Christopher Lydon Interviews…

     Instapundit speaks.

     Here’s the most interesting thing about Glenn Reynolds–more interesting, I think, than his opinions: in the liberated information bazaar that’s supplanting the old journalism in this blog moment, the most successful broker of political news and views never had a “press” card, never rode the campaign bus, wouldn’t be recognized in any of Washington’s power restaurants. David Broder or Johnny Apple he is not. The Instapundit is a Yale trained law professor at the University of Tennessee–better described, he says, as a “techno-libertarian” than as a conservative. The intersection of law and technology is the professorial specialty on which he has published abundantly. Blogging was almost an accident and is still an unpaid, unaccredited, off-hours hobby. And he’ll quit, he threatens, as soon as writing Instapundit begins to feel like work.

     In the meantime Glenn Reynolds is the reigning eminence in the political blogosphere. For his merry enthusiasm about the war on Iraq, he was fairly dubbed the “warblogger.” But in fairness it must also be said that the pages of Instapundit ventilated all the arguments for and against the war far more thoroughly than any newspaper I read. It was “troubling and stressful,” he told me, to see that much news up close. But the war discourse built his “circulation” up to 220,000 visits a day. And it made Instapundit perhaps the first inescapable and indispensable blog–certainly the model of robust, wide-open electronic axe-grinding at the center of a long political storm. In our conversation on Wednesday afternoon, Glenn Reynolds was high on the purchase hours earlier of a Mazda RX-8 sports car. He is clearly a man of parts–a learned, quick, combative wit who’s interested in everything and most especially music. He is a Creedence Clearwater Revival fan, a guitar player in several bands and part-owner of a no-profit record company, WonderDog Records. And still in his early 40s, he’s a patriarch in the blogosphere. It’s “more a functioning anarchy than a democracy,” he says.  Listen in.

     Kipling’s line was: “What do they know of England who only England know?”  Mine is: “What beyond blogging do we bloggers care to talk about?”  Presumably: everything.  

     Here’s a start with a little light summer conversation on a gap in American defenses that the 9.11 attack revealed.  It’s the matter of homeland security, seriously, without the capital letters. 

     Elaine Scarry is the author of the startling little essay, Who Defended the Country?  I have admired Elaine Scarry from a distance as a completely original literary critic.  Our last conversation on the air was about her book, On Beauty and Being Just, on the mental pictures that enliven the novels and poems we remember, from Achilles’ helmet in The Iliad to Levin mowing with his scythe in Anna Karenina.  Her theory stretched comparative literature in the direction of cognitive science, how the mind actually works as we read.  In the meantime, Elaine Scarry has become a prolific expert on the fate of TWA Flight 800 and other mysterious plane crashes.  And now she is speaking out–not as an expert but as a citizen who senses that there is no security in our security policy.  “One key fact, ” she writes, “needs to be held on to and stated in a clear sentence: on September 11, the Pentagon could not defend the Pentagon, let alone the rest of the country.”  The passengers on United Airlines Flight 93, who stormed their hijackers and brought their plane down in a field in Pennsylvania, managed by contrast in only 23 minutes to “gather information, deliberate, vote and act”–knowingly, selflessly, in the public interest, after many loving farewells by cell phone.  So Elaine Scarry’s not entirely rhetorical question, late in the age of nuclear terror, is whether and how we might agree to “restore within our own country a democratic form of self-defense.”  Listen up, think it through, and comment, please, as the spirit moves you.

     Metablogger Doc Searls votes Liberal, bets Conservative, and in both dimensions picks Howard Dean to win the presidential campaign in 2004.  “The hyperlinked underdogs are going to subvert the isolated overdogs every time,” Doc forecast in our conversation this afternoon.   The only real question is whether the citizenry will be effectively networked by the end of next year.  But even now, Doc said, the Web is the place to find the action and passion of the 2004 race, and the best information on it.  Doc Searls’ bet on Dean sounds like an extension of The Cluetrain Manifesto and the famous Searls marketing mantras therein, starting with “markets are conversations.”  Furthermore, “hyperlinks subvert hierarchy,” the book argued.  And “networked markets get smarter faster than most companies,” or, in this case, than the richest campaign organizations.  “I don’t see Kerry in the networked world,” he said.  Or much of George W. Bush either, for that matter, though a “wartime president” with some smart and militant blog lances is harder to dismiss.

     I was looking to the genial Doc Searls for clues to network building.  And I was eager to admire him for the intuitive leaps–the diagnostic imagination–of his own celebrated pages.  He is a news and radio guy who has graduated, by acclamation, to guru standing; but I see Doc in a white coat, with a medicine bag.  Blogs are his scope on the soul and spirit of the country.  He said his own blog feels more like prophecy than commentary.  He is trying to see where the country is going.  He thinks, as I do, that the blog boom and the war in Iraq are somehow entwined.  Blogs were far the best forum for argument in the run-up to war–far better than Congress, say, or the newspapers, not to mention network television.  Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit reminded Doc at moments of the Catch-22 character, the former mail clerk PFC Wintergreen, who seemed mysteriously to be running World War 2.  The “blog-guard,” notably Reynolds and Andrew Sullivan, “defined the war,” Doc Searls observed.  But the left-out opposition is finding its feet and growing everyday in the sorry aftermath.  The Internet, in any event, “is becoming the Commons on which democracy depends.  We’ve always needed this Commons, and now we have it.”  Listen in. 

      Blogger Ed Cone of Greensboro talks here about the several intersections he overlooks.  That is: junctions of the public and the personal (which every blogger faces) and more particularly the contrasting voices of a newspaper columnist and a blogger (he is both) and the opportunities for a local conversation in a global medium.

     Ed Cone is a 4th generation North Carolinian and a man of respect in Greensboro.  He’s a Sunday editorial wiseman on the Greensboro News and Record, and he’s thought of running for mayor of Greensboro, as he said in our conversation.  So he’s up to his neck in local life.  At the same time he’s a well known tech writer in national publications (WIRED, Forbes and Ziff Davis magazines, among others)  and he swims in the global ocean of bloggers, with distinction.  The longer we talked–about the emerging “Tar Heel Bloggers,” the political leverage for bloggers in city and statewide campaigns, and the lure of the “North State” and North Carolina conversation–the more in love he seemed to be with the local pleasures of bloggery.  It’s nice to be cited by Glenn Reynolds and picked up in “the bigs” now and then.  But it may be nicer to have a strong voice in the neighborhood.  Local blogs, Ed Cone says, “are one of the next big things.”

     I wanted to find out also whether Ed Cone has different voices in different media, and now I’m sure he does.  Only on his blog does he use the vernacular and post pictures of his kids.  Or as he put it himself: his career is at Ziff Davis.  At the newspaper, he keeps his oar in politics and he makes greens-fee money.  But his joy is in the blog.  It’s only the blog that makes his wife a little jealous.  “You have to follow your passion on this,” Ed Cone said.  “You spend time on stuff you love, and good things happen.”  Listen in.

     Can it be–a humble blogging star?  Listen in.

     Ringleader of the Volokh Conspiracy, UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh, runs a cracklingly smart and comprehensive team blog that got a record 17,000 visits last Friday.  The page has the high conversational hum of a crowded coffee house, full of lawyers who love to talk about real life, too.  It feels to me like a model of what blog energy can do to make professions like law and journalism (and institutions like the Supreme Court and CBS News) more transparent–a major liberation, I suggested to him.  But Brother Volokh, who talked with me for 20 minutes yesterday, takes success in stride.  He thinks of his site as an eclectic dinner table conversation among conservative-libertarian friends who feast on argument. It’s still a question, he thinks, how much blogging will “shake up the opinion marketplace.”  Yet the low-low cost of self-publishing, the critical energy and the opinion diversity among bloggers are striking.  The opinion hierarchy is at least “more permeable,” he says.  How do blogs grow?  Eugene Volokh volunteered that Glenn Reynolds’ Instapundit has driven a lot of traffic to The Conspiracy–about half of the visitors identified by “referers.”  Glenn Reynolds, clearly has become a force in that new opinion marketplace–something like the Great Mentioner that Russell Baker created in the New York Times.  Eugene Volokh sounded grateful for visitors but not awed by numbers.  To invite contributors from the left would dilute the “personality” of the page, he said.  “We’re trying to be a big tent,” he said, “but not a very, very big tent.”  And who does this much admired blogger admire?  Check him out here.