"Yeah, but he's so cute though"

As much as I complain about how reporters write about the campaign, I’ve read enough of the coverage recently to tell the good from the bad. Which is to say there are a lot of really incredible articles being written, and while I take them with a grain of salt a/f/a expecting their predictions to come true, their narratives to actually unfold as described, and their speculation re momentum and electability to be substantiated, I see very clearly that there is something artful in the way some of these things are conceptualized and composed. The best of them have elegance; they are simple chains of ideas based on sophisticated observations. What it takes to write one of those is the ability to come up with creative ways of reading an exit poll, to see something crucial or indicative that others miss, to visualize a coherent, compelling arrangement of facts, to come up with the right turn of phrase.

I guess I am talking about imagination again. Also discipline and craft, as per that John Darnielle quote.