Someone needs to tell Susan Jacoby about hyperlinks.

In last Sunday's Washington Post, she techno-moralized that the rise of video (which according to her includes "every form of digital media") has led to the fall of "print culture" and Americans' inability to read books and poems and locate things on maps. Her sociology is, as Peter Suderman points out, imperfect at best.  The trends are not as uniform as she suggests, and she takes liberties with the studies she cites, assigning causality where it's not at all clear it exists and making personal logical jumps ("[it]seems to me") where even that falls short.  But what's worse, she seems to have missed the biggest media story of the last decade.  It's a story you probably have a pretty good grasp of if you're here: the rise of the networked public sphere.

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A brief break from the sex, lobbyists and politics for a reality a little less entertaining.

On Skid Row is a documentary about the homelessness epidemic in Los Angeles from Good Magazine. It's a little tough to watch, so warning. This is the first part of five.

This is an open thread to speculate about both the facts and fallout of the McCain/Iseman story. What actually happened here? Why did the NYT publish the story like this? Does this mean the GOP race isn't actually over? How does it affect the Dems? And the big question: did Mike Huckabee know?

Share your idle speculation here.

Stanford Law Professor Lawrence Lessig is considering a bid for Rep. Tom Lantos' California House seat. He's made one of his trademark powerpoints to layout his thinking (after the break).

Lessig achieved iconic status in online communities for founding Creative Commons and going to war with the entertainment industry as the legal leader of the free culture movement. He's kind of a Thurgood Marshall for the Napster/YouTube set. His congressional run is an extension of his latest effort to reinvent himself as an anti-corruption crusader (see his "alpha" powerpoint for that here).

As a young techie, I have more than my fair share of admiration for the man. Even so, I'm skeptical.

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Howard Dean and Ned Lamont are the iconic Netroots candidates of the 2004 and 2006 cycles. They were Boomers who, despite little personal experience with or connection to internet politics prior to their campaigns, were able to ride a wave of support from organizers, fundraisers and bloggers to more serious challenges than anyone could have expected. But their campaigns may just have been a testing grounds for what we're now seeing: Netroots candidates.

These are not candidates simply supported by online communities and activists as Dean and Lamont were, they're folks of the Netroots whose rhetoric comes directly from it and who, again unlike Dean and Lamont, are obviously personally experienced with it.

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All this week we'll be joined by Marie Wilson, the author of Closing the Leadership Gap and President and Founder of the White House Project. Wilson will be here to offer thoughts on women in politics, and more broadly the obstacles to making our representative government actually representative of the diversity of the country.

Issues of gender and race have clearly been at the center of the current Presidential race, so we thought it would be an apt time to bring in an expert on gender and presidential politics. Wilson isn't here to advocate for either candidate, but hopefully she'll be able to help us better understand the historic and often challenging race we've been watching for the past year.