That’s about the best way sum up Joel Achenbach of the Washington Post.
Whether he is writing about the youth of old people ( Rise of the alpha geezer) or the changes facing journalism (
"I really need you to read this article, okay?"), Achenbach’s columns and blogs are snarky, flowing, and funny.
Achenbach graduated from Princeton University in 1982 with a bachelor's in political science.
At least by 1985, possibly earlier, he was reporting at the Miami Herald, and was there at least until 1989. He fought and lost against a court-ordered subpoena as a witness to an arrest while gathering news for the Miami Herald.
He has been a science column writer for “Who Knew?” at National Goegraphic, though he was writing about science long before that. He's also been a keynote speaker at the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts, and has written a book, "Captured by Aliens: The Search for Life and Truth in a Very Large Universe."
His history, at least via Internet archives, is difficult to piece together. At some point he moved from the Herald to the Washington Post, where he is today. During his career there he has had several columns (Rough Draft, Why Things Are, and his blog, Achenblog) and written several books, including “It looks like a president only smaller: Trailing campaign 2000.”
The Achenblog began in 2005 and its readers—the Select Audience Of 15, as the regulars are called—garnered a lot of attention for commenting prolifically on the blog, sort of. Well, why don’t we let Achenbach explain it? This is an excerpt from his column “The Tail that Wags the Blog.”
The blog originated in January [2005] as a catch basin for mental detritus, for the kind of stuff not good enough for print, but too good to waste on casual conversation or, worse, mere thinking. But this spring I began allowing "comments," and the blog suddenly mutated. America, it turns out, is full of smart, clever, creative people who happen to have no interest in working and whose employers have unwisely given them Internet access. Thus every day, on my blog, these strangers show up, just to shoot the breeze, flirt, kvetch, veer off topic and, most of all, pay zero attention to what I have written.
Let's cut to the chase: The blog ignores me.
His blogs (“the kit”) regularly have 300 comments (kaboodles) or more, and from that community has sprung a large list of inside jokes and terms. Sometimes the conversation spans several blogs.
There is no way to do his words justice; you just have to read them for yourself. Even if you are not so interested in the subjects of his writing, you will become interested in his writing for the sake of it. It flows. It has a strong voice, and addictive doses of humor. His observations, no matter how wacky, carry with them a sense of casual relevance.
Relevance, you know, is the essence of snark.
1 comment:
I just love the work snarky - I used it recently in an email to Sacramento Bee writer Lisa Heyamoto, suggesting that her column could use a dose of it to pep it up a little.
I don't have any snarky comments about this column, it's too well-done and the writer notes that this columnist is best read in the original and not filtered through the words of other writers - an interesting observation which reminds me of literary criticism.
My apologies to any English majors but literary criticism (you know, an analysis of what the whale in Moby Dick REALLY is) is largely irrelevant.
Here the writer succeeds in saying the same thing, but providing enough info about Achenbach to make him intriguing.
Snark on...
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