D Magazine is looking for a managing editor, and the ad is worth reading even if you don't live in Dallas or aspire to work in magazine publishing. From what I know of the job, and of similar positions elsewhere, it's an accurate description.
Writing in TNR, Brink Lindsey calls for "a politics that joins together under one banner the causes of both cultural and economic progress," a fusion of people the headline writer unfortunately calls "Liberaltarians." The historically inclined might simply call them liberals (and I have my own neologism, hence this site's name). It's a provocative piece and well worth reading (the Cato link is subscription-free), especially by Clintonite liberals. But the alliance Brink proposes requires three difficult shifts:
1) A commitment on both sides to a safety net for the poor but not to pursuing economic equality for its own sake. This is the easiest part and has largely happened already, despite protests from both hard-core levellers and anti-transfer libertarians. But many of the loudest Democrats and libertarians (small-l, the relevant ones) won't go along.
2) An abandonment of Herbert Croly-style technocracy as the governing philosophy of the Democratic Party, not only in economics but in social policy, where "centrists" like Hillary Clinton tend to confuse governing with raising children. Technocracy long ago lost its ideological oomph, but Democrats have a knee-jerk commitment to regulation. Today's good government liberals generally pay homage to tolerance, pluralism, and market processes. The trick is to draw connections between those values and specific policies.
3) A deliberate resolve to form a dynamist alliance at a time when "progressives" are increasingly redefining themselves as stasist populists--trade protection has become an ideological position, for instance, rather than a favor for special interests--and many self-styled "small government" supporters argue vociferously for vast expansions of police and planning powers to limit immigration. In this regard, I am more encouraged by the defenses of trade coming out of places like TNR and Slate than I am by the fawning on Jim Webb coming out of Reason. (The guy even wants to bring back the draft, which used to be a deal breaker for libertarians.).
If it's going to happen, such an alliance can only start among honest intellectuals who are not interested in scoring partisan points. How many of those are left, I'm not sure.
UPDATE: Maybe because I did something similar in TFAIE (developed further here), it seems much clearer to me than to other commenters that Brink is proposing an intellectual and policy alliance/debate, along the lines of the fusionism on the postwar right, not a short-term partisan political coalition to win the 2008 election. The stuff about 13 percent of the vote is mostly news-peg boilerplate. That's how you get TNR and the WaPost to pay attention. It's as irrelevant today as it was in the 1950s just how many libertarian-identified voters there are. The point is to talk seriously about policy ends and means and the role of market processes in serving liberal (in all senses of the word) values.
Demonstrate your support for "big books." Pre-order Brink's forthcoming book, The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America's Politics and Culture
Remember this post about how a stranger gave Chantal Adamson a kidney after reading her mother's plea on MatchingDonors.com. The kidney is still working, but the donor is in the news again--on a decidedly unrelated matter. It seems she's charged with hiring someone to kill her estranged husband before their divorce went through. From the local news article: "How could a woman who donates a kidney to a stranger also plot a murder? The State Police detective investigating the case says 'bizarre human behavior happens every day.'" That's the truth.
Remember when "It's a Small World" was a cute fairytale?
The resignation of John Bolton is as good an excuse as any to share Sandra Tsing Loh's delightful reminiscence of the innocent internationalism I remember so well as part of my 1960s childhood. (I revisited this passage while researching my next Atlantic column, on airline glamour, but the quotation didn't make it into the final version.) From Depth Takes a Holiday
International--what a guileless, friendly world. As a kid in the sixties, I remember drinking up everything international: Expo 67! UNICEF! The five intertwining rings of the Olympics! International...House of Pancakes! "Come in!" international people always seemed to be saying. 'We don't care where the hell you're from. Have some flapjacks!"
Ah, when "looking like the U.N." was a compliment, suggesting a nicely harmonious mix of costumes and skin colors--Star Trek with smoother foreheads.
"Once in a blue moon a reporter meets a man who changes the world by sheer force of will, character, and vision," writes Jonathan Rauch, in a column explaining why Franklin Kamen, whose papers were recently added to the Library of Congress archives, fits that description.
Publisher's Weekly reports on an appearance at NYU by the great Scott McCloud, author of Understanding Comics
In his talk McCloud covered the heart of his book, explaining his theoretical position that the comics artist faces five major areas of decision making when creating a new work: choice of moment (which moments of an action to show), choice of frame (how to frame what is being depicted), choice of image, choice of words and choice of flow (how the reader's eye follows the sequence of images). McCloud classifies comics artists in four "tribes": the classicists (like Alex Raymond), who value beauty and mastery of craft; the animists (like Jack Kirby), for whom art serves story content; the formalists (including himself), who experiment with the medium; and the iconoclasts (like Robert Crumb), whose foremost goal is to vividly convey reality. McCloud also narrated an entertaining montage of images illustrating his life story and showed examples of various online comics, demonstrating the new experimental forms that comics can take once freed from the printed page.
McCloud then turned the lectern and the screen over to his teenage daughter, Sky, who used the same words-and-pictures format to deliver an amusing presentation of her family's nationwide tour, blogging as they go. At one point she explained that each of them only brings two suitcases, one for clothes and one for electronic equipment, which is "pretty much all you need in the McCloud family."
The WaPost's David Segal reports on the tough question of who's too obscure even for the Wikipedia. Apparently a lot of people try to write their own bios. Not me. Yuck, what a job. Mine is officially a "stub," and it is indeed quite stubby, though I notice that someone has added my birthdate and Atlantic column since the last time I looked.
One of the most interesting business articles I've read in a long time. And it's short.
The Ball of Whacks is sold out at Amazon, but Roger von Oech, its inventor, emails to say that if you don't want to wait four weeks, you can order one directly from the online store at www.creativewhack.com.
The LAT's Jerry Hirsch reports on El Pollo Loco's plans to expand into New England, in part by selling its wares more as chicken than as Mexican food. The story made me think of an interesting cross-cultural moment. We were in a busy part of Tokyo with my parents and needed to find a quick bite to eat before catching a train. The answer: El Pollo Loco, a new experience for my parents. The main difference I remember is that in Japan they take the corn off the cob.