Friday, February 17, 2006

hey, and here i thought i had the lock on "of the day" stats

from my friend tim noah over at slate:

You may have noticed that "Chatterbox," the column I've been writing since 1998, has tapered off. That's because I've been preparing to launch a new Slate feature called "Document of the Day." The column will be a sort of cross between The Smoking Gun, the Harper's "Annotation" feature, and the Washington Monthly's late, lamented "Memo of the Month," combined with certain elements all our own that company scientists are still developing at our state-of-the-art laboratory facility in Huntsville, Ala. Barring a severe industrial accident, "Document of the Day" will debut in early March.

What I need from you, dear reader, is documents. White House memos, wiretap transcripts, financial disclosure forms, college transcripts, wills, e-mails, police reports, pending regulations, expense account filings—anything sufficiently piquant to interest the lay public. I'm especially interested in documents that have not previously been made public, but I won't exclude from consideration interesting documents that the public has overlooked. I'm just as interested in government documents as I am in documents from the private sector. I intend to define "documents" as broadly as possible, so that it would include, say, a particularly asinine instruction manual or a particularly cowardly liability waiver for some consumer product, or an especially interesting billboard, or something telling that's been scribbled in the margin of a book.

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