You’d think that the Wall Street Journal would own the biggest story of the past year, the meltdown of capitalism-as-we’ve-known-it. But the paper’s coverage has lagged. It did good work on the collapse of Bear Stearns a year ago, but for the most part it has done a mediocre job of...

The thing about writing a book is — pardon the obviousness — you have to write a whole lot of words. Now, plenty of bloggers do lots of writing, over a period of six months or a year they might easily reach the 80-100,000 word sum of a typical book. There are two big differences for the ...

Here in the state of California we are being treated to the spectacle of a small minority of Republican dead-enders in the legislature holding the entire state economy hostage to their tax-cutting religion. The story, for those blissfully beyond Sacramento’s reach, is that our state rules requ...

As the new book is finishing the copy-edit phase of its production cycle, I’ve turned my energy to a number of new projects, which explains the slow blogging here. I’ve already posted a bit about my entry in the Knight News Challenge competition — MediaBugs, a public “bug tra...

“No drama Obama” found his drama this morning in the best possible way. Given the weight of expectations on his shoulders today, this wasn’t a foregone conclusion. I’m not sure exactly how one rises to such an occasion, how one finds the words to fit such times, but for me at...

I worked for a decade at the SF Examiner, a newspaper that was in a very similar position to the Seattle P-I, whose probable death-knell was sounded today when Hearst announced it would shut down the paper if it can’t sell it. The Examiner, too, was owned by Hearst, and it, too, was the “...

I continue to read the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page and columnists in a “know thy enemy” mode. As the recent economic crises have pretty much razed the paper’s entire stable of totems, it has been fun to watch the rhetorical writhings. Mostly, they speak for themselve...

This is the time of year when I realize anew why I am here. I’m not having a spiritual experience. “Here” is the Bay Area, and as we approach the shortest day of the year and face some of the coldest days as well, I renew my delight in my home for the past two decades and more. Ove...

Front page NY Times piece today laments the general downsizing of Washington bureaus by papers and chains. On the one hand, any time some writer loses a job, it’s a shame. But we can acknowledge that human price and still question the assumptions behind the more general professional garment-re...

Item one: Jurgen Appelo was kind enough to include Dreaming in Code earlier this year in his Top 100 Best Software Engineering Books Ever. (Top 100 and best ever! Yow!) When he came back to me and asked me to do one of his “Five Easy Questions For…” interviews, how could I refuse? ...