The Nation

Another week, another fabulous Media Web Minute from MarketWatch's ace media critic Jon Friedman.

In this episode, a smirking, almost laughing Mr. Friedman plugs The Nation's new "Carnal Knowledge" sex and politics column ("Get it? Wink, wink... Smirk, smirk," Mr. Friedman says of the name), praising it as "a good idea... It makes a lot of sense." Mr. Friedman to neglects to mention the column's author, JoAnn Wypijewski ("Think Maureen Dowd meets Anna Quindlen," per Mr. Friedman), whom he interviews in the accompanying column. Then again, the video is only a minute.

Yesterday, Salon published a piece by writer Neal Pollack about his experiences with this year's moral panic-inspiring quasi-legal drug, salvia divinorum, in a piece called Confessions of a Salvia Eater.

Fans of Mr. Pollack will no doubt enjoy his description of what he saw on the other side:

I put the salvia in my freezer and didn't touch it for almost two years. Then I had a free midnight, and it occurred to me to try some. ... Almost immediately, I had visions. ... The next night, I repeated the dose. While I had a few small visions, I mostly felt that my body was stretching out beyond its boundaries, moving into infinite space.  read more »

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Let’s give a warm New York welcome to the 10th anniversary edition of Phillip Lopate’s essential Writing New York: A Literary Anthology (Library of America, $19.95), now in paperback and expanded to include material from the past decade.

We've seen many changes since 1998. The twin towers are gone. Rudy, too. The Yankees have quit winning the World Series. The rich got richer, again. Mr. Lopate detects a vein of anxiety about certain trends: “Some writers have warned that the city’s texture, its very character, is being eroded by a steady stream of luxury condominiums and national chain stores. In this apocalyptic vision, the destruction of New York will come not from terrorist attack but from the slow nibbling away of its soul by greedy, suburbanized blandness.” But browse awhile through this anthology and you’ll recognize that the city’s essence is eternal. Here, for example, is Tom Wolfe writing (writing!) in 1965, from a sweet little ditty called “A Sunday Kind of Love”:  read more »

The Nation very rarely does endorsements, but in their upcoming issue that hits newstands tomorrow, Barack Obama is on the cover and it amounts to, well, something very close to an endorsement.  read more »

Twenty-eight-year-old Christopher Hayes will be The Nation's new DC bureau editor, according to a memo sent to staff this afternoon.

Mr. Hayes, who has spent the last year contributing regularly to The Nation as a Puffin Fellow at the Nation Institute, will replace David Corn, whose departure for Mother Jones was announced a month ago. While technically a senior editor at In These Times, Mr. Hayes said The Nation has been his primary focus during the last 12 months, and that about 90 percent of his writing from that time has appeared in its pages.

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“I think my bureau will be almost as big as the Time magazine bureau,” David Corn told The Observer.  read more »