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Last weekend I made my first trip to the Newseum, a shiny new museum dedicated to---well, I'm still trying to figure that out. On its second floor there's an interactive exhibit in which you can play reporter by responding to battery of ethical questions. This'll be easy, I figured, knowing that the game was designed for kids. I can totally kick the asses of a bunch of five-year-olds at Tee Ball, so I was sure I could clean up at a journalism ethics game designed for high schoolers. Bring it, Newseum! Read More "What’s the Point of the Newseum?" »

When he's not busy being the favorite target of desperate, confused GOP apparatchiks grasping for any non-issue that might help their candidate win a presidential election, Bill Ayers is a Chicago-based professor of education theory. If you'd like to talk to him about that---and presumably other stuff he's been involved with---you can see him in person at Busboys & Poets on November 17 at 6:30 p.m. He'll be plugging a new book which he co-edited, City Kids, City Schools.

Please leave semi-coherent, rambling accusations about the relationship between Ayers and Barack Obama in the comments.

Blog Action Day, an annual event where bloggers collectively weigh in on some matter of import, happened yesterday. Last year the event failed to do something about the environment---if some game-changing idea about climate change or alternative energy or whatever got blogged about that day, I must have missed it. (Did one of the presidential candidates say something about it? John McCain's blinking hypnotized me, so I only half paid attention.) Read More "So, Did We Fix Poverty Yet?" »

Tonight Vertigo Books in College Park has what should be a fun evening planned: Tim Reid and Tom Dreesen, the self-proclaimed first and only black and white comedy team, will discuss their new book, Tim & Tom: American Comedy in Black and White. Our sister paper the Chicago Reader has an excerpt from the book; those with shorter attention spans can check out their appearance together on Reid's best-known gig, WKRP in Cincinnati:

Or their routine about standing on the corner of 47th and Drexel on Chicago's South Side:

The festivities start tonight at 7 p.m. at Vertigo Books, 7346 Baltimore Ave., College Park; (301) 779-9300.

An apology to anybody who was reading this week's print edition of the paper, saw my blurb on the Submersion Journalism event, and wanted to attend; I dutifully included the start time (6:30 p.m.) and info about the venue (Busboys & Poets), but neglected to state the day the thing is actually happening.

The good news is that you can still go---it's happening tomorrow evening, and should be a fun event, featuring a batch of top-shelf journalists including Harper's editor Bill Wasik, Submersion Journalism contributors Ken Silverstein ("Their Men in Washington") and Barbara Ehrenreich ("Welcome to Cancerland"), and City Paper staff writer Angela Valdez. (I guess this means she'll miss the Gin & Juice party.) And though I don't want to dissuade you from going out and rooting for the home team, there's another good option on the table tomorrow night if you want to meet smart journalists in person. At 7 p.m. at Politics & Prose a group of New York Review of Books contributors will talk about various issues related to the election. On the docket are Elizabeth Drew, Jonathan Freedland, Peter Galbraith (who has a solid piece in the NYRB's latest issue on what the surge did and didn't accomplish), Suzanne Goldenberg, and Michael Tomasky. (The peg for all this is a new book, The Consequences to Come: American Power After Bush, which collects some of the publication's writings on the current political moment.)

Ben Westhoff, a New York freelance writer and occasional contributor to City Paper's arts pages, recently signed on with the Examiner's new blogger-generated-content model, where writers proclaim themselves experts in some discipline and get paid based on pageviews. It didn't work out so well for Westhoff, who had a brief stint as a "music examiner," because, well---he was trying to get pageviews:

In the beginning I took my column pretty seriously, shouting out stories I'd written for other publications, and including some original content. It quickly became a slog. My hits were 200 or 300 a day, not terrible, but translating to pennies (or perhaps quarters) per day. Then, around the time of the Republican convention it occurred to me that the idiots who dial up Examiner don't want to read about Jamie Lidell or whatever, they want to read about Sarah fucking Palin. And so I began posting about her, every day. My hits went way up, well over 1000 for this Sarah Palin drinking game.

I was immediately told by an editor -- a different one -- that this was unacceptable, that I had to write about music only. I pushed back, noting my agreement with the first guy. But he couldn't be swayed, and since I was near a payment threshold I capitulated. I silently vowed to get over the threshold as quickly as possible, and to entertain myself in the process. And so I began to blog about nothing but Lil Wayne and boobs -- Katy Perry's, mostly -- in as absurd a manner as possible. Oh, and I still talked about Sarah Palin via ridiculous musical tie-ins. "Katy Perry and Sarah Palin to wrestle in Jello?" one was titled.

My hits stayed high, probably because nearly every post included a picture of Katy Perry with her tits hanging out, which were splashed across the site's front page next to headlines like "Katy Perry voted biggest boobs in music." (The first line of that particular post was, "By my friend Darryl"). After about a week of this they cut me off. My page is still up, but as of Saturday I can't post to it anymore. This annoyed me at first, but this morning I got paid so I'm over it.

Westhoff's post includes links to his Examiner posts, but they're all dead now.

For a brief moment on Friday, John McCain's campaign had an ad up on YouTube making a big noise about the non-issue of Barack Obama and ACORN. Fox News apparently had a problem with it, so it's down now, but the McCain-Palin camp is apparently still proud enough of the ad to have a transcript available.

ACORN is a favorite subject for rageoholic Twitterers and few others, and I suspect it won't sway many undecideds. But John G. Geer figures it's all a good thing anyway: In a Post op-ed over the weekend he argued that negative ads, if nothing else, get down to specifics. Geer's written a book-length study of the subject, but those with short attention spans can go straight to his "Attack Ad Hall of Fame." It's probably only a matter of days before McCain posts an ad featuring 25 seconds of Barack Obama's face and five seconds of a mushroom cloud; at least you don't need Fox News' permission for that.

If you're any kind of fan of crime and mystery novels, you'll want to take a look at the Baltimore Sun's book blog, Read Street, which is doing a knockout job covering this weekend's Bouchercon. The blog invited a batch of writers attending the fest to weigh in on a topic of their choosing, and among them is Austin Camacho, the Springfield-based author of a batch of novels featuring detective Hannibal Jones. Jones, like Camacho, is black, and his essay tackles the question of whether race matters when it comes to character. The whole thing is worth a read, but here's an excerpt:

Like most of his peers, Hannibal is not well-off financially, because in his world, being moral doesn’t pay very well. But how did our hero get to be this impoverished paragon? Surely his personal history shaped his character. The fact that Hannibal is a black man in a white man’s world shapes him just as much as the fact that he was raised by his mother after his father died in Vietnam and has little feel for the hip hop, red-black-and-green, whitey-distrusting culture of his neighbors. Hardboiled detectives are always outsiders, but in the case of black detectives it’s easy to understand why. White clients may expect them to have a hidden, anti-white agenda. Other African Americans, distrustful of authority figures in general, sometimes have a special resentment of black men who question them or try to associate them with crimes.

On top of eradicating a much-loved local chain, the closure of Olsson's bookstores also played havoc with the schedules of a few authors who had readings scheduled at the stores. At least one writer has found a new date and place to do a little self-promotion: Michael Kimball, Baltimore author of the novel Dear Everybody and guy who'll write your life story on a postcard if you ask---will now speak Wednesday, Nov. 5, at the Georgetown Barnes & Noble. He'll be joined by fellow Baltimorean Jessica Anya Blau, author of The Summer of Naked Swim Parties. For more on Dear Everybody, check out the video below:

If you're an author whose Olsson's reading has been rescheduled, drop a line and/or make mention of it in the comments.

Northern Virginia cartoonist Richard Thompson, whose strip Cul de Sac now runs daily in the Post (we're patting ourselves on the back), has a must-read blog where he comments on some of his illustrations that get published. Today he has an interesting post on an illustration that didn't get published. A little while back, Thompson writes, he was approached by the New Yorker to work something up for a Malcolm Gladwell review of an unnamed book about Goldman Sachs (this one maybe?)(Update: Thompson says that's the book):

The book dealt with a long-time head of Goldman Sachs who'd grown up poor in a tough Brooklyn neighborhood and started at the firm as an assistant janitor while in his mid-teens. He'd gone on to be a titan of finance, deal-maker & adviser to presidents, and Gladwell's take was that outsiders can often do things within the system that others can't, and hence do well. One of his counter-intuitive pieces, and it was interesting.

Well, Wall Street looks different now, and the piece may now be too out-dated to run without a lot of revisions, which is too bad.

You can check out Thompson's blog to see his now-unlikely-to-run illustration.

If you can't make the trip up to Baltimore this week for the country's biggest convention dedicated to crime fiction, you can at least meet two of Bouchercon's guests of honor in D.C. tonight. Barbara Peters and Robert Rosenwald, owners of the Poisoned Pen bookstore/publisher in Scottsdale, Ariz. (and winners of Bouchercon's 2008 lifetime achievement award), are at the Library of Congress, speaking on the topic "Books---Before and Beyond: Publishing in the 21st Century.” Among the subjects under discussion are book trailers, game-book tie-ins, devices like the Kindle, and other initiatives that are likely to have a modest-at-best impact on book sales in the future. The event starts at 6 p.m. at the LoC's Montpelier Room.

As you may have heard, some smart guy who helps give out the Nobel Prize in literature recently said that Americans are simply too "insular" and possessed of a restricting "ignorance" to produce great writing. So we have much to learn from the arrival of Suhayl Saadi, who's here for a month of readings and lectures at George Washington University. Saadi, who according to a press release is "known throughout the UK as the preeminent Scottish-Pakistani writer," has received much acclaim for his 2004 debut novel, Psychoraag, which he'll be reading from tonight. The book doesn't have a U.S. publisher---we're insular and ignorant, remember---but copies will be available for purchase at his D.C. readings and at the campus bookstore. Or you can just legally read the whole thing for free. Americans like free stuff.

Tonight's reading from Psychoraag is at 8 p.m. in the City View Room, seventh floor of 1957 E St. NW. A second event, during while he'll discuss "the role that memory, time, place, and multiple voices play in 'destabilizing' literature," takes place Monday, Oct. 13, 8:15 p.m. in room B07 of the Media and Public Affairs Building at George Washington University.

From now through Oct. 7, we'll be running updates from the Duke Ellington Jazz Festival at our music blog, Black Plastic Bag. Check out our report from opening night and, if you're disinclined to watch tonight's debate, our picks for tonight's shows.

Valleywag points to a Time magazine widget listing the results of a poll asking folks who will win tonight's watch-it-through-your-fingers-like-it's-The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Vice Presidential debate. The rest of the world gives it to Joe Biden, 83 percent to Sarah Palin's 17 percent. Even Alaska is on the same train as everybody else (78 to 22). Delaware goes to Biden, unsurprisingly---but at a full 100 percent. When's the last time an election poll went 100 percent in one candidate's direction? Even Alan Keyes got a few points against Barack Obama in the 2004 Senate race.