Bruce Feiler - Where God Was Born, Abraham, Walking The Bible

If true, this post by Roger Friedman is a revolting abuse of the legacy of Danny Pearl, a great American, a daring Jew, and brave journalist.

One of the odd things about having a blog is that you get information -- mostly vague -- about which posts seem to generate a reaction. And for some reason, my post about Adam Gopnik haters a few weeks back resonated with a small but loyal audience. This seems hard to believe, as the reports seem to suggest that readers around the world are checking out Feiler Faster (like one loyal reader and commenter in Kenya!), but there it is on the report I see every now and then. So, hey you loyal Gopnik haters/defenders out there (that includes you, Mrs. Feiler Faster, Defendress In Chief), check out this snide remark from New York mag this week:

Though they probably made it difficult for j-school students to score juicy interviews, recent revelations of superpower editors in the media have made us feel that we're not sure the days of the shy and retiring redliner — RIP, William Shawn — were so bad after all. In today's Independent, New Yorker editor David Remnick rapidly reduces our opinion of him as he tells us that he went to a fancy college — "God knows why" — his worst trait as a journalist is his "lack of concentration," Iraq is "so depressing," and though he doesn't "write so much," as the editor, he gets to be himself "with all its grave limitations." False modesty is all very well, but Remnick's ruminations about himself as a child make us worry that some of those grave limitations have totally carried over into the magazine's present incarnation. Remembering his own precocious youth, Remnick confesses: "If I come across a kid who's 12 or 13, who seems a little pretentious and doesn't really quite know what he or she is talking about, I think that's OK. It means they're interested." Ladies and gentleman, you heard it here. The mystery of Adam Gopnik's ascendance at the mag … SOLVED.

The picture is of Gopnik, by the way, not Remnick.

One of my favorite parts of cherry blossom season in Japan, during the many years I lived there, was learning all the different words the Japanese have to describe minute differences in cherry blossom season. There's a word for the time when just the buds are out, a word for seeing them in sunset, a word for having a picnic under them, a word for taking a stroll beneath them, a word for when the petals coming raining down at the end. For all I know, there's a word for when the blossoms come out early, in the snow.

Maybe now we need a new word: Cherry blossoms have become the canary in the mine for global warming. Whenever we have a burst of springlike weather in mid-winter, as we've been having in New York, the ultimate expression of this odd turnabout is that the cherry blossoms are blooming early. I keep reading, for example, reports that the cherry blossoms are blooming in Brooklyn. Most recently on Drudge, at this hour.