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How TPM Got Started

One day, after a morning of working the phones, Josh came out of his office looking as though he'd imbibed more than his usual liter-age of Pepsi One. He was on fire about some travesty of media coverage related to the recount (looking back at his first post--to read it verité-style, click here and scroll to bottom--it must have been about Ted Olson). I remember him pausing and asking Nick and me, "Dude, do you guys think it would be weird if I did a thing like Kaus is doing?" This was in reference to Kausfiles, which had begun the year before. Nick and I shrugged and said that it wouldn't be weird at all. Then, when Josh disappeared back into his office to create what would become Talking Points Memo, Nick and I decided that actually, yes, it would be sort of weird, because who but a fool would write for no money?

What was amazing was how prolific Josh was right off the bat, reporting and writing and analyzing--recognizably blogging, although at the time no such reference point existed, so it mostly seemed like the manic pursuit of a really smart, idiosyncratic guy who slept on the office couch. Manic, but always interesting. Josh quickly amassed a small but influential Washington readership and started getting tips and intel from them (including some prominent conservatives), and I remember it dawning on me that he had figured out a new way of doing journalism that nobody else had grasped yet. At the time, it seemed like all this would be in the service of his traditional long-form print career, and so it seemed neat and clever, but not revolutionary in the way that it does today.

via www.theatlantic.com

Wonderful post by Joshua Green, who was Josh Marshall's boss when TPM was founded. As Josh likes to tweet — "Must read."

richest "etc" ever?

via www.thestylerookie.com

My costume is Joey Ramone+Ramona Quimby=Joey Ramona Quimby. Hence, little girl dress, leather jacket, Converse, etc.

Leigh Johnson of Nowness has many more pictures of Tavi's Halloween costume, and I'm now having my "Where is Tavi from and how is she possible?" moment. I know that many friends of Hello, TypePad have already had such a moment, and I am way behind on this. I've arrived now.

I’m Moe. I have spent the past two and a half hours now not writing this post, because I’ve already written so excessively about myself on the internet that it feels fairly gluttonous to do it anymore. Here is a story I wrote earlier this year about my “career” before landing this gig. I’m a Libra and a native of Alexandria. Last night I babbled something about how I would give up my abortion rights if we could establish ourselves a just progressive tax policy in this country and, while I was obviously drinking heavily when I said this, that is the sort of leftist I am.

I have little to say about culture war bullshit, except to say that if you agree with Camille Paglia about Lady Gaga you are a moron.

Also, I haven’t really lived in this town since high school, when you had to pick up the City Paper if you wanted to know who was playing the (old) (and fucking glorious) 9:30 club. The world was better in those days, as I recalled again when perusing bound volumes of the paper from 1995. Back then, you basically had to fund journalism in order to get laid, and the nation was better for it. I don’t have anything particularly uplifting to say beyond that, so I’ll leave you with the text of a “Missed Connections” ad I found in the issue that published fifteen years ago this week:

via www.washingtoncitypaper.com

Moe-down? No good. But the rest is - you have to click through to see the ad.

Anna Wintour as Che Guevara

via www.papermag.com

Happy Fashion Week. #nyfw

Sorry I Haven't Posted — Inspiring Apologies From Today's World Wide Web

One thing I’ve always hated are the obligatory “sorry I haven’t posted in a while” posts that every sporadic blog seems to have. This won’t be one of them.

There comes a point in your life where you realize the limits of your talent. God gives talent, but he can also give us the perception to see the limit of that talent. One day, you wake up and realize that limit. It can keep you from frustration and spinning your wheels fruitlessly, but it can also be a very hard thing to accept.

via sorry.coryarcangel.com

I'm late to the party on this, but Cory's collection of apologies for sparse blog posts is an interesting read. Not fun or cool, just interesting.

The New Yorker on Hashtags

This usage totally subverts the original purpose of the hashtag, since the likelihood of anyone searching the term “Iwouldratherhaveamoose” is next to zero. But that isn’t the point. This particular hashtaggery is weirdly amusing, because, for some reason, starting any phrase with a hashtag makes it look like it’s being muttered into a handkerchief; when you read it you feel like you’ve had an intimate moment in which the writer leaned over and whispered “I would rather have a moose!” in your ear.

Another way hashtags are being deployed is as disclaimers—a more sophisticated, verbal version of the dread winking emoticon that tweens use to signify that they’re joking.

via www.newyorker.com

Best Blogs of 2010

Jason Kottke's blog is a grab bag of multimedia trivia. A YouTube clip from a 1936 documentary on mail trains? Check. A copy of an 1892 menu, fascinating not only for its price structure but for its customers' bill of rights? Yup. Touting only smart, stimulating items worth adding to the public sphere, Kottke.org is part odd-news aggregator and part archival treasure dig — consistently one of the most surprising domains on the Web.

via www.time.com

I agree, kottke.org is a great blog.

You can now create folders of apps on your iPhone. Just press down on an app’s icon until it wiggles. Then drag that icon onto another icon you want to group together and a folder is created. You can drag in up to 12 apps into one folder, and you can even name that folder whatever you want.

Back to our camera conundrum, though: can I still get easy access to the camera? I could just put it in my iPhone’s Dock (that’s the row of four icons at the bottom of your iPhone’s screen), but I don’t use the camera enough to devote one of those four coveted spots to it alone. I do, however, have a few apps that I use quite frequently.

via www.scottexplains.com

Cool tip from a new helpful blog: "Scott Explains."

Did it occur to me that the silence of the teacher in this pedagogical setting was crucial? Certainly silence was something at which I was never adept, whether as student or teacher. Some of my most impressive colleagues over the years have been withdrawn to the point of inarticulacy in debates and even conversation, thinking with deliberation before committing themselves. I have envied them this self-restraint.

Articulacy is typically regarded as an aggressive talent. But for me its functions were substantively defensive: rhetorical flexibility allows for a certain feigned closeness—conveying proximity while maintaining distance. That is what actors do—but the world is not really a stage and there is something artificial in the exercise: one sees it in the current US president. I too have marshaled language to fend off intimacy—which perhaps explains a romantic penchant for Protestants and Native Americans, reticent cultures both.

via www.nybooks.com

Font rendering on the iPad screen is a [pain].

JH: Personally I disagree — we’re testing all of our screen-optimized fonts on both desktop platforms and the iPad, and the iPad’s rendering (especially in-browser rendering) is demonstrably superior to even Safari 4 for Macintosh. But this is a discussion for another day, since all the fonts on the Wired app were rendered on a desktop platform, and provisioned to the app in the form of flat PNG files. The Wired app does not use the iPad’s rendering software at all.

via informationarchitects.jp

Buried in the flame war over the Wired iPad app (which by itself qualifies it as a success) are these insightful comments by Jonathan Hoefler. I think that publishing a large set of .pngs and calling it an application is ... suboptimal, but it certainly created an opportunity for superior typography.

The comments Oliver made about Scott Dadich are a little bizarre. Why go there? Especially since there's so much good thinking about iPad design on Oliver's site.