Travel writing is mostly bad. It's partly the fault of the form; contemporary travel magazines are filled with 10 Best New Hotels/Bars/Spas on Yet Another Tony Exclusive Island or How to Eat Fabulously in This Most Glorious Setting You Will Never See. Sometimes, quality sneaks in. And every so often...

A while back, as a nice gesture, a publishing pal gave me George Saunders' (at the time) new book, The Braindead Megaphone. Exciting: here in my hands was one of the few perks of being in a publishing-related field -- an advance copy book! And free! Plus, I like...

What I wish I had planned ahead, bought the ticket, found a place to stay, and got credentialed to see is this:

Bush's ceremonial exit, from the inaugural website:

In recent years,...

Cross posted at the home base!

"Burrowing" is the term of art for political appointees digging their way into the federal bureaucracy as permanent civil servants after their administration is gone. As Bush's horror show is coming to a close, he keeps trying to take a few more swipes...

Cross posted from my home base.

My friend Steven Kotler, a man of prodigious turnout, recently wrote a fascinating story about a former FBI agent who left the bureau for the ACLU. The agent, Mike German, was a once-politically conservative crack undercover agent, compiling evidence in...

From a website showing examples of challenged ballots, my favorite:

What this guy didn't realize is that a vote for Al Franken already is a vote for the lizard people!

--

For more awesome insights mixed with oddities of

Apparently, what I like to do at 10:30 pm on Wednesdays is peruse old magazines looking for lengthy policy-oriented articles from last summer. Here's a sweet find from the NY Times Magazine in August, a sort of profile of the economic aspect of Obama. This was before the financial...

I thought all those stories about the bang up business at gun stores after Obama's win sounded hokey.

And they are, according to Jack Schafer at Slate, who he has numbers to back him up. First, gun sales in the past sales period were no higher than usual. They...

Cross posted, of course!

Sure, sure, everyone loves Rachel Maddow and her sexy lesbian librarian glasses. But the best new political pundits minted in 2008 were not on cable news, or even on Huffington Post. They were Margaret and Helen, the two octogenarians...

Before the election, I did a story for Modern Painters about Shepard Fairey, whose graphic Obama poster became the campaign's unofficial public image. The article is in the October issue, but it's not online. For anyone who wants to know more about the...

Over the past week, the symbolic and substantive enormity of Obama's election has been slowly settling in to the nation's collective consciousness. Commentators, including myself, have reached for the history books to lay down words about "what it means." (I settled on the triumph of good over evil.) The most...

Like everyone, I have spent the past two days in a daze as the full consequence of the very fact of Obama's election materializes. I was in the biggest swing state, Florida, which redeemed itself for the past two disasters by turning blue. I went to the infomercial rally, saw...

The Pompano Beach McCain field office, like almost everything else in Florida, is housed in a strip mall. There's a guy waving a flag out front, but inside traffic is light. I've been hearing about empty McCain offices, sapped of enthusiasm, but this one has a few true believers left....

Cross posted here.

It's 11:59 and no sign of McCain. We're at the Bank United Center at University of Miami. It's Sunday night, thirty-six hours until nationwide polls open, and this is McCain's last appearance in south Florida. McCain is supposed...

OK, so this might be a little weird, but I'm sharing it anyhow. A little while ago I dreamt my own version of Oliver Stone's "W." But here's the even weirder thing: the night before, I dreamt a trailer for my own dream version of "W." And it was a...

It's fitting that the National Republican Trust PAC chose today to take Jeremiah Wright to televisions nationwide. If you're superstitious (or an 8th century Celtic Druid), tonight's the night when the underworld opens its gates so the ghouls can arise and wreak havoc. If you're a republican, you hope that...

As 20,000 Obama supporters streamed into the BankAtlantic center to see Obama's aptly titled Sunrise Rally, a small but valiant detachment of McCain volunteers stood their ground. We were in Sunrise, Florida, on the edge of the swamp, deep in Broward County, the largest...

I still can't make up my mind which McCain narrative obtains. Was he a straight shooter gone crooked, as lamented by David Brooks and the rest of McCain's former base? Or was he always a spoiled, irascible, goof off who cultivated a fictional biography for politlcal purposes, as exhaustively detailed...

This seems like a strange way to start your new attack ad:

"Would you get on a plane with a pilot who has never flown?"

Is the RNC trying to remind everyone about...

With this story? According to a Dutch freelancer who has volunteered for both campaigns in this election cycle, the McCain campaign asks its army of editorial letter-ghostwriters to -- surprise! -- lie. And lie big. About who they are, about the facts, about whatever it takes. When the writer,...