I'm an adviser to John McCain's campaign. 1 Siri calls me “Funk Deity.” 2 Aside from lessons in pole dancing——another fad workout sweeping Southern California——this may be the least macho exercise of all time. 3

I am not a cat person. 4 My mother was one for many years. 5 I am a professor of Shakespeare, among other subjects, at UCLA, and this has never happened to me. 6

I am a sucker for the man-befriends-nonhuman-creature genre of sitcoms. 7 I have no complaints about how much I make. 8

When the New America Foundation moves its offices in D.C., next week, Foreign Policy will become our tenants, but [...]

An old schoolhouse, two feed stores, an "84 Lumber" yard, the sheriff's substation and a western wear store were the notable tenants on the main street of Lakeside, California. It was just a half-hour's drive from the beaches of San Diego, but it had the dusty half-abandoned look of a Texas panhandle town. The "lake" was a pond in the small park at the end of the road. State Highway 67 ran parallel to the two-block-long downtown, and in a faded Old West-themed plywood strip mall, a lean middle-aged man in a brown corduroy sports coat was behind his desk with his typewriter and a coffee mug full of Bushmill's, [...]

Budapest had never been my favorite European capital, but a job in a foreign city is always better than a job wherever I happen to be living at the moment. This is why, on a balmy Southern California morning in February of 1996, I voluntarily carried my only possessions to Los Angeles International Airport's Tom Bradley terminal the customary three hours prior to departure. The first two hours passed pleasantly at the airport lounge, where my friend Steve and I drank double Greyhounds served in pint glasses.

The Double Greyhound is just a lot of vodka with grapefruit juice to soften the blow. We had been drinking these regularly in [...]

Don't you think it's super-awkward when someone pays you a lot of money and then publicly admits that they regret doing so? Anyway, do you think Jonah Lehrer will pay the Knight Foundation back that $20,000 they just gave him to explain why he was fudging things in his work? (But then, the Knight Foundation does a lot of pretty unfortunate money-spending, to be honest!) Still! Tell us all about it in the comments… over at the Knight Foundation's blog.

"Americans are overreaching; overreaching is the most admirable and most American of the many American excesses."—George F. Will

"Why don't you forward it over to CJ?" my editor said to the senior reporter. "He likes weird stories."

Which was how, on a pretty fall afternoon a couple years ago, I had ended up in this driveway in Fallbrook, California—a rural town nestled away in the San Diego County backcountry. The house in front of me was a well-kept one-story affair sitting on a quiet residential street. I was a cub reporter at the San Diego Union-Tribune. And I did indeed like weird stories. Anything to get away from city councils [...]

If you've ever been in one of those elevators that has a screen with news blips on it and wondered to yourself, "Are these things actually written by people or by slightly dull robots," the answer is people.

"Lindgren was speaking to 70 students at Columbia Journalism School’s storied Pulitzer World Room, after he'd been introduced by journalism professor Victor Navasky, who himself had served as editor of The New York Times Magazine in the 1970s. Navasky told the students the early "New Journalism" practitioner John Hersey was Lindgren’s personal hero and asked who there knew about Hersey’s 1946 New Yorker story 'Hiroshima.' One student raised her hand."

"America's largest open-air mental hospital," that's how Oceanside police spokesman Bob George described this run-down coastal city between Camp Pendleton and the surfer towns of North San Diego County. I called it the Slum by the Sea. Despite the miles of beach and the beautiful old Spanish mission and the Southern California weather, Oceanside was a honky tonk Marine Corps town on the west side of Interstate 5 and a sprawling mess of trailer parks and starter-home suburbs to the east.

I spent a lot of time at Bob's desk in the back of the OPD headquarters. Sometimes it was as a police beat reporter, sometimes it was as the [...]

From time to time, The Awl offers its space to everyday citizens with something to say.

I am a newspaperman. Before my freelancing days, my business card had the name of my paper, and under that it said my own name, and then: "Staff Writer." These days, I'm barely getting by as a freelancer, and my business card has a little graphic of a quill by my name.

I often think about how different the media landscape would be if newspapers had invested in killing off the "Web content" people once they became a clear danger to journalism.

Assassination is a nasty business, and I am against it. Still, you [...]

Who says there's no job security in media? Everyone says that, because it's true. But there are inspirational exceptions. Meet 94-year-old San Francisco Chronicle science reporter David Perlman, who cranked out 111 articles last year and continues to work full-time at the paper. He still loves his beat and his desk is in a sunny corner of the Chronicle newsroom, so there's no reason to quit working now.

After all, he said over a burger at a South of Market dive near Chronicle headquarters, "I'm doing exactly what I wanted to do all my life, be a reporter."

He "majored in the Spectator," the Columbia student paper, [...]

My leftist friends are mainly baffled by how much I like Andrew Sullivan. His blog, the Daily Dish, presents a libertarian-inflected center-right political stance. He supported the Iraq War; he is gay and a practicing Catholic. As Ken Layne recently remarked here, Andrew is "by any rational assessment, a demographic of one—a conservative liberal gay Republican Obama loyalist and Irish-English Oxford man who sought and secured permanent U.S. residency."

But the Dish is intelligent, rational, mannerly, and welcoming, in stark contrast to the common run of right-wing blogs. Here is a conservative who accepts me and my views freely, however much they may diverge from his. It was [...]

Apart from the various ways her artistic genius displayed itself, Nora Ephron was brilliant with people and brilliant with New York City. One small way: she was always terribly kind to kiddo reporters, reasonable in a former New York Post reporter, and as a family member to yet more reporters. No matter how stupid the story, you could email her and she'd write back—Oh hello, I'm in Greece (or Italy or on a boat or en route to Los Angeles or just plain "traveling") but let me think about this marvelous idea and get back to you just as soon as I can, and she did. And here is something [...]

The 2011 edition of Conor Friedersdorf's list of the year's best journalism is out, and a few of the selections might be familiar to you. Or not! But don't say you don't have anything to read now.

The publication of The Lifespan of a Fact, which is based on seven years of email exchanges between writer John D'Agata and fact-checker Jim Fingal, has prompted a lot of thoughtful discussion (an excerpt from the book ran in this month's Harper's). Unmentioned up till now, however, is that while D'Agata was emailing with Fingal, he also was engaged in a tense exchange with another fact-checker charged with readying one of his essays for publication. It was to be an epic piece of writing: concerned with the depletion of Lake Michigan's resident sturgeon population due to faulty Federal government practices, the essay also included relevant meditations [...]

A couple of years ago, I took the train out to Long Island to interview the last person pulled alive from the wreckage of the Twin Towers. Genelle Guzman-McMillan had been in her early 30s on September 11, 2001, and employed by the Port Authority, which had an office on the 64th story of the World Trade Center. She and her coworkers had managed to make it out into the stairwell and all the way down to the 13th floor before the second plane hit, after which the entire building collapsed and Guzman-McMillan was buried under several thousand tons of debris and dust. She lay there for 27 hours, a [...]

Dublin was busy with construction and slick with rain. I tried to recognize landmarks through the taxi windows—mossy stone gate here, mossy stone church there—while the cab driver told me how the Irish were all getting rich and he had finally been able to move back home from the impossible hell of Scotland. It was the end of 1999, I had just flown from Washington to interview for a magazine called International Living, the new hotel-pub where I was staying was owned by someone from the band U2, in 24 hours I would be back at the airport, and life felt like a Thomas Friedman column.

The registration desk [...]

Patch.com was launched in 2007 when Tim Armstrong, the man who turned Google into an advertising company, noticed his very wealthy Connecticut bedroom community lacked a local paper with an events calendar. When Armstrong became head of AOL in 2009 with the mission of transforming the company from a fading dial-up service to a media brand, he sold Patch to his new employers. There are 850 Patch sites, supposedly hyperlocal news operations run by modestly paid newspaper journalists and supposedly supported by neighborhood advertising.

Because the Internet is mostly a garbage factory and AOL produces a great deal of Internet content, it stands to reason that much of AOL's content [...]

Staffers and free-lancers at two West Coast alt-weeklies are nervously awaiting whatever unpleasant news comes with the sale of those papers to local conglomerates. Like all of the once-mighty urban weekly papers, the SF Weekly and Seattle Weekly are struggling to survive in a time when it's not at all clear what these kind of publications are supposed to do when all of their one-time informational and advertising monopolies—music and movie listings, sex personals, roommate ads, alternative news, restaurant reviews, anti-Republican ranting—have moved online.

In both cities, the one-time New Times and then Village Voice Media/Voice Media Group-owned papers will go to local publishers. The San Francisco paper joins [...]

Yancey County is located in the mountainous western stretch of North Carolina, about 45 minutes from Asheville. The county's population is less than 18,000, and yet it has two local papers to serve it: the Yancey Common Times Journal, which has been in publication more than a hundred years, and the "other" newspaper, the Yancey County News, founded in 2011. The paper's masthead lists only two people—husband and wife Jonathan and Susan Austin—but nevertheless, its first year out, the Yancey County News has won two major journalism awards, the E.W. Scripps Award for Distinguished Service to the First Amendment and the Ancil Payne Award for Ethics in Journalism.

Hitler 1 Kony 2 Anne Frank 3 Michele Bachmann 4 Ralph Sampson 5 "This Jeremy Lin Nigga" 6

Health care costs 7 Reproductive rights 8 Governance 9 SOPA 10 The rule of law 11 Dick 12