Our inaugural run with Spencer Ackerman and Melissa Lafsky was a bit up and down the wicket, so we decided to alter the format of Movable Snipe. What's Movable Snipe? you ask. An ingenious idea the Jewcy brass had a while back to get two writers to correspond with each other over the course of a week about five blogs pre-selected by little old me. Politics, feminism, pop culture, sports, literature, pornography – every purview is fair game and every Technorati eminence worth taking the piss out of.
Think Andrew Sullivan’s gone from conservative conscience to histrionic martyr? (I know nothing about that.) Here’s the platform to let his bloggy lordship have it.
As this is Jewcy, and as we can never do anything in a straightforward way, we've given our Snipers their own epistolary playground for a week: They can write rambling letters on whatever topics they choose, but they must incorporate all five blogs in each missive. It's like a clickable Mad Libs. But warning: some qualitative analysis of the internet may occur.
Your Snipers this week are:
Michael Helke, the books editor of Chicago monthly Stop Smiling. (It’s Jack Shafer’s favorite mag and – full disclosure – the first publication to ever print your humble servant, even if it was a pro bono gig.)
Fiona Maazel, former managing editor of the Paris Review, Jewcy contributor and current resident of Yaddo, that famed writer’s cloister where Jonathan Franzen is said to have kneaded the Muse into giving the world The Corrections.
Michael and Fiona’s quarry:
3 Quarks Daily: A nifty macedoine of science, literature, gossip and politics, beloved by Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and David Byrne. (Taking your sweet time with that blurb, aren’t you, Freeman Dyson?)
Nerve.com’s The Scanner: Another all-purpose jobber, only with more sex and fewer science geek endorsements.
The Elegant Variation: Mark Sarvas’ attempt to list all the great books you aren’t reading, though not because you’re spending all your time reading about not reading them.
Daniel Drezner: I emailed the newly tenured professor and old battle horse of the blogosphere to tell him that somebody loves him well enough to pay people to tweak him for a week. He appears gratified.
Crooked Timber: Named for Kant’s famous remark – “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made” – that was much co-opted by Isaiah Berlin to account for his milquetoast liberalism, this lefty blog has too many contributors to keep track of. I suppose they’ll be more carpet-bombed than sniped.
To answer your questions preemptively: a) shameless self-promotion, b) because tikkun olam doesn't do TrackBacks.