Atomic Nerds

*snif, snif, achoo*, “Where’d the day go?”

Linked around in various spots, an interview with one of my very few favorite celebrities, Penn Jillette, in Vanity Fair.

The interview is worth reading more for what the interviewer tells us about himself without meaning to, mainly that the title of the magazine is well-suited to him and that he values the team sport of politics over any sort of principle. The quotes from Penn are great, but if anything I admire him for managing to turn the interview into more of a dissection of the interviewer than of himself.

I’ve often disagreed with Penn, sometimes quite strongly, but he never gives me the impression he’s being an out and out weasel or that he hasn’t thought through his position- and more importantly, that he’s playing that demented team sport that so much of politics has become. Money quote:

Do you think Bullshit is fair and balanced?

We’re very, very fair and very, very biased. (Laughs.) Which is what I want from all media, by the way. I want the anchor on the nightly news to come on and say, “I hate President Obama… and here’s the news.” All this whimpering in the press about how we shouldn’t have news that’s partial and subjective, it misses the point completely. It was (newspaper magnate William Randolph) Hearst that invented the idea that journalism should be in the middle. It was never like that before. It was the Ohio Democrat and the Minnesota Republican. They said it right in their titles. And then Hearst decided he could sell twice as many papers if he pretended that they didn’t have a position. And of course that’s always a lie.

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