(This post originally appeared on stevesilver.blogspot.com on 12/18/'02; it can be accessed here).

By Stephen Silver

A few months ago The New Republic's website began running an anonymous political blog called "&c.," and since then it's been somewhat of a blogger guessing-game as to who exactly the author is (the smart money has always been on TNR writer Noam Scheiber). BUT, now I think we may have the answer. On Monday an item was posted to "&c." criticizing Ted Turner for failing to live up to his pledge to donate $1 billion to the United Nations by the end of 2002, while lamenting the decline of "AOL-Time-Warner-General-Motors, or whatever it's now called." This argument, and specifically that phrasing, sounded VERY familiar to me, and at first I thought that perhaps another blogger had plagiarized TNR. But then I realized it: ESPN.com's Tuesday Morning Quarterback column had also slammed Turner for the same thing- and used the same "AOL-Time-Warner-General-Motors, or whatever it's now called" phrase! Even more interestingly, the author of the TMQ column is Gregg Easterbrook, who is also a Senior Editor of... The New Republic!
This apparently means that either Gregg Easterbook is the elusive author of "&c.," or he's one of many group-authors. Am I the first to discover this?