David Simon has written an article for Columbia Journalism Review that is absolutely, completely wrongheaded, arguing that The New York Times and The Washington Post should simultaneously erect paywalls for their online content. Contrary to Simon's assumptions, this would only destroy newspapers faster; paywalls have never, ever worked.

What newspapers actually need to do is find successful funding models for the digital age, up to and including reestablishing themselves as nonprofit organizations if necessary. More conversation at MeFi.

A second round of late night shouldn't-have-taken-that-nap links.

* Why GM failed; link roundup from Kottke.

* A.O. Scott vlogs the awesomeness of Rushmore. Via TRA. It's vlogtastic.

* Mrs. Santorum is a very lucky woman.

* The headline reads, "Secret US Nuke Site List Accidentally Published Online by US Gov." Whoops!

* Handicapping the 2012 Republican field at Open Left.

* The median number of tweets by a Twitter user is one. This and other Twitter bubble factoids via MetaFilter.

* J.D. Salinger sues to block the publication of the unauthorized Catcher in the Rye sequel. I feel torn here between my liberal attitude towards copyright and my sense that said sequel can only be an abomination.

* “It’s remarkable, what we’re unable to do as a country": Wire creator David Simon on BBC Radio 4, via Edge of the American West.

* Monkey astronauts.

Misc.

* Batman and D&D alignment. I think "chaotic evil"'s a bit of a stretch. Via Neilalien.

* Lesbians have seized control of the world's supply of poems. It is appropriate to panic.

* Star Trek as liberal fantasy: 1, 2, 3. I'm planning on seeing it tomorrow, I'll have more to say then. (Image via Matt Yglesias.)

* Wire creator David Simon testifies before Congress on the death of newspapers.

Links for Wednesday.

* First-gen Sierra adventure games in your browser. Your childhood says come back home, all is forgiven.

* The setup for this Flash Forward show seems pretty good, but man do I wish Brannon Braga weren't involved.

* McSweeney's has the syllabus for "ENG 371WR: Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era."

* Long-time Republican strategist declares defeat in NY-20, while Norm Coleman presses on in the courts with his unique metaphysical argument that he is the only logically possible winner in the Minnesota Senate race.

* David Simon on Bill Moyers.

* Roberto Bolaño, 2666, and the Ciudad Juárez murders.

* What happens when you "run government like a business."

* I don't agree with everything Amanda Marcotte has to say about prostitution here, but she's certainly right about Eliot Spitzer; it's completely insane to me that some people actually seem willing to give the guy another chance.

* The best article about the "sexting" crisis you're likely to read.

He then told the parents and teens to line up if they wanted to view the photos, which were printed out onto index cards. As the 17-year-old who took semi-nude self-portraits waited in line, she realized that Mr. Skumanick and other investigators had viewed the pictures. When the adults began to crowd around Mr. Skumanick, the 17-year-old worried they could see her photo and recalls she said, "I think the worst punishment is knowing that all you old guys saw me naked. I just think you guys are all just perverts."

If your laws allow people to be charged with distributing child pornography for sending other people naked pictures of themselves, you need some new laws.

* Nate Silver thinks the libertarians are taking over the Republican Party. That would certainly be a huge improvement, as long as we're not just talking about glibertarians.

* The headline reads, "Obama keeps prosecutions on the table."

Other stuff.

* Jaimee has a piece in the Indy Green Guide this week comparing dueling energy initiatives in the North Carolina State Legislature.

* Begging as labor: Alex Greenberg thinks it over.

* Science fiction's most evil corporations.

* Hope for Dollhouse? 'Prison Break return disappoints,' scoring 75% of Dollhouse's regular audience in the Friday night death slot.

* Making Samuel Beckett.

* The Brick Testament has reached The Book of Revelations.

* "Metaphysics in a Time of Terrorism," by Terry Eagleton. Via MeFi.

The distinction between Hitchens or Dawkins and those like myself comes down in the end to one between liberal humanism and tragic humanism. There are those who hold that if we can only shake off a poisonous legacy of myth and superstition, we can be free. Such a hope in my own view is itself a myth, though a generous-spirited one. Tragic humanism shares liberal humanism’s vision of the free flourishing of humanity, but holds that attaining it is possible only by confronting the very worst. The only affirmation of humanity ultimately worth having is one that, like the disillusioned post-Restoration Milton, seriously wonders whether humanity is worth saving in the first place, and understands Swift’s king of Brobdingnag with his vision of the human species as an odious race of vermin. Tragic humanism, whether in its socialist, Christian, or psychoanalytic varieties, holds that only by a process of self-dispossession and radical remaking can humanity come into its own. There are no guarantees that such a transfigured future will ever be born. But it might arrive a little earlier if liberal dogmatists, doctrinaire flag-wavers for Progress, and Islamophobic intellectuals got out of its way.

*Think Progress says "Obama’s Immunity For CIA Agents Still Leaves Prosecutions Of Senior Bushies On The Table." People need to accept that Obama's going to let us down on this. He told us he would. He will.

* Your taxes at work. See also.

* A major EPA ruling this week declared carbon dioxide a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. More analysis at the Oil Drum.

* Imagine finding yourself aboard a burning ocean liner. An increasing number of people are trying to put it out -- and they stand a good chance, if they can get access to the fire axes and hoses. Unfortunately, some rich old fat guys are sitting in deck chairs blocking the equipment, enjoying drinks and appetizers, and every time the other passengers try to get them to move, the rich old fat guys say they don't really believe in the fire, and even if it does exist, it probably can't be put out so we should just trust in the new lifeboat being built. And, sure enough, there on the deck is a guy is a brilliant, somewhat unworldly professor, busily sketching a design for a new lifeboat as the smoke billows in larger and larger clouds.

That's a pretty fair analogy for the situation in which we find ourselves, and for the role geoengineering is playing in the climate debate.

* The Wire series bible.

Thoughts on the newspaper apocalypse from Wire creator David Simon.

"Oh, to be a state or local official in America over the next 10 to 15 years, before somebody figures out the business model," says Simon, a former crime reporter for the Baltimore Sun. "To gambol freely across the wastelands of an American city, as a local politician! It's got to be one of the great dreams in the history of American corruption."

Like it or not—and Simon doesn't just dislike it, he thinks it can't work—this is what blogs are for now.

DAVID SIMON: I like to tell everybody that the real subject of this film is Baltimore. Its particular set of social problems drive the romantic conflict here. Baltimore is a medium-sized city, as East Coast cities go. It's a stand-in for every place like it, these ports whose economies were just hammered by the collapse of the New Deal. Even so, there's an appealing human scale to the place. To a certain extent, that old-school solidarity still characterizes the social life of the city, if not the culture of local institutions. In Baltimore, everyone is one or two degrees removed from everyone else, more or less. You have these characters' social entanglements interfering with weaker professional or institutional ties—but which tie really is weaker? Are people more committed to their partner or to their institution? And that uncertainty breeds a natural suspicion. It's a culture where people live with a fundamental lack of trust in the goodness of other human beings. So it's not like he's not calling because he isn't into you—it's not about you! It's not about anybody, specifically. You never know who's talking to whom, or what anyone is up to. It's about this idea that the personal needs of an individual are not worth as much of a time investment as they used to be.

David Simon provides the audio commentary for the film He's Just Not That into You.

Random Friday links.

* Those "I'm a PC ads"? Made on Macs.

* Slacktivist has finished his years-long read of Left Behind. (Via MeFi.) Amazingly, he plans to keep going.

* Is there a media blackout on the Hurricane Ike aftermath?

* The 'Watchmen' film sounds like more regurgitated worms. I, for one, am sick of worms. Alan Moore doesn't mince words.

* David Simon's next project is Manhunt, "about the Lincoln assassination and the 12-day search that ended in the capture of John Wilkes Booth."

* LeBron James loses to a civilian in Horse.

* Kottke has the trailer for the next Charlie Kaufman movie, Synecdoche, New York.

More David Simon blogging: YouTube has video of The Wire creator with an address on journalists and the public square at USC Law.

I am wholly pessimistic about American society. I believe The Wire is a show about the end of the American Empire. We are all, or our kids, are going to live that event. How we end up at the end of it and where we end up and whether or not we can survive and on what terms is going to be the only question from now on.

MetaFilter has great links on David Simon and the pessimistic politics of the The Wire.

First, this from the Guardian: "The escalating breakdown of urban society across the US."

I live in Baltimore, in a neighbourhood that is none of these things. I am vested in the city and its future and I can drive you to places in this city that would transform even the most devout Wire fan into a fat, happy tourist. Baltimore's charms are no less plentiful than most American cities.

And yet there are places in Baltimore where The Wire is not at all hyperbole, where all of the depicted tragedy and waste and dysfunction are fixed, certain and constant. And that place is, I might add, about 20 blocks from where I live.

That is the context of The Wire and that is the only context in which Baltimore - and by reasonable extension, urban America - can be fairly regarded. There are two Americas - separate, unequal, and no longer even acknowledging each other except on the barest cultural terms. In the one nation, new millionaires are minted every day. In the other, human beings no longer necessary to our economy, to our society, are being devalued and destroyed. Both things are true, and one gets a sense, reading the distant reaction to The Wire, that Europeans are far more ready to be convinced by one vision than the other.

And second, clips of a recent lecture from Loyola College:

MP3 of the "Making 'The Wire' Panel" at the Museum of the Moving Image, with

David Simon, the series creator and co-producer; novelist and screenwriter Richard Price, who wrote several episodes; and four of the show's stars: Seth Gilliam (who played Ellis Carver), Clark Johnson (city editor Gus Haynes), Clarke Peters (Lester Freemon), and Wendell Pierce ("Bunk"), moderated by David Schwartz, Chief Curator.

Via Fiona and MeFi.

Don't talk to the cops: Prof. James Duane of the Regent University School of Law and Officer George Bruch of the Virginia Beach Police Department explain why you shouldn't ever talk to the cops about a crime under any circumstances without your lawyer present.





(I know, I know, it's Pat Robertson's law school, but he's right anyway.)

And here's a nice Miranda flashback from David Simon, creator of The Wire.

...a detective does his job in the only possible way. He follows the requirements of the law to the letter -- or close enough so as not to jeopardize his case. Just as carefully, he ignores that law's spirit and intent. He becomes a salesman, a huckster as thieving and silver-tongued as any man who ever moved used cars or aluminum siding -- more so, in fact, when you consider that he's selling long prison terms to customers who have no genuine need for the product.

Hercules at AICN has a host of reviews for the David Simon Wire followup, Generation Kill. Sounds promising.

TV news: HBO has ordered a pilot from The Wire's David Simon on post-Katrina New Orleans—sounds perfect—while NBC has posted the first of this summer's Office webisodes.

In Austin, Amanda Marcotte and Austin Kleon attend a David Simon talk at the University of Texas. Here's a snippet from Kleon's always fantastic notes:

It has taken an almost superhuman level of self-control, but I have resisted watching any of the last season of The Wire, allowing me to watch the entire thing in a single glorious weekend. This starts tomorrow. For now, you can read the creators' op-ed in this week's Time calling for citizen action to end the war on drugs, using the only tool at our disposal:

If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented. Save for a prosecution in which acts of violence or intended violence are alleged, we will — to borrow Justice Harry Blackmun's manifesto against the death penalty — no longer tinker with the machinery of the drug war. No longer can we collaborate with a government that uses nonviolent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens.

Jury nullification is American dissent, as old and as heralded as the 1735 trial of John Peter Zenger, who was acquitted of seditious libel against the royal governor of New York, and absent a government capable of repairing injustices, it is legitimate protest. If some few episodes of a television entertainment have caused others to reflect on the war zones we have created in our cities and the human beings stranded there, we ask that those people might also consider their conscience. And when the lawyers or the judge or your fellow jurors seek explanation, think for a moment on Bubbles or Bodie or Wallace. And remember that the lives being held in the balance aren't fictional.

There's some discussion of this at MeFi.

More Wireblogging: The Believer has put up the full text of Nick Hornby's interview with David Simon from last August, which I previously linked to just an excerpt of.

NH: How did you pitch it?

DS: I pitched The Wire to HBO as the anti–cop show, a rebellion of sorts against all the horseshit police procedurals afflicting American television. I am unalterably opposed to drug prohibition; what began as a war against illicit drugs generations ago has now mutated into a war on the American underclass, and what drugs have not destroyed in our inner cities, the war against them has. I suggested to HBO—which up to that point had produced groundbreaking drama by going where the broadcast networks couldn’t (The Sopranos, Sex and the City, et al…)—that they could further enhance their standing by embracing the ultimate network standard (cop show) and inverting the form. Instead of the usual good guys chasing bad guys framework, questions would be raised about the very labels of good and bad, and, indeed, whether such distinctly moral notions were really the point.

The show would instead be about untethered capitalism run amok, about how power and money actually route themselves in a postmodern American city, and, ultimately, about why we as an urban people are no longer able to solve our problems or heal our wounds. Early in the conception of the drama, Ed Burns and I—as well as the late Bob Colesberry, a consummate filmmaker who served as the directorial producer and created the visual template for The Wire—conceived of a show that would, with each season, slice off another piece of the American city, so that by the end of the run, a simulated Baltimore would stand in for urban America, and the fundamental problems of urbanity would be fully addressed.

First season: the dysfunction of the drug war and the general continuing theme of self-sustaining postmodern institutions devouring the individuals they are supposed to serve or who serve them. Second season: the death of work and the destruction of the American working class in the postindustrial era, for which we added the port of Baltimore. Third season: the political process and the possibility of reform, for which we added the City Hall component. Fourth season: equal opportunity, for which we added the public-education system. The fifth and final season will be about the media and our capacity to recognize and address our own realities, for which we will add the city’s daily newspaper and television components.

Did we mention these grandiose plans to HBO at the beginning? No, they would have laughed us out of the pitch meeting. Instead, we spoke only to the inversion of the cop show and a close examination of the drug war’s dysfunction. But before shifting gears to the port in season two, I sat down with the HBO execs and laid out the argument to begin constructing an American city and examining the above themes through that construction. So here we are.

Mark Bowdon's article on David Simon and The Wire in The Atlantic has started an interesting conversation over whether or not the cynicism engendered by the show is productive of change (the activism thesis) or destructive of hope (the nihilism thesis). Mark Bowden takes the latter view, arguing:

The Wire is ultimately premised on our inability to engage in self-help, and in particularly the inability of the black poor. It is about their lack of agency, and their status as eternal victims. Though compellingly drawn, so compellingly drawn as to move yours truly to tears, this is nothing new. Moreover, this view of human beings trapped in a cage of dysfunction transcends ideology: it strengthens the hand of paternalists of the left and determinists of the right. In that regard, the show is frankly destructive. I’m struck by how many of my friends believe they have more refined moral sensibilities because they watch and swear by The Wire, as though it gives them a richer appreciation of the real struggles of inner-city life, despite the fact that they are exactly as insulated as they were before.

Matt Yglesias, for his part, while mostly agreeing with the nihilism thesis, denies that that show is meaningfully political in these terms at all:

Simon believes that we are doomed, and political progress requires us to believe that we are not. But aesthetically it's an extremely powerful conceit. And at the end of the day, it's a television show not a treatise on urban policy. If some viewers are taking it too literally as a statement of truth, that's on them much more than it is on Simon.

Best of all is an appearance in the comment thread by someone claiming to be David Simon himself, arguing (as I would) that the show is productive of change insofar as it is a devastating critique of the contemporary state of America itself and the place that the unchecked capitalist drive has taken us. There are alternatives to unchecked capitalism, after all, even if we've convinced ourselves there aren't. But I'll let the person claiming to be the man himself speak for himself:

Writing to affirm what people are saying about my faith in individuals to rebel against rigged systems and exert for dignity, while at the same time doubtful that the institutions of a capital-obsessed oligarchy will reform themselves short of outright economic depression (New Deal, the rise of collective bargaining) or systemic moral failure that actually threatens middle-class lives (Vietnam and the resulting, though brief commitment to rethinking our brutal foreign-policy footprints around the world). 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.

Exactly so. I'm quite glad Season 5 is here.

(UPDATE: I've just posted this on MetaFilter, where there will undoubtedly be some more excellent commentary soon, and perhaps, if we're lucky, some vitriol.)

Jurist has a two-part retrospective this month on David "The Wire" Simon's original Baltimore police story, Homicide: Life on the Street. Via the crimelords at MetaFilter. Now here's Family Guy.