It often seems as though Salon's interviewers are short of time, and rush through their discussions with tantalizingly interesting people. Or is us, the readers, who don't get beyond the 2 page format?

In any case, Stephanie Zacharek's line of questioning feels like it was itself redacted — as if there were a whole buildup in the middle that we missed, skipping to the end with her dense, involved question about perspective, authenticity, and documentary.

But as surprised as he was, De Palma got it and gave the answer that Zacharek deserved, rather than just what she asked for. I guess that's the sign of a good interview!

In our egalitarian, largely classless and ritualless society, we only need to learn the most general rules of social conduct.

Miss Manners might disagree, with Gary Kamiya's implication if not his actual statement. One of her themes (which she's always able to put so much better) is the great amount of effort required to teach, and learn, politeness; and that all the specific rules of etiquette flow naturally from that arduous but rewarding general education.

But that aside, and given that we can all agree that people with nothing but obscene ad hominem slurs to offer are dead weight in any conversation (a premise with which they themselves might even agree, if pressed), let's look a little more closely at the nature of online discussion. Fundamentally, is anything really new under the sun?

Online discourse is nothing more than simply a particular form of public discourse in general. People have been discussing things in public, sometimes heatedly, for a very long time.

Are the more obstreperous of us really any different from the so-polite English, whose Parliamentarians occasionally assault each other physically with the antique legislative mace? Or the 19th century American legislators whose disagreements sometimes turned into duels on the floor of the US Congress? Socrates pissed the Athenians off so much that they banned him rather more severely than anything we do to web forum trolls today.

Public figures were subject to pamphleteering (the term "broadside" was hardly intended to denote subtlety or gentility), censure, slander, and the slings and arrows of outraged editorial long before there was the web.

Could it be that online discussion is simply taking the form that public criticism of public figures (including journalists and magazine editors) has always taken? That the ideal of genteel disagreement between modest proposals is the historical exception rather than the rule? Could the difference with online media simply be a lower barrier to entry (as Kamiya implies with his contrast between Salon and the New York Times)?

As for classlessness, it would be rude not to give Kamiya the benefit of the doubt, and read him as meaning "formally classless," since surely he knows how class-based, even if fluidly so, American society has in practice always been and remains. Right?

... maybe he should have dared something drastic, like, I dunno, running for president again.

I'm glad that Gore isn't running. His party desperately needs new life, and a self-imposed "one strike and you're out" rule goes a long way to nurturing promising young sprouts like Barack Obama. I similarly admire Kerry for the same reason (if few others), and the Green Party for rejecting Nader after his first run.

That's not to say that Gore shouldn't have been President in the first place — at one time I looked eagerly forward to protesting the vast legal-environmental complex of the Gore Administration and its draconian global warming laws, rammed through with the consent of a frightened populace as a poor substitute for a more visionary, empowering energy paradigm.

I guess we got that anyway, except without controlling global warming.

If I recall correctly it was Isaac Asimov who told a story about his publisher discovering that a small-time pirate was selling copies of his stories without paying royalties. The publisher wanted to crush the guy, but the author insisted on having his say first and made the guy an offer — pay back-royalties and agree to abide by a contract and you'll become one of my distributors. The guy readily agreed and went on to prosper, the publisher made money instead of spending it in court, and Asimov (or was it Bradbury? one of those two..) got to show off his a princely benevolence at no cost to himself.

I don't understand why that's so hard for commercially successful copyright holders to grasp. Offer someone who wants to publish a derivative work a deal. If your desire to control your work extends to Lucasian proportions, retain the right to review before publication. I thought we lived in a free-for-all economic system where you could make any deal you wanted. Whence this dead-handed prosecutorial reflex?

I don't know if makes Rowling greedy, but it does make her unimaginative. As much as I hate to risk the ire of Harry Potter fans, though, I think that we already kind of knew that about her.

... a monopolistic theory with zero tolerance for dissent ...

In this respect biological evolution is much like other, now obsolete preoccupations of those whose theological zeal is matched only by their maleducation — "theories" like the round earth, a heliocentric solar system, germs, atomic matter, and so on.

None of those are theories anymore, nor is evolution. They are well-observed, lavishly-documented phenomena, like gravity or the propagation of light. They are ground truths of the natural world.

The investigation of mechanisms by which these things take place remains an interesting one — for instance, the relatively recent discovery of placental immunization resuscitates the principles of Darwin's contemporary Lamarck's competing evolutionary theory in an unexpected way. But let's not fall into the same trap as the guys Gordy Slack cited in his article, in mischaracterizing evolution as "just another theory."