JOEL KOTKIN IS A REALLY SMART GUY. His 1989 (I think) book, The Third Century was a terrific debunking of the Japanese-supremacist hysteria sweeping the American financial and political press at the time, and if you read it now you’ll be amazed at its prescience.

Now he says that the newspaper Matt Welch and Ken Layne are starting is likely to succeed. I hope he’s prescient there, too.