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Is a billionaire interviewer really the last line of defence against Donald Trump?

The bankrupting of Gawker is part of a tough time for liberal media—and a good time for Trump-friendly media

Charlie Gillis on tipping points and the trajectory of political scandal

Rob Ford’s public soap opera is as convoluted as it is fascinating, but is there a finale in sight?

The Mayor of Toronto, baby-snatching eagles and a story in play

And by “you people,” of course I mean you, President Obama.

The extended North American/ Anglosphere Twittersphere is agog these days over the latest spectacle put on by Urblogger Andrew Sullivan, who edited The New Republic in the days when paper was king and who has spent the past decade blogging, in succession, for (a) himself (b) Time magazine (c) The Atlantic Monthly (d) Tina Brown. Since 2007 Sullivan has been perhaps Barack Obama’s leading gay British Republican supporter; he wrote a 2007 Atlantic cover story explaining why Obama was “necessary” to binding up the nation’s wounds and a 2012 Newsweek cover story asserting that Obama was about to become the most significant U.S. president since Reagan. (“The narrative writes itself. He will emerge as an iconic figure…”) About 6,000 times he has ended blog posts on Obama with the sentence-thing “Know Hope.”

But now comes Sully’s crisis of confidence.

He watched the same debate everyone else did last week; noticed, as many did, that the incumbent had a hard time of things, and then read yesterday’s surprising Pew Center poll, which essentially showed Obama’s support collapsing so rapidly he will soon owe Mitt Romney votes. So yesterday he wrote a blog post asking whether Obama has thrown the election away. Well, not really asking. More like telling:
Look: I’m trying to rally some morale, but I’ve never seen a candidate this late in the game, so far ahead, just throw in the towel in the way Obama did last week – throw away almost every single advantage he had with voters and manage to enable his opponent to seem as if he cares about the middle class as much as Obama does.
And:
I’ve never seen a candidate self-destruct for no external reason this late in a campaign before.
And:
I’m trying to see a silver lining. But when a president self-immolates on live TV, and his opponent shines with lies and smiles, and a record number of people watch, it’s hard to see how a president and his party recover.
Yoiks. Almost immediately, Sullivan was anointed with the Triple Crown of fleeting media-spectacle prominence: The top headline on Drudge Report…

A fake “Sully Panic” Twitter account…

Were we really the ones we were waiting for? Or was that just a lie, too?

Scott Adams’s recent posts have been controversial. So was the fake name.

Mad Men has now officially replaced The Wire as the most footnoted and overanalyzed television show going. Not that there’s anything wrong with that!

A lot of time was spent defending Canada’s honour in response to a generally irrelevant late-night TV host

For reasons both personal and professional, I’m concerned about ridiculous amount of turmoil in the media sector. It’s getting to the point where I’m tempted to shut off my mediabistro and paidcontent feeds before I end up with a massive ulcer. How bad is it going to get? Gawker honcho Nick Denton is battening down the hatches: