Forfare Davis

“Those institutions and reporters were never as good as their reputations. . . . It was largely—and this was true for decades—a small group of middle-aged, left-of-center, overweight men who decided how all of us should see politics and governance.”Jim VandeHei, co-founder of Politico, was opining about the annoying nostalgia that still persists in DC regarding the older generation of journalists. In Mark Leibovichs’ book, ThisTown, VandeHei’s Politico has an ambivalent presence in the Reality Distortion Culture of DC. “Speed, information, gossip, and buzz” VandeHei celebrates as the journalistic premiums of the “New World Order,” and Politico has set the standard on all these fronts, becoming a kind of political ESPN meets TMZ in the Beltway, and its star contributor, Mike Allen, This Town’s Hedda Hopper. Continue Reading »

What has gotten lost in the maelstrom of upward mobility in This Town, is any public-spirited notion of how government ought to work Continue Reading »

The Industrial Revolution, as we know it, could have occurred five centuries earlier. While Europeans were living short, subsistence-level lives, the rest of the world was witnessing an explosion in technology and trade coming out of Ming China. Continue Reading »

The inaugural post of Pseudoplotinus, aka Forfare Davis Continue Reading »