Annie Leibovitz, Robert Johnson playing the background, and Keith being ... Keith: Yes, he remains the coolest dude on earth.

Playwright-author-screenwriter David Mamet has a piece (in the Village Voice, of all places) describing his gradual realization that '60s utopian-leftist idealism just doesn't square with reality.

The nutgraph, buried deep in a wonderfully discursive piece:

And I realized that the time had come for me to avow my participation in that America in which I chose to live, and that that country was not a schoolroom teaching values, but a marketplace.

"Aha," you will say, and you are right. I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.

The biggest stories to come out of talk radio this election cycle have been found on the right side of the dial, as it were.

First there was Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and co.'s aggressive campaign against Sen. John McCain. More recently, we've seen Rush spearhead an apparently effective gambit to prop up Hillary Clinton with backhanded Republican support.

What I'm wondering is, with excitement on the left more intense than it's been since, well, 2006, and with Democratic turnout so sky-high, why hasn't there been a boost in listenership for Air America Radio or other liberal talk-radio outlets?

Ratings reports aren't current enough to bear out my hunch — and lefties will charge the game is rigged against them — but I'd be surprised if liberal talk has seen a significant uptick this year.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say this might have something to do with it: National Public Radio's audience is bigger than it's ever been.

Talk about intrepid reporting: I'd like to seen an embedded war journalist knowingly step into this.