Alex Pareene
Andrew Breitbart, Web entrepreneur and conservative propagandist, died on Wednesday night, apparently of natural causes, in Los Angeles. His death was unexpected, and the response to its announcement this morning was an odd and probably appropriate mixture of shock and suspicion. He was hugely influential in the creation and evolution of the political Internet, though he was only a national celebrity in his own right for a couple years. 
Spare a thought for poor Susie Breitbart. On January 17, 1998, her husband, conservative Web publisher Andrew Breitbart, got home “around midnight,” went online (which took some time in those days), and eventually (with, he writes, an actual tear rolling down his cheek) turned in bed to his presumably sleeping wife and said, “Susie, history just happened . . . Drudge just changed everything.” It’s hard to imagine a worse election cycle for this sort of project. McKay Coppins, a political reporter with BuzzFeed News, has produced, in The Wilderness, an expansively reported preview of the 2016 Republican-primary campaign, focusing on people generally considered by the smart set to be the most likely contenders for the nomination. But Coppins began work on his book years before the first primary vote would be cast, and it was released a month before the Iowa caucuses. Meanwhile, over the course of 2015, former reality-television personality Donald Trump, having reinvented himself as a sort of Twitter-era Joe McCarthy