Amrammig

Jeffrey Goldberg has decided to quit blogging soon in favor of column-writing and more long-form writing for the magazine. The Dish mourns. But the reason Jeffrey was such a good blogger is that he was not very capable of editing himself – and so perhaps felt dragged into energy-draining spats more often than he wanted. He makes a distinction between the Atlantic.com and the Atlantic as a magazine. As the former has begun to undermine the integrity of the latter – can you imagine the magazine printing a paid-for essay by the head of Scientology? – I can see his point.

There was a time when the Atlantic.com was based around a group of bloggers. That began to end while I was there. And it’s pretty clear at this point that that moment is now formally over. It’s mainly verticals, sponsored content, and aggregation mills. But we still have Fallows, Madrigal and TNC.

Quora is full of questions college students ask each other while high, except that sometimes they get answered seriously. Case in point: What is the political situation in the Mario universe? The top answer starts out:

Without going into too much detail, Mario generally lives and works in the Mushroom Kingdom, one of the largest geo-political structures on Mushroom World, in the Grand Finale Galaxy in, yes, the Mushroom Universe.

For the purposes of this answer I will deliberately restrict the terms to discussing Mushroom World, as a comprehensive answer on the entire Mushroom Universe would require covering 20-22 (depending on how you count) Galaxies and frankly, I doubt it would be any more fun to read than it would be to write.

Also, Bowser is probably a fascist.

A cool new example:

The fansite Tower of the Hand has developed a unique, and uniquely user-friendly, approach to spoilers: a “scope” system in which readers select the point they’ve reached in the series (book or show) using a toggle bar that hides or reveals information in the article they’re visiting according to their selection. By tagging different sections of each article according to the corresponding source material—”Book 1,” “Book 2,” and so on—site co-founders John Jasmin and Alex Smith are able to customize their reference materials, reviews, and essays to the needs of each individual reader.