Luke Ford

BigHeadDC reports:

The big news this weekend that a whopping three editors, including the managing editor, quit Nick Denton’s flagship Gawker Media blog empire, has left former Wonkette editor Alex Pareene up a tree without a parachute. Pareene, you’ll recall, was run out of Washington after his affair with a married female was revealed on Big Head DC. Denton looked kindly on him (maybe because Denton is known for some strange affairs of his own), and let him start quietly snarking in NYC at Gawker. But, with the departure of a majority of its editorial staff, Denton has now announced that he wants to re-fashion the site as a news disseminator — not a snark regurgitator.

BigHeadDC writes this memo to Dan Savage:

Perhaps you don’t want to believe the Benjamin Nicholas / Trent Lott story because you played a role in once hiring Nicholas, an alleged plagiarist, to write a few articles for your newspaper, The Stranger? Have you had communications with Nicholas since this story broke? If so, what has he told you? Have you not been honest in explaining your relationship with him? Most importantly, why did he risk his negatively affecting escort business by not flat-out denying a Lott relationship in his original e-mails?

Jack Shafer writes:

If I were maximum dictator, I would force every newspaper editor, every magazine editor, and every television producer in the land to read Ben Wallace-Wells’ 15,000-word article in the new (Dec. 13) issue of Rolling Stone, titled "How America Lost the War on Drugs."

Wallace-Wells captures the complete costs of the drug war better than any journalist I’ve read in a long time. He documents how the federal government has dropped about $500 billion combating illicit drugs over the past 35 years. Nearly 500,000 people sit in jail or prison for drug crimes, "a twelvefold increase since 1980," Wallace-Wells writes. For all the money the government has spent and all the people it’s jailed, it’s still failed to make a long-term impact on the availability of drugs. The militarized drug-control techniques favored by the Bush administration, he reports, have increased violence and political corruption abroad, violated human rights, and destabilized several Latin American nations.

Wallace-Wells’ accomplishment, while formidable, didn’t require the back-channel confidential sources that Bob Woodward relies on or the mildewed library stacks of obscure documents that made up I.F. Stone’s arsenal. Wallace-Wells gets the story and gets it well by approaching the much pawed-over topic with an open mind and a smart set of questions. Like an auditor called in to assess the wreck of a Fortune 500 company, he asks what the government has gotten for the half-trillion dollars it has spent on the drug war and takes the question to the limits.