As long as people are discussing Daily Dish, which I am generally sick of discussing, I’d like to bring up a related topic that combines two of my obsessions: blog traffic and the Atlantic blogs. I’ve noticed that Daily Dish keeps its sitemeter open, while none of the other blogs at the Atlantic do (as far as I can tell, maybe I’m an idiot and I just can’t find it). Presumably, this is because traffic is very low on the other blogs.
I’d really like to know how many people actually read Clive Crook and Megan McArdle. I think Sullivan is contractually obligated to link to them every so often and that probably gives them a bit of a bump. But beyond that?
I suspect that Crook’s traffic is the lowest of the Atlantic blogs. I can still understand why he has the gig, even though he’s a pompous moron, because he had some high-up job at the Economist and, rightly or wrongly, that publication is taken very seriously. But the case of McArdle really is strange: someone who can’t hold a job in the business world starts an error-filled econ blog that no one reads, then is hired at a big magazine to write an error-filled mostly econ blog no one reads, except to point and laugh, and despite the lack of popularity and accuracy, is given an honorific title at the big magazine and a regular gig on NPR American Public Media’s (awful) Marketplace.
How do things like this happen?
PaulW
Traffic to some of the Atlantic blogs is due to their setup with Disqus: people post on McArdle’s blog for the purposes of trolling, whining, whimpering, and sharing of chili recipes.
I personally hang out with TNC’s crew. It’s fun there.
Bnut
Because you touch yourself.
Narcissus
Connections.
lamh31
@PaulW:
I was just gonna mention TNC’s blog space. I would rate the blogs on Atlantic in this order personally,
1. TNC
2. Sully
3. Ambinder
4. Fallows
5. Green
6. The rest of them.
I’ll admit though, that 4-6 are only read by me if there is an interesting post up, not as a part of my daily routine. Fallows routinely have great post, so of the 3, Fallows I read fairly regularly. The otherwise, I barely read the others!
In terms of traffice though, I’d transpost Sully with TNC, but TNC is best cause he really engages with the commenters.
Germane Jackson
Isn’t failing upwards SOP in today’s dynamic business world?
Redshirt
Failing upwards? The results of non-stop networking at the Yacht Club? Common fraternity membership? Legacies?
Roger Moore
Simple. McAddled has two big things going for her. She’s a woman in a field that’s tended to be dominated by men, so some publications that want to improve their diversity are willing to lower their standards. Far more important, though, is that she’s willing to say whatever it takes to support the glibertarian worldview, which makes her popular among business types who want support for their sociopathy.
EdTheRed
TNC is doing some of the absolute best stuff in the blogosphere, and links from Sullivan are what got me there in the first place.
McMegan is always amusing, in an unintentional, let’s-all-point-and-laugh kind of way, but I can in no way figure out her success without dousing myself in Haterade and setting myself on fire.
Bullsmith
Her current entry is a classic. What’s the real scandal of the forclosure crisis? Is the the things the banks are doing that even she admits appear to be illegal?
No way. It’s our antiquated title system. Forcing banks to prove they own things before they can seize and sell them is SO last century.
cat48
I usually read Sully & Ambinder regularly and Fallows & Coates sporadically. I only read McMegan when I accidentally link from this blog. Sully first linked me to Mr. Cole’s blog!
Jerkface McGee
Other than the occasional McMegan appearance, I’ve always liked Marketplace. Why do you say it’s “awful”?
Southern Beale
How do things like this happen?
Falling upwards is a conservative specialty.
DougJ is the business and economics editor for Balloon Juice.
@EdTheRed:
I like Coates and Fallows. I stopped reading all the Atlantic blogs because the place is just too much of a circle jerk. I do read the Coates stuff that commenters link to and I go to Sullivan for the videos and some of the links (they find some very good stuff, like that long piece on Ratzinger’s boy toy).
Ed Marshall
McArdle got her start at The Economist to.
Wile E. Quixote
@DougJ
As TBogg pointed out yesterday it’s the tits, it’s always about the tits.
DougJ is the business and economics editor for Balloon Juice.
@Jerkface McGee:
I’ll let Jay Rosen do the honors.
MikeJ
Can you blame NPR for Marketplace? Isn’t that American Public Media?
Dave C
@Jerkface McGee:
Agreed. I enjoy it as well.
Southern Beale
@Jerkface McGee:
Not just specific to Marketplace but I’ve had my problems with NPR’s sloppy reporting in general.
MattF
I’ll read anything that Fallows writes, although he’s not in my bookmarks because he drops out for long periods. Coates– I’ll read what he writes, too– but I’d really prefer to read him in a long form, a book of essays or some such.
Corner Stone
DougJ, great title as I think it fits perfectly with the whole Sully nonsense:
El Cid
McAddled is useful in pushing right wing economic views, and in addition it helps appear more diverse to have a woman spouting this nonsense, so, done deal. It doesn’t matter if you’re an incompetent liar. Why would it? What, someone on Marketplace is going to angrily correct her and stop inviting her on?
trollhattan
Idle pedantry: Marketplace is not NPR’s fault, it’s from American Public Media. Which still doesn’t explain why they utilize McMegan’s reasoned idiocy on their show.
On a related note: I believe it WAS on NPR this weekend I heard an Austrialian economist (who knew there was such a creature?) blame the real estate collapse on the CRA. WTF? Seriously. I wanted to punch him in the neck through my radio and ask him whether the ink had dried yet on his check.
trollhattan
I see MikeJ beat me to comment 1.
john b
i think TNC rivals balloon juice for the best commentariat on a blog
EdTheRed
@DougJ is the business and economics editor for Balloon Juice.: I read Fallows when I come across recommended links, but even though I enjoy his stuff, I don’t usually hit his page just to see what he’s writing about.
Sullivan and Coates are the only two Atlantic blogs I’ve got bookmarked, and the only ones I read on any kind of a regular basis.
Mnemosyne
“Marketplace” was good when David Brancaccio was the host — it actually gave equal time to people who thought that maybe grinding employees into the dust in pursuit of an extra 1/2 cent of profit was not necessarily the best idea.
Once Kai Ryssdal came on board, it became full-time Cato Institute bullshit.
Dan
TNC is the best of the bunch by far. He doesn’t feel the need to fill every minute with new posts so when he does post stuff it tends to be well thought out (if not always well-edited). He also engages with commenters (either by replying in the comment section or by email) in a way that many bloggers do not.
I think he’s often a nice counterweight to Sullivan who tends to post before he’s even had time to think things through.
I’ll probably get ridiculed for saying this, but my third favorite is Goldberg. I know, I know he got the iraq war stuff way wrong, is ultra-sensitive to any criticism, etc… I still think that when you take him with a grain of salt he has some interesting things to say about the I-P conflict and other topics (the Castro interview was pretty fascinating). Plus, his clear pro-israel leanings tend to give his criticisms of israel additional weight. See, for example, his recent post about Avidor Lieberman.
arguingwithsignposts
@Jerkface McGee:
David Frum is a frequent contributor.
geg6
@Wile E. Quixote:
Okay, since that seems to be the requirement, I will admit that I have giant, perky Pam Juggs tits.
Where’s my big paycheck, people??
Snayke
Dammit, what does Mark Halperin have to do these days to draw this blog’s ire? Today’s column was easily one of the worst things I’ve ever read from Halperin…and that’s really saying something.
New Yorker
In addition to Sully, I’ll stop in at Ta-Nehisi’s place and Ambinder as well. That’s about it.
beltane
@Bullsmith: I thought conservatives were big on property rights. Has conservatism just boiled down to the defense of blatant theft and might makes right?
goblue72
@trollhattan: Tellingly, they had to go to a country founded by criminals and who’s most famous export is the sociapath who owns Fox in order to find an economist willing to spout that kind of nonsense.
Pancake
You’re probably the kind of jerk that thinks Paul Krugman farts near liquid gold.
jacy
I read TNC every day. He’s a brilliant writer.
I never read McCardle, because I’m losing enough brain cells as it is. If someone wants to point and laugh, I’ll laugh with them, but I’m not wasting any traffic on her, no matter what ridiculous bullshit she commits to electronic paper.
I used to read Sully every day, but his histrionic roller-coaster of cognitive dissonance and his constant refrain of “sure the GOP is full of racist homicidal monsters, but you just can’t trust those Dems” has gotten to be more than I can stand. I look at the links, but I really don’t read what he says any more. If I found that kind of writing satisfying I could break into an overly emotional 12-year old’s diary.
Corner Stone
@Dan:
I swallowed my own tongue at this point.
Bullsmith
@beltane:
Sure looks like might makes right to me. A caveman smashing someone else’s skull in and then dragging his woman off by the hair is just the free market in action, right ? He had the better product (a club) and with it he cornered the market and took his well earned profit.
Onkel Bob
@DougJ is the business and economics editor for Balloon Juice.: Herr Rosen’s argument is a bit thin, and that’s being generous. As the business and economics editor for this prestigious publication, I would expect something a bit more than a McMegan argument based on voices in your head. (BTW – There’s medication for that, it’s called booze.)
Marketplace is what it is. It is no more poorly constructed then any of the other fare on the radio or television, and well, not any better either. At least they give time to Frum and Reich, who at least make some sense. I also like the Duke psychologist (whose name escapes me) they bring on frequently.
The added bonus is that Kai Ryysdall doesn’t make me want to shove ice picks in my ears the way Robert Siegel or *shudder* Michel Martin does…
Earl Butz
OT: America, you chose correctly.
Bitch all you like about Obama but keep in mind this was the only alternative.
DougJ is the business and economics editor for Balloon Juice.
@Pancake:
I sometimes enjoy your trolling, but what is up with that, can’t you do a little better?
Mnemosyne
@Pancake:
At least when people ask Krugman to show them where he got his numbers, his response isn’t, “The statistics I used to prove you were wrong were hypothetical.”
El Cruzado
Sully’s is interesting because of his conversations with himself, TNC’s is because of his conversations with everyone.
Also Sully’s is good to have as a link when you need to stop for a minute as he’ll have some new content every 30 seconds.
Another +1 to TNC’s blog. I just hope it doesn’t become TOO popular and has the comments section ruined.
annamissed
I’m pretty much convinced they all know that bullshitting is the best part of their gig as the “serious people”. It’s all about how bright (or blinding) they can polish up the turd. And being a woman is a decided advantage in the fine art of bedazzlement. For my money Monica Crowley is the undisputed Queen because she always sweetens her her lies with a really big shit eating grin.
va
Sullivan is popular because he articulates shallow thinking forcefully, and persuades his audience that it’s deep.
The rest of those people, excepting Coates, have blogs at the Atlantic because this is the worst of all possible worlds.
daveNYC
Either she gives the world’s best blow jobs, or she has film of The Atlantic’s staff engaged in some sort of beastiality themed snuff film.
It’s not just that she’s wrong, you can get lots of people who are wrong nearly as much as she is. It’s the fact that her errors are very often caused by being sloppy or careless. I can understand (in theory) wanting a glibertarian or wanting a woman to make the staff look more balanced, but I have no idea why they couldn’t get someone who was at least semi-competent at things like, oh, math.
sukabi
How do things like this happen?
I’m betting her talents lie in another area…. she’s good at the metaphorical bj… maybe she’s good at the literal ones too
MikeJ
@daveNYC: You could even make the DougJ argument that competence in math isn’t really required, just ability to operate a calculator. She still fails.
PeakVT
Marketplace has people like McAddled on in an effort to seem hip. If I have it on, I switch it off when the lame Friday roundup segment comes up. I will have to say that at least McAddled doesn’t sound like a Valley Girl, unlike some of the other younger females featured on that segment.
El Cid
@va: The other day I looked up the term “fisked”, and it was based on a supposed takedown of Robert Fisk when he expressed both resentment and the ability to put himself in their position when he was badly beaten in Pakistan. I had my disagreements too, but the notion that this was such a ‘takedown’ that it should inspire its own verb is just absolutely ludicrous.
Sully, on the other hand, handled yet another of his ridiculous emotional outbursts by demanding we destroy the nation-state of Iraq, slaughter tens of thousands in the process, let loose a civil war (and a successful ethno-religious cleansing of Baghdad neighborhoods after which followed THE SURGE), and called anyone who disagreed “fifth column” Saddam lovers.
When I’ve seen him on Bill Maher next to Naomi Klein, he shouts over her in a spitting outrage because he just does not think anyone gets to express genuinely leftist ideas because it means you hate Americans and love Stalin. He’s a complete fucking prick. Also, fuck you lady beside me ’cause I get to shout over you because I’m a loudmouth prick and you’re just some woman not willing to shout.
Good on him for opposing torture on the right, but it’s not like I need to waste my time reading his arguments, since so many others worth my time had made and are making the same points.
El Cid
@daveNYC: She doesn’t care whether what she says or writes has anything to do with reality. Why would you, when it might get in the way of spewing your ridiculous Galtian rhetoric?
mark
@el cid
Dead on. That spot with naomi klein was awful. Don’t forget him calling hillary clinton ‘dick cheney in a pantsuit.’
Over on e.d. kain’s other blog, I commented that sully was a misogynist. I got shouted down.
Roger Moore
@beltane:
Not quite. It’s boiled down to defense of whatever big corporations like. So theft and might makes right are fine when it’s corporations doing the stealing, but not if the little guy is trying it. Similarly, it’s great for big companies to strong arm the little guy, but not for governments to strong arm corporations.
Bullsmith
@El Cid:
My understanding wasn’t that fisking entered the lexicon because Sully was so effective at refuting Fisk as he was credited for laying out his argument as a series of blockquotes with his responses interspersed.
Personally, I’ll take Fisk’s first-hand accounts over Sully’s parsings any day, but I do think it’s a good format for the web and if it’s Sully’s baby, kudos to him. Probably had a thousand parents out there already, of course.
Xenos
I got into a debate with McArdle in her comments section a couple weeks ago about corporate taxation. At the point she insisted corporations are flow-through entities I just gave up. You can’t fix that level of ignorance, not if business school could not clarify that sort of thing for her.
El Cid
@Bullsmith:
Really?
So, doing on a blog what we’ve read for a million years in books and magazines inspired a term which certainly appears to be derision of the best journalists in the world?
That’s just bizarre, in my view. Clearly I should have wiki’d it instead of assuming it from a blog comment.
Glenndacious Greenwaldian (formerly tim)
@Bnut:
LOL Thanks for making me snort loudly.
El Cid
@mark:
I guess that’s better than being a woman and trying to say that in person near Sully.
Bullsmith
@El Cid:
Hey, it’s information I assimilated from the internet. I’m not saying it’s reliable. But yeah, that’s my understanding. Of course in Sully’s circle at the time he destroyed Fisk, natch. Meanwhile in the real world Fisk has been touched by many sullying things, but Sully’s never touched him.
Glenndacious Greenwaldian (formerly tim)
@El Cid:
Yes, Sully is a prick.
I hate myself for dropping by there every day, yet I do. Help me. Please.
El Cid
@Glenndacious Greenwaldian (formerly tim): Thankfully I can depend on others whose writing I’m more interested in will quote him if it’s necessary. Just like I don’t have to be the person wasting time reading right wing blogs. Sure, I can do it from time to time, but regularly? Hell no. No more than I want to continually read people who argue that the moon landing was faked.
daveNYC
Yeah it’s pretty obvious that McMegan doesn’t care about anything that doesn’t directly impact her enjoyment of being McMegan. She is a glibertarian after all. I just don’t get why her bosses don’t look at the number of errors she is making, and swap her out for someone who can at least avoid the errors that involve multiple orders of magnitude.
I really think it’s like the situation with the Knicks and Isiah Thomas. Management really doesn’t care about the quality of the product that they’re producing.
celticdragonchick
I read Sully several times a day, and TNC at least several times a week.
I stay away from McMegan.
Punchy
/does a quintuple take
asiangrrlMN
TNC, period. He is all I read over at The Atlantic. The rest, no. I will read Sully if someone links to him (same with Fallows), but that’s about it.
@El Cid: Aaaaaand, this. I already vented about Sully in his own thread, so thanks for doing it so coherently for me here.
beulahmo
@@El Cid: and @@mark:
My impression of Sully is similar. El Cid recalls “yet another of his ridiculous emotional outbursts,” and I realized that his occasional inclination to allow his emotions to overpower his judgment makes me very uncomfortable. And I have the impression that he is often more motivated by emotion than reason when the subject of his attention is a woman (Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, Elena Kagan).
Still — Sully is capable of having some very interesting insights, and sometimes he articulates his positions in ways that resonate for me much more than any other commentator/blogger. But I stopped checking in at Sully’s during the Kagan confirmation. I was absolutely appalled at Sully’s personal double standard regarding the “outing” of gay people. He manages to find sympathy for the likes of George Rekers, but he can’t shut up about the necessity for the forced outing of Elena Kagan, who very well might not be gay, but might have very understandable reasons for wanting to keep her romantic life private. His ferocity about outing Kagan frankly made me sick. On a personal level, he demonstrated that he was capable of such callousness with Kagan while simultaneously demonstrating remarkable empathy for Rekers. Something about that is very, very wrong.
Norwegian Shooter
Speaking of the awful Marketplace: Somehow Chris Farrell is a respected economics journalist, despite this lazy false equivalence bit that was pre-butted by Paul Krugman 10 days before in his column, not the blog.
And he has a job at Bloomberg Businessweek, too, which somehow lists major journalism awards on his bio that the award websites don’t say he actually got.
I wrote it up here.
kth
Based on the number of comments McArdle gets, which tends to be large even for the infrequent posts that lack a blatant error of fact or inference, I’d guess that she gets a lot of readers. Libertarianism is a nerd philosophy, so it’s understandable that libertards flock to writers like Nick Gillespie and McArdle who can affect at least a semblance of cool. Compared to their readers, Gillespie and McArdle are Steve McQueen and Natalie Wood.
Wile E. Quixote
@kth:
Libertarianism is also a male nerd philosophy, again, as TBogg pointed out yesterday it’s always about the tits.
Larry Bird
Sullivan is how I found this place…. He likes the smell of his farts too much. The color change to his blog is a great example. The other day he posted a quote from a letter by Jack Kerouac with the gist being “life is to sweet to waste on self propoganda” to which Sullivan added “The longer I live, the more I feel this way too.”. That seemed odd to me from what I read there daily. Todays “how great is this blog after 10 years” stuff reminded me of that quote from last week and I thought “really?”. He’s an interesting writer but too emotional at times.
Alwhite
One of the quiet revolutions that has taken place in the last decade is the take over of NPR by the forces of evil. They rarely get the whole story any more & what is missing is always always – ALWAYS the left’s side. It was very subtle at first but it is getting worse.
American Pubic Media is simply ahead of the curve – they have huge endowments & draw a lot of corporate money to ensure that the corporate side gets treated well. They own Minnesota Public Radio which used to be a beacon of hope for what honest high quality journalism could be. But the Wayzata Yacht set took over & they now make more on interest from their corporate holdings than they take in annually on pledge drives.
Alwhite
As far as Atlantic bloggers go I have to thank this site for turning me on to TNC, the only reliable read over there. I read a couple of others if their headline looks interesting but McDipshit? I’d rather drink Draino. And waiting for Sully to find a nut is like watching a blind sow search for acorns. You know eventually it has to happen but it is just not worth the rare reward.
A drink soaked poppenjay was the best description of him I have ever heard.
JRon
How does it happen? Happens the same way Pam Gellar gets profiled in the Times instead of John.
Our elite commentators are money-soaked prima donnas, for the most part, and right wing bloggers are the only ones looking out for their interests.
Remember Charlie Gibson (one of the good ones) during the election? All he cared about in his Obama interview was his own tax rate.
HyperIon
@Alwhite wrote:
I haz sad. I used to live in the twin cities and absolutely adored all things MPR. It was such great local radio. Smart. Clever. Relevant.
Now it is very hard for me to listen to All Things Considered and/or Morning Edition. And I started listening to ATC in the early-70s. It’s just not the same. Oh, well.
HyperIon
@Alwhite wrote:
I don’t think he’s a boozer. But he may be a toker.
What he is soaked with is self-love.
Josh
Hype, it’s not always easy to distinguish Sully from Hitch.
Mnemosyne
@El Cid:
As Bullsmith said, “fisking” refers to the specific style of the rebuttal (ie, reproducing each paragraph and rebutting them point by point) and not to that specific rebuttal being totally epic. It may not be “new,” but it was new to the way blogs were written at the time.
sven
@daveNYC:
Lots of folks here on BJ seem to find McArdle incredibly annoying (I count myself among them) but I still feel as if I can’t put my finger on exactly why.
True, McArdle’s stock and trade are factual errors and faulty logic but no one here seems to care what the idiots at the Corner or Redstate have to say.
ideas?
DougJ is the business and economics editor for Balloon Juice.
@sven:
It’s because the Atlantic purports to be a Very Serious Magazine.
Corner Stone
@sven:
She throws up ridiculous shit, gets called on it, and doubles down.
Plus, as DougJ says, she is given an amazing venue to do such and so forth. Also, too.
sven
@DougJ is the business and economics editor for Balloon Juice.:
Yes, but…
Clive Crook also writes for The Atlantic, posts regurgitated pap, and yet somehow inspires far less bile.
I think it is stuff like this which puts McArdle at the top of my list.
The voice of authority and feigned expertise coupled with a total lack of human empathy… and being rewarded for it!
(gnash)
HyperIon
@Josh wrote: Hype, it’s not always easy to distinguish Sully from Hitch.
It is for me. Hitch’s mind is MUCH sharper than Sully. Yeah, both have adopted stupid positions in the past but that and their accent are about the only thing they share.
Hitch agreeing to be waterboarded earned him a whole lot of respect from me.
Davis X. Machina
@Mnemosyne: Brancaccio’s roots were in Maine mill towns — he had seen and heard about economics from the pointy end.
Much missed.
Tehanu
@El Cid:
in addition it helps appear more diverse to have a woman spouting this nonsense, so, done deal. It doesn’t matter if you’re an incompetent liar.
Doesn’t matter? Hell, it’s a positive recommendation to McGargle’s rightwing overlords. They want a woman who actually lives up — or rather, down — to their stereotype of women as incompetent, giggling noodleheads.
Downpuppy
There’s a participation element at McArdle’s you just don’t get at other major blogs: An almost daily chance to correct immense factual errors. When I go through a bored phase, it fills a need.
Pushing her into a flip out is fun, too.