This quite severe-looking chart has been floating around this morning: it shows unique visitors to the front page of five Gawker Media sites, not all uniques to the site, and is based on Gawker Media internal stat pages (which are described as "broken" by the company). And everyone is making a big "Gawker is doomed" stink over it, but I don't buy the numbers being representative, really; see directly-measured Quantcast, above. (N.B. Trust Quantcast for directly measured traffic, as in this case, but not "sampled" traffic.)

Still, it's interesting that Denton is sending out pageview charts in response, as he doesn't care about pageviews. "Search traffic [...]

What's that? You haven't been able to work all day either? I KNOW. Can't stop graming those N's.

Partisanship! Don't you hate it? Jon Stewart and David Broder do! And so do a lot of other people. But who is actually causing all of this partisanship? We decided to take a look at every Senate race in the United States since 1980, which we are arbitrarily defining as the beginning of the modern political era.

Why the Senate? Well, for one thing, Senate races are statewide elections, meaning their results are unlikely to be skewed by legislative gerrymandering. For another, a full third of the Senate is on the ballot every two years, and the results of those races are a better indicator of a national mood [...]