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I don’t really engage in online arguments that much anymore, probably because I visit only a handful of political websites these days. But I honestly remember having conversations like this one with a girlfriend I had in college:

1. For political cartoonist, how do you draw caricatures of Obama and Clinton and not come off as racist or sexist?

2. I’m late to the party, but apparently Sam Zell, new owner of the Tribune Company, recently said “fuck you” to one of his own journalists.

3. Now this is a way to go out in style. A Yahoo employee who gets laid off twitters his entire last day at work.

4. Has anyone else noticed that with ebook/Kindle and its recent purchase of Audible, Amazon is quickly changing its sales product from real-world objects to digital bits?

5. Kevin Kelly argues for why we need online editors. In other words, crowd sourcing isn’t valuable unless there’s a leader.

6. HarperCollins to release books for free on the web. Too bad they’re doing it on silly terms.

7. And as a follow-up about Sam Zell, apparently his workers aren’t given the same profanity privileges.

1. “Journalist escapes death by machetes” — Best headline ever.

2. If you’re a police officer and decide to arrest a guy who is holding a camera and/or a reporter’s notebook, you better make sure you’re arresting him for a good reason. Because that guy is likely a journalist, which means he can open up a whole can of worms if you screw up.

3. Charles Darwin wrote The Origin of Species. xkcd wrote The Origin of Ron Paul Supporters.

4. Oh look, Google has come up with another idea for how to squeeze as much creative juice out of its employees as possible.

5. In yet another sign that the sex industry is going mainstream, Adult Entertainment Expo seminars will be open to porn fans for the first time this week in Las Vegas.

6. I agree with James Fallows. Bill Kristol’s first op-ed at The New York Times is so bland, uninteresting and badly written that I couldn’t even begin to get angry at the actual content of the piece.

7. The New Yorker, my favorite magazine, has a new publisher because of a shake-up at Conde Nast.

8. This is pretty cool. It’s a blog written by a long-dead soldier, the entries written exactly 90 years ago.

9. Speaking of The New Yorker, they published a long feature article this week about how Google is trying to strengthen its influence in DC.

I met up with Jonathan Lethem last week to talk about the joys of living outside copyright laws, and the award-winning nerd novelist revealed that he’d love to be in a slash fiction story. Whom would he want to be paired with? “I want to be surprised! I want to see ones I wouldn’t think of!” he enthused, eyes wide with anticipation — or possibly fear. Lethem believes he’s been “slashed” only once, paired with fellow geek novelist Michael Chabon in a “sublimated homoerotic comic by Patricia Storms that was just an inch away from being Kirk and Spock.”

via ed

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