This is my annual camping trip to the Adirondacks High Peaks. Heated hut. Though there's a chance a couple guys will be in a leanto this year. My group came out of print media many years ago, but has broadened somewhat. The mountains contain the great spirits, per Bark-eater lore (the Adirondack Indians), and every year I go with the hope that they, and my friends, will answer some of my questions. This year's questions:
–Is the collapse of the print media recession-related, or is its contraction going to be permanent and transformative?
–When will the internet be monetized? (In midlife, this neurotically-endless question has replaced the endless question of my youth, when will I have a menage a trois?)
–The 6000-word magazine piece, do people still read it? Where and when?
–Do I have mild Asperger's? My wife made this diagnosis a couple years ago, and it was campfire fodder for a while. ("No your game is different from that," one friend muttered…) The latest evidence in the affirmative is that I don't get some of the Super Bowl ads and have to have them explained to me, which I was able to do at my Super Bowl party this year and not at home, because my wife long ago issued a policy about television-watching: I will not explain commercials to you.
–How does this Super Bowl rank among great football games?
–How do my more successful/m-o-r friends feel about Gaza?
–Marriage. Discuss.
–Does the New York Times's tailspin reflect its tragic error on Iraq and its refusal to apologize for this failure of intellectual leadership (C.f. Ken Pollack, Bill Kristol, Bill Keller, Judith Miller, and on and on)? What if it were to apologize now? Would that quench the holy burning trench between print and blogosphere?
–The big enchilada: Did the historic emergence into national political life in 1858-1859 of an oddball intellectual (whom ordinary times would have consigned to a successful legal practice in a provincial capital) over a burning moral question that was all Americans really wanted to talk about (Lincoln/slavery) anticipate Obama and the Israeli occupation-apartheid, in which all Americans are also implicated?
I feel I might keep the last question to myself, till I get a little air and can consult with the great spirits.
(Phil Weiss)
