At the New Yorker, Elif Batuman explains what’s wrong with comparing Ferguson and Iraq.
Why did Buzzfeed’s Jeremy Singer-Vine use Github to post the data he used in an article about Jefferson and St Louis-area segregation? “As journalists marshall more data than ever, collect it from a wider range of sources, and analyze it in increasingly complex ways, it’s important (and interesting!) to be transparent about those processes.”
At Salon, Molly Fischer boldly urges the New York Times Book Review to kill its Bookends column. “It’s not just the stiff phrasing (‘What should we make of this?’ ‘What’s behind the notion?’) that gives Bookends its blue-books-and-binder-paper feel,” Fischer writes. “It’s also the whole concept of a column designed to offer only the gentlest, most dutiful provocations.”
PT Anderson has quietly and selectively started screening his adaptation of Inherent Vice, Thomas Pynchon’s So-Cal stoner detective romp, which stars Joaquin Phoenix, Josh Brolin, Owen Wilson, Benicio Del Toro, and Reese Witherspoon.
Politico’s media reporter Dylan Byers has published a piece arguing that Vox—the media venture started by Ezra Klein, Melissa Bell, and Matthew Yglesias—has not lived up to its promise. But as David Weigel at Slate points out, Vox has passed up Politico’s traffic in just a short time.
