I tend to rank the Slate columnists as follows: Daniel Gross, Dahlia Lithwick, Tim Noah, Fred Kaplan, and then a pretty big gap down to the rest. And then another long, long gap down to Christopher Hitchens. Which is just my way of saying two things: 1) I'm confident I'll never be hired by Slate, and 2) I'm very, very excited that Dan Gross has started up his own blog.