Zagat's strategy for its losing battle against foodie blogs and user-generated restaurant review sites: Claiming to be kindreds. Nina Zagat says the Zagat Survey was crowd-sourcing before it was cool. Yelp : Zagat :: Charles Darwin :: Alfred Wallace Russel. Who? Exactly. [HuffPo]

When I was at Jossip, I wrote about an anecdote Malcolm Gladwell told at the Moth Gala last November, which was later rebroadcasted on This American Life. In the story, Gladwell boasts about getting absurd phrases like "raises new and troubling questions" and "perverse and often baffling" into the Washington Post. At the time, being self-serious and high-minded &mdash I do after all listen to This American Life &mdash I wondered whether there wasn't something "perverse and often baffling" about one of the most successful journalists of our time making lite deception sound so endearing . Some people agreed with me, or at least wondered how a Canuck like Gladwell ended up on This American Life. Gladwell is back, not to defend himself for the charges of being Canadian, but to explain the story on his own blog: