I have a short essay in the Wall Street Journal today. You can find it here. The Journal asked 12 people to write pieces on the significance of blogging (or lack thereof.) Other contributors included Harry Evans, SEC commish Chris Cox, Newt Gingrich, Mia Farrow, Tom Wolfe (who seems to think that wikipedia is a blog and says he doesn't read blogs because he's "weary of narcissistic shrieks and baseless information," which, funnily, is the same reason I could barely make it through his Portfolio piece on hedge funds), and then some actual bloggers like Jane Hamsher from Firedoglake and the Journal's own James Taranto.

In other news, I'm participating in another Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys reading on the 26th at McNally Robinson at 7PM. I'll be reading with Tom Dolby, Brian Sloan, Mike Albo and Bennett Madison.

And belatedly, Interview magazine put me on their "Pop A-List" of 50 people 30 and under in June. The list consists mostly of entertainment and fashion people (M.I.A., John Krasinski, Lily Allen, Emily Blunt, Arcade Fire, Proenza Schouler, etc.) but they threw in the YouTube guys, me, a guy named DVD Jon who figured out how to crack DVD encryption and Internet law expert James Grimmelman as the "web people". Along the same lines, Dazed and Confused put me on their "Digital 50" list of Internet creatives in the July issue. All very nice, though I'm not really doing any web stuff at the moment. It's all sleeping, reading and scribbling these days. Which is a nice change.

I wrote a little piece for Slate today on why TAM Brazilian, the carrier involved in yesterday's horrific crash in Sao Paulo, is the worst airline in the world. You can read it here. (And click here to experience the glory that is trying to leave a TAM terminal with your sanity intact.)

My friend Jeff Frank's hilarious new comic novel about the travails of a Washington hostess, Trudy Hopedale, is out now and I've been happily devouring it over the last two days. Jeff's previous two novels, The Columnist and Bad Publicity, are also about Washington, media and the social dynamics intrinsic to both, and they're screamingly funny. If you like Chris Buckley, this is probably up your alley.

Update to the previous post: Slate liked the TAM article and chose it for their weekly syndication to the Washington Post, where it appeared yesterday. Reaction to it has been mixed: Fray readers hate it (or more specifically, hate me); WaPo emailers love it. Interestingly, emails from Brazilians were overwhelmingly positive, which is not what I expected, but a pleasant surprise.