http://cache.gawker.com/assets/base/img/thumbs140x140/gawker.com.png http://gawker.com/tag/op-ed http://gawker.com/tag/op-ed

New York Times staffers just received the following exciting memo from editor Bill Keller and editorial page boss Andy Rosenthal. The paper is reinventing the "Week in Review" section! We've read this memo twice, and it sounds to us like the new section will be... exactly like the current one? But maybe with more letters to the editor? See if you can spot what the fuss is about. More »
]]> http://gawker.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5764544&view=rss&microfeed=true

On messiah machine day, blogger Anil Dash wonders if all the free publicity mustered by Apple's marketing machine might just be better directed at something else. This piece was originally published on his blog. More »
]]> http://gawker.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5458215&view=rss&microfeed=true

Obama's upcoming Newsweek editorial ("Why Haiti Matters") is online. Near the end: "In the aftermath of disaster, we are reminded that life can be unimaginably cruel....That "time and chance" happen to us all." He could've just ended it there. [Newsweek] More »
]]> http://gawker.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5449865&view=rss&microfeed=true

Gross itchy scabs Mark Halperin and John Heileman want to sell books by setting up Steve Schmidt and Sarah Palin in a cage match, argues Wonkette founding editor and Gawker Media alumna Ana Marie Cox on her Air America Radio blog. More »
]]> http://gawker.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5447356&view=rss&microfeed=true

On Sunday Katie Roiphe published a big essay (and pink charts) labeling this generation of male novelists "too cool for sex." Author Steve Almond replies in a piece first published on The Rumpus, one of our favorite literary sites. More »
]]> http://gawker.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5440500&view=rss&microfeed=true

It's tough out there for science writers following in Malcolm Gladwell's footsteps. Not because he's so good, but because he's so wrong. Here's a rant by author Jeff Wise, republished from Psychology Today, on undoing Gladwell's damage to the facts. More »
]]> http://gawker.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5432233&view=rss&microfeed=true

The Washington Post, as we all know, has the worst opinion section in America. The people who run it don't understand all the fuss about them running an op-ed by Sarah Palin on climate change! More »
]]> http://gawker.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5423633&view=rss&microfeed=true

On the occasion of this wonderful op-ed on how Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize is a violation of our nation's founding document, let us examine the recent crimes of the Washington Post opinion section. More »
]]> http://gawker.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5383303&view=rss&microfeed=true

Michael M. Thomas — who left the New York Observer after 22 years with a declaration that owner Jared Kushner "stands pretty much squarely on the side of those whom I consider the bad guys" — reflects on the paper. More »
]]> http://gawker.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5324575&view=rss&microfeed=true

With nabobs still nattering about TechCrunch's decision to publish internal Twitter documents, copyright lawyer Ben Sheffner reminds us that getting people to spill unauthorized info is commonly known as "journalism." Sheffner's post originally appeared on his blog, Copyrights & Campaigns. More »
]]> http://gawker.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5316975&view=rss&microfeed=true

Because Mike Bloomberg has more money and name recognition, and you, like all New York Democrats, are scared to actually take him on and end your comfortable career? More »
]]> http://gawker.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5271253&view=rss&microfeed=true

Paul Smalera, a Portfolio staff writer who was laid off before it shut down today, argues that it was hubris and an obstinate editor — not the economy — that doomed Conde Nast's business mag. More »
]]> http://gawker.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5229944&view=rss&microfeed=true

Heart disease is the leading cause of death among humans. As Clay Shirky points out in his incisive piece Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable, an inability to adapt is what killed print. Coroner's report follows. More »
]]> http://gawker.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5170088&view=rss&microfeed=true

Comedian Roseanne Barr took to her website yesterday and unloaded on everyone. Hey, it's fun! On Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie: "jon voight your evil spawn angelina jolie and her vacuous hubby brad pitt make about forty million dollars a year in violent psychopathic movies and give away three of it to starving children trying to look as if they give a fuck about humanity as they spit out more dunces that will consume more than their fair share and wreck the earth even more." And that's tepid compared with what she serves up for Voight himself, George Bush, John Edwards, and his former mistress Rielle Hunter. More »
]]> http://gawker.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5037849&view=rss&microfeed=true

With the exception of women's gymnastics, the Olympics have pretty much been a big bag of turds for the last forty years. Aside from the general boredom, there was the the massacre of hundreds of student protestors in Mexico City in 1968, the massacre of Israeli athletes in Munich in '72, our boycott of the Commies in 1980, the Commies' boycott of us (and Mary-Lou Retton!) in 1984, East German women, and now all this blah-blah-blah about Tibet. What to do? "There is only one way left to improve the Olympics: to permanently end them." More »
]]> http://gawker.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5005700&view=rss&microfeed=true

Times columnist and walking self-parody Maureen Dowd insists today that "Democrats are trying to sneak up on Hillary, throw a burlap sack over her head, carry her off the field and stick her in a Saddam spider hole until after the Denver convention." Yep, the party is through with Senator Hillary Clinton. "Democrats are coming around to the point Jay Rockefeller made 10 days ago after introducing Obama in West Virginia: 'Democrats always make a mistake by nominating people who know everything on earth there is to know about public policy. I introduced both Al Gore and John Kerry at their rallies. They knew all the policies, but people didn’t connect with them. You don’t get elected president if people don’t like you.'" Plus, the ladies of The View find Barack Obama "sexy," so surely the race is over. More »
]]> http://gawker.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5004775&view=rss&microfeed=true

Newspaper people are impressed (and terrified) by the size of the stake that a pack of hedge funds has built up in the New York Times. The 19% stake now controlled by Harbinger Capital and scary-sounding Firebrand Partners is now roughly equivalent to the ownership of the Sulzberger family. Here's what's amazing: not that another great American media institution is (snore) at the mercy of ravening capitalists; but that the newspaper is so frakking cheap. More »
]]> http://gawker.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5003362&view=rss&microfeed=true

In internet land, everybody's very excited about the Redmond software giant's bid for Jerry Yang's languishing internet directory. Where would a combination leave AOL? (Answer: without an obvious acquirer or partner.) What about the challenge to Google? (Finally, a competitor, financed by Microsoft's profits from its bloated operating system and office applications.) Most of the commentary is overblown. Fusing two mediocre internet units, Microsoft's MSN and Yahoo, will not magically produce a dynamic challenger to Google; merely, if business precedent is any guide, mediocrity on a greater scale. Unfortunately, the petrified traditional media companies don't know that. (They don't know anything really.) And that's why the creation of another internet behemoth would be so pernicious. More »
]]> http://gawker.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5002794&view=rss&microfeed=true

What should Barry Diller do? The IAC boss is being hung, slowly, by his largest shareholder. And for good reason: although online commerce and advertising is growing, the internet conglomerate has shrunk in value from $22bn to just over $7bn over five years. Barry Diller's reputation as a canny businessman, built up over decades in the movie and TV business, is tarnished. IAC has proven completely unable to build new businesses; and the New York group has had little success with the assets it bought. Let us count the fuckups. More »
]]> http://gawker.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5002676&view=rss&microfeed=true

So, finally, the bottom of the story of the Wall Street Journal's clash with web billionaire Marc Benioff. And it gets uglier. Pui-Wing Tam, the Journal reporter who was investigating the Salesforce.com CEO's Hawaii getaway, was indeed detained, both by Benioff's construction crew and the police. Benioff told the police that she was a stalker. The detention may have been illegal. And Journal brass in New York decided to cut mention of the incident when the article about Benioff's Hawaii complex was published. More »
]]> http://gawker.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=217452&view=rss&microfeed=true