A few years ago, writing about the book business and how dumbed down and craven books had become--and pathetic, designed only to sell and then not selling--I wrote the line "books suck," subjecting me to much middlebrow opprobrium.

I'd like to revise that line: Books are evil.

They're pernicious....

My 84-year-old mother was full of venomous indignation at dinner last night over the great mammogram take-back. Bureaucrats, in her view, will happily kill women to save money. My colleague, Caroline Miller, Newser's editor in chief, took umbrage in this space the other day about the new guidelines....

This is a phenomenon that just keeps giving.

Its very lack of explanation, and ensuing incredulity and apoplexy, propel it.

There may not have ever been anything like it in modern American politics. Well, Ronald Reagan perhaps. But his was, at least, a 20-year phenomenon. In little more than a...

For all sorts of obvious reasons, it seems like a greatly unacceptable and possibly discriminatory thing to say that the obese are a lot like the Chinese (though it's unclear which group, if either, is being slurred). But hear me out.

It is simple math. In eight years, according to...

If Arthur Miller were at it again, he'd call the play Death of a PR Guy.

Gary Ginsberg, Murdoch's PR guy who got the ax yesterday, used to beg me not to call him a PR Guy--his official title was Executive VP of Global Marketing and Corporate Affairs--but that was...

"First of all, let me say that I have never used Twitter. I notice that young people--you know, they're very busy with all these electronics. My thumbs are too clumsy to type in things on the phone. But I'm a big believer in technology, and I'm a big believer in...

Nobody I know who is smart and rich (albeit much less rich than they used to be) thinks the economy is patched up and ready to roll--except, apparently, Warren Buffet (who I don't actually know), who announced yesterday that "the financial panic is behind us."

But then he...

At the top of the Internet boom, Lou Dobbs left CNN to start his ill-fated Space.com, from which he returned ignominiously not long after. Dobbs left CNN again yesterday, at what is possibly the top of the conservative pundit boom, to, as CNN put it with a certain dig,...

It seems to be coming to this: Was he a Muslim or a nutcase?

The nation's two most sententious conservative columnists have weighed in with their view. Both David Brooks, in the Times, and Dorothy Rabinowitz, in the Wall Street Journal, believe that the evidence--ie, he was a practicing...

Rupert continues his war with the Internet. Over the weekend, he told an interviewer (the interviewer, on Sky News Australia, works for him) that as part of his campaign to charge users for reading his content, what he plans to do is to block Google from indexing his newspapers.

I think they have it. If they don't have the votes for the best and purest version of the bill, I think they at least have a fallback position which holds 60 votes.

I believe this has to be true because you wouldn't risk your presidency and place in...

How is it that we get a major insider trading scandal every two decades or so? The last big one, which ultimately ensnarled Michael Milken, the legendary junk bond king, happened in the late eighties. The current one, with a mass of arrests yesterday, threatens the hedge fund industry.

The Wall Street Journal was a great paper. It is still a pretty great paper but it is not the great Wall Street Journal. That former paper, with its particular look and feel and characteristically myopic focus on business and finance, has departed the stage, replaced by a vigorous, strong-minded...

I follow entrepreneurial dramas the way other people follow sports (did somebody win the World Series?). In these comedies, tragedies, or farces, people really do rise beyond human limitations or get ignominiously crushed. Sometimes there are second chances. Entrepreneurs--true entrepreneurs--pride themselves, like none-too-bright boxers, on their ability to take a...

The strange business that is going on in New York's 23rd Congressional District, which occupies some other universe than the one commonly associated with New York, wherein the designated middle of the road Republican fell to a crypto-fascist sort conservative, is meant to signal, at least for liberals, an...

Of all the outcomes of the 2008 presidential election, the strangest, beyond the rise of Sarah Palin herself, is the success of Levi Johnston.

He, in fact, may be the antidote to her rise, dogging her with his smile and his scabrous asides.

Or, as likely, they enable each...

I participated the other night in an oddly formal, anglophilic, Oxford-style, for-and-against-the-proposition debate on the topic of (you guessed it) the mainstream media. I was on the side arguing (you guessed again) that it should be buried as fast as possible.

My side, with NPR host John Hockenberry and Politico...

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...

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...

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...