On Amtrak between New York and Washington I sit in the Quiet Car with my phone off, laptop stowed, completely unreachable, and find out if I’m still capable of reading for two hours. I’ve been careful not to mention this to sources in Washington, where conversation consists of two people occasionally glancing up from their BlackBerries and saying, “I’m listening.” I worry that I won’t be taken seriously as a Washington journalist, and phone calls from my retrograde Samsung cell phone will go unanswered. I don’t have a BlackBerry, or an iPhone, or a Google phone, and I don’t intend to get an iPad. I’m afraid I’d end up letting my son go hungry. It scares me, not because I’m morally superior to it, but because I don’t think I could handle it. ![]() Carr himself was once a crack addict (he wrote about it in “ The Night of the Gun”). Who doesn’t want to be taken out of the boredom or sameness or pain of the present at any given moment? That’s what drugs are for, and that’s why people become addicted to them. And: “Twitter becomes an always-on data stream from really bright people.” And: “The real value of the service is listening to a wired collective voice … the throbbing networked intelligence.” And: “On Twitter, you are your avatar and your avatar is you.” And finally: “There is always something more interesting on Twitter than whatever you happen to be working on.” The most frightening picture of the future that I’ve read thus far in the new decade has nothing to do with terrorism or banking or the world’s water reserves-it’s an article by David Carr, the Times’ s media critic, published on the decade’s first day, called “ Why Twitter Will Endure.” “I’m in narrative on more things in a given moment than I ever thought possible,” Carr wrote. Twitter sounds less like sipping than drowning. In fact, if you’re at all like me, you’re trying to keep your footing out in midstream, with the water level always dangerously close to your nostrils. But that supposes we’re all kneeling on the banks. I’m told that Twitter is a river into which I can dip my cup whenever I want. The notion of sending and getting brief updates to and from dozens or thousands of people every few minutes is an image from information hell. Every time I hear about Twitter I want to yell Stop. The truth is, I feel like yelling Stop quite a bit these days. Anyway, I’m glad to see it back, and I’ll try to keep up with subsequent issues, even if I’m annoyed every second or third article by condescension or dogma. I’d like to believe that something with The Baffler’ s anti-market world view could do the same. Brevity is the fashion we bring you long-form cultural criticism with an emphasis on stylistic quality.” A little like the appearance of Buckley’s National Review, whose original mission statement, back in 1955, declared that the magazine “stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.”īuckley ended up riding history, and even guiding it. ![]() ![]() “Print is dead, they say we double down in our commitment to the printed word. “As the world careens one way we faithfully steer the other,” the editors state up front. There’s even a blue nylon bookmark glued into the spine. The writers are older, more established than before, the tone is more staid, and the presentation is defiantly old-fashioned.
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