The Wire

David Simon asks, in The Washington Post: What I don’t understand is this: Isn’t the news itself still valuable to anyone? In any format, through any medium — isn’t an understanding of the events of the day still a salable commodity? Or were we kidding ourselves? Was a newspaper a viable entity only so long as it had classifieds, comics and the latest sports scores? It’s hard to say that, even harder to think it. By that premise, what all…

Slate, November 2007: An upcoming issue of TV Guide has an amusing roundup of the 2008 presidential candidates’ favorite television shows. Nothing too surprising here: Hillary watches Grey’s Anatomy, Barack Obama likes The Wire (for the record, that’s the right answer), and John Edwards says his viewing guilty pleasure is “Fred Thompson on Law & Order.” Also, The Atlantic‘s Mark Bowden has a neat piece on David Simon.

The New Yorker has an awesome piece this week on “The Wire,” the best TV show ever. In addition to detailing why the show is generally awesome, there’s these two fantastic bits from the show’s creator, David Simon. The New Yorker: “The Wire,” [David] Simon often says, is a show about how contemporary American society—and, particularly, “raw, unencumbered capitalism”—devalues human beings. He told me, “Every single moment on the planet, from here on out, human beings are worth less. We…