of Andrew's posts are finely-crafted, well-reasoned, hugely entertaining, and occasionally not about Barack Obama. I even agree with some of them.

The point is, Andrew is a natural-born blogger. He has opinions. He has bandwidth. Most important, he has sitzfleish. In the errant hope of replicating his success, I asked him for advice. He was most unhelpful. "Four words: You will regret this," he wrote me, before posting twenty-seven separate items in a three-hour period.

Fortunately, I have other colleagues at the Atlantic who are professional bloggers, and are quite good at it. One of them, Marc Ambinder, was most helpful, offering the following suggestions: A blogger should only post, he wrote, when he has "something new to add to something old," and has "something that no one else has."posts only about boiled frogs. As it happens, the myth of the slowly-boiled frog happens to be the great obsession of my life, as well as that of Jim's, so I believe we'll make an excellent team. A little known fact: The Atlantic was started 150 years ago by a group of men, including James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, who all shared an interest in puncturing the myth of the slowly-boiled frog. They were also interested in ending slavery. But mostly, boiled frogs.

I do have other interests, as well, and I hope to blog, when the spirit moves me, on the future of Israel, the coarsening of American life, the Jewish predisposition toward dissatisfaction, the Mets (see previous), Dylan