Boy, that David Carr is a flawless writer. You never see the editor’s hand in his work, something that is rarer than you might think for reporters unless you’re reading closely. Emily Nussbaum, the TV critic at the New Yorker, is the same way. Pretty much perfect every time out. Journalists who write on that level can pull you into reading something you might not be initially interested in, give you something you didn’t expect.

From Carr’s latest New York Times piece in which he visits Glenn Greenwald, a bothersome man who’s useful even if you’re not sure you always trust his judgement, at his Rio de Janeiro home base, a surprisingly lo-fi lair for perhaps the most wired journalist on Earth:

“For all its challenges — the monkeys and dogs have daily throw-downs and some of the spiders are large and remarkably deadly — the location suits him, the eternal guerrilla fighting from the mountains. When cable television calls, he races down the hill to a satellite facility, suit coat and tie on top, sandals and shorts on the bottom.

On Tuesday morning last week, Mr. Greenwald was pleased. He woke up early and wrote an uncharacteristically brief post about the huge number of civilian casualties in the Gaza conflict. He was proud of the pie charts he had managed to conjure to go with his post.

‘I went to Google and typed in ‘create a pie chart’ and I ended up with an online pie-chart maker probably intended for first graders,’ he said. I mentioned that he now works for a digital news site that has a $250 million endowment from Mr. Omidyar and some very talented data journalists and graphic artists.

‘Yeah, I know, but I would have had to wait and I didn’t want to wait,’ he said. ‘There are others things, like the 7,000-word story we just did on the surveillance of Muslim Americans that 15 people probably worked on — the video, graphic and editing resources make a huge difference. But I wanted this to be simple and I wanted it to be mine.’

True to his intent, Mr. Greenwald’s first-grade pie charts entered the bloodstream of the web, coursing around Twitter and various blogs. Nothing — other than yet another dog rescue — pleases Mr. Greenwald more than lobbing in something from a great distance and watching it detonate.”