The Internet is the most powerful communication medium ever, but we've chosen to give up some of that power to get it for free. It's still the most powerful medium, even with the power reduced, but (this is very important) eventually we'll use it up, and be stuck without the ability to communicate at all, if we don't change. And further, we won't know how we got there, because the record won't survive. 

I spend a lot of time dredging through old magazines and newspapers--and books for that matter--but especially periodicals, because that's where stuff gets forgotten. People don't read old newspapers. If you want to find out what's been forgotten, you have to go to that kind of material.

Sullivan's Daily Dish goes silent for a while:

This is only the second time in its nearly ten-year history that the Dish has gone silent. The reason now is the same as the reason then. When dealing with a delusional fantasist like Sarah Palin, it takes time to absorb and make sense of the various competing narratives that she tells about her life. There are so many fabrications and delusions in the book, mixed in with facts, that just making sense of it - and comparing it with objective reality as we know it, and the subjective reality she has previously provided - is a bewildering task. She is a deeply disturbed person which makes this work of fiction and fact all the more challenging to read. And the fact that she is now the leader of the Republican party and a potential presidential candidate, makes this process of deconstruction an important civil responsibility. We take this seriously as we always have. We want to be fair to her, and to her family, and to the innocent people she has brought into the spotlight. And we are not reporters. We are merely analysts trying to make sense of evidence already in the public domain, evidence that points in all sorts of directions, only one of which can be true.

Since the Dish has tried to be rigorous and careful in analyzing Palin's unhinged grip on reality from the very beginning - specifically her fantastic story of her fifth pregnancy -  we feel it's vital that we grapple with this new data as fairly and as rigorously as possible. That takes time to get right. And it is so complicated we simply cannot focus on anything else.

Its refreshing that a blogger would actually stop posting in order to think things through carefully and completely. Ladies and gentlemen, give the man some room.