NP: Coldplay, X&Y

Maureen Dowd is off writing a book, and in her place, the New York Times is offering up Matt Miller from the Center of American Progress. So far, I'm enjoying the switch.

A week or two back, he had a column about balancing work and life that struck a chord. It was nominally about the challenges women face with regard to raising children, but the work/life balance is something I've been very vigilant in maintaining since it was the school/life balance, at the very least. I'd go so far to extend the concept to say I'm very wary of putting too much reliance on any one facet of my life as a matter of course. It's like a distributed network for living that can suffer outages in one area and still function.

This week, it's the death of persuasion. I have to say, I don't buy into the futility of it, but then again, I tend to be around people who are, for the most part, like-minded. Living in a blue city within a blue state will do that. I do understand the sentiment, and wring my hands with the best of them over the shoutfests.

For the sake of argument, pun intended, I don't think I'm as intransigent as Miller's trend implies, but maybe I was wrong enough at an early age to get used to the idea that I could very well be full of shit on any given topic. Or studying physics and the history of other sciences clued me in to the notion that very smart people can be very, very wrong.

Anyway, Miller's a good read, and mirroring his articles on his own site means he may continue to be a good read once you have to pay for the NYT op-ed columns next month. If Dowd isn't back by then, anyway.