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.

Hooray for Friday, hooray for everything.

* The Daily Show nicely nailed the hypocrisy inherent to the Republican position on the stimulus debate last night.

* Scandal at 1600: it turns out the practice of disrespecting the Oval Office by not wearing a jacket inside it—heroically revealed by former chief of staff Andrew Card just this week—goes back decades.

* They've remixed the audiobook versions of Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope. The real scandal is that it took this long for someone to think to do it.

* Remixing the inaugural poem.

* Syllabus for another class on The Wire.

* West Antarctic ice sheet collapse even more catastrophic for U.S. coasts. Icemelt Could Shift Earth's Rotation, Moving Water Northward. Antarctic warming is robust. Everything is fine.

* And will Vermont towns finally get their chance to arrest Cheney? Oh, please yes.

Misc.

* NYC's maple-syrup smell mystery resolved! It was New Jersey. (Really!)

* The AP lacks a basic understanding of fair use. More at MeFi.

* Raccoons have invaded the White House. Sadly the Secret Service has only trained for nighttime raccoon assault.

* How Obama is screwing up the stimulus: failure to counteract zombie Republican lies. More on this from Steve Benen.

* Also on the Obama-screwing-up front: he's publishing op-eds in dead-tree media. Nobody reads newspapers anymore, gramps!

* Though they do, apparently, read alt-weeklies.

* Also: Judd Gregg still sucks.

* Climate Progress now has one-stop anti-nuclear shopping.

* The nonprofit industrial complex.

* How various songs react to Ze Frank's voice-activated drawing applications.

* And via Kottke: Who wouldn't want to take a class entitled "What's So Great about The Wire?"?

If artists depend on angst and unrest to fuel their creative fire, then at least in one sense the 43rd presidency has been a blessing. Eight years is an eternity in the life of a culture, and when we look back on an era, we do it through pinholes: a movie here, a book there. What will stand out, decades from now, as the singular emblems of this moment in history? Newsweek asked its cultural critics to pick the one work in their field that they believe exemplifies what it was like to be alive in the age of George W. Bush.

Battlestar Galactica
American Idol
Jeff Koons’s Hanging Heart
The Corrections
Black Hawk Down
Cohen’s Borat
Green Day’s American Idiot
Far Away
Rick Warren's The Purpose-Driven Life

Battlestar is a decent if limited pick, and Idol a fairly inspired one, though not for the reasons given—but the exclusion of The Wire is simply criminal, not to mention Sopranos and Deadwood, and (yes) 24. For film, it might actually be The Dark Knight, or else There Will Be Blood. (Maybe Children of Men?) For books—surely the hardest category—it's probably The Road, for a few reasons. I'm too illiterate in music to even begin to answer: the best I could manage would be a half-serious suggestion of Gnarls Barkley, or else just name a Springsteen album because that's how I roll.

Via The Chutry Experiment, who points (among other things) to the unforgivable omission of viral video.

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.

Two men on opposite sides of the law, dependent on one another: the cop needs the criminal, and the criminal is only forced to employ cloak-and-dagger tactics because of the cop. Analyzing the credit sequences of The Wire at Moving Image Source. (Thanks, Fiona!)

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.

Saturday Night Fever.

* Games of the day: Fantastic Contraption, Totem Destroyer, and Hedgehog Launch.

* Josh Marshall, Matt Yglesias, and Marc Ambinder all agree that Maliki's endorsement of the Obama plan for withdraw from Iraq today is the nail in the coffin for the sole remaining justification for the John McCain candidacy.

* Notorious freedom-hater the Pope is at it again, reminding us the West needs to change its wasteful way of life.

* Children's-Film Sequels as Imagined by Famous Directors.

* And what's Alan Moore's favorite TV show? The Wire, of course.

Too Weird for The Wire: How black Baltimore drug dealers are using white supremacist legal theories to confound the Feds. Via MetaFilter.

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.