Why does Newsweek exist?

Michael Kinsley on the magazine's makeover:

What, for example, is this graphic on the letters page? Why, for that matter, is there still a letters page? It's the first page of content you come to. Five one-paragraph comments on the issue published two weeks ago--room for little more than a thumbs up or down. On the Internet, thousands of people have their say immediately and at length. And then a self-parody: "Your thoughts on swine flu" -the cover story two weeks ago--"in six words." Hali McGrath of Berkeley, California, submitted, "Blah, blah, swine flu, blah blah." And Newsweek published it.

My mother has subscribed to Newsweek I think my entire life.  I don't recall ever reading anything enlightening, and the thumbs up thumbs down bull shit simply infuriated me.  I think Newsweek must exist on mom-inertia.

Happy father's day

I was that one, and my father, flawed in the manner of all those cursed with opposable thumbs, was more than a presence. Judged against the void of paternity around us, he was fanatical. This was as much by choice as by chance; I was the sixth of seven kids born to four women. Some of us were born to mothers who were best friends. Some of us were born in the same year. It was all a tangled mess on paper, but measured against "Family Ties" or even "The Cosby Show," it was love, and it formed my earliest and most enduring sense of family.

We were not allowed to refer to each other with the prefix "half" (as in "half-brother" or "half-sister"), as Dad always told us that the half gets in the way, and when the mother of one spoke, it was law, as sure as if the mothers of all were speaking at once.

That's from today's Washington Post. Is it just me or are our newspapers getting much better?

Media conspires to avoid work

Seems they all forgot about the other "deadliest act of mass murder in a school in U.S. history":

The Bath School disaster is the name given to not one but three bombings in Bath Township, Michigan, USA, on May 18, 1927, which killed 45 people and injured 58. Most of the victims were children in second to sixth grades attending the Bath Consolidated School. Their deaths constitute the deadliest act of mass murder in a school in U.S. history. The perpetrator was school board member Andrew Kehoe, who was upset by a property tax that had been levied to fund the construction of the school building.

Kehoe used a detonator to ignite dynamite and hundreds of pounds of pyrotol which he had secretly planted inside the school over the course of many months.

Hat tip to Dad.