Link Banana

Here’s a dense bit. Two long celebrity profiles that aren’t interesting enough to mention seperately, but do merit a mention.

• This week’s New Yorker has a profile of George Clooney. In case you don’t have the patience, here’s what New York’s Vulture liked about it.
• The forthcoming New York Times Magazine has a profile of (MS)NBC’s Chris Matthews. In case you don’t have patience, here’s what New York’s Daily Intelligencer liked about it.

Hopefully you now understand what “New York” is doing in the title of this post.

Slate’s Troy Patterson thinks so.

Liberals would seem to believe that Bush strategist Karl Rove is a monster genetically engineered from the DNA material recovered from a fair copy of Il Principe, Pat Nixon’s cloth coat, and one of Lee Atwater’s old guitar picks, while moderates regard him with a vague but considerable sense of respectful queasiness. I will not pretend to understand what our friends on the Right think of the man, but the president of the United States calls him “Boy Genius,” and those nicknames have got to count for something. All concerned parties must be a bit unnerved by Rove’s recent performance as a contributor to Fox News.

Since materializing on-air on Super Tuesday, Rove has merely offered clarity, concision, humility, good humor, good posture, and dispassionate analysis. To be sure, there are lefties distraught that he does not eat babies on-air. Maybe some conservatives, too. But the only thing more impressive than hearing the man drop political science—what other cable-news analyst has lately name-checked Henry Cabot Lodge?—is seeing that one of our culture’s most controversial figures is one of its most mild-mannered. Given the jaunty clattering of MSNBC’s 24/7 locker room, the rapid-fire banter of CNN’s endless phalanxes of conventional wiseguys, and the screeching maelstrom summoned nightly by Rove’s Fox colleagues, the guy plays like a human comma, a very welcome thoughtful pause.

Jack Shafer says what most visitors to the sites have known for a while:

In their craven pursuit of clicks, the editors at CNN.com, MSNBC.com, and Foxnews.com turn their sites into virtual tabloids by peppering their home pages with the most sordid and bizarre stories that can be culled from the world’s news wires.