The world of traditional media has overturned in the past decade – and few have ridden the crest of this wave more savvily than Michael Kinsley. As a pundit on CNN’s “Crossfire,” editing Slate, experimenting with the editorial page of the Los Angeles Times, and now at The Atlantic, Kinsley’s philosophy has been an open desire to speak truth to power, and to bend the boundaries of where and how the media engages with its audience. Philip Bump examines the arc of Kinsley’s career, and just how ahead of the curve that arc has been.

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Former Bush speechwriter David Frum appeared on The Colbert Report last night to discuss his firing from the American Enterprise Institute for daring to tell the truth about the GOP’s defeat on health care. He rightly corrected host Stephen Colbert‘s assertion that he was a conservative “apostate,” but that’s probably Frum’s biggest problem right now. Conservative apostates can still make a living, but nobody wants a conservative heretic.

Author Christopher Buckley marks the eighth anniversary of author Joseph Heller’s death by wondering what his friend would have made of the “tumultuous — to say the least — decade” that he “missed, or perhaps another way to put it, avoided.” Perhaps at the very least Heller could have given a name to what we are now calling the Aughts.