…a partial, hasty, incomplete, inevitably somewhat flawed and inaccurate rendering of some of the things we have heard about in the past 24 hours – distorted, despite our best efforts to eliminate gross bias, by the very process of compression that makes it possible for you to lift it from the doorstep and read it in about an hour. If we labelled the product accurately, then we could immediately add: ‘But it’s the best we could do under the circumstances, and we will be back tomorrow, with a corrected and updated version.’

The *Washington Post‘s David Broder, quoted by Alan Rusbridger in his farewell message to Guardian readers*.

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) – Calling the Obama Administration’s actions against the soccer organization “weak and ineffective,” Senator John McCain on Thursday proposed military action to “dismantle and destroy FIFA once and for all.”

“These are people who only understand one thing: force,” McCain said on the floor of the United States Senate. “We must make FIFA taste the vengeful might and fury of the United States military.”

McCain said that he was “completely unimpressed” by the Department of Justice’s arrests of several top FIFA lieutenants this week, calling the action “the kind of Band-Aid solution that this Administration, sadly, has become famous for.”

“Rounding up a few flunkies in a hotel is meaningless when the leader of FIFA remains at large,” he said. “I will follow Sepp Blatter to the gates of Hell.”

McCain requested a four-billion-dollar aid package for moderate elements within global soccer, and said that the United States should be prepared to put boots on the ground in Switzerland.

Calling the use of force against FIFA “long overdue,” he placed the blame for the group’s alarming growth squarely on the shoulders of the White House. “Barack Obama created FIFA,” he said.

Lovely insight from Maureen Dowd:

WHEN my brother Michael was a Senate page, he delivered mail to John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, who had offices across the hall from each other.

He recalled that Kennedy never looked up or acknowledged his presence, but Nixon would greet him with a huge smile. “Hi, Mike,” he’d say. “How are you doing? How’s the family?”

It seemed a bit counterintuitive, especially since my dad, a D.C. police inspector in charge of Senate security, was a huge Kennedy booster. (The two prominent pictures in our house were of the Mona Lisa and J.F.K.) But after puzzling over it, I finally decided that J.F.K. had the sort of magnetism that could ensorcell big crowds, so he did not need to squander it on mail boys. Nixon, on the other hand, lacked large-scale magnetism, so he needed to work hard to charm people one by one, even mail boys.

Yep.

These numbers look like huge under-estimates to me. The obvious interpretation is that much online crime is never reported to the FBI. Interesting though that women fall for fake romance scams, while men lose their marbles over automobiles.

Source

Louis Menand is, IMHO, the best living literary critic. Perhaps that’s because he’s the most readable. At any rate, I will read anything he writes, on any subject.

One of his gifts is that, like Hemingway, he lures the reader in at the very beginning. Here he is doing it in a recent New Yorker essay on Saul Bellow:

Herzog is the book that made Saul Bellow famous. He was forty-nine years old when it came out, in 1964. He had enjoyed critical esteem since the publication of his first novel, “Dangling Man,” in 1944, and he had won a National Book Award for “The Adventures of Augie March” in 1954. But “Herzog” turned him into a public figure, a writer of books known even to people who don’t read books—an “author.” At a ceremony honoring the success of “Herzog” at city hall in Chicago, Bellow’s home town, a reporter asked the mayor, Richard J. Daley, whether he’d read the novel. “I’ve looked into it,” Daley said.

You get enough people saying that and you have a best-seller…

See what I mean? Read on.

Many thanks to the numerous people who wrote to tell me that Maureen Dowd had mentioned me in her splendid column about Uber. She wrote:

“I know Uber has the image of an obnoxious digital robber baron, a company that plays dirty tricks and proves that convenience “makes hypocrites of us all,” as John Naughton put it in The Guardian, noting that its very name has connotations of Nietzschean superiority. (Travis Kalanick, the C.E.O., coined the word “Boob-er” to describe his greater appeal to women because of his success.)”

Actually, even if Ms Dowd hadn’t mentioned me I would have rated her column highly because she highlights one of the odder aspects of the Uber phenomenon. She was puzzled because when she tried to summon a Uber car, most of those in her immediate vicinity immediately headed in the other direction. The explanation was provided by the driver who did pick her up, namely that they had all checked her Uber “rating” and discovered that she only got 4.2 out of 5. (Drivers rate passengers as well as vice versa.) In the end, she learned how this reputation system can be gamed: before you part company with your driver you make a deal: “five for five”.

QED.