Early on, Ailes tried (unsuccessfully) to get two newspapers to retract negative coverage of him. In today's environment, the gambit might have succeeded. You have to admire his balls, considering his suggested correction:

When Ailes was helping former president George Bush prep for his debates, he slipped him a sure applause line: attack the liberal media messenger, Dan Rather:

The review is illustrated with a clay bust of Frey, wearing a striped t-shirt of the variety that three-year-olds wear. So that's embarrassing. But that's only the beginning! Writes frequent Book Review contributor Walter Kirn:

"When Frey presents Parker's agent as "incredibly smart, incredibly savvy, incredibly smooth, incredibly successful and incredibly rich," it's possible — if one is used to being demeaned and has grown practiced in denial — to think that Frey is being bad on purpose; that he's reproducing others' mental impoverishment rather than exhibiting his own. It's hard to sustain such a charitable view, though, after seeing a character depicted as "an extremely attractive woman in her early 30s," a pair of chaise longues as "stylish, yet comfortable" and Beverly Hills's Rodeo Drive as "lined with the most expensive and most exclusive boutiques in the world." These aren't images, they're ratings. This isn't fiction, it's catalog copy. And "stylish, yet comfortable" isn't a description, it's a Zagat's review — but based on what? Who knows? The primary data about things and people that would allow us to apprehend Frey's world is sorely lacking in the book."

"Here is some of Frey's prose, ladled up from the huge pitcher in which he has blended events, ideas, dialogue and dozens of pages of Wikipedian trivia relating to everything from Los Angeles's freeways to its neighborhoods and street gangs into a sort of verbal fruit smoothie every sip of which has the same consistency."

[Illustration: Karen Caldicott]

From Emily Magazine, excerpted here and there for length:

"Before I get into this, I’ll save you the trouble of pointing out that I used to work at Gawker. I quit that job, and one of the reasons I quit was that I wasn’t comfortable with being shady, insulting, and two-faced. It’s not that I’m saying I’m some kind of moral beacon, I just am terrible at dissembling, acting one way to someone’s face and another way behind their back. And I’m not a hardnosed investigative journalist who will do anything for the story, no matter who gets hurts. I don’t like the idea of hurting people. It took me quite a while to realize this, and if you want to criticize me for having taken quite a while to realize this, go ahead. That’s valid. But just because I used to hurt people doesn’t mean I now have to approve of it when other people do.

"A woman named Susannah Breslin called me around the time that my Times magazine story came out, saying that she wanted to interview me for a piece she was writing about the Sex and the City movie... None of my quotes ended up in her article, which I was grateful for. However, I wasn’t particularly grateful when she wrote a post on her personal blog about how snotty I’d seemed on the phone. More recently, about the paragraph-long excerpt from an essay included in my book proposal that was posted on New York magazine’s Daily Intelligencer blog, Breslin wrote a post on her blog entitled “Vomit,” which reads in part:

“This writing is so god awful I thought it was worth pointing out. I love the blogosphere, and the blogs, and the blogginess of the world, but one thing blogs have done is given people who write the perception they are writers.”

We'll break in here to judge—not professional, Suze. But, Em! We wouldn't have even known about this had you not called it to our attention. Anyway:

Yesterday afternoon I was waiting around for various deliveries and installations of things and I wasn’t screening my calls. So I picked up the phone. It was Jessica Coen, who used to work at Gawker and who now works at New York magazine’s Daily Intelligencer blog, I guess overseeing it somehow, though during our conversation she was quick to point out that it’s not like at Gawker — “I’m not in in there in Moveable Type or anything” — so I guess this means she doesn’t have direct control over anything anyone writes there.

Daily Intelligencer posts don’t have bylines, but because one of their editors has always been friendly to me in person and wrote me a supportive, fuck-the-haters type email when that Times piece came out, I’ve been assuming that the really ad hominem posts about me on there — which are the fourth and fifth Google results for my name, respectively — have been written by the other editor, Chris Rovzar, who I don’t remember ever having met. Rovzar is one of the best Gossip Girl recappers of our time, and that’s saying something. But his posts about me are not only gross, they’re full of basic factual errors. He accuses me of documenting my “burps and blow jobs” and says, innacurately, that I “while at Gawker [I] made the site all self-referential, to the detriment of pageviews.” Well, okay, except that my Gawker posts still get more pageviews than the posts of some writers who actually currently work there. He has also taken me to task for misrepresenting bloggers to America, and for using the personal pronoun too many times in a personal essay.

Anyway, back to my conversation with Jessica Coen. “We have a very good source who says that you got a million dollars from Regan Arthur at Little, Brown,” she told me. I told her that rumor was wrong in all its particulars. I didn’t know then that Publisher’s Weekly and Publisher’s Marketplace had already run items about the book’s sale, which were correct in all their particulars (except that PW daily called it a “memoir,” a word that makes my skin crawl and which apparently makes everyone else’s skin crawl, too. What is a 26 year old who hasn’t overcome an addiction or been a child soldier doing writing a MEMOIR? But it’s hard to figure out what else to call a book of autobiographical stories, I guess. That is a few too many words to fit onto a computer screen, apparently.)

Anyway, I told Jessica, off the record, to look for a press release, and then — stupidly! — I took the opportunity of having her on the phone to ask her why her site’s coverage of me was so personal and so negative. I don’t know what I wanted her to say, really. “I don’t like you and I never did”? That would have been kind of gratifying, I guess. Instead, though, she talked about how she was sure, having been there, I understood what it was like. And she “apologized.” She said,

“I’m sorry you’ve found it hurtful.”

Look, it’s not like Jessica Coen and I were ever friends, but there was a time — I guess when I worked at Gawker — that we were friendly.

Oh, and then there’s Rachel Sklar, who was so nice to me when I worked at Gawker, always sending me such long, chatty emails, especially when she wanted something she’d written to be linked to. Sometimes I’d write something about Julia Allison that would make her angry and she’d send me long, crackpotty, strange emails. She’s also a friend of a friend. She has never been anything but incredibly nice to me in person. And lately she has been one of my harshest critics, writing cattily and condescendingly about me on the Huffington Post’s Eat the Press blog.

“For anyone who has followed the saga of Emily Gould, this week’s New York Times magazine cover story comes as a shock only to the extent that they would publish it,” one of her posts began. Of course Rachel Sklar thinks my “saga” is old news. She used to live in Josh Stein’s apartment building. This is a person who has been inside this machine so long she no longer realizes that a world exists outside of it.

Yesterday, her post about my book deal included four references to my appearance and the speculation that I might be tempted to pose for Playboy...

It’s true, the kind of coverage my book deal has gotten has been a far cry from the kind of support that Sklar’s friend Skurnick got when her deal for a collection of nostalgic pieces about classic young adult novels was announced. I guess there probably aren’t a lot of bloggers, blog-editors and freelance writers sitting around thinking “I am the perfect person to write a collection of nostalgic pieces about classic young adult novels, but she gets to do it and I don’t! Bitch!”

Nothing personal, just business as usual! Um, enjoy the Fourth of July weekend, eating non-gossip sausages, everyone!

From How your Emily Gould gossip sausage gets made [Emily Magazine]

Here are some other instances of Murdoch getting slammed, culled from an exhaustive list at io9 that you should read as well:

• Planet Fred—a movie about a tiny little alien who lives on the head of a media mogul who resembles Murdoch. Hard to believe this one isn't yet a classic.
• Max Headroom—a character named Grossman is an evil network boss who makes people's heads explode from too much advertising. True to life.
• Cold Lazarus—the book by Dennis Potter includes a Murdochian figure named Stiltz, who pushes fake, virtual experiences as a replacement for real ones. Eventually he gets killed. Draw your own conclusions.

Go read the full list at io9! And anyone who reads this book, please submit a report.

[Mixed Media]

Armistead examples two recent Brit memoirs about trudging through the calendar and repudiating the foolish assumptions of youth: Nick Cohen’s What’s Left? and Andrew Anthony’s The Fallout. They're odd, if telling, choices due to their ultra-specific commonality. Both books were authored by columnists for the Observer, the more heterodox sister publication of the Guardian, and both chronicle a disillusionment with the modern left.

Cohen uses his own experiences a red diaper baby to foreground a serious anatomy of vogue ideology. He charts the degradation of progressivism, particularly in the UK, beginning with the advent of postmodernism (Foucault saying the mullahs of Iran had a "different regime of truth” than the West, etc.), following through to the collapse of the Soviet Union, and terminating in the dark underbelly the New World Order, where Islamists are to be excused and fascist dictators coddled ("We Are All Hezbollah," etc.). Though What’s Left? reads like a personal confession in parts, it’s also a work of scholarship.

Anthony’s The Fall-Out hews closer to the tradition of the goodbye-to-all-that political memoir (Whittaker Chambers without the Christian conversion). He describes his early Marxist schooling, his love of pet revolutionary causes like the Sandinistas, his knee-jerk anti-Americanism, and then recounts his break with this line of thinking after 9/11 while remembering to pour plenty of ironic scorn on the old comrades who continue to hold it.

True, Cohen and Anthony prompted some condescending remarks from their critics (hell hath no fury like lefties betrayed) as to why they chose now to write their polemics. Weren't both a little grayer and softer around the middle than they used to be? Reviewing The Fall-Out in –- where else? — the Guardian, Decca Aitkenhead asked, “Does it have something to do with a midlife panic over masculinity and mortality? These are, after all, men of a certain age, and they did seem to find Bush's shock and awe disproportionately exciting.”

Maybe, but would the same pop-psychological diagnosis have been made of Susan Sontag after she delivered her 1982 speech at Town Hall denouncing Warsaw Pact communism as "fascism with a human face"? (The horrified fellow travelers who denounced her then could match in shrillness what Cohen and Anthony's enemies have said about them now.)

Armistead is interested in the complaints of the fortysomething male –- only they’re the complaints of Coleridge and Wordsworth after they swapped the revolution for stately conservatism, not those of Updike and Roth after they swapped getting laid for reminiscing about getting laid.

She also cites Dante, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Shakespeare for their lyric takes on reaching the middle of other sorts of journeys. But the most culturally resonant elegy on dotage remains Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium,” written when the poet was in his early 60’s. Though he was well beyond the point of a midlife crisis, his poem furnished the phrases “no country for old men” and “dying animal.” The first recently titled a Cormac McCarthy novel about a psychopathic serial killer (a creature typically afflicted with a surplus of testosterone) being hunted by a retirement-ready sheriff. The second titled a minor Roth novella about David Kepesh, now a superannuated professor of desire who takes up with a much younger Cuban girl and, in one deeply disturbing and unerotic scene, laps off her leg the very essence of discarded life.

Though if you still prefer growing old with the blokes less worried about Viagra and enlarged prostates, there's Martin Amis's gorgeous memoir Experience, which focuses on his relationship with his father (I gave it to mine on his 60th birthday). And Philip Larkin, favorite poet of Amis fils et pere, dabbled in his glum brand of nostalgia in “High Windows,” which he composed when he was in his 50's:

When I see a couple of kids
And guess he's fucking her and she's
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives—
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide

To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That'll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark

About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds. And immediately

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

[The Guardian]

"I've now gone through all the boxes and looked at all the books and a surprising number of them have been hollowed out with Polaroids stashed inside. The women depicted are varied (ethnically and size-wise) and the pictures range from softcore to extreme hardcore. Some of the images are very bizarre, at times grotesque.

At this point I'm at a loss as to what I should do with this stuff.

Hello! Send them to us, naturally.

[via Bookninja]

Bauer been named one of the "20 Worst Literary Agents" for her alleged fee-charging practices.

So will she sue us for reporting the news of her lawsuit? (We only wish we could locate the YouTube video made about her, titled "Crouching Snark, Hidden Dragon.")

Literary Agent Fights Her Online Critics

It's called Buying the Cow in the Age of Free Milk: The Get-Your-Man-to-Marry-You Plan, and it will be out in October.

"With a funny but firm hand, Lori Uscher-Pines, who herself maneuvered for a ring from her now-husband, offers the reader serious tips for securing a marriage proposal from the excuse-ridden, free-milk-gulping man she loves."

It began with Gladwell's retelling of an old, old story of his. He made up bullshit at the Washington Post. This amusing little tale became a tiny scandal! Does Gladwell write in defiance of the vaunted New Yorker fact-checkers? That scandal fizzled out, but the small height it reached is proof that something's in the air.

Now, this new book. It is about how some people succeed, and why, and how our metrics for predicting success are broken. Which means it will be a series of anecdotes, some about successful people, some about metrics for predicting success that don't work, and some about metrics for predicting success that do work. Also it will be about how to apply all of this to "the workplace." You can pretty much write it yourself. Or just read last Sunday's Times piece on it.

It probably will attach itself to the Times bestseller list, but will anyone be as kind to this book as they have been to his previous work? People still spend more time attacking Gladwell the corporate speaker, the wacky personality, and the amusing storyteller than the journalist and Thinker. But Morgan Meis, editor of 3 Quarks Daily and artist/academic type, finally got around to reading Blink, and he doesn't care for it!

The oddest thing about Blink, though, is the disconnect between these transformational claims and the actual arguments to be found inside. Throughout the book, Gladwell sorts his stories and anecdotes into two broad categories. On the one side are the stories about the so-called experts being shown up by the simple power of thinking without thinking. In these cases, we learn about the magical powers we all harbor within ourselves. On the other side, are stories about first impressions that have, in fact, led people astray. In these cases, we learn how to fine-tune and perfect our blinking skills in order not to get it wrong.

And then it turns out at the end that the way to do it is to have a lifetime of experience and be quite clever. Except even then sometimes you need to take more time and get more information so you don't screw up your initial response, which is the Blink thing the book is named after that is supposed to change the world. In other words it's all kinda bullshit.

Between this post, this similarly damning Blink revisit from a fellow Canadian (Happy Canada Day!), and the fact that someone told us as Keith Gessen's Internet Party that Gladwell hangs out with the n+1 crew even though they "all make fun of him behind his back," we think the intellectuals, such as they are, have finally turned against the Pop Sociologist Guru of Today. The blog backlash is already upon us. So maybe the rest of the middlebrow elite will catch up in time for the publication of Outliers.

WE'VE REACHED THE TIPPING POINT DO YOU SEE?

"Thayer Core was a blogger on one of those vicious new websites that had popped up in the last few years, displaying a hatred and vitriol that was unprecedented in civilized New York. The things the bloggers wrote made no sense [to Philip]. The comments made no sense to him. None of it appeared to be written by humans, at least not humans as he knew them. This was the problem with the Internet: The more the world opened up, the more unpleasant people appeared to be.

...Thayer Core was a bully, and like most bullies, he lacked courage. He was far too fearful to take physical action, striking out at the world instead from behind the safety of his computer."

The rumor is floated by Post gossip Liz Smith:

Anna's speech to her staff receives a mixed reaction:

Wintour takes her complaints public:

[Front Row]

"OK, let me be clear: I love GTA IV and I have no doubt that it is art, but an equal to "The Sopranos" or "The Godfather"? Narrative art of that caliber is distinguished by its ability to re-organize our preconceptions, to shift us into a world that's always been there but that we've been afraid to acknowledge, and I'm not convinced that GTA IV pulls off that miracle.

...For me, GTA IV is more an example of our evasions as a culture, more of a fairy tale, more of a story of consolation than a shattering cultural critique or even, dare I say it, great art. GTA IV is a game that allows you to forget how screwed-up and complicated things are in the real world; it could have done more, it could have put that screwed-up complicated world front and center."

Also, you definitely have to be a girl. But a girl without a criminal background.

Q. Books are weird and old and almost nobody buys them anymore. Why bother writing one? What're you trying to pull?

A. Books may be weird and old, but when the terrorists launch their EMF War against us (electro-magnetic frequency) and all electronic data is erased, isn't it comforting to know that you'll still be able to curl up with a book containing an essay entitled "How to Approach the Sensitive Question - Anal?"

Q. And the people who still buy books are ladies, mostly, and they mostly only buy books written by ladies with a photo of pretty feet and/or shoes on the cover. How are you gonna leap this hurdle?

A. I have an advantage with the female book-buying population in that I am a very attractive man. Women go gaga over my pronounced jaw line, high cheekbones, and full, supple lips. So I'm trying to emphasize those qualities to the book-buying population. How am I doing this? In every interview, I make sure to discuss my jaw line, high cheekbones, and full, supple lips. Also, I smell like chocolate.

Q. David Sedaris makes me angry and mumbly, but I'm not really sure why. Meanwhile, his sister, Amy Sedaris, makes me want to marry her every time she says or does anything at all. Why does she rule and he kind of makes me want to hang myself in the shower like that guy in An Officer and a Gentleman, or at least fling feces at him like the monkeys at the zoo?

A. This is a question that has bedeviled me for, literally, years! How can one family produce, on one hand, an American icon (Amy) and a virulent anti-American crusader (David)? It just doesn't make sense. I think you can learn a lot by looking at their individual books: David writes poignant, often painful essays about dysfunctionality (a word I think I just made up), while Amy writes recipes for cupcakes. That pretty much tells you all you need to know.

Q. Speaking of monkeys... Some monkeys are dangerous and terrible, while some monkeys are adorable and probably know the Secrets of the Universe. In your estimation, what is the most horrible kind of monkey, and what is the most wonderful kind of monkey? (Warning: I already know the answer, so I will correct you if you get this wrong.)

A. Obviously, the most wonderful kind of monkey is the baby chimpanzee. Michael Jackson proved that to us with Bubbles. Once they get much older than three, though, they get too grabby and should probably be euthanized. As for the most dangerous and terrible kind of monkey, that's easy—flying monkeys.

(The correct answer is that drunk monkeys are the most adorable and the worst monkeys are the terrible, terrible spider monkeys!)

Q. What is the greatest sandwich of all time? And why?

A. You can't beat a good reuben. The reuben is maybe the perfect combination of terrlble-for-you-meat, terrible-for-you-cheese, and terrible-for-you salad dressing, all mushed together on fried bread. It is truly fantastic. Better even than the Big Mac, which is also among the greatest sandwiches of all time, and which also includes salad dressing.

Q. I can't write my own stuff for more than three hours at time, excluding editing. Do you have a process? If so, what is it?

A. Sure. I use the QWERTZ method. I find that it's the most efficient process for writing ever invented. Also, when I write, I tend to try to think as much as I and and then just transcribe my thoughts as fast as I can. Thinking is easier than writing, so I just try to think instead of write.

Q. I actually love every single version of "I Love The..." on VH1. Even that weird 90s one! Is there another in the making?

A. I assume they will continue to make them until time itself comes to an end.

Q. We do our own "I Love The..." for the 80s and the 70s every weekend here. We call it "One More Thing." A theme is presented, and then everyone posts their fave clips and comments and comments and comments. Why won't you help? How hard is that? Just sign in and post a YouTube clip. Geez!

A. The only reason I won't help is because I never read this site. Otherwise, I would be all over that shit.

Q. Has Sedaris or any of his feverish followers contacted you yet? I kind of have to think that they have. Because they would.

A. There have been some Sedaris fans who have taken up his banner for him and defended him, which is at should be. One woman told me I wasn't witty enough to carry his shoes, which I thought was a strange thing to say, because honestly, how witty do you need to be to carry somebody's shoes? Carrying shoes requires no wit at all, which I suppose was her point, but even the completely witless, even those with negative wit, could carry his shoes, particularly because he has such small feet.

Q. Do you have Amazon Fever yet? You know, where you check your book's stats every few hours? And have they coupled your book to someone you can't stand yet? Because they love to do that.

A. They have coupled my book with my comedy album, entitled "I am a Wonderful Man," so to answer your question, yes. Because I am self-loathing. And yes, I do check my Amazon stats all the time because I really don't want to fail in this endeavor as I have in so many others.

Q. Bonus Question: What is the best thing to come out of the 80s? And what is the worst?

A. Best thing to come out of the 80's: the video for Whitesnake's "Here I Go Again." Worst: The phrase, "Hey, did you see the Space Shuttle blow up?"

Q. Another bonus Question! Why is David Sedaris?

A. Because he can.

Example: NYT reporter Jennifer 8. Lee's blog post from last year, in which she sighed in relief that "the manuscript does not suck" by re-printing a gushy e-mail from her editor.

Blogging can also be a colossal time-suck for a writer, unless writin' a blog is your job. But as publishing insiders will tell you, it's all a part of branding—and maybe even selling books!

Galleycat weighs in further: it's actually not such a bad idea if you do it right:

"Blogging isn't an end, but a means to an end—just one tool (and not always the best one) that you can use to spread the message that you are (or you publish) an interesting person who has something to say about the human condition worth paying attention to.

If you can't bring yourself to do that, you need to step back and consider some very fundamental questions about why you want to be a writer or a publisher. It would be great if we could just drop a book on the table and expect everyone to be bowled over by its intrinsic rightness—but we all know that's not going to happen. So we've got to go out into the world, and present our authentic selves in such a manner that what we have to say will resonate with others when they come across us in their own wanderings.

[Galleycat]

[Big Think]

The commentator, conservative Glenn Beck, said in this Headline News commentary that "it is despicable" that Irena Sendler did not win the Nobel Peace Prize after smuggling 2,500 Jewish children out of a Nazi ghetto. She was caught by the Gestapo but survived to the end of World War II, only to die after losing the big Nobel contest to "Al Gore and his movie about a slideshow."

HOPE YOU'RE HAPPY NOW HOLLYWOOD AL!

(This clip is very popular on global warming denial websites.)

From an interview in Windy City Times:

Sedaris: The Internet is so new to me. I didn't realize you could just go on and lie about people. I can get on a computer right now and write "Michelle Obama said to me she hates Jews." Somebody called me the other day: "Oh, there's that thing on Gawker that you try to pick guys up during your readings." I've never done that. Ever, ever, ever. I will have gifts for teenage girls when I go on tour because I'm always honored when they come and it's fun to make a big deal out of a teenager. I take the shampoo and conditioners from my room, and yesterday I went to the museum and got a bunch of cheap bracelets. I'll often talk about how pretty she is, like, "It must be so good to be you, and you're what guys in prison dream about." But a guy? I won't talk like that to a teenage boy because I don't want it to be weird or uncomfortable. Early on I saw somebody on a book tour try to pick someone up from the audience. They respect you and are in awe of you so it would be weird to put any move on them. Plus, I'm involved with somebody. So I was appalled because I've never done a thing like that.

At a cocktail party, a bottle of lousy champagne is uncorked. You take a swig, grimace, and say, "Send this swill back to France where David Sedaris is undoubtedly enjoying a baguette." (I admit this probably doesn't seem like much of a put down on paper, but if you say the word "baguette" with a sneer, trust me, this will be devastating.)

Another idea: you're knitting with some gal pals. Somebody drops a stitch. You respond by saying, "Speaking of stitches, that's what David Sedaris wishes he had me in when I read his last book."

Perhaps you are simply riding the subway. Somebody across from you is reading "Me Talk Pretty One Day," or another Sedaris gem. You lean over to that person and say, "I read that book, too..." Wait a beat, then unleash the punchline: "When I was in a coma!" (This one doesn't make that much sense, but if you say it fast enough they will probably ignore the glaring logic problem of trying to read something while in a coma.)

You've just been arrested for aggravated assault. The processing officer instructs you to make your one phone call. You dial seven random digits and say to whoever answers the phone, "Call David Sedaris and tell him I've just been arrested. If he pretends he has no idea who idea who I am, then you will know all you need to know about 'The Great' David Sedaris."

When referring to him, put a "p" after the "S" in "Sedaris," so that what you're saying is "Spedaris." This isn't a put down exactly; it's actually just a mispronunciation of his name, but if enough people start doing it, I have no doubt it will drive him fucking crazy. [Michael's Webpage]

The book is roundly, universally cruel to Arianna.

Arianna Huffington had charmed me out of my socks to get me to manage her husband's campaign. But in a few short months, I'd come to realize that she was the most ruthless, unscrupulous, and ambitious person I'd met in thirty years in national politics—not to mention that she sometimes seemed truly pathological. Her allure and style were only a veneer: the soul of a wily sorceress lurked beneath.

Jeez. It's worth mentioning, of course, that after this debacle, Rollins went on to work for Katherine Harris in her disastrous Senate campaign. Until he quit and leaked terrible shit to newspapers. Rollins has a nasty habit of losing political campaigns and then blaming ambitious women, right? (Though in the Harris case, well, that was definitely her fault. She's fucking nuts.)

[Amazon]

• The Web is dead. Churchill once described a pudding as having no theme. The same is broadly true of today’s Internet; Web 2.0 has descended into bathos, which really ought to have its own 'sphere named after it. Facebook’s great advertising revenue model went bust a year ago and everyone’s already stalked everyone else on MySpace. Most user-generated content reads like a stale algorithm of pettiness, paranoia and semi-literacy. Time formerly proclaimed “us” the “Person of the Year,” and it proved too burdensome a responsibility. We renounce the title.

• The television season is over. What is there to watch now except the Real World set where it always belonged – on a Hollywood soundstage – and with revolving cast members that don’t hang around long enough to come out of the closet, smack each other in the face, or forget to load the dishwasher? Bring back House with its acerbic Bertie Wooster.

• The economy is in limbo. It’s bad, sure, but it’s not quite so bad as to precipitate a new artistic or literary movement. No one's ready to move into lean-tos on the B.Q.E., become a Trotsykist, and found Partisan Review. Speaking of which –

• There are no new magazines. What’s to overhype and then hound to an early grave? Radar’s doing fine in that unremarkable way of its. And n+1 will either lurch into neoconservatism or get bought out by Dave Eggers and turned into Zimbabwean refugee’s emo fanzine.

• There are no parties, except the one being thrown tonight by Keith Gessen, the Julia Allison of public intellectuals, who wants to take back the Internet the way Irving Howe wanted to make socialism relevant.

• We live in atomized and fragmented times. Like academia, the culture is over-specialized and only caters to microscopic – mostly web-based – niches. My Buddhist Scandinavian black metal band can beat up your vomit porn-themed ballet troupe. It’s impossible to congregate under a mass banner of anything anymore. Is this why Barack Obama is deified? Is he the closest thing we have to a popular icon? (Michael Chabon thinks so, and he’s the dean of Superman studies.) But there are no other imagos to make our hearts beat as one and give us a shared cultural experience. What’s the last stadium-venue concert you attended? (I'm seeing Mos Def with a Big Band this month and I can't even get worked up about it.) Who’s the Seinfeld of the humorless aughts, the Geldof of this age of waste?

• Politics has sucked the oxygen out of media. Fortunately, like the TV drought, this may just be seasonal and subject to change once November comes and goes and Obama Girl is cast in the next Tom Stoppard play as Béla Kun's wry housekeeper.

• It’s been an uneventful summer thus far. Might we look forward to a rolling blackout in August that will allow us all to mate in darkened stairwells and wash with tonic water for a glorious twelve hours again?

"It’s an honor and a fulfillment of all my lifelong dreams. To be considered only for my looks; I'd like to thank my Mom and Dad for the excellent genes and the lovely ladies of Penguin for recognizing my hotness."

Matt gracefully declined our offer of a pin-up photo shoot with our photog Nikola. Perhaps it was something I said:

I wanted to talk you into doing a really fun photoshoot... You wouldn't have to take your shirt off or anything (unless you wanted to.)

Anyway, congratulations!

I had always imagined the commenters as a pack of wolves… and if they smelled blood, my blood, because there I was with them, they would pounce. And then we could have it out.

Instead, the commenters wanted me to leave. It was as if I’d misunderstood. Dude, said the commenters, in effect: We weren’t talking about you. We were talking about “Keith Gessen.” You’re just a name to us. Kind of a funny name, actually. And an author photo. Kind of an obnoxious author photo. But we don’t mean you, personally. We’re bored at work. Come on.

And that was really strange. I have a friend who occasionally makes the argument: You’ve put yourself out there, now people can take their shots. I have another friend who puts it a little differently: You manifest yourself in public, and then people will make of it what they will. But this didn’t feel like either of those things. It was more as if I’d given up my name and photograph as an offering, for people to take shots and interpret those