We'll like your spirit if you'll like ours

By Media Farm

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The Globe rang in the Iraq war's fifth birthday with an eminently competent assessment of the surge. Charles Sennott jetted off to the desert, wandered around a neighborhood ravaged by sectarian cleansing, and made Iraqis and American soldiers alike uncomfortable by, you know, asking reporterly questions. All in long-essay form!

"The majority Shi'a were afraid from the past. The minority Sunni feared the future. This was the essence of the problem. Now we are working very hard to be sure there are guarantees for all of the partners," [said Ammar al-Hakim, a Shi'ite cleric] ... He spoke the glowing language of reconciliation, without mentioning that the council's own militias were responsible in part for some of the displacements of Sunni families. "Every Iraqi should have his place," he said, and the choice of the word "place" rather than "home" hung for a while in the discomforting air and the practiced piety of his speech.

Good stuff. Globe readers who've been without their Economists since January's great Wal-Mart news rack purge surely found the piece to be a revelation. And at the very least, Sennott's article, coupled with Farah Stockman's piece on Halliburton's off-shore tax evasion, shows that the paper, while laboring under ever-tightening budgets and a steady exodus of talent, is still capable of setting its sights high—and delivering.

Let's hope this is the kind of work (as opposed to, you know, broadsheet-sized fashion spreads) that sees investment once Marty Baron finally tosses that illiterate fucking albatross of the Sidekick into the harbor.

Oh. Sennott's reportedly leaving the paper? OK then. Nevermind.

APPARENTLY ALL THOSE WHISPERS swimming around our head about Mike Barnicle possibly landing at WBUR weren't just unfortunate aftereffects from our recent five-day bender, but were actually real, possibly true rumors. Jesus. What's next? Northeastern's J-school hiring Patricia Smith?

At any rate, we say, go for it, 'BUR. Hire the bloated old plagiarizing fabricator. Because if Barnicle can be half as unintentionally hilarious on the radio as he was when he ran into Billy Bulger last summer, it'll be so, so worth it. (Herein, the term "it" shall represent public humiliation, lowered standards, recrimination from donors and unrest in a newsroom famous for its low morale.) Boston mag's Joe Keohane reported:

[Bulger] turns to Barnicle and asks how he is. "I'm doin' well," Barnicle says. "Same old, same old. Just get up every day and get back in the batter's box."

"You're doing very well," Bulger tells him. "I like your spirit. It's real."

"Well, I like yours, too."

"Bet your life."

But wait! If Barnicle lands on 'BUR, how can he ever follow through on those vague threats to buy the Globe?? Wouldn't that be an ethical conflict or something???

CONGRATS to the Sunday Herald for beating all those other 20 years after the Gardner Museum theft retrospectives. By two years. What a coup!

As scoop-tastic as it was to jump everybody else's news cycle and celebrate the heist's 18th anniversary (extra points for dropping the phrase "cultural terrorism" with a straight face), Media Farm still feels like this was a missed opportunity. If the story had run two years before, we could have thrown it a monster birthday bash, bought it a pink Beamer and had Tom Mashberg tell us how fat we all look in our party dresses.

A QUESTION: Does James Parker have an editor over at the Phoenix? If so, could this editor start, you know, editing him? We could swear the kid used to know how to write.

A SECOND QUESTION: What's more entertaining than the spectacle of the New York Times critiquing a high-class hooker's MySpace single? ("On the Web page is a recording of what she describes as her latest track, 'What We Want,' a hip-hop-inflected rhythm-and-blues tune that asks, 'Can you handle me, boy?' and uses some dated slang, calling someone her 'boo.'")

Answer: This little bit of arithmetic from the New York Post: "Experts estimate that Dupre will bring in between $2.5 million and $5 million from companies looking to promote the hooker who brought down the governor. Dupre would have to service Spitzer 581 to 1,162 times at her going rate of $4,300 for four hours to earn the same amount of money."