A friend recently said to me that Chicago was the center of American media criticism, a remark he made because he is a stuck-up middle-American reverse elitist, and also because it is true. I was thrown for a moment, both because I’m the regular kind of elitist and because I’m so interested in technology, where New Yorkers Walt Mossberg and David Pogue stand at the epicenter of their field.

Mossberg is your standard tech reviewer. He lives in a hyperbaric chamber, from which he dictates his columns to his robot assistant “K-T.” He recently had a camera installed in the chamber so that he could make web videos, which I find annoying because he pronounces the word “program” as “pro-gruhm,” and he says that word a lot.¹ Mossberg also says that he appears on TV, on the Fox Business Network, a channel nobody has ever watched, so it is impossible to verify his claims. Once a year he undergoes an arduous decompression process to hold heartwarming reunions at a conference called “D.” Last year he brought together Steve Jobs and Bill Gates; this year Mossberg reunited the cast of Family Matters. He is ¼ bird. All in all, a pretty normal guy.

That brings us to the other half of this titanic duo, David Pogue. In contrast to Mossberg, and in all seriousness, Pogue is an enigma. I find Pogue to be the superior reviewer both in print and on video, where he crafts silly mini-movies to explain new products. Silly is good. Pogue is good. My question is, how much does he actually know about technology? Is he closer to the brainy engineer Woz end of the spectrum or the big-picture Jobs end?

I ask because after years of reading Pogue’s email newsletter and then his New York Times blog, I still cannot gauge the depth of his technical acumen. Pogue seems to alternate between postings that reveal a penetrating insight into technology and posts that would prompt my mother to yell “newb”!² My attempts to understand what makes Pogue tick have become a fun, long-running puzzle.

Every time I think I have him nailed, he surprises me. When he put together a cogent survey of the first Android phone mere hours after its release, rattling off cellular network stats with ease, I concluded, case closed, the guy knows his stuff.

Then, today, Pogue posted to let us know that he’d found this site Google that can locate stuff on the Internet. Pogue discovered that if you type “amazon freakonomics” into Google, it will take you to the Freakonomics page on Amazon. He felt it necessary to alert his readers immediately. Here is the closing line of the essay:

Google may or may not be evil, but wow, is it getting good at search.

Gee, you don’t say.

How is it possible that a guy with extensive knowledge of electronics and the Internet is suddenly awestruck by the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button? Who is the true Pogue?

The question doesn’t matter in any material sense. I’m not coming at this from some puerile perspective of “geek cred.” The guy is great at his job, so who cares if he could debug a video card driver or not? All I can say is that as a longtime admirer of Pogue (even since his early Macworld days), I have to know. I have to know what he knows. And I fear I never will.

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1. This isn’t technically a non-standard pronunciation, I know. It’s still weird. I think it would bother me less if it were part of an overall accent, but this is the only word Mossberg says that’s a little “off.” It reminds me of a film-history professor I had in college who spoke normally except that she pronounced the word “theater” as “thee-AY-ter.” As you can imagine, this word came up an awful lot, and it drove me nuts. ↑

2. I’m sure my mother has no idea what the word “newb” means, but I guess that makes the point. ↑