The New Republic has published a blog for several months written by a culture maven named Lee Siegel. Siegel is perhaps the single most pretentious person in America today, close to unreadable at length no matter the topic on which he is writing and immensely uninteresting as a blogger. It turns out he was conspiring with someone to post comments on his blog — evidently to create the impression that said blog had at least one reader. Now he won’t have any blog readers, as TNR has cancelled the blog — and suspended Siegel as a writer for the magazine.