Galley Friend Mike Russell (whose art adorns good chunks of wall-space at my office) has been interviewed over at io9.

The Sabertooth Vampire is happening!

Olbermann: The Movie

Be on the lookout: Joel Engel’s amazing L.A. ’56 is beginning to roll out in bookstores and will ship from Amazon on April 10. Buy it now; you’ll thank me later. It’s true crime at its very, very best.

Offered without comment. Except that it’s 1,700 words long.

I hope Chris Hughes is good for the New Republic and if taking down the magazine’s paywall works for them, mazel-mazel. But I found this line about how TNR had to take down the paywall to attract writing talent to be kind of insane:

It’s just under two years since TNR implemented the paywall. A former staffer tells us that “it was unpopular with writers at the time.” Articles were essentially “doomed to obscurity”—even as more people subscribed to read them—because sharing on larger platforms wasn’t possible.

It’s not exactly a surprise that an internet sharing pioneer like Hughes is willing to forgo subscriptions and money in order to get more people reading the magazine. Sharing has become the currency of the Internet, and it’s the thing that makes reporting-for-cheap worthwhile for a lot of writers. We imagine that taking down the paywall will appeal to younger writers who might otherwise pass on working for TNR. And as long as Hughes has money to burn, this sounds like a pretty good idea to us.

Wait–there are young writers out there in the world who are turning down paying gigs at the New Republic because it just doesn’t give them enough exposure? Is this a joke?

Journalism is in a nuclear winter. There are probably 50 aspiring writers for every real-world, paying gig. And every magazine in Washington could easily fill its entire newshole with cheap, over-the-transom freelance copy and never even need paid staff writers. (Let’s hope they don’t figure this out soon . . .)

I’m sure killing the paywall made business sense for TNR in some way. But I’d be really, really surprised if they did it because the labor-supply market for writers is so tight.

Here’s Romney connecting with Wisconsin voters:

Talking by conference call with thousands of Wisconsin voters Wednesday, Mitt Romney told them he had a humorous connection to their state.

But it didn’t take long for “funny anecdote” to become “campaign fodder.”

Romney’s story involved the time more than 50 years ago that his father, George, an American Motors executive, shut down a factory in Michigan and moved the work to Wisconsin.

“Now later he decided to run for governor of Michigan, and so you can imagine that having closed the factory and moved all the production to Wisconsin was a very sensitive issue to him, for his campaign,” explained Romney, who described a subsequent campaign parade in which the school band marching with his father knew how to play Wisconsin’s fight song, but not Michigan’s.

“Every time they would start playing ‘On Wisconsin, On Wisconsin,’ my dad’s political people would jump up and down and try to get them to stop, because they didn’t want people in Michigan to be reminded that my dad had moved production to Wisconsin,” said Romney, laughing.

Ahh. Closing factories; talking up your dynastic roots; laughing about your father freaking out over political optics so as not to upset the dim-witted voters. Good times.

But don’t worry: Romney is a hedge for down-ticket Republicans.

Don’t miss this wonderful little WSJ piece about the cottage industry of former white-collar felons consulting with incoming white-collar felons on how to survive prison.

The piece is worth reading on its own merits, but what’s really great is that it highlights the chasm between the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. You can tell, pretty easily, how just about every line in this piece would have been written by a Times reporter: ponderous, diligent, hectoring.

Instead, the Journal’s Michael Rothfeld is sly, cheeky, and fun. Look at the way he slips “courtesy flush” in there–it’s not just hysterical, it’s artfully done. He’s got such a great punchline that he knows he doesn’t have to do cartwheels around it. He just pulls the pin on the grenade, drops it, and slips out the back door.

I’ve never been quite able to understand why the NYT–outside the precincts of the Sunday Magazine–is so hostile to good writing. Maybe it comes with the burdens of being the paper of record.

TNR’s Jonathan Bernstein thinks the SCOTUS verdict won’t have any political implications for this year’s election. I disagree.

And while we’re at it, I’d encourage the three of you who haven’t signed up for my Weekly Standard newsletter to do so. Today’s edition is full of Flash Trading, singularity-style paranoia.