Felt said that if he had something for me, he could get me a message. He quizzed me about my daily routine, what came to my apartment, the mailbox, etc. The Post was delivered outside my apartment door. I did have a subscription to the New York Times. A number of people in my apartment building near Dupont Circle got the Times. The copies were left in the lobby with the apartment number. Mine was No. 617, and it was written clearly on the outside of each paper in marker pen.

Felt said if there was something important he could get to my New York Times -- how, I never knew. Page 20 would be circled, and the hands of a clock in the lower part of the page would be drawn to indicate the time of the meeting that night, probably 2 a.m., in the same Rosslyn parking garage.The relationship was a compact of trust; nothing about it was to be discussed or shared with anyone, he said.

How he could have made a daily observation of my balcony is still a mystery to me. At the time, before the era of intensive security, the back of the building was not enclosed, so anyone could have driven in the back alley to observe my balcony. In addition, my balcony and the back of the apartment complex faced onto a courtyard or back area that was shared with a number of other apartment or office buildings in the area. My balcony could have been seen from dozens of apartments or offices, as best I can tell.

A number of embassies were located in the area. The Iraqi Embassy was down the street, and I thought it possible that the FBI had surveillance or listening posts nearby. Could Felt have had the counterintelligence agents regularly report on the status of my flag and flowerpot? That seems highly unlikely, if not impossible.

Bob Woodward on his relations with Mark Felt.

How Mark Felt Became 'Deep Throat'

MAN: We ain't one-at-a-timin' here - we're mass-communicatin'!
MAN: Oh, yes. That's a powerful new force.

Read the transcript, stream the segment, or podcast the whole show from

http://wnyc.vo.llnwd.net/o1/otm/otm040805.mp3

The Chaos Scenario

] "I work for a newspaper[;] that is where my paycheck
] comes from. But I believe that all online newspapers
] should be free, and on principle I refuse to pay for an
] online subscription to the Wall Street Journal. I have
] not read the paper copy of the New York Times regularly
] for two years. I read it only online."
]
] - Thomas L. Friedman, The World Is Flat, Page 102

Will the New York Times columnist read himself?

If today's video games are, as Steven Johnson says, repetitive and often frustrating, and if they make up for monotony by offering infrequent but exciting rewards, the same can be said for his book, "Everything Bad Is Good for You."

Ouch. (I think.)

Without a zero-sum model for the kinds of changes in thought that are cataloged here, Mr. Johnson need not explore the real price of new pop-cultural intelligence. He understands what skills we have gained. He'd rather not think about what we've lost.

Johnson Gets Good Taste of His Own Bad Medicine

"We'll need to develop considerably more sophisticated ways of using these new means of communication that are now available to reach the many and diverse audiences."

General Memetics, anyone?

Rumsfeld Laments Global Reach of War News

The old dogs won't be able to rest as easily, though, once they've read "Everything Bad Is Good for You," Steven Johnson's elegant polemic about the supposed mental benefits of everything from watching reality television to whiling the night away playing "Grand Theft Auto."

The Couch Potato Path to a Higher IQ

Maybe it won't be so bad being cut off from the blogosphere.

That's how David Brooks begins his latest column, which happens to be about the recently retracted Newsweek story.

What have the most powerful people on earth become?

Whining media bashers.

The Lament of David Brooks

Starting in September, some of the nation's most influential op-ed voices will disappear from the blogosphere, including Tom Friedman, Maureen Dowd, Nicholas Kristof, Paul Krugman, Frank Rich, David Brooks, Bob Herbert, Gretchen Morgenson, and more.

The New York Times is not downsizing. All of these authors will still have jobs in September. But online access to their columns will require a $50 annual subscription fee.

To entice readers to pay for this content, several extras are being tossed into the offer. Foremost among the extras is access to the archives.

"We're happy to see The New York Times acknowledging the importance of subscription-based revenue that we have long seen as a key element," said Todd Larsen of the Wall Street Journal.

Will you subscribe? Or will you say goodbye to Tom Friedman?

Think of the children!

NYTimes.com to Offer Subscription Service

Our goal is to put in one place as much original and aggregated data as possible about each of the major journalism sectors.

From the introduction:

Our desire in this study is to answer questions we imagine any reader would find important, to help clarify the strengths and weaknesses of the available data, and to identify what is not yet answerable.

We believe our approach of looking at a set of questions across various media differs from the conventional way in which American journalism is analyzed, one medium at a time. We have tried to identify cross-media trends and to gather in one place data that are usually scattered across different venues. We hope this will allow us and others to make comparisons and develop insights that otherwise would be difficult to see.

The State of the News Media 2005

With the same winning combination of personal revelation and friendly scientific explanation he displayed in last year's Mind Wide Open, Steven Johnson shatters the conventional wisdom about pop culture as pabulum*, showing how video games, television shows and movies have become increasingly complex.

Johnson lays out a strong case that what we do for fun is just as educational in its way as what we study in the classroom.

I had drifted away from Johnson's blog in recent months, and so I didn't even know that his new book was due in May. But with the benefit of prominent placement at Barnes and Noble, the book promptly found its way into my library.

Frequent readers of MemeStreams will be generally familiar with many of the issues that Johnson threads together in "Everything Bad", but the book connects them in an interesting way to make what some will see as a contrarian argument about the state of today's media. Johnson also offers up some unique gems, as well; his quantitative structural analysis of one-hour television dramas is my favorite such example.

Although it's being marketed as a book, this is really more of an extended essay. It's structured like an essay, and I believe it is meant to be read like one; I finished it the same evening I bought it. Ample end notes provide support to the argument and serve to send readers off on interesting tangents after Johnson's has made his case. I expect that stevenberlinjohnson.com will be the site of some worthy discussion threads in the days and weeks to come.

Recommended.

P.S. Johnson will be in Los Angeles on Tuesday, May 10 at Vroman’s Bookstore, before moving on to San Francisco for Wednesday and Thursday.

* pabulum, n. something (as writing or speech) that is insipid, simplistic, or bland

Everything Bad Is Good for You