Name a newspaper columnist at any paper -- daily, weekly, mainstream, alternative -- as good as Dan Savage at his best. Just one.

The A.P. reports on Ty Alper's lethal-injection study: "Nearly all lethal injection executions have occurred in states where veterinarians are not allowed to use the same method to euthanize animals."

Call for a new literary category

Jack Shafer's debunking of a Malcolm Gladwell riff demonstrates only that Gladwell is a talented bullshit artist and Shafer is a scold, both of which we already knew. (An obvious point Shafer misses: when a guy tells a funny story about sneaking humorous fabrications into a newspaper, doesn't the story itself hint that the guy is not to be trusted?)

Gladwell has apparently told the "new and troubling questions" story at dinner parties for ten years. My guess is that it has gotten funnier, and less strictly veridical, over that time. Anyone who heard him tell it at a dinner party would identify it immediately as a hybrid of fact and fiction, just like any other successful dinner-party anecdote. And then it gets played on This American Life, and Shafer spends 3,000 words pointing out that it doesn't stand up to fact-checking.

Why don't we just have a category called "anecdote," to accommodate stories rooted in autobiography but containing exaggerations and emendations for comic or dramatic effect? The ones in magazines like the New Yorker would typically be humorous, but Reader's Digest could use the rubric for those moralistic little fables that illustrate how Jesus is always there when you're not expecting him. Let's stipulate that an anecdote must be relatively short (when it reaches book length, it's a novel), and that it's bad form to use anecdotal license for self-glamorization, just as it would be at a dinner party (Margaret Jones, throw your hands in the air). And then let's stick the word "anecdote" at the top of the page where it used to say "personal history," and Rodney Rothman can write for the New Yorker again, and David Sedaris won't get special treatment, and Shafer can stop stating the obvious.

This post's title notwithstanding, the anecdote -- the tale told around a fire, presented as true but not entirely verifiable -- has a much longer history than the clearly labelled fiction or the thoroughly researched news story. (Homer: [stands up, clears throat] "This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles....") It's no wonder that it keeps returning even when we don't make room for it.

Is it just me, or is it a little weird for the New Yorker to run a review of an NYU bar/restaurant that essentially says it's a crappy college bar/restaurant?

Times staffers (up to and including Bill Keller) answer readers' questions about the McCain story.

I would not have imagined that I could be surprised and disappointed at the critical standards prevailing at Maxim, but somehow I am.

Remember the (very minor) point I made about Nancy Franklin last night? Well, that very same day, Joshua Clover made essentially the exact same point about Franklin's review of Gossip Girl:

Franklin does seem intimately familiar with the zip code in which the show purports to reside.... At the same time, she seems surpassingly oblivious to the culture-consuming world beyond 10028, and what's happening out there. She mentions the show's "primary purpose of marketing pop songs, which are heard throughout." Actually, we're pretty sure that an untested show on the CW isn't marketing "What Goes Around" by a non-New Yorker named Justin Timberlake, and the like. Mr. Timberlake, who comes from a land down under 72nd Street (it's called "Tennessee") may in fact, along with his staff and servants and holding company, be receiving a certain fee for his participation. We are just guessing.

This pattern (two examples is so a pattern) suggests that, to Franklin, whatever's on TV is by definition the white-hot center of the media universe, and everything else (some website, some pop song) is desperate to bask in its reflected glory.

And in case you care way, way more than you probably do: my original point was challenged (by Jossip Jirl herself) in the comments.

New Yorker TV critic Nancy Franklin is often pretty good (she totally gets Friday Night Lights, for instance), but her column this week reveals an amusing old-person misconception. Near the end of the piece, Franklin writes that "the CNN/YouTube debates were a great promotional device for YouTube."

According to Internet World Stats there are 1.25 billion people using the Internet. According to Alexa, 17.25 percent of them look at YouTube sometimes. That means there's a total of 216 million people watching YouTube. Meanwhile, the Republican debate was watched by 4.4 million people. If anything, the debates were a great promotional device for the American democratic process; YouTube certainly doesn't need the help.

Radar has a good summary of the recent Joe Klein FISA bill controversy, for those who don't have time to read 50,000 words by Glenn Greenwald.

This probably shouldn't be as surprising as it is: A Slate intern named David Sessions is an evangelical Christian. He's written a piece criticizing David Kirkpatrick's Times Magazine cover story on the crackup of the Christian right. The "Christian left," according to Sessions, is an overhyped fringe movement that "gets more attention in the press than it does in the mainstream evangelical community," and the fact that younger Christians have other concerns beyond abortion and homosexuality doesn't mean they're poised to abandon the Republican Party. Sessions's piece is kind of depressing, obviously, but I suspect it's closer to reality than Kirkpatrick's rosy take.

It's strange how strange it seems that Slate has an intern who's an evangelical Christian.

Politico-linguistic intervention of the day: Listening to Terry Gross's meaty interview with WaPo's Thomas Ricks last week (web, iTunes), it struck me that serious, knowledgeable people have begun using the term ethnic cleansing to refer to what's going on in Iraqi cities and neighborhoods. Besides Ricks, the author of one of the most important books on the war so far, and Gross, who's usually pretty careful with her words, it's been all over the NYT in recent weeks, appearing in news stories and opinion pieces alike. David Brooks writes,

Second, the worst of the ethnic cleansing may be over. For years, Shiites and Sunnis have been purging each other from towns and neighborhoods.

But the problem, for once, is not Brooks's limited intelligence. Paul Krugman has this:

Oh, and by the way: Baghdad is undergoing ethnic cleansing, with Shiite militias driving Sunnis out of much of the city.

An early example is this Time piece headlined "Ethnic Cleansing in a Baghdad Neighborhood?"

The term ethnic cleansing originated, during the Balkan conflict, as a euphemism for genocide, often used by the English-speaking media with deliberate irony. It's a little strange to watch it turn into a legitimate, unironic term for mass displacement, especially since the word cleansing carries an ineradicable whiff of Nazi ideology.

But if we're going to use the term, can we at least use it accurately? Sunni and Shi'a are not ethnicities, they're religious denominations. For the most part, the people involved in homogenizing their neighborhoods, both Sunni and Shiite, are Arabs (although some are Turkmen, on both sides). The process is more properly called sectarian cleansing, or if you want to get really technical denominational cleansing, or if you want to lose the Nazi stuff sectarian homogenization. The best example of ethnic cleansing during the Iraq War is probably the expulsion of Arabs from Kirkuk, which seems to have calmed down a bit.

The misusage reminds me of another Fresh Air interview, this one with George Packer, who told a horrifying story about an Iraqi whose beloved kid brother was kidnapped by militiamen. The kidnappers called the Iraqi on his celphone and asked him, "Are you Sunni or Shiite?" The man had to guess whether the kidnappers were Sunni or Shiite, in order to give them the answer they wanted to hear. He said he was a Shiite (a lie), and heard the line go dead: the kidnappers were Sunnis, like him.

Slate joins the struggle to impose order on NYMag's Approval Matrix.

Weird: Joni Mitchell has a poem in the New Yorker. It's, um, not her best work:

We have poisoned everything
And oblivious to it all
The cell-phone zombies babble
Through the shopping malls

So yeah, pretty cool about Zack's new job.

The Observer on James Wood's move to the New Yorker. Interesting fact: Wood has had a standing offer to work for David Remnick for many years.

My #1 intellectual hero James Wood is leaving the New Republic for the New Yorker. I have wondered when this was going to happen. Political correspondent Ryan Lizza made the same move a month ago, which is maybe what's behind this comment from Leon Wieseltier: "The New Republic plays many significant roles in American culture, and one of them is to find and to develop writers with whom the New Yorker can eventually staff itself.” Meow!

Unintelligent design

I have nothing against the idea of redesigning the New Yorker. The most recent tweaks have made it more pleasant and readable than ever. But KT Meany's argument for sweeping changes to the magazine's look provide an inadvertent case study in the dangers of redesigning-for-the-hell-of-it.

In her introduction Meany writes:

It’s time to elevate design standards to the same level that grammar and language are held. Ain’t it?

The cutesy grammatical mischief of "Ain't" would be more convincing if the previous sentence weren't so illiterate. The same carelessness is evident in Meany's suggestions.

She starts with the table of contents:

First, create more space by removing any ads from the contents page. Territorially speaking, we own that space!

What a great idea! Just get rid of the ads! The editorial designers will have much more room to play with, and the result will be so pretty and readable that Conde Nast will be happy to print the magazine for free! Why didn't Rea Irvin think of that?

(However, I acknowledge the importance of advertisements, and, if they are necessary, simply extend the ToC across two pages.)

Even when making concessions to reality, Meany loses touch with reality. If you give the ToC another half-page, you have to lose half a page of editorial content somewhere else. Where does it come from? Or is that something for the editor to worry about while you're busy designing?

Anyone can make a table of contents look and function better if they're allowed to say "First give it twice as much space." The challenge of magazine design is improving things within the space you actually have.

Her dumbest suggestion, I think, is this one:

The magazine prints in four colors but predominantly uses only one: black. The 2 x 2-inch advertisement in the margin is bursting with color, yet the whole spread is sedately black and white: an inedible garnish amidst this rice-and-beans meal.

Pay attention to that metaphor. What does the garnish represent? That's right -- the text, i.e. the New Yorker's journalism and fiction.

If The New Yorker pays for CMYK, as the ad suggests, shouldn’t the spread sing with color? To make the most of money spent, let’s rethink color choices. Any one of the New Yorker sections could easily be differentiated with a subtle page tint. This would help one flip to desired articles. Illustrations could be colored, too. How devilish: Hell could look quite hot!

Well now. Since Tina Brown opened the door, the New Yorker has begun using color in ways that would once have been hard to imagine: in photographs and illustrations and in the red display type throughout. (If you have the August 6 issue nearby, take a look at pages 6, 43, and 72 for examples of the effective use of color.) Meany thinks that's not enough, and that there should be color on spreads that contain nothing but running text. Why? Because the publisher pays for color printing. This is the worst kind of design thinking: if it's available, use it! ("Where can we put this cool <marquee> tag?")

Her specific suggestions for color are as bad as you'd expect from the fucked-up premise. (1) She wants a "subtle page tint" for different sections -- maybe salmon for the listings, lime green for Talk, eggshell for fiction. This is such a great idea it's astonishing that not one of the zillions of magazines that print in full color has ever done it, perhaps because it would look totally moronic. (2) She wants to add color to the cartoons. This is the other worst kind of design thinking: the content is a tabula rasa for me to work my design magic on. Cartoons in the New Yorker are a particular kind of drawing with a long history. They're typically done in black lines and (sometimes) gray washes on a white background. The lack of color is not a sad concession to technological or economic realities -- it's a feature of the style. It allows for a particular kind of expressive linework that gets trampled on when you add color. Of course, certain drawings look good in color (there's one on page 65 of the same Aug. 6 issue), but they're not what we mean when we talk about New Yorker cartoons. If you want to replace the New Yorker cartoons with a different kind of drawing, you're welcome to suggest it, but you're not talking about design anymore, you're talking about cartooning.

And note the implication of that dopey "Hell could look quite hot" remark: apparently it's impossible to convey heat in a black-and-white illustration. Redesigning the New Yorker is a fine idea, but it should probably be handled by someone with more respect for writing and drawing than KT Meany.

So in the course of breaking the news in Slate that it's a shame people don't write letters anymore (seriously), Anne Applebaum slips this in:

Letters have gone the way of the gentle anecdote, the meandering sentence, and the ironic paragraph. Try lengthy irony in an e-mail, and you'll be misunderstood. Try it in a newspaper column, and you risk furious attack. I once attempted to mock Americans' deep suspicion of voting machines, in contrast to our implacable faith in the solidity of ATMs and the safety of Internet shopping. Eight paragraphs of tongue-in-cheek do not go down well in the culture of instant point-scoring.

Wait - what?

So she's now saying that this Washington Post column, in which she argued that there's no need to require voting machines to provide a physical record because we all use ATMs and often don't ask for a receipt (and which, as numerous people pointed out at the time, is just unbelievably stupid and offensive) was tongue-in-cheek. So she didn't really believe it at all. She was writing a parody of a stupid Washington Post column.

No wait. I think the point is that she genuinely was making that argument, but that she used "tongue-in-cheek" techniques to do it, and that was what pissed people off.

First of all, she didn't. There's nothing in there you could call tongue-in-cheek. But more important, even if she had, that's not why people got mad. They got mad because the idea that there's no reason for voting machines to be required to produce paper records since we all use ATMs is just stupid and offensive in itself.

And then to try somehow defend yourself two and a half years later by mischaracterizing what the people who objected to it were saying is just focking infuriating.

George Packer has a blog.

From the making-a-fool-of-yourself-on-the-Internet department: A blogger named Mollie dares to criticize John Colapinto's New Yorker profile of Paul McCartney, and Colapinto responds by throwing a hissy fit in the comments. Money quote: "And that's why you're a blogger and not a writer." (HufPo confirms that it's really Colapinto.)