Thomas Mallon, whom I generally like — he wrote Stolen Words, an excellent book on plagiarism that I’ve occasionally plagiarized myself — decides to have at The New York Times‘s “Portraits of Grief”:

[A]nyone depressed over his weight became a “gentle giant” and every binge drinker was the life of the party. As the Portraits accumulated over weeks and months, I began performing mental translations, from a sugary base 8 to a real-life base 10. The fifty-four-year-old vegetarian office temp, a bachelor with “strong opinions” who preferred “short-term jobs,” was, I would bet, an absolutely impossible man; but I would prefer to have known him rather than the bland reincarnation forced to share a page with the other murdered souls under headings like “The Joys of Fatherhood” and “Perpetual Motion.” If Rudolph W. Giuliani had perished in the attacks, as he nearly did, he would be remembered in the Portraits as a rabid Yankees fan who sometimes liked to put on lipstick.

Tim Noah, who excerpted this in Slate for those of us who don’t take The American Scholar, compares the Portraits unfavorably to the Times obituaries, which Mallon praises elsewhere. Surely this is unfair. It’s far easier to write of distinguished people, with real achievements, than of hundreds of more or less anonymous murder victims, especially when you get more space. And how hard is it to translate even Mallon’s own example from octal to decimal? The 54-year-old vegetarian office temp was so obviously impossible that I see no need to say so. No doubt you would get a fuller picture of the man having known him. Are the Portraits worthless on that account?

Go read them. Of the thirteen posted today maybe three are irredeemable treacle. Considering the assignment that’s a pretty good track record.

William Beatty explains not only what causes traffic jams — and it isn’t accidents, at least not most of the time — but how, as a single driver, to help fix them. (Thanks to Cut on the Bias for the link.)

For somebody who doesn’t drive I seem to write a lot about cars.

Aren’t we? Postrel, Joanne Jacobs, Volokh, SamizData, Megan McArdle, Eric Raymond… (This extremely abbreviated list is in approximate ascending Sullivan number order, so everyone can feel insulted.) Not even counting the fellow travelers like Lilek and Musil and Reynolds and King Andy himself, who may also have spawned the weird Catholic blogging subculture. If you wanted to compile a list of libertarian blogs the real question would be if you could find anybody to exclude. There’s Alterman, and Josh Marshall if you absolutely must. Mickey Kaus used to wring his hands over the gap between rich and poor in America and the decline of public civility and other sissy stuff, but that was ten years ago. Now it’s all welfare reform, all the time. We have before us a case of selection bias on a par with the poll of automobile owners that predicted Landon for President in ’36. But why?

I’ll post a theory when I think of one.

Turns out the new poem by Shakespeare isn’t really by Shakespeare after all. No one ought to care a great deal because it wasn’t much good. But you have to admire anyone who can say, as Donald Foster did in his attribution retraction, “No one who cannot rejoice in the discovery of his own mistakes deserves to be called a scholar.” Or a blogger for that matter. Worth reading is Ron Rosenbaum’s reaction to the attribution retraction (this link, alas, appears to be temporary).

So Pat Buchanan, who certainly has more serious transgressions to answer for than alleged disloyalty to his past employer, is the latest suspect, according to the execrable Joshua Micah Marshall. Marshall is atwitter because, mirabile dictu, Buchanan won’t confirm or deny! Um, Josh, Stanley Kutler in Slate supplies a slightly more persuasive explanation. And as Jane Galt points out,

if Buchanan were really concerned about alienating his peeps in the GOP, he’d be more worried about, oh, say, his running for national office on a third party ticket and thus siphoning off some of the party’s base during a tight election year than he would about admitting he blew the whistle in a 30 year old political scandal.

Something about Deep Throat — secret meetings! scribbled times on newspapers! wrestling matches in underground parking garages! — inflames the imagination of every journalist. My friend Mark Riebling, who’s really more a historian, joined the fray by nominating, in his generally excellent book Wedge, ex-spooks William Colby and Cord Meyer, but he admits he’s no longer convinced, and really he wasn’t very convincing even when he wrote it eight years ago.

Edward Jay Epstein, on the other hand, argues that there was no Deep Throat. Throat’s revelations were attributed in the original Washington Post stories to multiple sources, which Woodstein bundled up and dramatized for All the President’s Men. Epstein’s theory is no fun at all. Its only merit is that it’s obviously true.