Seventy-year-old Washington Post features editor Henry Allen, like many of us, frequently wants to punch the writers of Washington Post articles immediately after reading them. But you can’t actually do that, Henry! Oh, wait, it was a “charticle” someone else had assigned that infuriated him so much last week. Punches are justified on anyone who writes a “charticle,” of course. MORE »

Henry Allen, we know you’re a Pulitzer-winning critic, a respected old newspaper veteran, all that jazz. But please — the death of Ken Lay does not call for a rewrite of Hunter S. Thompson’s Nixon obit. Ken Lay was a garden-variety crook, not the near-mythic villain of a generation. You are a Washington Post staff writer, not an iconoclastic, self-destructive legend. Here are some phrases that should not appear in the Washington Post: MORE »