It's good to know the president-elect thinks as highly of himself as his supporters do:

Obama, who is not without an ego, regarded himself as just as gifted as his top strategists in the art and practice of politics. Patrick Gaspard, the campaign’s political director, said that when, in early 2007, he interviewed for a job with Obama and Plouffe, Obama said that he liked being surrounded by people who expressed strong opinions, but he also said, "I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director." After Obama’s first debate with McCain, on September 26th, Gaspard sent him an e-mail. "You are more clutch than Michael Jordan,” he wrote. Obama replied, "Just give me the ball."

This carried over to the people Barack surrounded himself with. Lizza quotes Barack telling communications director Dan Pfeiffer that "what I want around me are people who are calm, who don’t get too high and don’t get too low, because that’s how I am." This soothing tone carried over to every part of the campaign, says speechwriter Jon Favreau:

"Even during tough times, everyone sticks together. There are not a lot of Washington assholes on this campaign." Alyssa Mastromonaco, the director of scheduling and advance, who had also worked for Kerry in 2004, said that she had some trouble getting used to the quieter vibe of the Obama operation. “When I first started on the campaign, at the very beginning of this one, I was one of the only people who had actually done a Presidential before,” Mastromonaco, who is thirty-two, told me. “And so we were on some conference call, and I was just completely irritated by something someone was saying. After the call, they came in and were, like, ‘Alyssa, this is a campaign where you need to respect other people’s opinions and you can’t be a bitch.’ I was, like, ‘Oh, my God, these guys are serious!’"

Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee, Alyssa.

Battle Plans [The New Yorker]

In 1975 Anatole Broyard wrote in The New York Times that as a critic, John Updike was "too kind." In the years since he seems to have taken that diss to heart, relentlessly smearing even the most slightly ambitious work that's not in his preferred, realistic style...of men who only think about sex. He starts off this truly wretched review in this week's New Yorker with the following bon mot/machete, "Toni Morrison has a habit, perhaps traceable to the pernicious influence of William Faulkner, of plunging into the narrative before the reader has a clue to what is going on."

This is nothing new for Updike — as his prose has gotten more journalistic and dull over time, his level of tolerance for more exciting stylists is inversely proportional to his own ineptitude, and he's made many enemies. (Salman Rushdie once said after Updike criticized how he named his characters, "Why not? Somewhere in Las Vegas there's a male prostitute named John Updike.")

He needs to take a cue from the man who said, "Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt." That of course was John Updike, more than three decades ago.

The 76-year-old Updike pretends to be more politic before throwing Morrison under the bus, as if it were impossible to know exactly what he thinks of A Mercy. Ironically, his language becomes more circular and winding than Morrison as he puts her down in the most condescending fashion possible. Does he know how transparently pathetic he sounds?

...she does better at finding poetry in this raw, scrappy colonial world than in populating another installment of her noble and necessary fictional project of exposing the infamies of slavery and the hardships of being African-American. The white characters in A Mercy come to life more readily than the black, and they less ambiguously dramatize America’s discovery and settlement.

This is the usual Updike horseshit: finding something to damn with faint praise in A Mercy while undermining Morrison's chronicling of the black experience. "This author’s early novels were breakthroughs into the experience of black Americans as refracted in the poetic and indignant perceptions of a black woman from Lorain, Ohio," he sneers, by which he means to say, that is all she is.

The obsession with the infantilization of everything that runs through the toy trade fair story - it is ostensibly on DEADLY TOYS! but it is really about how capitalism sucks duh — seems to permeate both the magazine's "real world" of journalism and its "imagination world" of fiction, the latter of which is okay maybe not "embodied by" but for my purposes represented here with last month's opening reading, a short story by Ben Marcus titled On Not Growing Up. And so although I once bought in to a jaded ex-staffer's characterization of the magazine as a "crusty old man" it would actually seem to be Harper's' intimacy with its inner teenage boy that differentiates it from the legion other stapled staples of highbrow required reading.

The September issue, by way of example, features:

1. A description of a humping dog toy on display at the aforementioned toy fair whose packaging reads "I hump until disconnected."
2. A retired colonel leading a newly-established cultural-sensitivity hearts/minds unit called the "human terrain team" jokingly imagines an appropriate insignia for his unit to be "a skeleton surfing on a wave of human bodies…all the bodies of all the people that the United States Army has ever subjugated throughout history.” (“No, no,” the psychological operations (psyop) sergeant cuts in. “A skeleton sitting on a throne of skulls.”)
3. Some excerpts from the board game "Vatican." (It is like the "Life" of the Holy See.) "The Holy Spirit intervenes in our favor by appearing to cardinals who had been wavering in their support of you. Earn forty cardinal votes." Hee hee, I love it when the Holy Spirit appears and advises me to, say, write…
4. Retarded-brilliant punny headlines i.e. "Paper Pushkin" and, atop a transcript of the torture-y interrogation of a sixteen-year-old accused of killing a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan, the title "Teen Beat." **
5. A cover story on Kaplan's burgeoning "No Child Left Behind" business teaching test prep classes wherein an English teacher relates to the author, while they are eating lunch in a nursing home, that he sometimes writes fetish erotica about old people — and also "soft-cock fucking" — to make extra money.*
6. A whole passage on scientific sex studies that determine, among other things, that "men who are narcissistic thrill-seekers also have more sex." Also: "Computers are now better than people at air hockey."

I could go on, but I don't actually want to tarnish the platinum prose that sets off these semi-precious little gems!*** The larger point is, Harper's kidulthood is the very thing that is so lovable about it. Part of this is merely a matter of salvaging some of the weirder details other editors would cut "for space."**** There are readers who might find some of that sort of detail gratuitous: reviews of Thomas Frank's book The Wrecking Crew, an excerpt of which***** was last month's Harper's cover story, roundly mocked Frank's fond little asides about his favorite DC hardcore bands such as Government Issue.

To such readers I can only say: Fuck you.

Because in all seriousness, all this beautiful puerile crap is generally the deliberate result of the magazine's mission to apply a kidlike curiosity to its subjects, more often than not by favoring over the opportunistic time peg or the imperative to Definitively Weigh In On Whatever a degree of participation to every topic it covers, to the point that it's sometimes hard to see why exactly they chose this moment in time to send that guy — and it is usually a guy, unless it is Barbara Ehrenreich — to do that weird thing. Why follow the trail of rubber ducks stranded by a container ship that capsized in the South China sea in 1992? Why hang out with Stevie Wonder at the Super Bowl when the bizarre dispatch won't hit newsstands until the following summer? Why start an inane trend called "flashmobbing" when…hey wait! As it turns out, maybe that's actually the wrong question. Maybe because a good story, to take this back to the opening anecdote, is a little like a toy robot:

By day, Wong is a CEO, but at night he likes to imagine he’s Batman. This is kidult. Growing up in Hong Kong, Wong was forever pining after toys. “For example, when I was ten years old,” he says, “I saw a toy. It’s a robot, but my mom she never buy it for me. At that moment the toy was 150 Hong Kong dollars. Now it’s 5,300, forty times as much. I still buy it. Why is it forty times expensive? Because of the kidult market.”

By which I mean it holds up. It's hard to imagine Harper's running a story about a high-tech shoplifting rings, for instance, without its author actually talking to any of said shoplifters, much less actually shoplifting anything themselves, as the New Yorker just did in an interesting yet unsatisfying bid to augment its seasonal style-issue offerings. It is also hard to imagine anyone there bragging about his almost-decision to join the Israeli military, but more importantly, it is harder to imagine the magazine embarking upon a four-month effort re-reporting an Army private's dispatches from Iraq under pressure from right-wing bloggers only to conclude that "The more we dug into Beauchamp's writings, the more clear it became that we might have been in the realm of war stories, a genre notoriously rife with embellishment." When really, I can think of a few things for which war stories are a little more notoriously rife, such as them blood, dumb jokes, porn and occurrences too otherworldly in their horror and pointless to know much about embellishment.

Anyway, I should stop before I start to sound like I'm some sort of overeager publicist for Harper's new anthology about so-called "submersion journalism" and disclose that I personally know a few of the kidults on the Harper's staff* and that it goes without saying that I initially intended this post to be slightly more mocking, but then I started thinking about how it all pertained to the Rest Of Journalism, God Bless It, and that got me fucking depressed as usual. Which means it is about time for one of those beers I was talking about.

*"Might I suggest that, in the future, you align the titles of your articles with their actual content?" wonders the first letter in the "Letters" section. Ha.
**"This is actually a merciful kidult interlude in the midst of a piece that is a bit on the prudish side. At the beginning, for instance, the writer — a Kaplan "coach" — meets a "very pretty" teacher with "full lips colored red" and you feel a little bad for him, knowing that he's only taken this terrible Kaplan job because he is a "grownup" with a wife and kids now, but maybe needs his own erotica hobby to pursue for such matters!
***Yeah, I couldn't help myself with the gross metaphor. Anyway, here is an example of how the right prose can turn a terrible gathering in a soulless town into a thing of beauty!

Ambiguity is now Hong Kong’s major asset; translation, its major industry. Hong Kong translates Chinese labor into Western goods, Asian exports into American imports. It is a semipermeable membrane as well as a semiautonomous region. More than 60,000 factories in the Pearl River Delta belong to Hong Kong interests. Those factories are the primary source of both the city’s prodigious wealth and its equally prodigious smog, a sulfurous whiff of which, up in Expo Hall 7, had penetrated the air-conditioning.

****Of course, they cannot keep everything; a writer with whom I corresponded once about his Harper's-chronicled road trip through Colombia shared with me that his editor had cut the part about how he was beaten at pool by the cousin of Gabriel Garcia Marquez "who told stories about them all trying to have sex with donkeys when they were younger [a costeno cutsom, apparently].")
*****Incidentally, they called the piece something along the lines of "HOW A GANG OF RIGHT-WING SHITHEADS STRIP-MINED THE GOVERNMENT WHILE MANAGING TO SELL OUT EVERY LAST ONE OF THEIR DUMBSHIT PRINCIPLES" or something. This month's cover story is called "INSIDE THE KAPLAN TEST PREP RACKET" This, too, is "kidult."
******Harper's readers are genuine participants — participatory citizen journlists? — in the larger situation they observe to a degree that could also be labeled "kidult." When literary editor Ben Metcalf wrote a tongue-in-cheek essay on the virtues of paying taxes to a government that provides such an ample return on investment "body count" wise (or something), a 62-year-old from Albuquerque wrote the magazine to offer that he had actually managed to survive for the entire year of 2007 on $3,524. No shit! They fact-checked it and everything. The guy wrote that he had been applying such fiscal austerity to his lifestyle for some 29 years precisely *because* "marching for peace while paying for war is like pigging out on junk food while praying for health," which is to say, "a stupid contradiction." (And also sort of a rhyme!) Anyway, that is some crowdsourcing is all I'm saying, though I don't think anyone's boasting about that guy to the ad sales department.
*Fuller disclosure because Nick wants to milk the 'Moe is the new Emily' meme be professional: I even dated one! But we broke up.

Think of how easy it might have been to understand Arianna Huffington's bloggy animus toward Tim Russert if there were a book out chronicling all the sordid details of their decade-and-a-half-long secret feud. (There is.) Every gossip-mongering gadabout should know the full backstory on every spat, falling out, and long-running mutual antagonism in media. Below are the volumes no shelf should be without.

1. The Operator: David Geffen Builds, Buys, and Sells the New Hollywood, by Tom King

The Gist: A gay Polish-Ukrainian Jew from Borough Park moves to Hollywood and enters the mail room at the William Morris Agency. After forging a letter suggesting he had a college degree when in fact he did not, Geffen rises through the ranks to become an agent, then leaves WMA and founds Asylum Records and produces albums by Jackson Browne, Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan. Asylum is sold to Warner Communications, and Geffen becomes Vice Chairman of Warner film studios. He then retires and un-retires after a minor but erroneous health scare, founds Geffen Records, courts John Lennon and Yoko Ono (see below), produces Cats, Risky Business (see below), co-founds Dreamworks SKG, produces Saving Private Ryan, backs Bill Clinton, gives lots of money to AIDS research, falls out with Bill Clinton over one of the sleazeballs he didn't pardon, and now backs Barack Obama. Along the way Geffen throws many temper tantrums and raises his voice to the point where even Steven Spielberg asks him politely to lower it. He also shows a remarkable ability for betraying the confidences of good friends and business associates in order to charm potential clients he’s just met. The night Lennon was shot, Geffen was in bed with a male prostitute and loves to boast about it.

The Pull-Quote: “’What about my music?’ [Yoko Ono] asked. ‘Well, I’ve never heard any of your records.’ ‘Really,’ Ono said. ‘That doesn’t sound like a very good reason for me to make a deal with you.’ ‘I’m a big fan of John’s, and I have a great deal of respect for the two of you, and we do a very good job. We’re a good record company.’ ‘What do you mean you’re a good record company?’ Ono fired back. ‘You haven’t put out a record yet!’”

The Takeaway: A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Be enlightened and progressive on your own time, but cunning and ruthless on corporate time. Respect for others’ privacy won't make you rich and powerful. Endear yourself to those you want to impress by gossiping about people you know behind their backs. It'll smack of such poor judgment that would-be clients will assume you're either crazy or brilliant, and guess what? You are.

2. Tina and Harry Come to America: Tina Brown, Harry Evans, and the Uses of Power, by Judy Bachrach

The Gist: Gifted writer Tina Brown makes her fellow students feel small at Oxford, dates a host of famous men (including Auberon Waugh, who washes frantically after sex, Martin Amis, whom she adores, and Dudley Moore, whom she does not), deflects charges of arrivisme, and becomes editor of UK tabloid Tatler at age 25. She meets Harold Evans, then married and famously editing the The Times of London and The Sunday Times, which names her Most Promising Female Journalist. Brown and Evans marry in 1981, then move to New York three years later, whereupon Brown revives the moribund Vanity Fair by turning it into the must-read glossy on celebrity doings and the leisure class. She hires true crime reporter Dominick Dunne, photographer Helmut Newton and inaugurates a new wave of magazine journalism, operating under the assumption that "intellectuals should be read and not seen." Meanwhile, Tina and Harry are now East Coast socialites whose fiercely guarded life together aspires to shape headlines, not become them. (Their best friend is British libel law.) Brown takes over The New Yorker in 1992 and remakes that antiquated smart sheet, too, acquiring Malcolm Gladwell, Anthony Lane and David Remnick, who later replaces her as editor-in-chief. On a manuscript submitted by Yiddish Nobel laureate, Brown writes, "Beef it up, Singer," which more or less encapsulates her style of feared-but-respected-or-hated tenure. She founds Talk magazine in 1999, which folds after just two years, an over-sensationalized failure from which this unauthorized biography derives all of its rise-and-fall schadenfraude. (Bachrach is a contributing editor at the new VF, edited by Brown’s archnemesis Graydon Carter.)

The Pull-Quote: "We live in a time when infamy sells.... There is no honor, no reticence, no loyalty." Spoken by Maureen Dowd on Brown's New Yorker reign, and quoted by author to make a clichéd point.

The Takeaway: Develop a nose for future A-listers. Sleep with as many as you can all the while adopting an “amused” air about them. Overpaying the talent means you can bully them into submission, so don't be cowed by easily tossed around phrases like "national institution" or "greatest living writer." Fuck 'em if they can't take a kill-fee. Oh, and marry old men.

3. How To Lose Friends and Alienate People, by Toby Young

The Gist: Son of highbrow sociologist Michael Young, who coined the term "meritocracy," Toby Young devotes his life to testing how much strain that already weakened concept can take. He writes for the British Times, gets fired from the British Times. He founds celebrated Modern Review, which traffics in "low culture for highbrows," then shuts it down, much to the dismay of everyone else involved. Young moves to New York in the early 90's, gets hired by Graydon Carter as a contributing editor (read: sinecurist) at Vanity Fair, then proceeds overlong tenure as a piece of gum stuck to the bottom of Graydon Carter’s shoe (this is G.C.’s description of him, not ours). Young cracks dud jokes to celebrities, refers to doormen who won't let him into parties he'd end up hating anyway as "clipboard Nazis," does blow while on assignment, asks Nathan Lane if he's gay, gets fired from Vanity Fair. Now back in London (this isn't in the book), Young edits The Spectator, a conservative weekly, and boasts of his "negative charisma," probably as a way to boost paperback sales. HTLFAAP, much like Young himself, has been up and down the wicket of sadomasochistic success. A film adaptation is said to be in post-production, starring Simon Pegg and Kirsten Dunst.

The Pull-Quote: “Cool Britannia was a cry of independence, a howl of protest against the all-enveloping cultural hegemony of the United States, yet, paradoxically, it didn’t really mean anything—it hadn’t really happened—until it was noticed by the American media. That explained the schizophrenic attitude of people like Damien Hirst, Keith Allen and Alex James: they wanted to assert their indifference to the attentions of glossy, New York magazines, and yet they wanted to be photographed striking this insouciant pose in Vanity Fair. Like rebellious schoolchildren, their protest wouldn’t have counted unless it was registered by the authorities. Unfortunately, in this scenario I was cast as the toothless substitute teacher.”

The Takeaway: The memoir is a good object lesson in what not to do if you want to hang onto a job or a masthead listing, or cast the impression that deep down you really had high expectations for the world of glamour-besotted New York media. Also, it pays to be obnoxious in a way that only you find ironic.

4. Spy: The Funny Years, by Kurt Andersen, Graydon Carter, George Kalogerakis

The Gist: In 1986, Graydon Carter and Kurt Andersen found the future of piss-taking journalism in the form of Spy magazine. Épater le bourgeoisie never had it so good, or so the editors – now all dressed up and fixtures of the very culture they once lampooned – are the first ones to remind you. Spy pioneers satire as a clever agglomeration of facts, and specializes in the infographic, the listicle (just like this one!) and the blurb cloud. It attempts to decipher just who, exactly, is on the New Yorker’s indecipherable masthead. It follows Anthony Haden-Guest into the dank reaches of his own nightlife. It refines hatred of Donald Trump into an art form. Features include the Liz Smith Tote Board, Separated at Birth, and Logrolling in Our Time, without which everything from The Onion to Conan O’Brien’s pre-interview fooling would be unimaginable. The self-conscious prose style is a cocktail of H.L. Mencken, A.J. Liebling and Wolcott Gibbs, and its been swigged by every glossy editor in search of a readership ever since. Once G.C. leaves, it all goes to shit. Like Studio 54, the new owners can’t make it work, ergo the justified hubris of the book’s title.

The Pull-Quote: “How easy is it to steal the sour cream?” – in a chart surveying the various Manhattan cafeteria chains.

The Gist: You need only ask yourself if you read Radar to determine whether there’s any pedagogic value to be mined from Spy.

5. Bright Lights, Big City, by Jay McInerney

The Gist: Nameless 24 year-old fact-checker for elite New York glossy (a thinly veiled New Yorker) moonlights as an aspiring novelist, or wants us to believe he moonlights as that while he’s busy Hoovering coke by the suitcaseful and partying through the vertiginous 80’s club scene with a yuppie twat called Tad Allagash. Tad calls the narrator, who writes annoyingly in the second person, “Coach.” His mother has recently passed away, so we’re shin-kicked into wondering if a life of artifice and glitz is simply an emollient for real pain. Behind the hatred there lies a plundering desire for love. Or something.

The Pull-Quote: “Just now you want to stay at the surface of things, and Tad is a figure skater who never considers the sharks under the ice. You have friends who actually care about you and speak the language of the inner self. You have avoided them of late. Your soul is as disheveled as your apartment, and until you clean up a little you don't want to invite anyone inside.”

The Takeaway: Once Tina Brown takes over Coach’s magazine, he’s fired. Sort your soul out before you move to the metropolis of infinite distractions, otherwise you, too, will wind up a shiftless anonymity with withdrawal symptoms. (Your apartment can still be a mess, however.)

6. The Devil Wears Prada, by Lauren Weisberger

The Gist: Recent Brown graduate Andrea Sacks wants to write for the New Yorker (sigh) and blankets the media world with her resume hoping to get a dues-paying job somewhere that will eventually allow her to become Larissa MacFarquhar. Whoops. She gets hired by fashion bible Runway’s bitch supreme Miranda Priestly (Anna Wintour, not even thinly veiled) as her junior personal assistant. Next thing Andrea knows, she’s chasing down lattes at Starbucks and sirloins at Smith and Wollensky instead of learning about ledes and nut grafs. Not what she had in mind but she loves the clothes and even develops a knack for being a second-string slave to a subhuman narcissist. Unlike in the film, Andrea doesn’t quit – she gets fired for saying “Fuck you, Miranda. Fuck you.” Ballsy, sure, but she does get to keep some of the Dolce and even snags an interview for a real writing position at another magazine in the same building. (N.B. Author Weisberger was Wintour’s personal assistant, so this novel is a bildungsroman, which is a word Andrea learned at Brown but seldom got to use after graduation.)

The Pull-Quote: “Fuck you, Miranda. Fuck you.”

The Takeaway: How many bright young girls have come to New York hoping to fill these Cinderella slippers, only to discover that not only is Wintour not hiring, but she’s honed her filter for confessional opportunists more interested in publishing advances than making sure her Apple Fritter is extra flaky. If you want to be a bona fide reporter, save yourself the aggro and dashed hopes and apply for an internship at the New York Sun your junior year. Also, while it’s true that some ball-breaking editors respond well to self-assertiveness, telling your boss “Fuck you” isn’t the wisest career decision.

7. Monster: Living Off the Big Screen, by John Gregory Dunne

The Gist: The story of Dunne and wife Joan Didion's attempt to transform the life of anchorwoman Jessica Savitch, who died in a car wreck after more or less proving on air in 1983, during a broadcast of NBC News Digest, that she was a drug addict. Instead of a sadder version of Network, the screenplay transforms into the Disneyfied Up Close and Personal, which makes absolutely no mention of Savitch and which even Robert Redford doesn't remember filming.

The Pull-Quote: “The purpose of such a meet-and-greet is to allow the executive to size up the supplicant. [Disney studio chairman Jeffrey] Katzenberg had not read Golden Girl, but he was aware of the less savory details of Jessica Savitch’s life. He liked the ugly-duckling idea; it was the kind of narrative he wanted, and he was also responsive to the television background against which it would be played. He did have reservations, and here I quote Joan’s notes of that first meeting: ‘Wants to know what is going to happen in this picture that will make the audience walk out feeling uplifted, good about something and good about themselves.’”

The Takeaway: Dunne is witty and disarming, especially when he quotes Jack Warner's definition of screenwriters: "schmucks with Underwoods." Interestingly, the "monster" in question is not the industry or any particular studio executive, but rather the money that governs all, including Dunne.

8. You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again, by Julia Phillips

The Gist: Scandal-sponge Jewish producer reveals the vast corruption, drugs and sexual indiscretions that motor the movie industry. Phillips gets fired by Steven Spielberg on the set of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, accuses Goldie Hawn of body odor, and, on the night she becomes the first woman to win a "Best Picture" Oscar for The Sting, downs three valiums, one upper, one and a half drinks, two joints and a dash of cocaine. The book is a sprayfire indictment of practically everyone Phillips ever met in Hollywood, and it got her banned from Morton's.

The Pull-Quote: "They were really a rogues' gallery of nerds. Marty [Scorsese] was tiny and asthmatic, Steven [Spielberg] had the soft, flabby look of a typical Twinkies kid, and Brian [De Palma] never took his safari jacket off."

The Takeaway: Sour grapes ferment the best, although it's not as if anyone still believes in some West Coast Arcadia where dazzling moving pictures are made. Still, you'll hardly do better for the brutally honest story of a show biz prodigy that had to burn everything before she flamed out.

9. Autumn of the Moguls: My Misadventures With the Titans, Poseurs, and Money Guys Who Mastered and Messed Up Big Media, by Michael Wolff

The Gist: Following up on Burn-Rate (1998), which was about Wolff’s bust foray into the world of online startups, this is the nasty-minded sequel by the former New York media writer who wants badly to be the next Murdoch but can’t and decides to just insult everybody he ever envied instead—especially Fox News President Roger Ailes. Most of the stuff in here consists of Wolff's recycled columns, but it's all in one place and no true mogul ever wasted his time searching through web archives. Harvey Weinstein is obese and grotesque. The media business is "collapsing” like communism. Some of Wolff's axioms should be true even if they aren’t: “The larger and higher-profile the company, the bigger the nutcase who runs it.”

The Pull-Quote: “This was the meta thing. Meta gave both irony and gravitas to what we did. The delicious incongruity between our superficiality and our importance. The joie de vivre of self-referentialism. The stupendous, intoxicating power of being able to create the world we lived in."

Bonus Pull-Quote: “So, as I arrived for my speech, I was thinking of my relationship to the absent but always present [Fox News head Roger] Ailes. He was the greatest, but the Antichrist too.”

The Takeaway: Still fun. Like Young’s book, AOTM is a serviceable monument to failure dressed up as critical thinking. Though most of the wisdom you could just as easily cull by lunching at Michael's. Wolff went on to try and match-make the sale of his old haunt New York (he's now at Vanity Fair) to Mort Zuckerman, who in the event lost out to hedge fund wizard Bruce Wasserstein. That means more meanness is forthcoming in what promises to be the Dance to the Music of Time of inferiority complexes.

First, Mead emails Malkin, repeatedly, to no response at all. Then they try her editor at the New York Post—nothing. Then Remnick tries!

Dear Michelle Malkin,

I am the editor of The New Yorker magazine, and I believe that you have received some sort of contact from our office, but I just wanted to assure you that our desire to write about you is serious and genuine. I can be reached through email above or [phone number redacted].

Best regards,
David Remnick

On 2/16/08, Michelle Malkin wrote:

Thanks.

Dear Ms. Malkin, "Thanks..." but can we talk? I am at home at [phone number redacted]. Best, David Remnick

OMG, the home number! Malkin finally responds: she has "neither the time nor inclination to sit down with your staff Jane Goodall and serve as an anthropological specimen for The New Yorker's readership."

Ok, Michelle. Whatever.

Hilariously she was more than happy to be profiled by Washington Post Media "critic" Howard Kurtz last year.

Why the Hell Would The New Yorker Want to Write a Profile of Michelle Malkin [Bloggasm]

The "reports" come from news.com.au, which, as everyone knows, is from Australia. And Australia is entirely peopled with criminals. And criminals are used to having people not trust them, as this item is not trusted by me. So I can clearly not believe the story in front of me!

Look in your pockets. Is there money in there? Hopefully yes! Even if you're broke, you've still at least interacted with cash and change at some point. Bills and coins are such a quotidian part of our existence that we rarely stop to think about their actual design, we just stick singles into soda machines and strippers. So whenever news comes out about the ugly and slightly gay redesign of five-dollar bill, there's a built-in interest. We've all used a five-dollar bill before.

But what's to be done about the uselessness of the penny or the hideous new five-dollar bill? Nothing. No one's going to boycott fives. Like a weird birthmark, five-dollar bills and pennies are just a part of life you have to accept.

Yes, there are problems with the Mint. Apparently it's grossly inefficient and continues to produce a coin that no one likes because of the Zinc and Coinstar lobbies. But assuming that money isn't literally made from the blood of children, I don't really care enough to do enough anything to change it. When was the last time you met an anti-Mint activist? Besides Ron Paul?

Pennies are the price we pay for apathy, and that's a cost I can live with.

"Penny Dreadful" [NYer]

For those who don't know (like me), Lenny Dykstra is a former baseball all-star who is launching a magazine for ex-athletes. But like all great profiles, who Dykstra is and what he is doing is irrelevant. He's a great character. McGrath starts with an anecdotal lede about Dykstra nearly standing him up for their first meeting and lets Dykstra take the story from there. McGrath quotes his subject frequently, though not at length — McGrath also has the gift of economy — letting his subject, not his writing, be the star of the piece.

Usually, McGrath contributes to Talk of The Town, which could dubbed Talk of Rich New Yorkers, or Talk of Hendrik Hertzberg Still Being Upset Over The 2000 Election. But McGrath's pieces are worth reading. Whenever I see corduroy, I think of his piece on the Corduroy Appreciation Club, which holds meetings on 11/11, the date that most resembles corduroy. And on strange streets in Manhattan, I remember McGrath's Talk about Caleb Smith, the Columbia librarian who walked every block in Manhattan. His story two weeks ago on IdreamofHillaryIdreamofBarack.com was so well-crafted I read it three times.

I'd love to pretend that McGrath's skills come from his connections, but that's just not the case. The guy knows his way around nouns and verbs.

My only complaint is that his Google image sucks. The image above is his head shot from the Yale Herald circa 1998.

In the past three weeks, the only must-read story to appear in the New Yorker was a letter to the editor complaining about the scientific impossibility of the way sunlight was depicted in Grand Central on a recent cover. After a post-Tina Brown smartening up of the magazine, they've ended up with articles about how the brain understands numbers and profiles of turgid Upper East Siders. While their political coverage and war reportage is still respected, the New Yorker is trying once again to ditch their boring reputation.

Along with now publishing four letter words, the magazine is actively mocking their institutional stodginess. Covers now feature hipster nipples. In the cartoon issue, the editors responded to former New Yorker EIC Harold Ross's question "what's so funny about red?" with five cartoons about red.

At the New York Times and New York, Kelefa Sanneh and Ariel Levy both proved to be brilliant at explaining Youth Culture to The Olds (the mission of cultural reporting for Old Media) and appealing to younger audiences. Sannah's most famous piece for the Times might still be his attempt to define "rockism" in music criticism, and Levy's most famous work—besides the Dash Snow "introducing 'the new downtown' to the Old Downtown" New York cover—is Female Chauvinist Pigs, her investigation into and castigation of the post-feminist culture that produced Girls Gone Wild and gave Playboy a female editor. All those stories were debated, linked, discussed, and dissected on websites and blogs that reach very attractive demographics.

If Sanneh and Levy each contribute one or two pieces of must-read of cultural reporting a year, they'll build internet buzz (and ad bucks!) while maybe even raising the New Yorker's subscription base. Buying four issues at the newsstand is almost the same cost as subscribing. And with the cartoons, and the venerable brand, even when the New Yorker is bad, it's still worth getting.

Plus now when David Remnick goes to parties, he'll be to tell all his Upper West Side friends with that he's down with black people and lesbians.

From Cal Performances:

Dear Valued Patron:

At Cal Performances, we're committed to bringing to our stages the very best in dance, music, theater and the spoken word, and to making your experience while in our halls enjoyable.

It concerns us, therefore, that a number of patrons who attended the Saturday, February 23 talk by Ira Glass and David Rakoff have written to express their dissatisfaction with the event. A moderator for the talk was provided at Mr. Glass and Mr. Rakoff's request, but many of you felt disappointed by this format. We apologize for the unfortunate circumstances that detracted from your enjoyment of the evening.

As a way of expressing our appreciation of your continued patronage and to show how much we value your trust in Cal Performances, we would like to invite you to be our guest at either the performance of the SF Jazz Collective on Saturday, March 15 at 8 pm in Zellerbach Hall; or the upcoming taping of the nationally broadcast radio program, From the Top, on Thursday, May 29 at 8 pm in Zellerbach Hall.

Please contact the Ticket Office at 510.642.9988 or tickets@calperfs.berkeley.edu by March 15, 2008 to complete your ticket request. Please note that only tickets purchased through the Cal Performances' Ticket Office and only the original purchaser of the tickets to the Ira Glass/David Rakoff event is eligible to take advantage of this offer (as we must have a record of your purchase in our system). Seating will be based on availability.

We hope to see you at Cal Performances very soon!

Sincerely,
Robert Cole, Director of Cal Performances

Excuse me but is this mini crabcake cruelty-free? It's just that I have an allergic reaction to any foods that have been prepared cruelly, even crustaceans, and I just don't—

Oh! Jeez I am so sorry! I didn't recognize you in your all-black catering outfit. With your hair combed and off your face. You look so respectful!

You know, I love New York. Here you are at the New Yorker Festival, and so am I, both in our own ways. This city is so jazzy!

Wow, it's so great to see you. I have been really wanting to talk to you actually. But you are a hard one to track down!

Oh you changed your email to a Gmail. Right, right, finally... Oh, hold on—

Junot! I'll be there in a second. Save a seat for me, my love.

It's so cool that you are here at this after party for NYF participants and their lovers. We were just coming from our close close close friends A.M. and Mirand's panel on Deviants and I thought of you.

No no no. Not that you are a deviant. I just thought of you and your crazy friends!

Phew. It's so good to be back in the States. Hm? Oh it's a long story. But I'll try to tell you quickly before you have to go pass around the rest of that food.

So, as you know among my crazy, busy activities as a journalist, actor, shaman, and amateur Corcoran real estate executive, I dabble in Digital Forensics. Well it just so happens that I had been working on a program that de-encrypted digitally altered images. Last month, I created "UnSwirl," a program that unwound photographs that had been "swirled" to conceal a person's identity.

Well, fast forward to now. I just got back from Lyon, working closely with Interpol to try and track down that evil, disgusting pedophile who had taken over 200 photos of himself with under-aged Vietnamese and Cambodian boys.

So what have you been up to? Are you still going to Bungalow 8 a lot? I just remember running into you last month and you told me you were going there a lot. (I remember this really well because I was like: Wow! People still go there hoping to see Mischa Barton?) And you were sort of, in your words, 'wasted.' You were also in your 'who cares who knows my dirt' modes and said that you like to procure sex online and send out images of yourself posing and performing your various predilections. You told me about how you like to go on Men4sex.com, Sex4men.com, and Iwantabigblackbaseballbatinmymouthandanusrigtnow.com.

And I told my pals at Interpol that there is a whole segment of perfectly innocent people swirling their images out there, and that they would just be really bummed if Unswirl™ became available to everyone. So we agreed just to keep it under wraps and not sell the software to Microsoft. For you. And others like you, to enjoy your privacy, and your unalienable right to trawl the internet for sex anonymously. Am I a good friend or what?

Oop! Gotta go, Zadie will kill me if I don't introduce her to those crazy guys from Sigur Ros. I'll come back and say hi when you guys are passing out dessert.

I enjoyed reading Tim Page's essay on living with Asperger's syndrome: the insomnia, the social puzzlement, the obsession with various subjects to the exclusion of more common ones - all are very familiar to me ("Parallel Play," August 20th). Then came this description: "In the late nineteen-seventies, I saw a ragged, haunted man who spent urgent hours dodging the New York transit police to trace the dates and lineage of the Hapsburg nobility on the walls of subway stations." I was the gentlemen in question; although I didn't care about clothes, I don't think I was that ragged. I want to assure Mr. Page that I was never homeless or institutionalized (as he guessed), and I got only one ticket. Mr. Page and I had other things in common; like him, I was at the premiere of Steve Reich's "Music for 18 Musicians" at Town Hall. Unlike Mr. Page, I did not find this particular music's structure all-engrossing; I preferred to dance to it. At one performance of Reich's music at the U.S. Custom House, I danced alone around and around the central musicians. For someone as acutely self-conscious as I had been, this seemed a moment of glorious emergence, of living my own life in everyone else's world.

John Yohalem
New York City

Pleased to Meet Me [VV]

James Wood: 'I Won't Go Soft' At The New Yorker [NYO]

While ostensibly an article about how Giuliani is playing out in the sticks (surprisingly well), the piece is more or less a lengthy biography of America's mayor. For those of us who endured his tenure, there's not a lot to learn here, but to a national audience that may be unfamiliar with Giuliani, this should probably be required reading. (It is nowhere near as vital as last week's Village Voice cover story on Giuliani, which is a devastating indictment of the mayor's mendacity concerning 9/11, but it is also nowhere near as boring: That story should have been edited down to five bullet points and distributed to every news organization in the country.) What's odd, though, is the way the article actually had us sympathizing with Giuliani for a few moments, particularly when it comes to his upbringing.

The well-worn tale of his Yankees fandom is trotted out once again:

Over the years, Giuliani has often spoken of his childhood in Brooklyn, giving special place to a story about the discordance of growing up a Yankees fan in the shadow of Ebbets Field. His father, Harold, a Yankees partisan from East Harlem, once dressed young Rudy in Yankee pinstripes and sent him out to play in the Dodger-mad streets of Brooklyn. Too young to have any say in the matter, Rudy was set upon by the neighborhood toughs, Dodger fans all. A gang of boys seized him, placed a noose around his neck, and threatened to lynch him. (His grandmother intervened.) In one recounting, to John Tierney, of the Times, a dozen years ago, Giuliani said that the incident was his proudest moment, because he refused to renounce his team. "I kept telling them: 'I am a Yankee fan. I am a Yankee fan. I'm gonna stay a Yankee fan,' " he recounted. "To me it was like being a martyr: I'm not gonna give up my religion. You're not gonna change me."

One of Rudy's high-school teachers, Jack O'Leary, remembers being struck by Harold's interest in his son's discipline. Bishop Loughlin High was run by the De La Salle Christian Brothers, stern-looking men in black robes. One morning, O'Leary—who was known as Brother Kevin—went up to Rudy, who was gabbing with a classmate, and cuffed him on the ear. At the school's annual open house, Harold sought out O'Leary and thanked him for thumping his kid if he'd had it coming.

O'Leary became a family friend and had a lasting influence on Rudy. He encouraged the boy's interest in reading and nurtured his love of opera, helping Rudy form the school's first opera club. O'Leary sometimes visited the Giulianis at home, and Rudy would excitedly greet his teacher and rush him down to the basement, where he kept a phonograph and opera records. Harold, too, formed a personal bond with O'Leary, which eventually took on an aspect of the confessional. "I think it was because I was wearing the robe, or religious habit," O'Leary recalls. "Now, I wasn't a priest—a brother is not a priest. But Harold called me very, very frequently. And I think a big reason was because I was a brother, and he felt that he could confide in me, a religious figure." In his conversations with O'Leary, Harold spoke of his past, and of his troubles before he was married. "But he told me that that was behind him, and how sorry he was," O'Leary says.

So, yes: It's hard not to feel sympathy for Giuliani, a shy, bookish child desperate for the love of a father whose own version of love was to treat him strictly so that he might not make the same mistakes. One can almost picture the eleven-year-old mayor, excited about opera and longing for the approval of a tough, distant parent and any other strong male authority figure he encountered.

And then you come across something like this:

His personality only sharpened the edges of his policies, leaving an impression, broadly felt, that was summed up by former Mayor Ed Koch in the title of a 1999 book: "Giuliani, Nasty Man." When a caller complained on Giuliani's radio show that her son—a robbery suspect—had been shot dead by the New York Police Department, he answered, "Maybe you should ask yourself some questions about the way he was brought up."

Mayberry Man [NYer]