"We must always be very careful in trying to relate any country’s taste in sport to its national temperament. After all, the most varied of cultures all prefer soccer. But still, America’s increased devotion to football must mean something. Unlike our two other home-bred sports, baseball and basketball, which have developed appeal in many other countries, American football is just that –– American. Except for a bit over our northern border, in all the world it is played seriously only in the United States. That we alone love this sport so much and love it more and more — that must tell us something about ourselves."
— Football Uber Alles. Uber Alles, Football — Frank Deford
"Thomas’s approach to the Eighth Amendment underlines some of the problems with his approach to the Constitution, and with originalism generally. Only two Justices, Thomas and Scalia, have built their jurisprudence around originalism (one of them faintheartedly), so its full adoption would require the trashing of dozens, if not hundreds, of Court precedents. Further, notwithstanding Thomas’s enduring certainties, it is difficult to know what the framers would have thought of any given situation. (Alito, a conservative but not a full-fledged originalist, captured this problem nicely, in the oral argument about the California law on violent video games. Following up on a series of questions by Scalia, Alito asked the lawyer, “I think what Justice Scalia wants to know is what James Madison thought about video games. Did he enjoy them?”)"
— The Thomases vs. Obama’s Health-Care Plan
This bit in the NYT Mag about David Foster Wallace and the modern style of writing he helped spawn hits remarkably close to home. I struggle to strip my writing of qualifying word, lulz jargon, parenthetical asides and ironic punctuation. Sometimes I can’t do it. Sometimes I just don’t want to. (Lots of my favorite web writers do this stuff all the time, and they’re very entertaining. It’s not all bad!) But I do think this piece is valid.
Qualifications are necessary sometimes. Anticipating and defusing opposing arguments has been a vital rhetorical strategy since at least the days of Aristotle. Satire and ridicule, when done well, are high art. But the idea is to provoke and persuade, not to soothe. And the best way to make an argument is to make it, straightforwardly, honestly, passionately, without regard to whether people will like you afterward.
"Paying for something you value, even when you don’t need to, is a mark of a civilized society. The NYT treated its readers as mature and civilized adults, and outperformed internal expectations as a result. Meanwhile, the WSJ and FT are still treating their readers with mistrust, as though they’ll be robbed somehow if they ever let their guard down a little. It’s a sad and ultimately self-defeating stance, and I hope in future they learn from the NYT’s embrace of the open web, even in conjunction with a paywall."
— Felix Salmon
