Rod Dreher

Junot You Can't Wait Amazon's Omnivoracious blog has an interview with Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Diaz (Does he still smile every time he hears that?) and an excerpt from a work-in-progress he's calling Dark America. New York's Vulture Blog (which tipped us off to the link) says "It's pretty rad..."

Mixed Wingnuts Writer Roy Edroso compiles The Official Village Voice Election- Season Guide to the Right-Wing Blogosphere for the New York alt.weekly. Notables include Rod Dreher ("Cheerful when discussing food or “sluts”; otherwise, grimly millenarian"); Jonah Goldberg ("Goldberg's comical persona—once pretty much all he had—is now mainly a fallback position in his attempts at serious commentary."); and the always fun Michelle Malkin ("STUPID/EVIL RATIO: 97/3").

I Love the 80s Newsweek's Jonathan Alter talks to Mediabistro's Kathryn Carlson and shares this career high: "When I started covering the media in 1984, there were very few media critics in the United States. At one point, I was named one of the top ten media critics in America and my parents were very pleased—but I had to tell them that there were only ten media critics in America."  read more »

In her syndicated column Why I Am Not a Crunchy Con, Maggie Gallagher looks Rod Dreher's new book, Crunchy Cons and laments the author's lack of historical perspective:

But in his restless, dissatisfied search for Something More, Rod appears to me as less a traditionalist than a fellow postmodern, rootless, cosmopolitan American desperately seeking an identity group where he can believe and belong.

"Rootless cosmopolitan" has a nice ring to it. Where have we heard that one before? This from the writer who saw Million Dollar Baby and mused, "I used to wonder how the Nazis readied normal Germans for legalized murder. Walking out of that dark movie theater, I don't wonder anymore." —Matt Haber

Departing New York Times editor Joe Lelyveld received a surprising newsroom sendoff at 5 p.m.  read more »