Weekly Standard senior writer Matt Labash is about to hit the public radar screen.

Simon & Schuster has just published “Fly-Fishing With Darth Vader,” a collection of articles Labash has written over the past ten years or so. They are, in two words, uniformly excellent.

And now Labash rightly gets his 15 minutes in the self-cleaning oven that is the news media.

(Totally disregard this DOOFCON 4 interview in Esquire, a photo-finish of who’s more annoying: the interviewer or the interviewee.)

Regard, instead, this book review in the Wall Street Journal:

In a just world, Matt Labash would be celebrated as the heir to Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson and other writers in the 1960s and 1970s who were corralled under the rubric of “new journalism,” but, well, the world just isn’t just. Like the best of the new-journalism practitioners, Mr. Labash inhabits a story so thoroughly that readers feel as if they’re at his side, seeing events with his sharp eye, privy to his wisecracks, savoring moments when he reels in what feels like the truth. Sure, executing long-form journalism at this high level has about it a whiff of the Civil War re-enactment—an almost perfect evocation of a bygone era!—but there is also a certain thrilling defiance, displayed by both the writer and the magazine that lets him plow ahead, page after page.

Yes, mad props to the Weekly Standard for letting Labash run amok all these years.

For the past decade, Matt Labash’s work has been a private club for a select group of readers, including the hardworking staff at Campaign Outsider (see here and here).

Now he’s going mainstream.

Don’t let the marble pillars get you, Matt.