You might really be amped for your Friday night, and by all means you should be, but the rest of us would much rather learn the exam content than be made aware of your Seoul Taco plans.

The latest chapter in the ongoing war between the Internet’s devotees and their mainstream media adversaries is an article in The New York Times Magazine about Mike Allen, writer of an e-mailed morning news digest called Playbook that is enormously popular with Washington, D.C., residents and other “politicos.

I suppose the Olympics are noisy: the wild crowds, the rhythmic helicopters, the smooth newscasters, the frosty sounds of carved ice or fanned snow. It’s probably a hell of a cacophony, but I haven’t heard any of it. Oh, I’ve been watching the Olympics all right—I’ve been sold on the winter event since I eagerly watched Tara Lipinski seize the gold in 1998 at the Nagano games.