Maybe I’m the only person annoyed by this, but when did Salon turn into Ain’t It Cool News? Like the first half of every other article at AIC, this intro to an otherwise great interview with journalist Mark Danner feels completely out of place :

On a cloudless day, the sky a brilliant, late-afternoon blue, my car winds its way up the Berkeley hills. Plum and pear trees in glorious whites and pinks burst into sight at each turn in the road. Beds of yellow flowers, trees hung with lemons, and the odd palm are surrounded by the green of a Northern California winter, though the temperature is pushing 70 degrees. An almost perfectly full moon, faded to a tattered white, sits overhead. Suddenly, I take a turn and start straight up, as if into the heavens, but in fact toward Grizzly Peak, before turning yet again into a small street and pulling up in front of a wooden gate. You swing it open and proceed down a picturesque stone path through the world’s tiniest grove of redwoods toward the yellow stucco cottage that was only recently the home of Nobel Prize-winning poet Czeslaw Milosz, but is now the home — as yet almost furniture-less — of journalist Mark Danner, who has said that, as a young writer in search of “a kind of moral clarity,” he gravitated toward countries where “massacres and killings and torture happen, in the place, that is, where we find evil.”
. . .
We seat ourselves, a makeshift table with my tape recorders between us, and, turning away from the slowly sinking sun, simply plunge in.

Jeez, and they say bloggers are self-indulgent. Perhaps I should start writing like this too :

“It was a frigid Tuesday not unlike any other that I returned from lunch to once again sit at my desk and survey the media landscape. The browning of the leaves and the stiffness of that February wind were no match for the scalding hot cup of coffee that I brought slowly to my lips to begin warming me from inside. As I sat there checking the correspondence from friends and foes alike, I had no idea I was about to click on the link that would change my life forever. Through normally locked behind an impenetrable wall composed of 1′s and 0′s, this particular column from the New York Times would prove to catalog the failures of an Administration whose exploits would put Don Quixote to shame. Beneath the byline Krugman lies prose too good to miss my friends, so do yourselves a favor and make sure to ‘read the whole thing’.”

On second thought, if I wrote like that, I’d probably just end up wanting to kick my own ass.