On the occasion of Snarkmarket’s fifth year

On November 3, 2003, Robin posted Snarkmarket’s first post. Two-thousand, two-hundred and seven posts later (excluding the 103 unpublished drafts), here we are.

We intend to mark the occasion by finally migrating this blog from a dusty old Movable Type installation to a sleek new WordPress install, so pardon our dust over the next couple of weeks as we make that transition. And since it’s always wise to do a CMS transition and redesign at the same time (ha), we’d welcome your feedback on our imminent new look as well.

But most importantly, we want to extend a warm welcome and happiest of birthday wishes to a third Snarkmaster, for whom this is less a promotion than merely an official acknowledgment of his contributions: Mr. Timothy Carmody.

Lightly-edited sentimental ruminations posted over Google Chat (concerning Snarkmarket, blogging, time, destiny and all that) can be found in the extended entry.

Thank you again for reading, and most of all, for sharing your thoughts. To the next five years, and beyond.

Read more…

We all know I’m a giant fan of Michael Pollan, and his recent NYT Magazine piece is no exception, containing a bevy of ideas for how the next President can transform U.S. food policy. But it seems to me his locavore-cheerleading and attacks on factory-farm monoculture are in direct conflict with the claims Paul Collier makes in this month’s Foreign Affairs.

Two parts of Collier’s thesis – that we should promote factory farms in developing countries and work to overcome Third-World opposition to GM foods – seem to run counter to Pollan’s ideas. (They agree on a third argument – that US farm subsidies are wack.) Re-reading Pollan’s article after reading Collier’s, I’m struck by how quickly Pollan glosses over the effects of his policy recommendations in the developing world. (A characteristic line: “To grow sufficient amounts of food using sunlight will require more people growing food

I laughed, I cried, I read the whole thing.

A propos of nothing, I’m going to point you to the best song we performed in high school choir, Randall Thompson’s “The Last Words of David,” as interpreted by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Man, that’s some great stuff.

Slate redesigns. Again. For the last year or so, I’ve debated doing a follow-up post on my snark-out of their 2006 redesign, just to verify that I never got over my initial awful reaction to the site. I’ve got some problems with the new design, but they’re minor compared to my feelings on the former look.

I have this funny feeling that the separation between the “Today in Slate” and “Slate Blogs” tabs isn’t going to last …

Marc Ambinder’s right, this piece on the Obama campaign’s organization in Ohio is fascinating.

Last Thursday’s Presidential debate was widely panned for its ridiculous format. Seriously? Two-minute responses and one-minute followups? And this is supposed to transcend talking points?

The Lehrer debate felt much meatier to me. It clearly showcased two men who had very different (but both quite substantial) views on foreign policy, and allowed them to contrast those views at length. Still, any amount of time spent paying attention to the moderator in a Presidential debate is wasted time, and Lehrer had to do a fair amount of refereeing to keep the candidates in line.

CJR’s got some excellent ideas for shaking up the debate format. I’ve got one more:

What if we allotted to each of the candidates a block of time — say 40 minutes — and allow them to apportion it however they’d like? Engage a moderator merely to pause the debate and send the candidates in another direction if they get stuck on a particular topic, but mostly allow them to steer the debate where they’d like. Each candidate could be wired with a mic that detects when he’s speaking and winds down the clock, and both the candidates and the viewers can see how much time each one has left.

You could even take this a little further by employing a team of fact-checkers who work furiously during the debate to spot misstatements of fact. If a candidate is discovered to have fudged the truth, the misstatement is revealed during the course of the debate and the candidate is docked a minute. (This would be difficult to enforce and cause a lot of partisan sniping, so the plan might be better without, but I offer it as a possibility.)

What say you, Snarkmind?

I love this. Ironic Sans posts a video of the CNN Election Center, left momentarily unattended. It’s like an outtake from a dystopian ’80s movie about the future.

60 Seconds in the Life of the Election Center from Ironic Sans on Vimeo.

Infosthetics points to this well-done short about the standoff in the Middle East. Being five minutes long, of course it dispenses with a lot of the actual geopolitics of the matter (leaving the prophetic religious elements of the conflict entirely unmentioned, even), but it’s pretty.

BrickArms. Nefarious. From Things.