The “S” stands for “Speed.”

I actually think that’s the case. Anyway, the new Iphone 3GS came out today, and it’s fast and has all sorts of cool stuff, including video. The only downside is hidden in the fine print on Apple’s website (bold added):

Requires new two-year AT&T wireless service contract, sold separately to qualified customers… For non-qualified customers, including existing AT&T customers who want to upgrade from another phone or replace an iPhone 3G, the price with a new two-year agreement is $499 (8GB), $599 (16GB), or $699 (32GB).

That is a lot of change.

Clearly, Sotomayor was wrong.

Pop quiz! After the world learns of an incident where one of your employees karate-chopped a black woman and called her a “nigger,” would you:

1. Immediately call a press conference to reassure the public that the two anti-immigration groups you head up are not, in fact, racist.
2. Immediately write an essay where you accuse the blogosphere of becoming “a modern day lynching by a faceless, angry, ignorant mob.”

If you’re Bay Buchanan, you choose door number two, and you practically kick it down. On the one hand, I actually do feel bad for Marcus Epstein (the half-Jewish, half-Korean ninja-wannabe). He had real problems, and I’m certainly not a model citizen when I’m drunk, either–and let’s be honest, it’s tailor-made lefty tablog-fodder, so of course it’s going to get blown sky-high.

But damn. A lynch mob. Way to stamp out that fire, Ms. Buchanan.

Quotatious.

“It’s my great nightmare that I, or my son, ever sound like [Lindsey Graham]–smug, self-satisfied, unreflective,  whiny and narcissistic. It’s the sort of comment that betrays a man bereft of any deep interest in this country’s history. But if you’ve never had to grapple with who you are in relation to other people, if you’ve never had to worry much about courting people who aren’t like you, if you’ve never struggled with being politically correct, it’s exactly the sort of thing you’d say.

It is, in a word, ignorance. ” – Ta-Nehisi Coates, from a longer post on what PC really means.

Writing exercise.

There’s an piece in this week’s NYer about creative writing programs. In true NYer style, it’s good (and incredibly long), but this sentence came off with a clonk, especially in an article about learning to write well:

As McGurl points out, the horses that the Plains Indians rode when they hunted, so picturesquely, the buffalo were European imports.

I think every journalism professor in the country just had a stroke. How would you fix this sentence? Discuss!