Happy Birthday to Kiki Dee, 66.
Good stuff, or at least a little of it:
1. Philip Klein on Trump and CPAC.
2. Gotta love those state legislators -- Steve Greene finds one set of very self-impressed ones.
3. And a profile of Ta-Nehisi Coates, who I've often said is the single Best Blogger out there, by Jordan Michael Smith.
I didn't realized he turned down an offer to become of columnist for NYT, kind of interesting. Also if memory serves me right, didn't he get that job at The Atlantic because Matt Yglesias left to go work for Center for American Progress? Funny how these things work.
ReplyDeleteOne great thing about TNC is feels more like he blogs to learn something rather than to say something. He said something to that end a while back, aspiring to be a "public student" rather than a "public intellectual."
ReplyDeleteI also enjoyed the TNC profile, which I think reminds us why we love that guy. For perspective, in the era of the tubes, everyone is "Great", in the sense that any two morons can go on LinkedIn, reciprocally endorse each other, and viola!, they're both Great (TM), a by-product of being Endorsed (TM).
ReplyDeleteCoates, to his credit, is Not That Guy. He calls it like he sees it and gets stuff wrong, sometimes maddeningly. But he's always passionate, always learning, always improving. That beats any old stupid LinkedIn endorsement!
I'm pretty fascinated to see where he goes from here. I have a sense that because Coates seems to value learning and improvement to the cultivation of his Brand (TM), he can be too-easily dismissed. That's probably a mistake; given how fraught black-white relations are in the US, a black commenter with Coates' style communicating with a mostly white audience is silver and gold. I bet he goes far.