In the good old days, when a week was as full of gossipy news as this one was, I’d head off to the bar near the National Press Club. There, amid clouds of smoke and the reek of decades of cheap booze, reporters would sit around and spread the dirt in an atmosphere of bonhomie. Now, to watch reporters at leisure I have to go to some damned net cafe where kids fresh out of journalism schools they went to because their grades in area studies stunk and they wanted “to make a difference” hang out. So I went to the Fair Trade Shade Grown Beans where they sat around trading narratives. It wasn’t a good week for them. “Campus culture of rape” had taken a body blow when it turned out the claims against a University of Virginia fraternity gang rape could not be substantiated; something the Rolling Stone author who first published the tale might have learned had she or her editors exercised normal investigative journalism caution. (Lena Dunham’s...(Read Full Article)