Davos Newbies

Maria Farrell strikes some resonant chords. And I don’t even like the constitution.

Jonathan Chait has chapter and verse on The New Republic website: “I didn’t think Daniel Okrent, the departing New York Times public editor, could get any more cowardly. But he just did.”

Read Chait’s entire analysis. You can read the farrago here, with both Krugman’s and Okrent’s contribution and make up your own mind.

Update Brad DeLong provides the essential, annotated version.

Tom Peters has made his 31 points for interviewing excellence available for download.

Whatever you think of Peters, he’s a great storyteller, and that means he must be a great interviewer to ferret out all the stuff he raves about. I think his list is excellent (although his examples of great interviewers don’t strike a chord for me).

His “secret” in tip 26 resonated particularly for me: “I’m just a dumb old fart trying to figure out what goes on here. HELP ME, PLEASE.” For years, I told my journalists never to worry about saying, “I’m sorry, I don’t understand that. Could you explain it for me, please.” Even if you’re meant to be a financial writer and you don’t know what a floating-rate note is. The truth is just about everyone loves being an expert, and a naive question is often a cue for someone to hold forth in revealing detail.

Tom’s final, crucial point (capital letters and exclamation marks are his):

FEW THINGS IN LIFE PISS ME OFF MORE THAN GOING THROUGH SOMEONE’S INTERVIEW NOTES AND FINDING A DEARTH OF “SOLID EVIDENCE� — examples, stories, detailed process maps, etc. (I BLOODY HATE Generalizations!)

Even at this early beta stage, Google Print looks like it will be terrifyingly useful and addictive.

Ever wished a great research library could be completely searchable? Here it is.

I eagerly logged on to the much-trumpeted TPM Cafe on its launch today. The product of Josh Marshall, author of Talking Points Memo, TPM Cafe has both a number of group blogs with some good participants (Anne-Marie Slaughter, John Ikenberry, Todd Gitlin, Ivo Daalder) and some individual blogs like Matthew Yglesias’s.

But as far as I can tell, there are no RSS feeds whatsoever. Not even the poor one- or two-line feeds that the original TPM provides, which is what I had feared pre-launch. How can a clued-up blogger like Josh Marshall do this? There also doesn’t seem to be any provision for trackbacks, which is odd, but not crucial. I don’t get it.

Just as the rest of the world is increasingly using RSS, how can a new venture — which I assume wants to maximize its audience — ignore it? I’ve sent TPM Cafe a bug report.

Update There’s a teaser feed here. Thanks to Mark Schmitt for helping me find it. (And following that syntax, you can get Matthew Yglesias’s teaser feed here.) That’s better than nothing, but it’s pretty poor. Here, for example, is what I get from Mark’s first post on TPM Cafe:

First, I’m very excited to be here, looking forward to great discussion. Josh started this off with two questions, and it’s the first, the big one, that Greg, Karen, Ed…

That’s it. There’s even no way to tell which author wrote it. Is it going to make me click through to read the entire post? Josh or someone should get in touch with Kieran Healy at Crooked Timber to see how to do decent feeds from a group blog. You can choose your flavor and the feed tells you the author, so if you prefer Kieran to John Quiggin (I like them both) that can direct your reading.