Niall Ferguson!

Holy shit. Ferguson slips under the bottom rope, digs around under the mat, and pulls out some tables, ladders, and chairs. And then proceeds to go hardcore on the goon squad which popped up to take down his Newsweek story. Sample awesome:

Sadness.

I remember getting the first issue in the mail, for free. It had Zelda tips.

In the course of castigating Niall Ferguson for not loving Obama, Ta-Nehisi Coates gives this little Cliffs Notes version of his CV:

When I worked at the Village Voice back in the early aughts, there were fact-checkers. When I worked at TIME (Newsweek‘s direct competitor) in the mid-aughts there were fact-checkers. Some of this may have changed, due to budgets.

My freelance experience has pretty much been the same–everyone from VIBE to the The New York Times Magazine had fact-checkers. The Times’ edit page did not have dedicated fact-checkers, but they did have editors fact-checking. They asked for sources, looked themselves, and followed up with me in instances where I forgot to cite a source, or none could be found.

When I arrived at The Atlantic in 2008, I was subjected to arguably the most thorough fact-checking procedure in all of popular publishing. That meant submitting an annotated version of the story with all sources cited, turning over all my notes, transcripts or audio, and the names and numbers of each of my sources, all of whom were called to confirm the veracity of my quotes. When I freelanced for The New Yorker, it was pretty much the same deal and the same level of scrutiny.

Beyond my Paul Ryan as Harvey Dent riff (and why has no one picked up the subtext?), I haven’t had any deep thoughts on the veep pick yet. But Galley Friend X has. Here’s GF X tossing a little grenade into the room:

In re: Ryan v. Biden.  (Or, “I question the gi sometimes.  It seems to get in the way.”)

OK, obviously I’m absolutely gleeful over Romney’s pick of Ryan.  But . . . why is every Republican so completely certain that Ryan will mop the floor with Biden at the debate?

Ryan’s a smart dude, and a very good speaker.  But his speeches always fight on home turf, before audiences that share his assumptions.

In a debate, by contrast, an opponent will challenge those assumptions — or even disregarding them altogether, and steering the debate to completely different turf — can we be so certain that Ryan will win?

Think back to the Ryan-Brooks debate at AEI.  David Brooks held his own against Ryan (even after Ryan ducked out early, to return to the Hill).  After pointing out that Ryan’s (and Arthur Brooks’s) freedom-versus-socialism dichotomy simply caricatured much more difficult policy realities, he pinned Ryan down on the specific question of trade-offs and compromise.  Ryan simply had no response to the utterly predictable question, what if President Obama offered you big spending cuts for a relatively small (i.e., six-point) top marginal tax increase?  Brooks completely nailed him on his inability to seriously consider compromise even when necessary to avoid fiscal disaster.

And Brooks and Ryan even came from more or less the same foundations.  I suspect that when Biden faces Ryan, he’ll take a relentlessly populist position, hammering Ryan on cutting Medicare, and endorsing tax cuts that disproportionately favor the rich.  And some of what Biden says might even be somewhat true.  What will Ryan do then?

He’s the white knight, the hero entitlement reform needs. What’s that you say? Mitt Romney’s negatives in the swing states show almost opportunity to make up lost ground? Remember, it’s always darkest before the dawn. And I promise you, the dawn is coming.

Let’s just hope the experience of running in a presidential campaign–with Mitt Romney and against Barack Obama–doesn’t leave him wandering around Washington muttering to himself and flipping a coin.

(I don’t do Photoshop, but surely this has to happen. Internet, make it so.)

Updated: Courtesy of the great Katherine Miller:

Galley Friend Gabriel Rossman has a really interesting statistical look at baby names that goes deeper than the typical Baby Name Voyager search:

 I was inspired to play with this data by two things in conversation. The one I’ll discuss today is somebody repeated a story about a girl named “Lah-d,” which is pronounced “La dash da” since “the dash is not silent.”

This appears to be a slight variation on an existing apocryphal story, but it reflects three real social facts that are well documented in the name literature. First, black girls have the most eclectic names of any demographic group, with a high premium put on on creativity and about 30% having unique names. Second, even when their names are unique coinages they still follow systematic rules, as with the characteristic prefix “La” and consonant pair “sh.”

Not coincidentally, Rossman’s book, Climbing the Charts (a statistical look at how pop songs perform on the charts) is out and worth your valuable time.

Ben Domenech’s morning email newsletter, The Transom, is a year old now and I’ll amend what I said about it when it launched: It’s the single best news digest in America. Not just because it’s smart and well-focused, but because reading it isn’t an act of obligation. It’s actually fun. It’s the part of my morning reading I look forward to most.

A subscription is just $20 a year. You won’t be sorry.

My buddy Joel Engel is up to no good . . .

You may recall that last week a PR agency sent around a release saying that 50 Shades of Grey had outsold Harry Potter. Or something.

Anyway, so far as I could tell, source zero for the story was this post over at The Verge by Vlad Savov, which wasn’t worded much more clearly than the press release. I emailed Savov asking if he could clarify a bit and asking where he had gotten his data from. He didn’t respond. So I then emailed Verge editor-in-chief Joshua Topolsky. He didn’t respond either.

You might think that a reporter asking if a story you’ve published has any basis in reality might get at least a perfunctory response from a news outlet. But maybe they’ve just had a really busy week. Anyway, just something for the clip file for any other reporters doing pieces about TheVerge.com.

People are pretty worked up over the moment yesterday when Andrea Saul responded to the latest Obama ad charging that Bain Capital killed a worker’s wife by saying that Romneycare would have saved the unfortunate woman. I understand why conservatives would be upset about this response, I suppose. But I have two genuine, not smart-alecky, questions:

(1) When is the last time you heard what someone on the Romney campaign was saying and thought, “Geez, that’s pretty sharp. Smart insight. He/She is a pro.”

I’ve followed the Romney operation pretty closely and only two people I’ve come across inside the campaign really impressed me. One of them was shunted out the door in reasonably short order. The other one wasn’t brought on until fairly recently.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t smart, impressive people toiling away for Romney. And it’s not to say that staffwork will win or lose the campaign. (My own belief is that once you cross a certain very low threshold for money and organization, the onus for winning a presidential campaign is really on the candidate. Either they have the vision, the magic, and the environment, or they don’t.)

All that said, it is pretty striking how a guy whose primary credential is his businessman’s ability to master an organization has surrounded himself with so many folks who seem to be more valued for something other than ability.

(2) If Romney wins, what do you think the odds really are that he’ll repeal Obamacare? Not waiver it, or starve it, or alter it–but actually go through the bloody fight of full and final repeal?

I don’t know the answer and I’m open to all sorts of arguments on this. But it strikes me that repealing Obamacare will take, under the best of circumstances, a singular focus and drive on the part of the executive. It will require both enormous rhetorical skill to build public support and political skill to cajole Congress. And, more than anything, the administration will have to be willing to endure a blood-letting from Democrats and the media.

Given all of that, and what we’ve seen from Romney and his campaign, do we really believe that, if elected, he’ll repeal Obamacare? Like I said, I don’t know. I’d like to believe it, as, I’m sure, most conservatives would. Because repealing that law is the single most important task for the next president. If he repeals it, he is a success, whatever else follows.

But if not? The great unmentionable in conservative circles right now is this simple question: Would it be better to have another term of Obama and a last-gasp, hail Mary shot at repeal in 2016 than to win the White House in 2012 only to have a Republican president who doesn’t repeal it?

Like I said, I’m not sure. Probably not, is my guess.

Courtesy of Galley Friend J.P.

Try not to lose it in your pants.