"Later, while sitting in a coffee shop in the West Village—inexplicably one of the only areas in Manhattan Ms. Crosley can comfortably navigate in spite of the spatial dysphasia disorder from which she has suffered since childhood—she politely said she did not find the question of her universal appeal very interesting." Okay; let's talk about your bizarre disease, then.

Indeed, given that "Ms. Crosley appears actually to enjoy the clusterfuck" of media parties, we have a right to know: What is this spatial dysphasia and, more importantly, is it contagious? Following in the grand tradition of Pasteur and Salk and House, let's proceed first to an exact-match Google search, which reveals that one thing "spatial dysphasia" is not is an accepted medical term. Or any other kind of term for that matter. Leon seems to have sort of made it up, actually!

One might fear that the trail ends here. Happily, though, we find that, in addition to personal essays on her butt and her goldfish, Crosley also recently wrote one, for Salon, about her "severe spatial disability." The scene after a seven-year-old Sloane scored in the tart-cart tranche on her first standardized test:

My mother went on to explain my brush with brilliance, my aptitude for geniusness, my general awesomeness, but the school was having none of it. They made me take an IQ test, after which the test administrator announced he had never seen such a right-left brain discrepancy. I was diagnosed with a severe temporal spatial deficit, a learning disability that means I have zero spatial relations skills.

It was official: I was a genius trapped in an idiot's body.

It makes some sense now: "spatial dysphasia" as a phrase of solidarity with "someone else who hid her problems in plain sight...working double-time just to keep up with everyone else's standard of 'normal.'" Now is also when our investigation becomes irretrievably weird, because "recognition dysphasia" is just as non-term a term as the spatial variety. As it turns out, "face blindness" is actually a form of agnosia, which Wikipedia tells us is the "loss of ability to recognize objects, persons, sounds, shapes, or smells while the specific sense is not defective." This might be Crosley's problem with subways and the street grid, but it's definitely not dysphasia.

Truth is, dysphasia is just another word for aphasia, the familiar catch-all term for post–brain damage problems in producing and comprehending language. That's langauge, as in speaking and writing. It is therefore impossible to be a "spatial dysphasic," or a "facial" one. But perhaps Sloane Crosley is in fact an aphasic/dysphasic whose condition prevents her from accurately describing her condition. (Certainly, she appears to have some kind of difficulty communicating normally: "Ms. Crosley...cuts to the chase with editors and writers, and conscientiously tailors her pitches to suit their tastes.") Then again, there's the distinct and unpalatable possibility that Crosley, like so many before her, confused dysphasia with the identical-sounding dysphagia ("difficulty swallowing").

But, let's not work too hard at his; she probably won't be the best person you know in publishing anymore if she ever actually became knowable:

Earlier, an ex-boyfriend had walked by carrying something like four drinks; asked to describe Ms. Crosley, he gave a wistful smile before turning away. "Inscrutable!" he said to no one in particular as he disappeared into the crowd.

The Most Popular Publicist In New York [NYO]

Well, okay. Can't really argue with a meaningless claim. But! Right below the main column is something more intriguing: a slight, dark grey sidebar called "Morgenstern's Picks" that proves meaningful in spite of itself. Indeed, the 35 square inches it takes up on the page are indicative the same way 300 is indicative, exemplifying an insidious hollowness in the culture of weekend media that seems to be growing increasingly, regrettably blatant.

After the jump, a speculative look into the Morgenstern process.

The point of the sidebar, as far as we've been able to gather from skimming it every other week, is to recommend a few good movies united by a theme related to the topic of the week. This week it was big, dumb action movies. So what did Morgenstern decide to write about? Elephants. Specifically, movies that somehow involve elephants—as he puts it, "elephant movies." As he explains in the intro text, he did this because 300 is "elephantine." A classic example of an elephantine movie in the same tradition, he writes, is the Elizabeth Taylor version of Cleopatra (like an elephant, he explains, it was "lumbering, but entertaining").

What follows amounts to more than just filler. It is a particular kind of filler, distinctly 2007 in its naked, almost smug reliance on common search engines and its apparent disinterest in concealing its laziness. Quite simply, Morgenstern typed "elephant" into IMDB. Or maybe AllMovie; maybe both if he'd already had his coffee. This was after he decided that identifying 300 as "elephantine" was enough of an excuse to do so.

He found two movies that were sort of about elephants: King Solomon's Mines, a safari film from 1950 that features graphic violence w/r/t elephants, and Elephant Walk, in which a stampede of elephants "reclaims the land it lost to human planters."

The last one was easy: The Elephant Man, directed by David Lynch. Never mind that The Elephant Man is not about elephants. Nor is it "elephantine" or flashy—in fact, it is in black and white. That's okay, Morgenstern thought. And he put it in his column. For the accompanying blurb, he wrote a bit about the plot and the circumstances of its production. He put the actors' names in parentheses—something he didn't do in the other blurbs, since at that point, presumably, he was getting on towards word count. Then he realized he needed a few more lines. So, he looked it up on Amazon.

He noticed the first user's comment: "Amazing, but not for the weak of heart." Morgenstern thought that was pretty well said, so he decided to quote it in his article. Happily, he copy-and-pasted it into his Word document.

That's three, he thought. Good. That's three, and that's how you write an article on Saturday. Call it "Elephants on Parade." God help us, and never mind the elephant in the etc., etc., etc.