I’ve got a short item up at the Standard on Superman renouncing his citizenship. It’s another brilliant move from the crack team running DC.

In related news, I found a high-grade copy of Silver Surfer #4 last night . . .

Update: Here’s is a perfect example of a very particular kind of journalism. Over at Reuters, Alex Dobuzinski has a piece about the reaction to the news of Superman’s impending citizenship renouncement. He writes:

In the comic, Superman never actually renounces his citizenship, he only talks about his plans to do that.

But conservative commentators reacted with disgust to the new storyline, given that the fictional superhero has long proclaimed he stood for “Truth, Justice and the American way.”

In a blog post at The Weekly Standard, senior writer Jonathan Last questioned Superman’s beliefs, now that he seems to have rejected the United States.

“Does he believe in British interventionism or Swiss neutrality?” Last wrote. “You see where I’m going with this: If Superman doesn’t believe in America, then he doesn’t believe in anything.”

Maybe “conservative commentators” have reacted with disgust. And I’m certainly bent out of shape about it. But the point of my complaint–and I don’t think it was buried too deeply–wasn’t “hey, here’s another bit of PC nonsense.” It was: “Hey, Superman needs this anchor to give his character dramatic weight and meaning and what DC has done strips him of that.”

I realize this is a (slightly) nuanced argument but isn’t it pretty obvious that it’s a literary, not a political one?

The NYT carries a story on Microtask, a tech firm which slices really mundane data-entry style work into pieces that can be accomplished in about 2 seconds. The Big Brains at Microtask believe that soon they will partner with game designers to make this work less like a chore and more like a videogame. After which point they won’t even have to pay workers.

Ville Miettnen, Microtask’s CEO, says that “Pure monetary compensation is a 20th-century concept.”

I bet Clay Shirky would agree.

Two buddies sent quasi-related items concerning market valuations of tech companies. Let’s take them in order.

First, Galley Friend P.G. sends this note, after seeing that Netflix’s stock tumbled 6 percent on news that Facebook has reached a deal with (correction: Warner Bros, not Time-Warner) to start streaming movies. Netflix’s real problem, however, isn’t that Facebook has any idea what it’s doing when it comes to securing rights for, or enabling distribution of, filmed entertainment. It’s that Goldman Sachs–Goldman Sachs!–has proclaimed that Facebook “could become a credible threat as its video business evolves.”

That’s fine, except, as P.G. observes, of course Goldman would say that–they just stuck their neck out to pump up Facebook’s valuation by 500 percent over 18 months!

Meanwhile, Galley Friend A.W. points out that Twitter’s valuation has jumped by 100 percent since last December. Why?

The catalyst for Twitter’s soaring valuation wasn’t the revenue model, but Goldman Sachs’s move in January to invest $500 million of its own money, along with $1 billion from wealthy European individuals, into Facebook. That deal valued Facebook at $50 billion, although the company now has a valuation of more than $65 billion in the private market. What about profits? Please don’t ask.

“I think the investment in Facebook got everyone else saying, we want to do this as well. There is a little bit of follow the leader going on,” says Jeffrey L. Dearth, partner with the New York-based media investment bank DeSilva+Phillips.

As A.W. puts it, we’ve seen this movie before. From a July 1997 Financial Times story:

Chuck Prince on Monday dismissed fears that the music was about to stop for the cheap credit-fuelled buy-out boom, saying Citigroup was “still dancing”.

The Citigroup chief executive told the Financial Times that the party would end at some point but there was so much liquidity it would not be disrupted by the turmoil in the US subprime mortgage market.

He denied that Citigroup, one of the biggest providers of finance to private equity deals, was pulling back.

“When the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated. But as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. We’re still dancing,” he said in an interview with the FT in Japan.

The next internet crash is going to be awesome.

There you go, Daily Beast/Newsweek. Enjoy your beautiful new life!

PS: They might need to dial it up a bit if they’re going to out-compete AOL/Huffington Post for page views without using SEO sorcery. The Diller money will run out eventually and you can only afford to employ multiple TNR editors for so long.

PPS: Even if Fournier had to give up two first-rounders, a third, a pile of cash, and a player to be named later, this was still a fantastic deal. The Atlantic’s long nightmare is finally over.

While the rest of Republican America is swooning for Chris Christie, Mark Levin isn’t buying it. Levin seems not to consider Christie a viable presidential candidate, which is perfectly sensible, since Christie isn’t going to run. But Levin’s discounting of Christie doesn’t seem to be based on political horserace calculations. Here are the clips from Galley Friend A.W.:

January 14: “The new GOP presidential hope? Are you kidding?”

February 16: “[H]e refuses to address issues that expose his weaknesses to conservatives.”

February 17: “For all the loud bravado, on this hugely important [Obamacare] issue he’s a wimp. . . . It’s fiscally irresponsible for Christie to sit on his butt and do nothing. Is this what they mean by frank talk?  Maybe his supporters inside the beltway can help us better understand while they’re touting him for president.”

It’s unclear if Levin’s appraisal of Christie as an “irresponsible wimp” is the result of Christie not coming onto his show or some deviationist thinking concerning the 2010 Delaware Senate race.

Steve Sailer highlights a little nugget from the New Yorker’s big Scientology take-out. Quick summary: The New Yorker piece is hung largely on the back of former Scientologist Paul Haggis. Haggis broke with the group after 35 years because he found that a single member of a Scientology office in San Diego signed a petition in favor of Prop. 8 and the group’s galactic national leadership declined to publicly renounce the member to Haggis’s personal satisfaction.

Makes you wonder how Haggis gets around in the world at all. I’m sure plenty of Ralph’s employees signed petitions–or maybe even voted for!–Prop. 8. Same’s probably true for In-and-Out Burger and 76 stations and banks and . . .

So what happens if the Egyptian government falls and Twitter/Facebook aren’t a major source of the people power? Just asking.

Galley Friend C.A. has a different worry:

I don’t know much, but I do know this. If Egypt falls apart it’s because Sullivan, Ambinder, and Reynolds didn’t turn their Twitter feeds green.

Probably not. But, as we’ve discussed before, he might be the worst boss in the NFL. (By worst, I mean “biggest jerk,” not “most incompetent.)

Now we have a new data point, concerning David Akers and the Eagles playoff loss.

So it turns out that two days before the Akers found out that his 6-year-old daughter had a tumor on her ovary which needed surgery–and doctors were not certain if it was benign or malignant.

Akers wasn’t a wuss–he sacked up and played, understanding that a bunch of his coworkers were counting on him. In the movie-version, he would have kicked the winning field-goal. In real life, the pressure got to him and he doinked two field goals that would have won the game. That’s too bad.

But after the game, Reid went and through Akers under the bus publicly, singling him out and blaming him for the loss.

You want to fire Akers because he couldn’t hold it together and perform his job to the highest level? Fine. But for Reid to publicly dump on him while knowing what was going on in Akers’ head?

That Andy Reid is pure class. No wonder his family life turned out so swell.

A year ago Fox Sports Radio killed what was–hands down–the best sports-talk show in America: Steve Czaban’s First Team. They replaced Czaban with all-purpose buffoon Stephen A. Smith.

First, Smith was fired from the Philadelphia Inquirer. (Which was then forced, through arbitration, to rehire him. Unions are awesome!) The reason for his firing was that his Inky gig had basically become a no-show job because he was spending most of his time with various jobs at ESPN, where he was a frequent guest, analyst, and host–and even had his own short-lived show. Then ESPN fired him.

Then MSNBC hired him and started grooming him to move from sports to mainstream news and political punditry. But that got cut short because Fox Sports Radio had to rush out and throw money a guy who was a national laughingstock and give him his own morning drive-time show.

Well, that experiment is over now. After just one year, FSR is pulling the plug on Smith. I know–who could have possibly foreseen that he would be a failure!

But don’t worry. Surely somewhere else in America another media executive is preparing a lavish offer-sheet for good ol’ Stephen A. After all, Mark Levin loves him!

Hey, I have an idea: The Atlantic is super-profitable right now and David Bradley doesn’t mind closing his eyes and letting people take his money. Why not give Stephen A. Smith a spot next to Andrew Sullivan? By comparison, he’d look pretty smart.