Ian Best writes:

Since it was first used by Palin, and then commented upon by the media, I've heard the word [refudiate] used a couple of times in everyday speech. Both times it was used in a playful, ironic way, as if the person knew it was a Palin-invented, non-legitimate word. I.e. "You need to refudiate that comment!"

My question: At what point does a word become a legitimate word, one worth keeping, if it is used often enough in everyday speech, even ironically?

I actually think "refudiate" is a useful invention, whether intended or not by Palin. "Refute" and "repudiate" have distinct meanings, and it is certainly possible to do both simultaneously. Politics and origins aside, what do you think about the word itself, and about the chance that it will catch on?

There are certainly plenty of portmanteau words that have come into general use, from brunch and spork to bridezilla and wikipedia. There are fewer that were promoted by a public figure's creative mistake, but one precedent is George W. Bush's misunderestimate.

Misunderestimate is generally taken to be a blend of misunderstand and underestimate; like Sarah Palin's refudiate, it was sporadically invented by others over the years before President Bush used it; and like refudiate, it has caught on both as a joke and because people sometimes find it genuinely useful. In fact, of course, Sarah Palin cited it in defense of her own coinage.

Another relevant example may be then-Senator Warren G. Harding's use of normalcy in a 1920 campaign speech. This is not a portmanteau or blend it's just a way of forming the noun meaning "state of being normal" and it had been used from time to time since the mid 19th century, but Harding's usage was the subject of considerable discussion, e.g. by the NYT on 7/22/1920:

If Senator Harding likes the word "normalcy" he has a perfect right to use it. Mathematicians used it before him long ago, and nobody can question successfully either the propriety or the comprehensibility of the term. The word, however, is unfamiliar to most people, and therefore its employment in a political campaign is of dubious wisdom, as it will distract attention from what the Senator says to the way he says it.

To do that is usually a mistake for either orator or writer. Still it isn't always a mistake sometimes meaning can be fixed in the minds of hearers or readers by a noticeable peculiarity of locution or vocabulary.

Why either a mathematician or a candidate for the Presidency should consider "normalcy" better than the familiar "normality" is a puzzle beyond the solution of an inquirer who is neither, but such a preference does not need explaining. There are even people who like "abolishment" better than "abolition".

An audio recording and transcript of the speech in question is available here. The "normalcy" passage, featuring Harding's peculiarly mechanical delivery:

America's present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality but sustainment in triumphant nationality.

For me, the most striking lexical feature of this passage is the sub-slogan "not experiment, but equipoise": imagine it on a bumper sticker. Historians may rank Harding as one of the worst presidents in American history, but this was clearly a man who knew how to use a thesaurus.

[Or rather, as William Safire points out in the entry on normalcy in his Political Dictionary, Harding knew how to hire a man who knew how to use a thesaurus:

his "literary clerk," Judson Welliver, the first fulltime White House speechwriter

Safire passes along this analysis of why Welliver might have chosen normalcy, and why it caught on:

James McCawley, the great linguistics professor at the U. of Chicago, wrote the author in 1992: "You express puzzlement that normalcy caught on and some other neologisms didn't. One reason that the use of normalcy in Harding's address was so catchy is that with that form of the word the alliteration is between two syllables that bear the primary stress (no'strums, no'rmalcy) whereas if Harding had said norma'lity instead, the alliteration would have been on a syllable of that word that had only secondary stress."

Safire who ought to know expresses the opinion that "It is unlikely that Welliver thought that through in creating the alliterative passage", but this seems to elevate rational choice to a level that Jim McCawley would have never have attributed to a poet or a speechwriter. Or for that matter to any other human deciding what to say.]

Today's New York Times has an obituary for James J. Kilpatrick ("James J. Kilpatrick, Conservative Voice, Dies at 89, by Richard Goldstein) that focuses, as the headline promises, on Kilpatrick's career as a conservative voice in newspaper columns, books, and television appearances. In passing, Goldstein mentions Kilpatrick's (often decidedly peevish) career as a critic of grammar, usage, and stye:

Mr. Kilpatrick railed against turgid prose in "The Writer's Art" (Andrews, McMeel and Parker, 1984). In his "On Language" column for The New York Times Magazine, William Safire wrote that Mr. Kilpatrick's essays on "the vagaries of style are classics."

The Writer's Art is no longer in print, and used copies, though available, are absurdly expensive. Unfortunately, I didn't snap one up when they were on the market.

JJK played a significant role in at least eight Language Log Classic postings:

ML, 7/29/06: James J. Kilpatrick, grammarian (link)
ML, 12/11/07: Authoritarian rationalism is not conservatism (link)
ML, 12/14/07: The non-existence of Kilpatrick's Rule (link)
ML, 2/6/08: Genitive anxiety (link)
ML, 2/12/08: The liturgy of lost causes (link)
ML, 3/26/08: James Kilpatrick, linguistic socialist (link)
ML, 3/28/08: The values of correct grammar (link)
GP, 3/29/08: Modesty, hod-carrying, everything but relevance (link)

On several topics (including "double genitives", as in a friend of Kim's), but especially Kilpatrick's Rule (as we called it), stipulating that only the narrow-scope reading is available for negation in combination with a universal quantifier that is, Mass Transit Not an Option for All Drivers, for example, can mean only 'for all drivers, mass transit is not an option, for no drivers is mass transit an option', and not 'it's not the case that mass transit is an option for all drivers, for some drivers mass transit is not an option' (which is what essentially everyone gets, and conveys, as the meaning, and has done so at least since the time of Shakespeare, "All that glisters is not gold", and similar examples).

Note that he didn't say such sentences were ambiguous (with many speakers having a mere preference for the wide-scope reading), he said that they had only the narrow-scope reading, and that using them to convey the wide-scope reading was some kind of wince-making, eyeroll-provoking, groan-inducing mistake (the winces, eyerolls, and groans were in his original text). His claim was interesting in connection with the actual facts of elite usage, but much more interesting for the assumptions that could possibly have led someone to such a preposterous assertion (some kind of reasoning from first principles, combined with a strongly held belief that what is correct in language is what follows from these principles, that is, that what is correct is what should be correct here I paraphrase, and grossly simplify, Mark Liberman's discussions.).

That's how JJK entered LLC.

He's appeared a number of times here on New Language Log, mostly in comments, and mostly in connection with themes from LLC, but occasionally on other points, like split infinitives and "split verbs", where, so far as I can tell, he seems to have taken positions that accorded with linguists' descriptions of actual (rather than fancied) standard English, though not of course for the same reasons that linguists give.

He lived to be 89, and handily survived his passionate defenses, in his 20s though his 40s, of segegation based on his conviction that "the Negro race, as a race, is in fact an inferior race" (written in 1963), a position he later attributed (in 1970, conceding that segregation was a lost cause) to his upbringing as a white boy in Oklahoma City.

None of the LLoggers ever experienced the sort of public belligerence he displayed towards those he saw (indeed, cultivated) as opponents, for example Shana Alexander on "60 Minutes", in exchanges satirized on "Saturday Night Live" by Dan Ackroyd (in the Kilpatrick role) and Jane Curtin (in the Alexander role): "Jane, you ignorant slut" / "Dan, you pompous ass".

Janet Randall wrote:

I am faced with a query from someone at a pretty high level at Public TV who is objecting to an employee's use of the preposition "acrosst". I looked for some dialect information about this variant of "across" but haven't been able to find it on language log, or anywhere else, without spending more time than I have, so I thought you might know of a post on the log, or know who might know whether this is regional, etc.

I replied:

The OED has an entry for "acrost", listing as U.S. dial. and colloq., with citations going back to 1759:

1759 in Essex Inst. Hist. Coll. (1882) XIX. 145 Ye enemy fird at our men a Crost ye River.
1779 W. MCKENDRY Jrnl. 6 Sept. in Proc. Mass. Hist. Soc. (1886) II. 467 The Lake..is..about 8 miles acrost.

But I felt this was not really an adequate answer, so I forwarded Janet's query to Bill Kretzschmar, who responded:

I'm in Europe and so don't have access to my paper files in Athens [GA], where I could address the particular findings on this point.

The "st" ending is known, especially in Ireland, to be applied to "while" yielding "whilst", and some usage mavens don't like it. A similar case that I know about is the choice between "toward" and "towards", as when you "turn toward(s) an event." I wrote about our Atlas evidence on that one for a Bill Safire "On Language" column years ago (it turns out that the Mid-Atlantic speakers who don't like "towards" are the only ones not to prefer the final s!). In Michigan, people who work for the Ford Motor Company often say that they work for "Fords," which might be interpreted as a strange genitive construction but probably isn't. So, the presence of an extra -s or -st is a commonly occurring variant pronunciation in English. No need to get excited about it. It is not substandard, just a bit different, like many other variations that naturally occur in the language of every educated person. If somebody with enough authority at MPTV doesn't like it, then she can ask the employee not to do it. Now, if somebody then asked me to find such variations in the speech of the MPTV honcho, I suspect it would be easy to find them. We've all got them. Might be better not to start down the road of correcting every little thing we hear.

After Bill got back to Georgia, he added this:

Back in Athens last night. I've had a look at the paper records, and can tell you that we recorded the -st form of "across" from about 20% of the people we interviewed in Maryland (11/62). The form is found throughout the state, from Eastern Shore to Baltimore to up north near the panhandle. It's used by both men and women, both middle age and older (we didn't interview too many young people), different job types. I did not see it among the most educated, but did find it regularly among high-school educated people. It is also pretty common in Pennsylvania, less so in Virginia. Kurath and McDavid produce a map (#179) in their *Pronunciation of English in the Atlantic States* of the places that add a -t to the words "once" and "twice" which shows that the pronunciation is widespread in the Midland and South (except the Virginia piedmont), and "widely used by middle-class speakers" in these areas besides by less-educated people. So, what they say about "oncet" and "twicet" matches what we found for "acrosst".

So, the evidence says that this is a historical pronunciation in Maryland and adjoining states, not particularly marked as uneducated. Our interviews are 20th. c., so not contemporary, but these things usually don't disappear.

The OED's entry somehow missed Kipling's Fuzzy Wuzzy:

We've fought with many men acrost the seas,
An' some of 'em was brave an' some was not:
The Paythan an' the Zulu an' Burmese;
But the Fuzzy was the finest o' the lot.

And also Ring Lardner's You Know Me Al, which has dozens of instances of acrost, e.g.

Well Al I and Schaefer was talking to gether and he says Well may be this is the last time we will ever see the good old US and I says What do you mean and he say People that gos acrost the pacific Ocean most generally all ways has there ship recked and then they is not no more never heard from them.

For the peevers' perspective, we can turn to Charles Harrington Elster, The Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations:

The fact that Elster feels the need to warn "educated speakers" in such dire terms ("lay themselves open to disparagement or ridicule") is good evidence for Bill's suggestion that acrost is "not particularly marked as uneducated", at least in certain regions. On the other hand, Elster's discussion also makes it clear that Janet's Public TV friend is not responding in an idiosyncratic way.

Charles Krauthammer has joined the chorus of pundits using presidential first-person pronouns to test the theory that a lie told often enough becomes the truth ("The selective modesty of Barack Obama", WaPo, 7/9/2010):

It's fine to recognize the achievements of others and be non-chauvinistic about one's country. But Obama's modesty is curiously selective. When it comes to himself, modesty is in short supply.

It began with the almost comical self-inflation of his presidential campaign, from the still inexplicable mass rally in Berlin in front of a Prussian victory column to the Greek columns framing him at the Democratic convention. And it carried into his presidency, from his posture of philosopher-king adjudicating between America's sins and the world's to his speeches marked by a spectacularly promiscuous use of the word "I."

For mind-numbingly detailed examinations of the facts indicating that Obama uses first-person singular pronouns less often than the other recent presidents see here, here, here, here, here, here, And for a discussion of why the use of first-person pronouns is in any case not a very good way to measure modesty vs. narcissism, see here.

But Krauthammer decorates the presidential-pronouns meme with another little empirically-untested curlicue:

Notice, too, how Obama habitually refers to Cabinet members and other high government officials as "my" "my secretary of homeland security," "my national security team," "my ambassador." The more normal and respectful usage is to say "the," as in "the secretary of state." These are, after all, public officials sworn to serve the nation and the Constitution not just the man who appointed them.

Fev at headsup: the blog ("The echo chamber: Pronouns again!", 7/9/2010) does some searching through news archives, and finds that Obama's use of these phrases seems comparable to that of other recent presidents except that by this test, at least, Obama, unlike Carter and Bush senior, seems never to have been quoted as using the phrase "my ambassador".

You can do a version of this sort of thing yourself. Search the NYT archive since 1981 for "my secretary of state", and you'll find 11 hits: in chronological order, the speakers are Ronald Reagan, Jesse Jackson, George Bush senior (three times), Christine Todd Whitman, Jimmy Carter, George W. Bush (twice), Thomas Friedman, and DIck Cheney.

Now not every presidential statement is memorialized in the New York Times, so maybe Charles Krauthammer has commissioned some archival research showing that Barack Obama is especially prone to use phrases like these. Or maybe he's just blowing smoke. My own guess is that he doesn't really know or care what the facts are, because he thinks he knows the truth.

Fev's conclusion:

All right, America's Newspapers. Charles Krauthammer is a hack and a fabulist. You already know that if you run his column. Consider this advance notice that this particular column is a pack of lies from top to bottom. You should consider calling the Washington Post Writers Group and asking for your money back. And if you're the Washington Post, you should consider asking your columnists to meet minimum professional standards or confine themselves to the studios of the Fair 'n' Balanced Network. I really don't think you'd have a problem filling the space with competently written, accurate, provocative material.

If it was up to me, I'd start by soliciting the official Language Log take on Kathleen Parker. That might provide the Wills and Krauthammers of the world with a gentle hint that open fraud is no longer an appropriate mode of op-ed discourse. Sound like fun?

That "official Language Log take" can be found in the posts "Rhetorical testosterone and analytical hallucinations", 7/1/2010, and "More on the stupidity of Kathleen Parker", 7/4/2010.

Political pronoun-counting is not even an original piece of nonsense, alas it's been around in American politics at least since the time of Abraham Lincoln. Here's the entry for "my (use of possessive pronoun)" in Safire's Political Dictionary:

Location based social networks - are you over it already? It feels like location is all we ever hear about anymore, especially this week leading up to SXSW.

We're excited about location too; see our enthusiastic write-ups What Twitter's Geolocation API Makes Possible and The Era of Location as Platform Has Arrived. But it's getting a little ridiculous. We offer below a few thoughts to consider about all this location madness.

Sponsor

1. That Phrase: "Location, Location, Location"

   You're going to hear journalists use it far too much. Want to know where it came from? Language sleuth William Safire investigated for the NYT last year and concluded that the phrase was probably first used in a 1926 real estate classified ad in the Chicago Tribune: "Attention salesmen, sales managers: location, location, location, close to Rogers Park." Don't you feel more savvy now?

2. Too Many Startups?

We're under embargo on almost all of them, but we can tell you there are at least 25 companies making location-related announcements at SXSW this week. Probably more. The Dunbar number of startups in a particular market, if you will, is something like 5. More than that and most people stop taking new entrants seriously. It's one thing to offer different technologies along the value chain of location, but sharing your location and aggregating messages by things like hashtag are two very crowded niches right now. One of my favorites is SitBy.Us, an app that lets you see where your Twitter friends are sitting in a conference session. That's pretty cool.

You've got to wonder if and when Location will Jump the Shark and what consumer exhaustion for it might mean for the long-term prospects of the market. Everyone wants to be "the Twitter of SXSW 2010" but the fact is that SXSW represented a statistically insignificant increase in Twitter usage, historically speaking.

3. Location Startups "Not Playing Nice"

There are loads of ways to post your location but it's very hard to get a feel for who exactly is where. SimpleGeo launched a site called Vicarious.ly today that aggregates check-ins across scads of services, all around Austin. It doesn't work very well, though. SimpleGeo's Matt Galligan told us today that the site is really just a proof of concept and that our perception that these startups aren't playing very nice together is very true. "And it's a real shame," he told us. It's hard for a 3rd party service to clearly identify whether these competing services are really talking about the same location, for example. No one tells their users what users on competing services are up to in the same location. Gowalla's Josh Williams says he doesn't know what the problem is and that Gowalla is very open about user data by open standards.

Update: Galligan pinged us after publication to clarify: "I mostly meant the problem with venue data was because of how awful the *business listings* market is. There's certainly issues with non-connecting venue data but it's a *very* hard problem to solve, so I don't blame them right now. It can, however, be solved in the future."

4. We Need Cross-Service Venue Tracking

If you're thinking of going to a place, or you're there and wonder who else is, what you need is a place where you can see who has checked in there across all services. For the place to be at the center of your experience, not the service. Michael Arrington says the new AOL Lifestream lets you track particular locations, but that service only supports Foursquare among location services. What we need is something like that across any and every check-in service. That's the kind of thing that data standards can enable.

Google's Chris Messina told us that the Activity Streams standard has a namespace for "place" and would probably add support for GeoRSS soon, but that so far Google Buzz is the only location service that seems to be supporting it.

5. Gowalla Doesn't Get Enough Love

Gowalla's API is read-only, meaning that 3rd party apps can't publish check-ins to the service like they can to Foursquare. Gowalla says they are working on it, but they are the underdog already and this isn't helping. AOL's cool new Lifestream product, for example, only supports Foursquare, not Gowalla. That's a real shame. You know what's nice about Gowalla, though? You can see who has checked into a place and when, even if they aren't friends of yours. That's not something that's easy to do with Foursquare at all. It's also much prettier than Foursquare and uses peoples' full names, instead of grade-school-style first names and last initials. Gowalla's API just isn't seeing the adoption that Foursquares is, though. Have you seen Avoidr.org for example? That's pretty funny stuff and it's built on top of Foursquare.


The above is for illustration purposes only. I like both these guys just fine.
6. Imagine the Future, It's Going to Be Different

If location based services ever become popular with the mainstream, every urban area might end up looking like the Foursquare map of downtown Austin this weekend. That means services are going to have to come up with creative and interesting new ways to make that data usable day-to-day and not overwhelming.

Likewise, when you think about the future, imagine Facebook being a player in this market, because they are going to be soon. It's possible that Facebook and Twitter could be where all these other services meet-up. Brightkite has different features than BlockChalk but we can see what our friends are doing across any of these apps on Facebook, perhaps. And Facebook is where your mom checks-in, if she's not an early adopter.

Finally, will location tracking be persistent? Loopt right now uses mobile carrier tie-ins to track your location constantly and expose it to a circle of trusted friends. Is that something that all services will enable in the future? Gowalla CEO Josh Williams told us "no way" does he think that will be the dominant model, but Adam Duvander, author of the forthcoming book Mapscripting 101, says he agrees with Loopt: that the value in persistent location tracking will be so compelling that everyone will end up going for it in the end, once proper privacy settings are figured out.

What do you think, do you think persistent location tracking is the future of location based services?

These are some of the things I'm thinking about location this week.

Discuss

Throughout 2009, I kept a running list of the best journalism I encountered. Although I endeavored to remain as impartial as possible, note that I've been an employee of The Atlantic, that I'd eagerly write for numerous publications that received awards, that I have too many friends/acquaintances/professional contacts in journalism to disclose them all, and that the number of pieces I miss every year far exceeds the number I'm able to read.

In other words, this isn't an infallible account of journalism's best, but I aim to make it the best roundup that any one person can offer, one of these years I intend to do better than the committees who pick the Pulitzer Prizes and National Magazine Awards (the pressure's on, especially since you guys charge entry fees), and if nothing else my effort encompasses writing that is well worth your time.

If you find this a valuable resource or if you want to help support future incarnations, do so through the donate button on the right margin here (it's another project I recently worked on).

The 2008 awards are here, and you can get exceptional journalism throughout the year by following JournoCurator on Twitter.

As is proper, the categories below were chosen after the winning pieces were selected, and serve only as an organizational tool. And now, without further delay

EXCEPTIONAL STORYTELLING

The Washington Post

Fatal Distraction By Gene Weingarten

Forgetting a child in the back seat of a hot, parked car is a horrifying, inexcusable mistake. But is it a crime?

Rolling Stone

The Boy Who Heard Too Much by David Kushner

He was a 14-year-old blind kid, angry and alone. Then he discovered that he possessed a strange and fearsome superpower one that put him in the cross hairs of the FBI.

The Washington Monthly

Pie in the Sky by Mariah Blake

What happened when a billionaire pizza mogul tried to build an elite Catholic law school.

Chicago Magazine

A Mugging on Lake Street By John Conroy

A veteran investigative reporter looks into his own beating and finds himself confronting harsh and lingering questions of race.

Esquire

How I Convinced a Death Row Murderer Not to Die by Michael Finkel

He was the one person on earth I wanted to die, and instead I've helped to save his goddamn life.

LA Weekly

Box of Broken Dreams by Mark Groubert

A young photographer's belongings are abandoned on a Hollywood street, leaving our writer to piece together the fragments of his life.

This American Life

Mistakes Were Made Act One: You're As Cold As Ice

It's the late 1960s, and in the new technology of cryonics, a California TV repairman named Bob sees an opportunity to help people cheat death. But freezing dead people so scientists can reanimate them in the future is a lot harder than it sounds. Harder still was admitting to the family members of people Bob had frozen that he'd screwed up. Badly.

AND

Re-United, Act II: If By Chance We Meet Again

Ralph and Sandra Fisher, who run a show-animal business in Texas, had a beloved Brahman bull named Chance. Chance was the gentlest bull they'd ever seenmore like a pet dog than a bull. When he finally died, Ralph and Sandra were devastated. Around that same time, scientists at Texas A & M University were looking for animal subjects for a cloning project. They already had some tissue from Chance because they'd treated him for an illness. So Ralph and Sandra offered up Chance's DNA for the experiment. Second Chance was born. And he was, eerily, just like Chance. Except he wasn't. Which they found out the hard way.

PROFILES

The Weekly Standard

A Rake's Progress: Marion Barry bares (almost) all. by Matt Labash

The definitive profile.

The Virginia Quarterly Review

Double Vision: The Art of Trevor and Ryan Oakes by Lawrence Weschler

There isn't a person alive who can best Mr. Weschler at writing about art accessibly without sacrificing substance.

The American Prospect

Constant Comment by Kerry Howley

How Kathleen Parker became America's most read woman columnist.

FOREIGN AFFAIRS

The New York Times

Held by the Taliban by David Rohde

The most riveting piece of the year.

Slate

The Letter of Last Resort The Decision About Nuclear Apocalypse Lying in a Safe at the Bottom of the Sea by Ron Rosenbaum

The writer uses a fascinating, little known fact to explore the terrible paradox of nuclear deterrence.

The Virginia Quarterly Review

Empires of the Mind: SERE, Guantnamo, and the Legacies of Torture by David J. Morris

This first person account ends with the kicker of the year.

The New Atlantis

AIDS Relief and Moral Myopia by Travis Kavulla

The writer does his best to tackle the thorny subject of attitudes toward AIDS in parts of Africa that are particularly hard hit, explaining to a Western audience why our assumptions about fighting the disease may not track reality.

The New Yorker

Gangland by Jon Lee Anderson (subscription required)

Inside the favellas of Rio.

World Hum

You're American? I Should Kill You!' by Cory Eldridge

To most of his roommates at his United Arab Emirates apartment, Cory Eldridge was an exotic American. To one of them, the Iraqi who'd been held at Abu Ghraib prison, he was President Bush.'

INVESTIGATIONS

The New Yorker

Trial By Fire by David Grann

Nearly proves that an innocent man was executed in Texas.

The Independent

The Dark Side of Dubai by Johann Hari

Dubai was meant to be a Middle-Eastern Shangri-La, a glittering monument to Arab enterprise and western capitalism. But as hard times arrive in the city state that rose from the desert sands, an uglier story is emerging.

The New York Times Magazine

Strained by Katrina, a Hospital Faced Deadly Choices by Sheri Fink

Arguably the most impressive reporting job this year.

The New Yorker

Brain Gain by Margaret Talbot

The underground world of neuroenhancing drugs.

This American Life

Turncoat

All three acts.

Slate

How Often Do Women Falsely Cry Rape? By Emily Bazelon and Rachael Larimore

A well-executed effort to treat this charged question as empirically as possible.

HEALTH CARE

Wired

An Epidemic of Fear by Amy Wallace

How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All.

The New Yorker

The Cost Conundrum by Atul Gawande

What a Texas town can teach us about health care.

The Atlantic

How American Health Care Killed My Father by David Goldhill

After the needless death of his father, the author, a business executive, began a personal exploration of a health-care industry that for years has delivered poor service and irregular quality at astonishingly high cost. It is a system, he argues, that is not worth preserving in anything like its current form. And the health-care reform now being contemplated will not fix it. Here's a radical solution to an agonizing problem.

This American Life

Fine Print: Act Three Restrictions May Apply

On the least-defensible insurance industry practice.

AND

The radio show's exceptional two-part broadcast explaining the American health care system here and here.

SPORTS & LEISURE

GQ

Game Drain by Jeanne Marie Laskas

What the NFL doesn't want you to know.

The Weekly Standard

The Cocktail Renaissance by Robert Messenger

The piece I most enjoyed reading this year.

The New York Times Magazine

The No Stat All Star by Michael Lewis

The writer's sports prose is as fun to read as anything by Malcolm Gladwell, its arguments are as counter-intuitive, and its conclusions on basketball are more persuasive (in other words, NBA coaches would be better served trading for Shane Battier than instituting a full court press).

BEST RANT

The New York Press

Flat N All That by Matt Taibbi

The writer's polemical rants are hit and miss. This one puts Tom Friedman so far up a creek he'll need three shovels and a steering wheel to spelunk himself out.

SHORT ESSAYS

Obsidian Wings

Why Do They Stay? by Hilzoy

Shortly before retiring from the blogosphere, the dearly missed blogger explained why battered women don't leave their abusers.

The American Scene

A New Way to Think About Life by Reihan Salam

The Cosmic Timekeeper is on your side.

The New Yorker

William Safire (1929 2009) Mother Hen by Hendrik Hertzberg

A lesson in how to write an obit for someone with whom you profoundly disagreed.

The Washington Examiner

The lonely passing of Senator Kennedy by J.P. Freier

Empathy as a rarely used but useful tool in editorial writing.

The Washington Post

Murphy's Law by Gene Weingarten

The writer excels on every topic he tackles. Dogs are no exception.

This American Life

Pro Se: Act I, Psycho Dabble

Contributor Jon Ronson tells the story of a man who has spent more than a decade trying to convince doctors that he's not mentally ill. But the more he argues his case, the less they believe him.

BEST ARTICLE RENDERED UNSEARCHABLE DUE TO A CRIMINALLY BAD WEB SITE

The New Republic

An unknown story from the magazine whose URL I saved, but that I cannot now access due to their long-running, maddening archival clusterfuck. Can you help me out, criminally underpaid TNR interns? http://www.tnr.com/story_print.html?id=12ef5554-1023-4be9-ad93-681003b280ef

EDUCATION

The Washington Monthly

College for $99 a Month by Kevin Carey

The next generation of online education could be great for studentsand catastrophic for universities.

This American Life

Going Big Prologue and Act One: Harlem Renaissance

Paul Tough reports on the Harlem Children's Zone, and its CEO and president, Geoffrey Canada. Among the project's many facets is Baby College, an 8-week program where young parents and parents-to-be learn how to help their children get the education they need to be successful.

Human Resources Act One: Rubber Room.

The true story of little-known rooms in the New York City Board of Education building. Teachers are told to report there instead of their classrooms. No reason is usually given. When they arrive, they find they've been put on some kind of probationary status, and they must report every day until the matter is cleared up.

The New Yorker

The Rubber Room by Steven Brill

The battle over New York City's worst teachers.

TRAVEL

World Hum

Where No Travel Writer Has Gone Before by Rolf Potts

The writer joins Trekkies aboard a Star Trek' theme cruise to Bermuda.

MichaelTotten.com

Christopher Hitchens and the Battle of Beirut by Michael Totten

A famous writer, a swastika, and a street brawl that could've turned deadly.

The Atlantic Online

Keep scrolling down through Graeme Wood's astonishing blog Prepared for the Worst, penned by the man who may be 2009's most well-traveled writer.

BUSINESS AND ECONOMICS

The Wall Street Journal

No Grapes, No Nuts, No Market Share by Barry Newman

All the world's Grape Nuts come from a dirty-white, six-story concrete building with steam rising out of the roof here in the San Joaquin Valley. The valley grows lots of grapes and lots of nuts, so the factory's location would make sense, if Grape Nuts contained any local ingredients. Which it doesn't.

Vanity Fair

Wall Street on the Tundra by Michael Lewis

Iceland's de facto bankruptcyits currency (the krona) is kaput, its debt is 850 percent of G.D.P., its people are hoarding food and cash and blowing up their new Range Rovers for the insuranceresulted from a stunning collective madness.

Wired

Why Craigslist is Such a Mess by Gary Wolf

The worst site that we all use by choice.

Vanity Fair

The Man Who Crashed the World by Michael Lewis

Is there anyone on earth who can write a story as enjoyable about AIG? (This story is complemented by an episode of This American Life that is also excellent.)

This American Life

Scenes From A Recession.

All three acts and no, this isn't the same episode linked above.

CULTURE & CRITICISM

The American Spectator

The New Humanism by Roger Scruton

Why it's worse than the old humanism.

Slate

My Newborn is Like a Narcotic by Katie Roiphe

Ignore the subtitle and enjoy a blissful piece.

Reason

Anatomy of a Child Pornographer by Nancy Rommelmann

What happens when adults catch teenagers sexting photos of each other? The death of common sense.

Vanity Fair

A Crime of Shadows by Mark Bowden

After months of prowling Internet chat rooms, posing as the mother of two young daughters, Detective Michele Deery thought she had a live one: parafling,' a married, middle-aged man who claimed he wanted to have sex with her kids. But was he just playing a twisted game of seduction? Both the policewoman and her target give the author their versions of the truth, in a case that challenges the conventional wisdom about online sexual predators, and blurs the lines among crime, intent,' and enticement.

The New York Times Magazine

Married (Happily) With Issues by Elizabeth Weil

The writer grapples with America's marriage counseling trend by revealing the intimate details of what happened when she and her husband set out to improve their union, and wound up testing it.

New York Magazine

The Sex Diaries: A Critical (But Highly Sympathetic) Reading of New Yorkers' Sexual Habits and Anxieties by Wesley Yang

The New York Times Magazine

Google's Earth by Nicholas Baker

The American Scholar

The Decline of the English Department by William M. Chase

The New York Times Magazine

Love in 2-D by Lisa Katayama

The weirdest trend story of the year.

ENTERPRISE JOURNALISM

The Atlantic

What Makes Us Happy? by Joshua Wolf Shenk

Is there a formulasome mix of love, work, and psychological adaptationfor a good life? says the subhead. For 72 years, researchers at Harvard have been examining this question, following 268 men who entered college in the late 1930s through war, career, marriage and divorce, parenthood and grandparenthood, and old age. Here, for the first time, a journalist gains access to the archive of one of the most comprehensive longitudinal studies in history. Its contents, as much literature as science, offer profound insight into the human conditionand into the brilliant, complex mind of the study's longtime director.

Wired

Writer Evan Ratliff Tried to Vanish. Here's What Happened. by Even Ratfliff

PHOTOJOURNALISM

The Big Picture

The Sartorialist

DOGGEDNESS AWARD

Box Turtle Bulletin

Coverage of the Ugandan anti-homosexuality legislation.

MEDIA CRITICISM

This American Life

The Friendly Man Act II, The Friendly Man

Scott Carrier takes a job inside his profession, as a producer for a national commercial radio program, and catalogs the pressure he faces to turn in the kinds of stories Americans want to hear.

The Daily Show

Despite going after the right with more acuity and zeal than the left, Jon Stewart and his team of writers have no peers when it comes to exposing the absurdity of cable news networks.

Slate

Jack Shafer wins the year's most consistently good media critic award.

One Forty Plus

The Anatomy of a Smear: How The Reigning King of Special Effects Got Caught in One by John Mayer

Yes, that John Mayer. Weird, I know.

NONFICTION BOOKS

The Ballad of Abu Ghraib by Philip Gourevitch

Left seat Pilot Thomas Sonne; Right seat: Major Bill Tice.

Kandahar, Afghanistan
10 February 2010

American forces are stationed at bases far and wide around Afghanistan. Some bases are like towns, such as Camp Bastion, Kandahar Airfield, and Bagram Airfield. But mostly they are small, often occupied by only a handful of troops.

Logistics into Afghanistan is a nightmare, and it only gets worse after you cross the border from the North or from Pakistan. By comparison, Iraq logs was like a run to a convenience store down the road. Afghan logs are more like driving from Miami to Seattle for grocery shopping, and then driving the groceries back to Miami while under threat of attack. Not a speck of exaggeration in that statement. Enemy logs interdiction was a large constituent of the Soviet defeat, despite that the Soviet Union comprised the entire northern border of Afghanistan. When the Soviet hammer tried to crack the Afghan rock, the hammer shattered. The Soviets can easily put people in space and keep them there, but they couldn't handle backdoor logistics during their Afghan war. It's easier to keep people in space than to supply our war here.

Our Coalition is stunningly more effective at logistics than were the Soviets. For instance, when the British were resupplying small FOBs near Sangin last yearjust a short drive from the origin at Camp Bastionthe monthly convoys were major operations that drained needed combat power, and still vehicles were destroyed with casualties. So powerful are some of the bombs that they can launch the ultra-armored American MRAPs into the air, flipping them like turtles, often breaking the backs of soldiers. Even today, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is making moves to facilitate allies to get more counter-IED gear, such as MRAPs, which seems like a good move because some allies are risk-averse to the point of being ineffective (not that MRAPs are going to save them). By air, when a civilian helicopter was trying to resupply at Sangin, it was shot down just outside the base, killing the crew and at least one child on the ground. Make no mistake: this is a worthy enemy.

Without the U.S. Air Force, we would need thousands more troops here just to run convoys, and bringing in those troops would require more convoys to supply their needs. It's okay to use contractors to bring supplies in from Pakistan or from the north, but driving up into those mountains and other remote locations would be suicidal.

The United States Air Force invited me on a resupply mission, and when I showed up at 0400 to the trailer where the crew lives, one of their doors had been blown off the night before, leaving all else intact. Nobody knows what caused the door-ripping, though SSG Michael Jeffries was outside and said he got pounded in the face by gravel. Michael Jeffries said the winds were at least 60MPH and lasted only a few seconds. The pilots inside hit the deck. Anyway, Afghan mysteries aside, we drove to a chow hall, got breakfast to-go, and drove to the flightline.

The 772 Expetionary Airlift Squadron (EAS), from Little Rock, is comprised of elements from the 19th Airlift Wing, which they call the Black Knights. During January 2010 the 772 EAS conducted 119 missions in Afghanistan that comprised 454 sorties. That's a lot of convoys saved.

Today's mission would consist of six sorties. A sortie consists of a takeoff and landing, and hopefully the landing was controlled. We would fly from KAF to Shindand to unload supplies, pick up passengers, then fly back to KAF. That would be two sorties. The crew would pick up more supplies and passengers and fly to a small base in Farah Province, then back to KAF to pick up another load, then fly to Camp Bastion, then back to KAFmission completefor a total of six sorties. Arguably this could be called three missions, but the Air Force is conservative and calls it one mission. The pilots would not shut down the engines which would be running all day.

Before starting engines, Captain Thomas Sonne, the pilot, adjusted an oxygen mask and showed me how to use it. He handed over a Bose noise-cancellation headset, then plugged it into the comms and demonstrated how to adjust volume on several radios and the internal.

I asked Captain Sonne if we have enough C-130 lift in Afghanistan (knowing we don't have enough helicopters). Captain Sonne said we had enough C-130 liftnot extra capacity, but enough, which coincides with what others have said. Is the Haiti relief hurting us here? Captain Sonne confirmed what others have said: no, they can't feel the Haiti mission affecting our effort. Captain Sonne explained we are short on ramp space to park the aircraft, so they are busy building more ramp. This coincides with something General Petraeus told me in late 2008.

The pilot and copilot started through the strange checklist. The instrument panel showed we had 24,590 pounds of fuel. The weather was looking dicey for the landings on the rough airstrips, but takeoff would be easy, the pilots said. There were eight passengers and eight crew; three of the crew were FAST personnel (Flyaway Security Team) with body armor and weapons, and they would disembark on landing to guard the aircraft. Was good to have them along. Finally the crew got to the pre-taxi checklist. I understood a few words on this one:

Brakes.
Brakes clear.
Copy.

Captain Sonne was wearing night vision goggles while Major Tice, copilot, was going without. Captain Sonne's voice came over: We've got a 135,000-pound airplane, and then he looked back over his right shoulder at me, saying, If you have any questions, go ahead and I'll alert you if we are busy. Roger, I say in the microphone.

And now they are talking to each other again, We'll try to get up to 265 tactical, says Captain Sonne.

My pen was too slow, especially in the dark cockpit, but I got some snippets:

Pre-flight checks complete, says Major Tice.
Pressurized.
Roger.

They talk quickly, succinctly, all business, and rumble down the dark runaway and lift away, Gear's up. Gear's up. The flight computer has a female voice that commands attention, and she kept saying, Altitude, altitude, altitude, altitude, and then much later, the computer woman says, Thousand to go. This has to be about one of the coolest jobs in the military. As we roar into the sky, it occurs to me that a young person with brains and a sense of adventure would be crazy not to consider joining the Air Force. This is fun!

I ask through the headset if the HUDs are classified and if it's permissible to make photos so people at home can see. Captain Sonne and Major Tice said there is nothing classified. Have at it.

We descend into Shindand by first coming over the base, and doing a hard corkscrew down, wings sometimes tipped at 45 degrees, to avoid ground fire. The cockpit is armored against SAFIRE, but there are people in the back and it's never a good idea to get your airplane shot.

We come down to the skinny runway, apparently made for Russian figthers, some of which were sitting near the runway. The Taliban had gotten their hands on old aircraft years ago, and somehow got them flying. Today, Taliban Air Force consists of kites and carrier pigeons. I've photographed a kite in downtown Kandahar that was flying in the dark with a dim strobe. Was it a signal? The pilots intended to land at about 120 knots.

We landed and the pallets were removed by forklift, followed by the pax (passengers).

The crew had a couple of flags hanging in the back. The pilots said they fly flags on missions for people at home, and send each flag back with a little certificate.

More passengers were loaded up and we rumbled away at about 0730, and someone said from the back that a flock of birds was off to our right. After we were safely airborne, and the pilots finished their checklists, I asked about bird strikes. How high do bird strikes happen in Afghanistan? Major Tice had heard of a strike that occurred at over 20,000 feet. Everyone seems to have high regard for the C-130J. The pilots explain that older variants required six crew members, but the J only needs four. The Navigator and Engineer no longer are needed, and so this cuts one officer and one NCO, both of whom require much expensive training. A four-man crew beats a hundred-man convoy.

And that was it; we landed back at KAF, the first two sorties complete.

KAF doubles as a civilian airport with traffic including 747s. This is the civilian side of the terminal. We can't do a lot of top secret stuff on the airfield because civilian planes land every day and everyone can take photos.

Captain Sonne and Major Tice parked the airplane, left the motors running without the props turning, and while loadmasters re-loaded the C-130J, I got coffee.

We loaded back up and taxied to the runway for the second part of the mission: take supplies and pax to Farah Province. On the taxiway, we waited for this 747 to take off. ATC (Air Traffic Control) said something about a 747 heavy taking off. I asked the pilots what heavy means, and they answered that any aircraft weighing more than 250,000 pounds is considered heavy, and there are special rules at KAF for heavy. For instance, after he takes off, a truck must drive the runway to clear debris that the giant engines often blow onto the runway. The debris will not damage the C-130 (after all, they land on gravel airstrips), but a rock sucked inside an F-16 engine is a bad thing, and we don't want to see pilots ejecting off the end of the runway while one of our jets crashes in the desert. Another rule is that we have to wait for three minutes after a heavy takes off because the giant airplanes leave dangerous vortices that can cause us to crash.

While we rumbled toward the FOB in Farah, the pilots were curious about the ground war and I offered a few vignettes. There are thousands of wars going on here. Everyone's war is a snowflake.

As we approached the airstrip, the pilots put the nose down and we dived into the soup of clouds. The biggest threat in Afghanistan for fixed-wing pilots is terrain. It's easy to eat a huge mountain over here.

Flaps 50% please.
Roger.

Now over Farah and approaching the strip, we kept going down, down, down and the clouds were looking brown. Occasionally the clouds winked and we could spot the earth momentarily, until the instruments said we were a thousand feet up. The pilots could not see the ground. The ATC said visibility was less than two miles, and Captain Sonne said he could not see a half-mile ahead. A loadmaster called up saying he could barely see the ground at 1,000 feet. I just kept saying to myself, They know what they are doing. They know what they are doing. They know what they are doing. Captain Sonne reported we were getting some rain, and finally, at four miles out, he said Abort, and I drew a breath of relief and we climbed away. As we climbed out, Captain Sonne said, A little bit of rain, I'm going to switch back to weather.

We continued to climb away, when on another channel a pilot was talking to the ATC behind us. ATC crackled to the pilot, Runway unsafe to land. Report your intentions. Captain Sonne explained that the ATC can advise the pilot about unsafe conditions, but the decision to land rests with the pilot. The other pilot aborted. ATC called saying it could be 2-3 days before the sloppy runway was dry enough for safe landing.

The computer issued an alert about a fuel imbalance. Captain Sonne explained that in older C-130 variants, the flight engineer would have been aboard to monitor this, and then he explained some details about fuel balancing and why it's important to stay within constraints to maintain stability. He reached around to his left and pulled out a book, explaining the different sections. Some alarms were critical and could mean life and death, but this was just an alert to take care of some housekeeping. He read the procedure, which he probably already had memorized, and dialed four overhead knobs to redistribute the fuel, explaining each step.

We landed back at KAF and prepared for the sortie to Camp Bastion, but got a report that an aircraft had a problem on the runway, and so the Bastion runway was shut down and there was a delay. Meanwhile, a rocket attack occurred and so we ended up on the ground, and there was a nearby boom (maybe a few hundred meters or more). We wasted time in the bunker (somebody's rule up top) and the senior officer took inventory of his people, and finally the all-clear was sounded. We learned that the runway at Bastion was still closed. That was it. Mission was over. Not every mission goes perfectly, but then you can't control the weather, or acts of God. And in any case, this was seven doing the job of a hundred.

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Ben Zimmer on William Safire in his role as the NYT's On Language columnist:

For more than 30 years, in more than 1,300 crisp installments, Safire used this space to create a singular voice, that of the Language Maven, as he styled himself. We lost that voice last month, but we are left with a rich and varied legacy that shaped how Americans talk about talk.

When Safire died and I wrote that he was one of my favorite writers and columnists, I got a slew of complaints from left-leaning DF readers. How could I say such good things about a man who, among other things, so strongly supported George W. Bush's disastrous invasion of Iraq?

Here's the thing. I didn't read his op-ed column because I agreed with him; I read it because I didn't agree with him. Though I seldom agreed with his politics (and when I did, it was in favor of individual privacy and liberty), Safire was always thoughtful and his writing always playful. I feel it's important to read the opinions of those with whom you tend to disagree, politically or otherwise.

But even if your politics and constitution are such that you could not abide his op-ed column, I don't see how anyone who loves U.S. English didn't cherish his Sunday On Language column as the national treasure that it was. 30 years! And he kicked ass until the very end.

Columnist and conservative speechwriter William Safire died yesterday at age 79. Here is the speech he drafted for president Nixon to read in the event that Apollo 11 astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong found themselves stranded to die on the moon. I am happy to note that Messrs. Aldrin and Armstrong are all still alive (as is Michael Collins, who orbited the moon while his colleagues walked on her surface). William Safire's Finest Speech. (Gawker, via Scott Beale)

Columnist and presidential speechwriter Bill Safire was one of only three non-disloyal Jews President Nixon could name. Here is the speech he drafted for Nixon to read in case the Apollo 11 Astronauts became stranded on the moon!

It is a wonderful piece of alternate universe American history, in which President Nixon had to explain to a nation that Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong were going to die on the moon.

Morton Janklow remembers his lifelong friend, William Safire:

Bill brought a surprising contrarian perspective, grounded in conservatism in the true sense of that word. A civil rights advocate, a staunch defender of the right of privacy and human rights around the world, and an outspoken critic of governmental efforts to infringe upon those rights, Bill was, at the same time, cautious about political and social change and hawkish in his attitude about America's role, including its military role, in the post-World War II era.

Here's JPod's summary:

He was a patriot, an American nationalist, a Zionist, a civil libertarian, and a classic Washington type of a sort that has now almost entirely passed from the scene.

I loved reading him on the nanny state, the First Amendment, the pretensions of left-liberalism, and his love of actual life in all its humdrum variety. I confess to finding his writing style sometimes unbearably cute, but there was great mischief in his provocations, and his back-and-forth with readers on language was, in some ways, a fore-runner of the blogosphere. He lacked pretension as a journalist when New York Times hauteur was at its peak.

But when the subject turned to Israel, the tone shifted dramatically.

It wasn't his Zionism or defense of successive Israeli governments, or his right-of-the-Likud stance that troubled me. It was the assumption of the most extreme views of Jewish and Israeli vulnerability as if they were inarguably the only positions a non-anti-Semite could take. Maybe that's why the New York Times obit made no mention at all of his life-long defense of Israel. Were they embarrassed by it? Or did it seem routine?

With this passionate exception, Charles Murray's tribute to Safire (and Buckley and Kristol) is on point, even as I think he overlooks Kristol's latter day cynicism and movementitis:

The comparisons with the voices of the Right today are unavoidable (The Left's no better, but they're not for me to worry about). There are many exceptions in print and some on radio and television. But who got on the cover of Time magazine the same week as Irving died? Glenn Beck, sticking his tongue out. He and others like him comprise far too much of the public face of the Right todaycrudely sarcastic when they are not being angry, mean-spirited, and often embarrassingly ignorant. The antithesis of Friedman, Buckley, and Kristol.

I expect to be told that I'm too squeamish. We're in a battle for America's soul at a pivotal moment. But the very truth of that statementwe are indeed in a battle for America's soulmakes it a good idea to stop and think about when the American Right was truly influential. It didn't start after right-wing talk shows got big. It started in the 1960s, as Friedman, Buckley, and Kristol were hitting their stride. It flowered in the 1970s, then reached its apogee in the 1980s when their ideas were given political force by Ronald Reagananother man of civility, good humor, and optimism. Don't tell me that we have to put up with the Glenn Becks of the world to be successful.

So another Bush bashing book is out (at least in excerpt) and the Bushie loyalists are again charging the airwaves and the Internet to defend GWB. Just as we saw with Scott McClellan, they'll define Latimer as a doofus, out of the loop, in over his head, not as important as he thinks. (Which, of course, begs the question why the Administration excelled at hiring the incompetent and the self-important. Didn't they have a screening process?)

I have read the excerpts of Latimer's book and frankly don't find all that much wrong with it. I'll likely buy the book and consume it all simply because I liked the way the excerpts were written. His publisher is right. He has an engaging style. Was he in the room or across the street at the EEOB? Who cares. He was clearly closer to the President than 99.9% of Americans will ever get in their life, so let him have his say. We might find it interesting.

The treatment Latimer has received in the last 36 hours, however, has left me perplexed. It reminded me a lot of McClellan's welcoming reception and that reminded me of something Peggy Noonan wrote.

William Safire, himself a memoirist of the Nixon years, said to me, a future memoirist of the Reagan years: The one thing history needs more of is first-person testimony. History needs data, detail, portraits, information; it needs eyewitness. I was there, this is what I saw. History will sift through, consider and try in its own way to produce something approximating truth.In that sense one should always say of memoirs of those who hold or have held power: More, please.

Noonan, and by extension Safire, were spot on. I think that every White House staffer should not be discouraged, but rather should be required to write a book, and tell the story of their time there. Our history demands that those making it (whether the President or his secretary) should provide us with as much detail as possible. When these books are written we should not denounce the writer, we should simply ask for the next installment from the guy who sat next to Latimer so we could see how he remembered the events.

One of the most interesting conversations I have ever had was with the woman who sat next to Monica Lewinsky in the White House. She once gave me her take on the woman behind the blue dress and it meant more to me than any ABC News special report.

Do I buy the caricature of Latimer as an opportunist trying to parlay his brush with fame into a financial windfall? Absolutely. Do I also believe that much of what he says is probably exactly as he remembers it? Absolutely.

That's why we need more of these books, not less. We need to be able to compare notes and make our own determination about what happened, who these people were, where they made mistakes and where they proved they were only human.

Now, the latest to weigh in against Latimer in protecting the Bush years is James Carville.

This little dweeb needs to be glove slapped People that have the honor of working in the White House ought not be going out and publishing this

I couldn't disagree with Carville more.

The people that need to be glove slapped are Carville and his ilk for attempting to silence future tomes. If Dana Perino, Tony Fratto, or Ed Gillespie recall events differently, let them write a book and give us their take. By the time all the ink dries, we might have a semi-complete picture of life inside the GWB administration.