This intrepid op-ed writer (is there any other kind of employee on so-called "News" sites these days) was actually writing about the death of civility, but the following quote caught my attention:

"One of the odd laws of the Internet is that the more obscure and bizarre the site, the nicer the comments tend to be. Store some comments from a Respectable News Site, and they’ll eat through the container. Visit the comments area of an Livejournal community of people who enjoy writing erotic fiction about cat-men, and the comments are correctly spelled, very polite, and uniformly positive."

-- Alexandra Petri, Washington Post