Double Flee A

magazine

The new Atlantic monthly is here, and it's got a must-read article about talk radio called "HOST" by David Foster Wallace. With, you guessed it, thousands of delightful footnotes.
It takes a lot of ideas I've seen in many different places and condenses them (talk radio is conducive to ideological reductionism, talk radio is primarily about money, not rhetoric, the reason Rush and "Dr." Laura failed on TV is because their audiences didn't compute the way they looked after so much time spent with their fantasies and the reassuring voices, and that the voices themselves can be sped up using powerful computers, to save airtime). Of course, I'm only about halfway through it, so it may turnout to be original yet.

The above-listed stray facts are well known to people who love to read about the mediascape, but who has time, so this article is sure to make a big splash. And Wallace is a great writer anyway.

posted by dale @ 7:32 AM