Hans Eisenbeis

Joe brought to my attention this morning that the term “mud duck” has emerged as a derisive name for Minnesotans. It’s trend enough to have made the pages of the Star Tribune, although to be fair, the Strib appears to have perched its considerable reporting credibility in this very important matter on the back of … Read more

A moment away from a very busy week of production: It’s too early to see whether the roll-out of Times Select is going to bung up the daily “most e-mailed” list–and whether articles behind the firewall, that is, primarily the celebrities of the Op-Ed pages, will even be emailable and thus eligible for the honors … Read more

The Minnesota State High School League has banned “mid-riff baring” cheerleading uniforms, and I feel conflicted–and not because I’m a pervert. This is one of those touchy issues where I see both sides of the arguent. Despite the “we’re all in this together” vibe of the announcement, I am pretty confident that any official, affirmative … Read more

This week’s New York Times Sunday magazine packs an interesting one-two punch. In the opinion slot, David Rieff argued a new facet of an old premise–that President Bush’s approach to liberating the world is not necessarily seen that way on the receiving end. Rieff said what many people have been thinking for some time–that the … Read more

I think I admirably avoided ranting about this year’s main event, dropping only a single Lance Armstrong-inspired metaphor a few weeks back. For this, I have been congratulated for “keeping my Lance in my pants” by a certain fellow who ought not to be pointing because there are three fingers pointing back at him. (I’m … Read more

Somehow, I managed to avoid most of the television coverage of Katrina until last night, when I stuck on CNN for a while. As has been repeated ad nauseum, the tragedy beggars the imagination, but that of course wont stop most major news outlets from giving it the old college try, after this short break. … Read more

As promised, though overdue– our assessment of the “controversial” All-Target issue of the New Yorker: Big deal. No, that’s not exactly right. In fact, we’d like to see more of this sort of thing. Given the economy of the last four years, no one deserves a vacation more than magazine ad sales executives, and we … Read more

It was a surprise to come back from vacation to hear that Village Voice and New Times may be well on the way to a merger. You may remember as I do that it was someone’s unenviable job to make Village Voice Media properties profitable enough to justify the significant investment it had required by … Read more

We haven’t had a chance to look at the new issue of the New Yorker–the one that has been entirely underwritten by the Target corporation. That’s because we haven’t received our copy, and this is added to the bank of anecdotal evidence that the magazine is delivered to nicer neighborhods first, or perhaps to readers … Read more