Slate's Bizbox
readme: Policy made plain.

What?

By Michael Kinsley
Posted Saturday, Sept. 28, 1996, at 3:30 AM ET
(564 words; posted Friday, Sept. 27; to be composted Friday, Oct. 4)
What?
At SLATE, we're still trying to define ourselves. Should we just be about high politics and high culture? Or should we seek out hip trends and cultural novelties, guide our readers through the Best and Worst of consumerworld, and adopt the philosophy that nothing human is alien to SLATE? The trouble with trend-mongering is that it's hard to find the cutting edge, and the search occasionally leads you down a blind alley--or, in this case, a deaf alley. Our Associate Editor David Plotz became convinced that there is a trend these days toward ear irrigation. "Friends returned from doctor's visits in ecstasy. They could hear pins drop. Their ears tingled. They talked about huge chunks of ear wax that were flushed out of their ears. I was fascinated. Was ear irrigation the high colonic of the future?" Youth wants to know. So we sent David for an ear flush. "The doctor filled an enormous syringe with a mixture of warm water and hydrogen peroxide. I held a kidney-shaped bowl below my left ear to catch the drippings; she sprayed the syringe three times into each ear canal. (Imagine the sound of Niagara Falls. Multiply.) But the result was a letdown. I could hear no pins drop. My ears tingled, but only for a few minutes. And there were no chunks--only a few sad beige flakes floating in the bowl." Furthermore, there is apparently no trend toward "ear lavage," as it's officially called, except among people who've jammed so much wax into their ear canal that they can barely hear. Then you get chunks. And remember: You heard it first in SLATE.
SLATE and Trees
Despite our best efforts to promote it, many readers seem unaware of the special print-out edition of SLATE, which we prepare every weekday. It gives you almost all the contents of SLATE in about 25 nicely formatted pages--a much more efficient way to read SLATE offline than printing out individual articles from the Web. This edition is available as either a Microsoft Word or an Adobe Acrobat file. To download it, just click on "Print SLATE" at the top of the SLATE Contents page. Or, hell, just click here. The print-out edition is also available every Friday afternoon by e-mail. Click here for a free weekly delivery.
Miscellaneous plugs
Our national political correspondent, Jacob Weisberg, initiates his column this week. It will be called "Strange Bedfellow." This issue also inaugurates two occasional SLATE columns: "Dispatch," which will be filed notebook-style from various locales by our contributors, and "Letter From Washington" (not that Washington, our Washington, Washington state!). The debut "Dispatch" is by Harry Shearer, who is covering the ongoing O.J. Simpson legal saga for us; Norseman wannabe Knute Berger is the author of the first "Letter From Washington." Starting Monday, the "Committee of Correspondence" takes a week off from politics and policy to ask whether movies have gotten worse, and if so, why. The participants include New York Times columnist Frank Rich, actor and writer Ben Stein; writer and producer Joe Queenan; and Jack Valenti, head of the Motion Picture Association. Our "Dismal Scientist" economics columnist, Paul Krugman, comes under attack for his writings in SLATE and elsewhere in an essay by Robert Kuttner in the September/October issue of the American Prospect, now on the Web.
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Michael Kinsley is a columnist for Time and the founding editor of Slate.
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