More evidence of the way LA bends men’s souls.

Michael Kelly, the guy who revitalized the Atlantic magazine, died today in a Humvee accident in Iraq. Bad.

Stocks are trading up and down in relative unison, an effect last seen during during major free-falls like the ’87 crash, the ’97 Asian crisis and the ’98 Russian debt debacle.

The market rallied sharply after each of these tumbles and periods of lock-step trading. Does this mean we’re going to rally big once the Iraq war is resolved? Or is the correlation with inflection points rather than bottoms, which might instead mean we are next headed down?

We are, in the big scheme of things, still perched atop a 19 year rally, and may not have factored in swelling deficits, exhausted consumer borrowing power, a coming housing slump, and/or looming baby boomer retirements.

Most importantly, we may have yet realized that the 19 year equity rally may have been powered by nothing more than falling interest rates. The future value of money was rising for the last 19 years. Is it any wonder that stocks, which we buy because they will generate future profits, were rising in value too? As the Fed’s ability to lower rates comes to an end, that trend is, by physical necessity, over.

I guess another possibility is that we are inflecting out of a rise into a plateau, the kind of bump and grind that we saw from 1965 to 1984.

See the Dow chart or click more for correlation chart. (more…)

“The blast, when it came, was met with rousing cheers. The horse and its rider were sent hurtling off the pedestal, crashing to the base.” This tale of the felling of a Saddam statue recalls October ’56, when Hungarians ripped down a giant Stalin statue.

Josh Marshall wracked up 1.4 million page views in March. Indricotheriums beware, the grass is being eating from beneath your toes. (Via Mr. Jolliffe.)

From this month’s National Geographic: “Bulk benefited Indricotherium, the largest land mammal ever (weighing the equivalent of several modern elephants.) Its size let it browse tall trees and discouraged enemies. But size also brought its demise: When climate change turned this giant’s forest environment grassy, it couldn’t stoop to graze and became extinct.”

Andrew Sullivan writes: “March was another record traffic month: 1.88 million visits to the site from almost half a million separate people. 2.5 million page views. But my favorite piece of data is from Alexa.com. They rank websites, and like most such rankings, they’re fallible, so don’t put too much weight on this little piece of information. But according to Alexa, this site is now neck and neck, in traffic terms, with the Nation. In fact, the very latest data show this site just ahead of the Nation: we were ranked 6,116 Monday; they were ranked 8,728. No, I’m not putting out a full-fledged magazine, but the more you think about that simple statistic, the more remarkable it is. This site didn’t exist three years ago; the Nation has been around for a century. This site, thanks to you, is comfortably in the black with no debt. The Nation has bled money for decades, as most such magazines do. Moreover, compare the stats for last month with the same month a year ago: we had 805,000 visits in March 2002 and 1,880,000 in March 2003.”

Business 2.0 figures out that proto-blogger Matt Drudge is getting rich. Drudge has the highest ROI in online media, strike that, any media, strike that, any business other that’s legal. (Via Hylton Jolliffe and Nick Denton.)

The genius of Drudge’s model is very, very, old news, but Business 2.0’s math is good.

Unfortunately, big media won’t be able to copy Drudge’s model. The DNA just isn’t right. As I wrote previously, “as commercial organisms, blogs have short life-cycles, small metabolisms and are run by flexible egos. Up against the old, thick-shell, high-burn, multi-cell media organisms, the blog is an ideal candidate to evolve and exploit the new environment.”

‘We have entered an era vibrating with the din of small voices,’ Drudge said in his 1998 speech to an assembly of sneering National Press Club members. As usual, Drudge was first with the story.

Ken Layne fights the digital devil and wins. He celebrates in the kitchen.

Jonathan Rauch writes: “Americans of Asian descent face racial discrimination when they apply to almost any selective university in the country. So do most whites. Asians and whites who wish to avoid being penalized for their color can apply to public universities in a handful of states that have banned or curtailed overt racial preferences. (The states are California, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, and Washington.) Or they can choose a nonselective university. Or they can skip college. Or they can go abroad. Or else’tough.”