Shots in the Dark

The Times reports that regular folks are now being paid to distribute sponsored tweets.

It is perhaps the last frontier in advertising — getting regular people to send a sentence or two of text, on behalf of paying advertisers, to their friends and admirers. The idea, according to the entrepreneurs who are developing such services for Twitter and other Web networks, is that people trust recommendations from those they know and respect, while they increasingly ignore nearly ever other kind of ad message in print, on television and online.

And it is just the kind of thing that will cause people to turn off Twitter…even faster than they already are.

This is taken from a new book, Polar Obsession, by wildlife photographer Paul Nicklen.

The tusk of the narwhal, by the by, is absolutely fascinating.

Frank Rich had a terrific Sarah Palin column in the Times yesterday, in which he looked at parts of her book which haven’t been widely dismissed picked over.

Here’s a nicely turned paragraph. The first sentence—thanks to the parenthetical— is like the punch to the stomach, setting up the knockout blow to the jaw:

The book’s most frequently dropped names, predictably enough, are the Lord and Ronald Reagan (though not necessarily in that order). Easily the most startling passage in “Going Rogue,” running more than two pages, collates extended excerpts from a prayerful letter Palin wrote to mark the birth of Trig, her child with Down syndrome. This missive’s understandable goal was to reassert Palin’s faith and trust in God. But Palin did not write her letter to God; she wrote the letter from God, assuming His role and voice herself and signing it “Trig’s Creator, Your Heavenly Father.” If I may say so — Oy!

Rich thinks that Palin will have staying power in politics after the buzz over her book fades. I’m not so sure—not that she couldn’t, but that she wants to. Politics is a lot of work; knowing your stuff is hard. I doubt Palin wants to work that much.

Someone give her a talk show and a Playboy shoot and she’ll be happy.

Yale’s coach goes for it on 4th-and-22. From his own 25 yard line. While winning The Game, 10-7.

Yale doesn’t get the first down, promptly loses The Game.

Seriously?

I mean, I can see going for it on 4th-and-2 a la Belichick. I actually think that was the right call.

But…4th-and-22?

That is just stupid.

I keep thinking of how the Yale players must feel—pretty pissed off, I would think.

Connecticut’s embarrassment of a senator continues to treat my home state as if Robert Pattinson had accidentally spent the night in Rykers.

Lieberman is threatening to filibuster any health care reform bill that features a public option—which could mean the end of health care reform, period.

“I don’t think about that stuff,” Lieberman told POLITICO this week. “I’m just — I’m being a legislator. After what I went through in 2006, there’s nothing much more that anybody [who] disagrees with me can try to do.”

In other words, fuck alla youse, basically—how dare you have voted for a Democratic challenger?

One man’s bruised ego could keep 30 million more Americans from getting health insurance. What a jerk.

Thank God Connecticut has a serious candidate to replace Lieberman in the wings: state attorney general Richard Blumenthal.

You have to like any guy named Richard….

After Steven Pinker trashed Malcolm Gladwell in the NYTBR, the two public intellectuals fight write it out in the Times via dueling letters. Whose is longer?

Here’s Gladwell:

I wondered about the basis of Pinker’s conclusion, so I e-mailed him, asking if he could tell me where to find the scientific data that would set me straight. He very graciously wrote me back. He had three sources, he said. The first was Steve Sailer. Sailer, for the uninitiated, is a California blogger with a market research background who is perhaps best known for his belief that black people are intellectually inferior to white people….

And Pinker:

What Malcolm Gladwell calls a “lonely ice floe” is what psychologists call “the mainstream.”

In this exchange, I have to give the advantage to Gladwell, because Pinker a) should never have relied upon the work of a racist, as Gladwell pretty clearly implies, and b) in his response Pinker never addresses that little problem. Whoops.

Here’s Steve Sailer’s blog. How interesting—you heard it here first—that Sailer…

“...interviewed [Pinker] in 2002 during his book tour for his bestseller The Blank Slate. It didn’t fully register upon me at the time, but what has stuck with me the longest is Pinker’s concept that “mental effort seems to be engaged most with the knife edge at which one finds extreme and radically different consequences with each outcome, but the considerations militating towards each one are close to equal.”

Whatever that means. But could Pinker really not have known that the guy is—at least according to Gladwell—the Jimmy the Greek of social science bloggers?

It’s a great fight, though. Here’s Sailer on Gladwell:

See, what makes Malcolm so successful as a speaker at sales conferences is that he believes his own hype. Many people can smell insincerity, but Malcolm is sincere. He believes whatever he’s peddling, no matter how obviously wrong it is.

Gentlemen, please don’t stop. Next think you know, you’re going to make the New York Times Book Review worth reading.

(And it’s a drag that he’s a Yankees fan.)

Rudy Giuliani isn’t running for governor of New York.

I’ll be traveling to Virginia over Thanksgiving weekend for a sad family occasion: a memorial service for my uncle Tony, one of my father’s two younger brothers.

Tony Blow was a lovely man, big-hearted, kind, gentle—everybody uses that word to describe him—generous, with an enormous laugh and an inquisitive spirit. He adored his wife and kids.

Below is an obituary.

She just keeps giving.

Here’s a great snippet from the Rachel Maddow show in which campaign aide Nicolle Wallace rebuts Palin’s attack on her in Going Rogue.

And here’s an item about how Sarah Palin is accusing Newsweek of sexism for using the cover below.

Well, it’s hard to accuse Newsweek of sexism for running a photo for which you posed. (Okay, let me rephrase: For any thinking person, it would be hard…)

But here’s why Newsweek ran the photo, I’m sure:

1) She probably wouldn’t pose.
2) Using a pick-up photo is cheaper than doing a photo shoot.
3) It’s kind of a sexy picture, and it’ll probably sell a lot of magazines.
4) The weird juxtaposition of imagery—running tights! Blackberries! American flag!—actually does reveal something about the metaphysical train wreck that is Sarah Palin.

I must say, I’m enjoying this cultural brouhaha immensely. It’s good clean fun that happens to be really bad for the Republicans.

Some universities are boycotting the device because it doesn’t have functionality for blind people.

“Quite apart from our legal obligations, we at Illinois believe that our technology choices should be shaped by our institutional values and aspirations. We will not embrace technologies that undercut our commitment to accessibility. We will instead apply our ingenuity to technologies that enable everyone to participate more fully in society,” said a statement from [the University of Illinois at Champagne-Urbana]. ”

Meanwhile, some Kindle owners are boycotting books that are priced over $9.99….