Alex Beam writes one of those "journalist-insider" pieces— "The Greatest Stories Never Told" —for the November issue of Atlantic Monthly. If you're truly a journalist-insider— preferably Jewish— or would just like to know how they behave around each other, read it. Otherwise you will certainly wonder what the fuss is about, since journalist-insiders tend to snigger amongst themselves in much the same way as intellectuals and literati.

But Beam reintroduces a word that used to be a favorite among intellectuals in the days of the Cold War: samizdat. Meaning "self-published," it referred to the works of the Soviet intelligentsia who were forced to pass around typed manuscripts, either because the official organs of the Soviet media wouldn't publish them or because it would be dangerous even to offer them.

I thought Beam was going to make some astute comparisons between samizdat and the blogosphere, but only at the end did he come up with this—

Samizdat is no longer a matter of punching typewriter keys through recalcitrant carbons and hoping the neighbors don't tip off the KGB. Now self-publishing is waking up in the morning, turning on your computer, and sharing your thoughts with the hypothetically limitless audience of the Internet. The San Francisco-based consulting firm Technorati recently estimated that the number of digitally published Web diaries, or blogs, almost doubled in the first half of this year, from 7.8 million to 14.2 million.

Forget writing for "the desk drawer." Forget mailing copies of your unpublishable work around to your friends. To paraphrase Yogi Berra ("Nobody goes there; it's too crowded"), so many people are doing it, it's hardly worth doing at all.

The idea of valuing writing for its rarity probably hasn't occurred to anyone since the invention of the printing press. Perhaps it's an idea that Beam should promote as venues for his own writing, such as the Atlantic, become increasingly rare.

But certainly I haven't written all this to criticize Beam's article. You know me better than that! Actually I wanted to share a parody of "folksy, anecdotal first paragraphs" (or ledes) that Beam offers—

DALLAS, Nov. 22—Elvira Brown's aging face seems almost to be a map of the parched, weatherbeaten Texas countryside that has been her home for 83 years. Through the eyes that squint in the harsh sunlight, she has seen Dallas grow from a tiny cowtown into a midland capital. The street outside of her tiny house used to be nothing more than a dust trail in summer and a mudhole in winter.

Years ago, she would sit on this porch and watch cattle drives pass. Today, a procession of quite a different sort passed along the now-paved course. It was a motorcade. It flew by at top speed on its way to Parkland Memorial Hospital. Top speed, because, it seems, the President of the United States was inside. And he was dead.