I’ve been writing essays over at The American Interest Online’s group blog, Cont’d. The deal there was that I’d contribute longer, more thought-out and well-argued pieces. I’m finding myself missing the ability to write shorter response-type posts, though, so I’ll continue to post those here.

Here’s a linked list to the posts I’ve written so far:

Corruption in Afghanistan

The Face of the Taliban

The Ethical versus the Possible

Fighting Islam in Afghanistan

Of Women and Donkeys

The Futility of Partitioning Afghanistan

The West’s Pet Project

The WikiLeaks Phenomenon

Literary Weekend: Modernism, Objectivity and American Journalism

I had no idea Gawker bloggers made this kind of money:

It turns out that Golson got 557,469 pageviews in March, which equates to a total paycheck of $5,435. That’s well over double his base pay. His colleague Nicholas Carlson earned $9,025 for the month, in which Valleywag as a whole got just over 5 million pageviews.

Online advertising has clearly arrived in the past few years, and nimble, lean operations like Gawker are making very good money. Heck, even well-positioned, interesting individuals like John Gruber seem to be doing quite well working for themselves. Sure sounds like the life to me…

I think I’ll be keeping keeping an eye on Waxy for the next few months:

I’m going to try an experiment this year: publish something original on Waxy.org, every weekday. Not my opinions about news (opinions are cheap) and not just glorified linkblogging, but something new: original research, investigative journalism, information visualization, digitizing dead media, live reporting, or interviews. I’ll also be releasing new applications, interactive web toys, and social software throughout the year, because as much as I love journalism, I love coding just as much.

Like a programming Ze Frank? Let’s stay tuned and find out.

Matt Yglesias and Reihan Salam debate The Wire in light of Mark Bowden’s recent Atlantic piece, when all of a sudden, the demiurge behind the show, David Simon himself, chimes in:

*The Wire* is dissent; it argues that our systems are no longer viable for the greater good of the most, that America is no longer operating as a utilitarian and democratic experiment. If you are not comfortable with that notion, you won’t agree with some of the tonalities of the show. I would argue that people comfortable with the economic and political trends in the United States right now — and thinking that the nation and its institutions are equipped to respond meaningfully to the problems depicted with some care and accuracy on The Wire (we reported each season fresh, we did not write solely from memory) — well, perhaps they’re playing with the tuning knobs when the back of the appliance is in flames.

Simon’s of a revolutionary mindset, so The Wire is certainly not to be taken as a policy prescriptive. That said, while I don’t subscribe to Simon’s despair at America’s irredeemable dysfunctionality and failure as experiment, I share his despair at institutions being hopelessly flawed by their very nature. I’d not characterize myself as a revolutionary, but rather as deeply jaundiced towards bureaucracies of all shapes and forms. It’s what keeps me from being a progressive—I don’t see better institutions as the answer. And I happily experience The Wire as a grim confirmation of my prejudices.