static – even the most mathematically perfect models have to keep changing to keep up with events.   The same principle applies to journalism, and to other complex systems. Of course, just getting people to acknowledge complexity can be a challenge (the complexity column reminds me of Jona Hansen’s book). But it’s a challenge that weblogs are helping us meet. 7:58:16 AM    comment []

America’s right-wing whackos seem to really miss the Red Menace.   First Ann Coulter tries to rehabilitate Joe McCarthy – an effort foreshadowed by Michael Stipe that is too nutso even for the WSJ editorial page. Then yesterday as I was driving to the airport I heard Rush Limbaugh ranting that the real reason the Democrats hated Nixon – the true cause of Watergate – was because he exposed Alger Hiss as a commie spy.   Three’s a trend. Who’s next? 7:26:43 AM    comment []