For years, one of my small pleasures was reading James Taranto’s Best of the Web.
It was a strange thing to look forward to. It was a daily column about politics, journalism, and whatever else had caught the attention of the editor of the Wall Street Journal’s online editorial page. It was mostly links to other people’s work, with Taranto’s comments attached. Sometimes the comments were serious. Often they were funny. Sometimes the joke was nothing more than a headline followed by another headline that made the first one look ridiculous.
But I looked forward to it anyway. More than that, I trusted it.
And I realized recently how much I have missed it since Taranto retired the series in 2017.
That may sound like an oddly specific piece of nostalgia. The internet is full of things that have disappeared. Websites have closed, blogs have died, magazines have moved behind paywalls, and entire online communities have migrated to places that no longer feel like the places they used to be. Why should one political web column matter?
I think it matters because Best of the Web did something that is easy to miss when thinking about the history of the internet. It did not merely give readers information. It gave them judgment.
And that is something the internet has not gotten better at providing.
Someone had already read the internet
The benefit of reading Best of the Web was that someone had already done some of the work.
This was especially valuable in the 2000s. The political internet was becoming enormous, but it was still possible to imagine that someone could keep up with it. Blogs were multiplying. Newspapers were putting more of their content online. Political campaigns were learning how to use the web. News sites were publishing constantly. The 2000 election, 9/11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Bush administration, the 2004 election, and the rise of political blogs created an almost continuous stream of things to read.
The problem was not that there was nothing to read. The problem was discovering what was worth reading.
Best of the Web was a filter. Taranto would find a story, a headline, a correction, a strange statistic, an editorial, a blog post, or some bizarre piece of political news and put it in front of you. Sometimes he would explain why it mattered. Sometimes he would simply give you the perfect headline.
That distinction is important. A link aggregator can tell you what exists. An editor can tell you why you should care.
In a 2005 NYU journalism profile, Best of the Web Today was described as having more than 120,000 daily readers and as a “collection of wisdom in a blog-like format.” That description gets surprisingly close to what made the column special. It was not simply a collection of links. It was a collection of someone’s judgments about the links.
Taranto was the person standing between the reader and the day’s political internet.
That was the service.
The joke was often the analysis
The first thing I remember about Taranto is the humor.
He had an almost preternatural ability to recognize when a headline had accidentally become a joke. He liked puns, but the puns were usually attached to something more substantial: a contradiction, a badly framed story, an absurd claim, an unintentionally revealing correction, or two stories that looked very different until you put them next to each other.
Over time, Best of the Web developed a vocabulary of recurring categories. They became a kind of editorial shorthand between Taranto and his readers. The Best of the Web archive preserves dozens of these recurring devices.
There was “Other Than That, the Story Was Accurate,” reserved for corrections that did more damage to the original story than the correction seemed to acknowledge. One example involved NPR correcting a correction about Celsius temperatures. Taranto’s category title did most of the work:
“Other Than That, the Story Was Accurate”
The joke is funny because the correction itself is the story. A seemingly minor editorial note becomes evidence that the original reporting was less reliable than the reader had been led to believe. Taranto did not need an angry paragraph explaining the failure. He found the right frame and let the correction indict itself. The 2015 example is preserved in the archive.
There was “Bottom Story of the Day,” or “Bottom Stories of the Day,” for stories that had somehow made it into the news despite being spectacularly unimportant, misguided, or silly. A 2012 example paired that label with the headline, “New Virus Not Spreading Easily Between People: WHO.” The category sounds like a joke about ranking stories, but it also expressed a serious editorial judgment: not everything that gets published deserves the same amount of attention.
There was “Out on a Limb,” for statements that were conspicuously speculative, overconfident, or unsupported by the evidence. Sometimes the headline was enough. In one 2016 example, the headline was simply:
“US Concerned by Russia’s Increased Military Presence in Syria”
Taranto’s joke was not merely that the statement was speculative. It was that a headline could present a commonplace observation as a daring analytical conclusion.
There was “News of the Tautological,” for headlines that announced something that was essentially true by definition. One of the best examples is almost self-parodying:
“Centenarians Proliferate, and Live Longer”
It appeared in the New York Times in January 2016, and Taranto filed it under the category. The headline is technically true, but it tells you very little beyond what the word centenarian already implies. The archive preserves the item and its surrounding column.
There was “What Would We Do Without Experts?”, which became a reliable way of puncturing headlines that invoked experts to announce something obvious, trivial, or insufficiently supported. One 2015 example was:
“Smartphones Are Addictive, Say Experts”
The joke is immediate, but so is the criticism. What exactly did the experts add? The archived column makes the pattern clear: Taranto was often interested less in whether a statement was technically true than in whether the authority attached to it actually earned the reader’s attention.
There were also the two-in-one constructions, ironic headline rewrites, literary references, and deadpan juxtapositions. A story could be funny on its own. Two stories placed beside each other could reveal something neither writer had intended.
Sometimes the deadpan commentary was even better than the setup. In a 2016 item about an intelligence official’s denial that intelligence officers had displayed political “body language,” Taranto concluded:
“That’s a very credible denial, as long as you’re willing to believe that senior intelligence professionals don’t have body language.”
That is a joke, but it is also a compact argument about the quality of the denial. The original archived item shows the pattern: Taranto quotes enough of the underlying reporting to establish the contradiction, then uses one dry sentence to expose it.
That is what made the humor more than decoration.
Taranto was teaching readers a way of seeing.
After reading enough Best of the Web, you started noticing certain things yourself. You saw the correction that quietly destroyed the premise of the original story. You noticed when a headline merely restated the obvious. You became suspicious when an article announced that “experts” had reached a conclusion without telling you much about the experts or the conclusion. You learned to look at two headlines together and wonder whether the juxtaposition told you more than either story did.
The categories became mental tools.
That may be one reason the column was so memorable. A normal political column gives you an argument. Taranto gave you a vocabulary for recognizing recurring forms of journalistic absurdity.
An editor, not an oracle
It is tempting to remember Taranto primarily as a political voice. He was certainly that. He was a conservative, and his perspective was evident in what he selected and how he interpreted it. If you disagreed with him politically, there were plenty of reasons to disagree with him.
That is not really the point.
The value of an editor is not that the editor has no point of view. It is that the point of view is visible, consistent, and useful.
I did not need Taranto to tell me what to think about everything. I needed him to help me figure out what was worth thinking about.
Those are different services.
An editor discovers. An editor selects. An editor remembers. An editor notices patterns. An editor decides that one story deserves three paragraphs while another deserves only a headline and a joke. An editor notices that today’s story contradicts something published six months ago. An editor knows that a correction is more interesting than the original article. An editor recognizes that a seemingly trivial story is actually revealing.
And then the editor says: Look at this.
That may be the most important thing Taranto did.
He made the internet legible.
The hidden labor of making it look easy
The other thing I appreciate more now is how difficult Best of the Web must have been to sustain.
Taranto did it for roughly seventeen years. His final column appeared on January 3, 2017, after which he moved into his role as the Wall Street Journal’s editorial features editor. By then, the web he had started covering had changed almost beyond recognition.
The early Best of the Web belonged to an internet in which a person could plausibly survey a large portion of the interesting political web. Over time that web became much larger, faster, and more fragmented. Yet the basic task remained: find the things worth showing readers and say something useful about them.
The scale of that achievement is easy to underestimate because the format was so compact.
A typical item might consist of a headline, a link, and a few paragraphs. That looks effortless. But brevity is not the absence of work. It is often what remains after the work has been done.
The column also had an important advantage that is easy to overlook: it was not really a one-person discovery operation. Readers sent him material. The archive describes Best of the Web as a collection of interesting items “found by readers on the internet and commented on by James Taranto,” and the columns regularly thanked contributors. That reader network was part of the format, not an incidental detail. The archive’s description makes that explicit.
That suggests a useful way to think about the project. Taranto may have been the final editorial bottleneck, but he did not have to be the only person looking.
He had a distributed network of readers, a major newsroom behind him, a repeatable format, years of accumulated knowledge, and an editorial vocabulary that let him process familiar kinds of stories quickly. He did not need to invent a new form every afternoon. He had built a system for turning the day’s raw material into Best of the Web.
That is partly why I suspect the recurring categories mattered so much.
“News of the Tautological” was not merely a running joke. It was a classification system. So was “Bottom Story of the Day.” So was “Other Than That, the Story Was Accurate.” Once you have names for recurring patterns, you can find those patterns faster.
The format itself became a tool for doing the work.
That does not make Taranto’s contribution mechanical. Quite the opposite. The system worked because someone had developed the judgment behind it.
The internet got bigger. The editor became more valuable.
This is the part that makes the loss of Best of the Web feel heavy.
In 2017, when Taranto stopped writing the column, the internet was already vastly different from the one he had spent years covering. Today the difference is greater still.
We have newsletters, podcasts, social feeds, recommendation engines, aggregators, search engines, Substacks, YouTube channels, Reddit threads, group chats, and AI-generated summaries. We have more ways to discover information than Taranto could have imagined when Best of the Web began.
Discovery is no longer the scarce resource.
Attention is.
And judgment is.
The algorithms are extremely good at finding things that resemble things we have already clicked on. They are good at showing us what is popular, what is controversial, what is being discussed, and what will keep us scrolling. They are much less trustworthy as editors in the older sense of the word.
They can tell us what everyone is talking about.
They cannot necessarily tell us what deserves to be talked about.
That is the gap Taranto occupied.
He had taste. He had memory. He had a sense of proportion. He had biases that you could see. He had jokes that you either appreciated or didn’t. Most importantly, he had spent enough time doing the job that you could learn his judgment.
Trusting an editor does not mean surrendering your judgment to him. It means borrowing his judgment for a moment.
You can read Taranto and disagree. In fact, disagreement is part of the usefulness of a distinctive editorial voice. If I know what you think and understand why you selected something, I can decide whether I agree with you. A completely personalized feed can feel neutral while quietly making thousands of editorial decisions on my behalf.
Taranto made the editorial decision visible.
What I miss
I do not miss the political internet of the 2000s and 2010s in any uncomplicated sense. It was partisan, argumentative, sometimes cruel, and often wrong. Taranto himself was not infallible, and Best of the Web sometimes reflected the limitations of its editor and its era. The column was not a neutral record of reality.
That is not why I miss it.
I miss opening the column and knowing that someone had already looked around.
Someone had read the stories. Someone had noticed the strange correction. Someone had caught the tautology. Someone had found the absurd headline. Someone had remembered that this politician had said the opposite thing three years earlier. Someone had found two unrelated stories that, placed side by side, suddenly made a point.
And someone had decided that I would probably enjoy seeing it.
That last part matters more than it sounds.
There is something deeply human about an editor saying, You should read this. Not because an algorithm calculated that I would click it, but because a person with a recognizable mind thought it was worth my time.
That is what I think I miss about Best of the Web.
Not the links.
Not even the politics.
The judgment.
James Taranto spent years teaching a generation of internet readers what to notice. He made corrections funny, headlines revealing, contradictions visible, and the daily political web a little easier to navigate. He turned an overwhelming collection of other people’s work into something that felt curated, coherent, and occasionally delightful.
I still read plenty of political commentary. More than ever, probably.
But I no longer have the same feeling I had when I opened Best of the Web.
I already have the internet.
What I miss is the person who had read it first.