You will read it, and feel better about how Obama is not doing this or that quickly enough or even at all. Or, if you don't want to read it, because it is long or because something about Matt Bai bugs you, try Ezra Klein's summary. See? Don't you feel better about things now?

Ok. Now. You probably don't want to read Kevin Baker's essay in the upcoming Harper's, "Barack Hoover Obama," which is more or less the exact same observation, only presented less optimistically. And, specifically, it addresses the inkling of dissatisfaction we have each time we hear that Emanuel phrase repeated: don't you have, right now, a rather historic opportunity to redefine what the "possible" means?

No doubt, President Obama and his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, would claim that by practicing "the art of the possible," they are ensuring that "the perfect does not become the enemy of the good." But by not even proposing the relevant legislation, Obama has ceded a key part of the process-so much so that his retreat seems not so much tactical as a reversion to his core political beliefs.

A major theme of Obama's 2006 book The Audacity of Hope is impatience with "the smallness of our politics" and its "partisanship and acrimony." He expresses frustration at how "the tumult of the sixties and the subsequent backlash continues to drive our political discourse," and voices a professional appreciation for Ronald Reagan's ability to exploit such divisions. The politician he admires the most-ironically enough, considering the campaign that was to come-is Bill Clinton. For all his faults, Clinton, in Obama's eyes, "instinctively understood the falseness of the choices being presented to the American people" and came up with his "Third Way," which "tapped into the pragmatic, non-ideological attitude of the majority of Americans."
[...]
Just as Herbert Hoover came to internalize the "business progressivism" of his era as a welcome alternative to the futile, counterproductive conflicts of an earlier time, so has Obama internalized what might be called Clinton's "business liberalism" as an alternative to useless battles from another time-battles that liberals, in any case, tended to lose.

Clinton's business liberalism, however, is a chimera, every bit as much a capitulation to powerful and selfish interests as was Hoover's 1920s progressivism. We are back in Evan Bayh territory here, espousing a "pragmatism" that is not really pragmatism at all, just surrender to the usual corporate interests. The common thread running through all of Obama's major proposals right now is that they are labyrinthine solutions designed mainly to avoid conflict. The bank bailout, cap-and-trade on carbon emissions, health-care pools-all of these ideas are, like Hillary Clinton's ill-fated 1993 health plan, simultaneously too complicated to draw a constituency and too threatening for Congress to shape and pass as Obama would like. They bear the seeds of their own defeat.

So yeah, this is just more typical liberal whining about how the guy who never really pretended to be anything more than a mainstream liberalish Democrat has turned out to be a mainstream liberalish Democrat, but still: WE WERE PROMISED A STEALTH SOCIALIST!

[Photo: Pete Souza/The White House]

David Steele was a 44 year-old sports columnist for the Baltimore Sun who had a nice career until the paper laid him off last week—by calling him, on his cell phone, while he was in the press box at a Baltimore Orioles game, which his paper had assigned him to cover. Sucks. Two other Sun staffers at that game also got laid off. During the game. Worst Orioles game ever. Which is saying a lot.


Noted: "NYT made it to May 2009! Suck it, Michael Hirschorn!"

Did you know that there's a German magazine that looks just like Harpers? It's true! We hear Harpers is deciding whether to go after them for copyright infringement. The last thing the world can tolerate is two good magazines.


Two journalism conferences have already been canceled this year, because organizers expected low attendance. Are top journalism bosses giving up their love of all-expenses paid bar tabs in Boca Raton golf resorts? No, it's just a phase.

News Corp has big plans "to devise a system to charge for content on the Web." Top executives are working on it! I don't know. A system to charge people is the easy part. (Send me checks, in the mail, if you agree!). Getting people to pay: hard part.

This is Lt. Gordon J. Klingenschmitt, an evangelical Episcopal Navy chaplain who got himself court-martialed and kicked out of the Navy for appearing in uniform at a political rally, against orders.

Here is last Saturday's One-Minute prayer:

7. Saturday 25 Apr 09 One-Minute Prayer:

IMPRECATORY PRAYERS AGAINST ANTI-JESUS BARRY LYNN AND MIKEY WEINSTEIN

Let us pray. Almighty God, today we pray imprecatory prayers from Psalm 109 against the enemies of religious liberty, including Barry Lynn and Mikey Weinstein, who issued press releases this week attacking me personally. God, do not remain silent, for wicked men surround us and tell lies about us. We bless them, but they curse us. Therefore find them guilty, not me. Let their days be few, and replace them with Godly people. Plunder their fields, and seize their assets. Cut off their descendants, and remember their sins, in Jesus' name. Amen.

**Listen below! And call & ask your local Christian radio station to broadcast this 60-second prayer many times throughout the day on Saturday, 25 Apr 09.

Yes, that sounds a bit like praying for Barry Lynn and Mikey Weinstein to die, right? What did they ever do?

Barry Lynn is the head of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Mikey Weinstein, hero of the Harper's piece, is the president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. Even though he helped defend Regan during Iran-Contra and worked for Ross Perot, he is pretty awesome.

He is the most prominent voice fighting the growing influence of evangelical nutcases in the military, who believe in making holy war and think the Constitution establishes a Christian nation. How did this happen, exactly? Didn't you think chaplains were all boring milquetoast mainstream protestants, like Chaplain Tappmann? They used to be. Then:

The next turning point occurred in the waning days of the Reagan Administration, when regulatory revisions helped create the fundamentalist stronghold in today's military. A longstanding rule had apportioned chaplains according to the religious demographics of the military as a whole (i.e., if surveys showed that 10 percent of soldiers were Presbyterian, then 10 percent of the chaplains would be Presbyterian) but required that all chaplains be trained to minister to troops of any faith. Starting in 1987, however, Protestant denominations were lumped together simply as "Protestant"; moreover, the Pentagon began accrediting hundreds of evangelical and Pentecostal "endorsing agencies," allowing graduates of fundamentalist Bible colleges-which often train clergy to view those from other faiths as enemies of Christ-to fill up nearly the entire allotment for Protestant chaplains. Today, more than two thirds of the military's 2,900 active-duty chaplains are affiliated with evangelical or Pentecostal denominations. "In my experience," Morton says, "eighty percent
of the Protestant chaplaincy self-identifies as conservative and/or evangelical."

So. This Mikey guy. Back when he was an 18-year-old freshman at the Air Force Academy, he got the shit beat out of him for reporting antisemitic comments. Thirty years later, his son Curtis was still dealing with getting called a "fucking Jew" by cadets and officers. And now he fights prominent military officials who promote crazy Holy War ideas and forcefully proselytize to underlings. He foolishly thought he might get a Pentagon job in the Obama administration but instead we still have Petraeus and Gates.

In Harper's, Gideon Lewis-Kraus says that the "mid-twentieth-century good fortune of publishing" that allowed highbrow writers to live a well-compensated life of literary leisure was an anomaly. So stop whining:

[Some say] contemporary late-corporate publishing is a fallen world in which Lauren Weisberger, author of The Devil Wears Prada,gets really rich, while Richard Ford, one of the indisputably important novelists of our time, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Independence Day and The Sportswriter, gets slightly less rich. None of the elegists say: What is coming to an end is the idea that Richard Ford is going to be richer than Lauren Weisberger. None of them say: What is coming to an end isthe wishful insistence-for it is, ultimately, a wish, deeply felt, by a lot of people-that Richard Ford is going to be rich at all.

In other words, chill out, fancy literary types!

For if in the end the money disappears, and, sadly, it probably will, then so be it: there will still be a party, and maybe that party won't be in New York or in the displaced New York that is Frankfurt, but neither will the Rieslings cost 12 euros.

This argument shadows a grander argument, often unstated, that says: Yes, the money is draining out of publishing (and journalism, for that matter) but that's a good thing. Then people will only write for the love, and real writers will win, because they will press on, while money-chasing hacks will fade away.

But the book industry (and the journalism industry) isn't the music industry. Authors can't support themselves doing reading tours in small-town bars until that big break comes through. The people putting forth the purist argument have probably never had a huge student loan bill to pay back, or faced years working at Starbucks while writing that novel. Let's hope the money comes back for everybody. Even real authors are willing to concede all the Devil Wears Prada-s it takes for them to be able to get an advance big enough to make that grad school bill seem like a worthy investment.

Things like this:

Number of vehicles in the motorcade that transports Bush to his regular bike ride in Maryland: 6

Estimated total miles he has ridden his bike as president: 5,400

Minimum number of nicknames Bush has given to associates during his presidency: 75

Number of associates with the last name Jackson he has dubbed “Action Jackson”: 2

Rank of Bush among U.S. presidents with the highest disapproval rating: 1

Average percentage of Americans who approved of the job Bush was doing during his second term: 37

Percentage of Russians today who approve of the direction their country took under Stalin: 37

Some magazines struggle to keep up with the shifting expectations for print journal's but Harper's has done a decent job keeping their magazine interesting. Whereas other publications fear dipping their toes into darker waters, the Readings section's dark investigations into torture and greed always did remind us of the best possible blog.

Here the magazine reprints conversations between undercover officer Ed Newcomer of the Fish and Wildlife Service and people who keep "roller" pigeons. Such folks aim to protect their pigeon collection by eliminating natural predators like hawks and peregrine falcons, sometimes in sadistic fashion. In the following excerpt, Newcomer incriminates pigeon keeper Rayvon Hall by asking him how he kills the hawks.

Ed Newcomer: What do you use, pellet guns?
Rayvon Hall: Yeah.
Newcomer: You know what? The last one I caught with my pellet gun, I heard neighbors trying to look over the fence, so I just chucked the gun as quick as I could and walked away. But you were telling me there's another way to kill them.
Hall: The ones I killed, I just put some bleach and ammonia in a spray bottle, shook it up, sprayed 'me in the eyes and mouth. They went into convulsions.
Newcomer: How long did it take? Did they make a lot of noise? Flap around or anything? They didn't do that screaming they do when you shoot 'em? Because that's the other thing. I think my neighbor heard that too.
Hall: Yeah, somebody else told me that if you mix the bleach with the ammonia, it makes a gas. The fumes damn near knocked me out. I was spraying it, and I had it on that wide spray. That's some strong shit. You be hearing that bottle fizzing. I just started spraying his ass through the wire cage. He started blinking his eyes, and his mouth kept opening, and he was flapping — he was suffocating, you know. I did two or three like that.

Would this be the same if you read it on a blog? I guess we're finding that out now. Don't leave us, print!

Of course no one cares about Leigh Lezark and Cory Kennedy and Peaches Geldof and even Julia Allison and no offense but their "zero money down" strategy w/r/t talent! This silly idea of Andy Warhol's about everyone getting to be microfamous is just as silly as the idea that everyone in America needs to own a house when obviously they really don't have the "marketable skills" our society would deem worthy of that sort of security. But we invested then-valuable hours in their crappy fundamentals and look what happened: they and Lindsay and Paris and the pothead socialite tranche and the Kardashian tranche and the reformed rapper concubine tranche brought the WHOLE CELEBRITY MARKET crashing down with them. And now it is up to Us Weekly to make sure Sarah Palin doesn't get elected while we at Gawker educate you in the ways of the new communist regime. Look, it is not like people were paying us to give them "AAA ratings." We hated them all along, every one, but we get paid by the page view. That is how the free market works. Or doesn't, I dunno! Anyway thank you market for rallying in support of us trying to figure out complicated things such as "How fucked are the people who don't actually have any money?" Please celebrate the liquidity while it lasts this beautiful cold weekend!

*My roommate, who incidentally stole my October 'Harper's' but that's okay because if she hadn't bought the last like 90 rolls of toilet paper I would be using it to clog the toilet, is the subscriber.

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.

What Gives With Joe Biden? [Harper's, which has an awesome website and archive and you should all totally subscribe to access it.]

"I've never been a fan of Howard Kurtz at all, I mean, you know, to me, he's sort of the epitome of insider journalism," Ken Silverstein told us. And though the Harper's Washington editor may be "not terribly fond" of Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz, he reserves his real venom for liberal pundit Eric Alterman. "I really can't stand Eric," Silverstein said.

(Of course, Eric in turn is famous for his feuds—he hates, among others, Time's Ana Marie Cox, her husband, the New York Observer columnist Chris Lehmann, and The Nation's Katha Pollitt. Anyway!)

The Silverstein and Kurtz throwdown actually began way back in July: Silverstein wrote a piece about D.C. lobbyists, for which he flirted with entrapment, nailed his story and pissed off a lot of people. Predictably, the pious got their panties in knots, the bored were bored, and the crowd that secretly would kill for a White House Correspondents Association invite lashed out at the Beltway media elite in charge of doling them out.

Kurtz was indignant, and scolded Silverstein: "No matter how good the story, lying to get it raises as many questions about journalists as their subjects." Oh ho!

Silverstein responded in the LATimes, saying he found Kurtz's criticism "disappointing" but unsurprising, and pointed to two of our own favorite undercover press stings as reasons to continue pursuing the kind of reporting that has largely died out.

Since June, Silverstein has written at least seven items about Kurtz on the Harper's website.

One trashed Kurtz's new book. ("Seems like a pretty dreary read," Silverstein told us.)

One trashed Kurtz's blog. ("Really embarrassing... anyone who writes an item about getting caught in a rainstorm and titles it 'Wet and Wild'&mdash I mean, I'm almost sure it was 'Wet and Wild.'" (Yes. It was.)

Another trashed Kurtz's "hand-wringing, tut-tutting" clucking about the state of American journalism.

We asked why Silverstein hasn't yet disclosed the genesis for his Kurtz aversion on his blog.

"I had thought about putting up some sort of Surgeon General warning about how I'm not terribly fond of the guy&mdash or at least his writing, I don't know him personally," he said. "It just seemed to me there've been so many public references since the lobbying story, the undercover story, that anyone who would probably read an item about Howard Kurtz would probably know about you know, my general dispute with him."

Silverstein points out that it's not as if he's a flip-flopper. "I've always bitched about Kurtz, long before this thing," he said. (True that.)

"The only nice thing I'll say is, I don't question Kurtz's honesty at all in terms of his take on my piece, I mean, he genuinely found it distasteful, so I hope I haven't in any way suggested there was anything dishonest about his critique."

On the other side, Kurtz found a supporter in the temperate Huffington Post media critic Rachel Sklar.

Wouldn't you know it: Damn, did Harper's smack her for it. (They are a tight-knit defensive little group over there, no? Tread lightly!) A Sklar-Kurtz "love fest", cried Harper's contributor Scott Horton.

Sklar's piece on Kurtz's book, in which she wryly told her readers to go buy the critic's book, was a "A drooling, fawning blurb-like emission"!

Then came the requisite conspiracy theory: "First, it seems, Rachel Sklar was invited to Kurtz's show as a guest, showing up in transcripts several times in the course of this past summer. Second, Howie wrote a piece about Sklar in his column at the Washington Post. It's an over-the-top puff piece filled with product placement."

Well, frankly, we too were inclined to think the love-fest might not be all that imaginary. (Although, um, we don't see Kurtz swinging the younger gal thing, but we digress, again. Also? Sorry.)

But! We asked Sklar about Horton's allegations that she'd stopped maligning Kurtz only after he invited her on his show, and she forwarded us her barely-restrained response email, which, Horton has posted today.

In it, she cites her criticisms of Kurtz—from running scintillating B-roll while mourning the loss of television dignity that said B-roll represents and calling previously-published material "exclusive" to pushing his own book on his show.

"So to imply a road-to-Damascus conversion that just happened to coincide with Kurtz giving me facetime is a pretty serious allegation that you might have invested some effort in actually backing up," Sklar.

Then she called him "a little 'sleazy and dishonest'" in return.

"If you are going to make allegations about what motivates a critic in her coverage, you'd best make damn sure that those allegations have some merit. I have no problem 'admitting' that I like Howard Kurtz—heck, I call him Howie—but that hardly means he or anyone else has me in his pocket," she wrote.

The "unusually sunny" Sklar's Kurtz-critical moments are typically balancing acts. Her point about his self-promotion was countered with noting that the publication of his book, "in all fairness, falls squarely within his mandate on 'Reliable Sources' and definitely merited exploration, and this seemed a nice way to handle it," and though she thought his CNN auto-interview was "hokey," she also called it "goofily endearing," which admittedly, sounds pretty familiar.

Unfortunately, her coverage of the controversy surrounding Kurtz's "exclusive" book material carries lines like this one: "We're going to spin this on the sunny side, since that's what we do here."

Is it? We think you'd better inform the other alligators about that!

• Jeff Greenfield returns to CBS after a long stint at CNN. Greenfield is known in the industry for his "wry perspective on events," which is like being a "comedian's comedian" for a group of people who have no sense of comedy. [WSJ]
  
• Paula Zahn feels need for new man, divorce. [Radar]
  
• Is there anyone who didn't pay off Conrad Black? [AP]
  
• Admitting that you are powerless over your addiction to humorless media scolding is the first step on the road to recovery; congratulations! Also, good point. [CJR Daily]
  
• Long-laboring internet hero Paul Ford (aka Gary Benchley) wins internet! He's got all 160 years of Harper's tedium made available online. [Fishbowl NY]
  
• Lester Holt will replace John Siegenthaler as weekend anchor on NBC. [Post Chronicle]
  
• Black people will get Essence's take on "30 Dates in 30 Days." Sadly, it will be online-only, and on that other internet. [WWD]

Then the PR person at Harper's helpfully e-mails me its circulation figures, which are astounding and sad. This supposedly influential magazine sells 231,000 copies (including to a substantial group of Canadian readers) in a nation of 300 million people. It reaches only .076% of the U.S. population.

Magazines: where are the women writers? [CBC]

F. Scott Fitzgerald, It Seems, Never Met Lewis Lapham [NYS]
[Image: AP]

...If time stood still, which contrariwise moveth so round that a froward retention of custom is as turbulent a thing as an innovation; and they that reverence too much old times are but a scorn to the new.
—Francis Bacon

Girl at Mall: Oh my god!
[laughs at Freud's introduction]
Sigmund Freud: You seem to be suffering from a mild case of hysteria.
Girl at Mall: You are such a geek!
[walks off with her friend]
Billy the Kid: Way to go, egghead!
Sigmund Freud: Wha...?
Socrates: GEEK!
[laughs]
Sigmund Freud: What is a geek?
— Chris Matheson, Ed Solomon, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure

Not so long ago, when Lewis Lapham still helmed Harper's magazine and the office was filled with smoke from his unchained melody of Parliaments, the annual Christmas Party was the stuff of legend. To hear Lewis tell it, one might, without undue surprise, stumble upon Kurt Vonnegut defrocking a young Mia Farrow, or Walter Cronkite making the acquaintance of a young Jayne Mansfield's buxom. As an intern at the magazine, it was hard not to imagine the Christmas party as the orgasm that made the 10-6 skullduggery of the internship worth it, even more than the lunch with Lewis at the end during which he'd tell variations on a story involving him as a cub reporter, a koala, and delivering the goods (with his organ) to a wealthy San Fran widow. But tempis fugit mors venit. Smoking got banned, Lewis got canned and last night at Pravda, Harper's looked its age.

Here, in a vaulted basement vodka bar, elegant captains of industry, bespectacled journalists and dyspeptic former interns gathered to celebrate another year of getting on with it. The party wasn't a bore, exactly; just staid. For a magazine that once advocated the assassination of the President, that indicted the same man for voter fraud, that so insouciantly played with the possibility of time travel as it pertains to reportage, one have hoped form for some vestigial radicalism. Alas, no one seemed desirous to upset the delicate balance of champagne flutes on silver trays. Marlene Kahan, a taut-yet-aged woman who began introducing herself as "working for ASME" but quickly amended the title, metonymically, to, "I am ASME," pondered whether "dancing on the table, after this martini" would enliven things. Wiser tempers concluded it would most likely result in a herniated disk and flashbacks to Kingpin. Tony Hendra, who may have Down Syndome, seemed happy as a clam casino, glowingly declaring this the best party Harper's had thrown at Pravda since last year, when Harper's threw a party at Pravda. After hours of staring at Harper's circa 1880, Paul Ford, aka Gary Benchley, the adorable writer tasked with yolking Harper's archives online, cast the party a success, growing glassy-eyed and giddy over tumblers of cachaca. Sinclair "Pee Wee" Smith, and his fiance Kristen Richardson, an ex-intern, bemoaned the jumping of the Harper's party shark: "Back when I was an intern, there was smoking upstairs and coke in the bathroom." Sadly, there was neither. Searching for the missing element, Richardson paused and suggested, "Jews?" But Frederick Kaufman, one of the few Jews there and professor of Journalism at CUNY, suggested, "We should yell anti-semitic slogans at Art Spiegelman." As Shuggie Otis' "Strawberry Letter:" played, it became clear the party was at war with itself. More than lingering sales or the shortage of tail to chase, that is the coal in the Harper's stocking. When Francine Prose jumped ship early on she told us she had never stayed for the Harper's Christmas dance party We didn't have the heart to tell her there never was one. No one was singing the same tune.

Second to Alec Baldwin, the elephant not in the room was Roger Hodge, the current editor. Home. he claimed, sick. Instead, it was up to deposed king of Harper's Lewis Lapham to work the room and rally the troops. Yes, he of the large cock and no socks, the gravelly-voiced demagogue. His fingernails tobacco-stained but well-kempt despite their froward struggle against time. As a cub editor, I had worked with Lewis at his fledgling, (and perhaps stillborn) quarterly just a few months ago. And when we shook hands, his bright eyes clouded behind his glasses. "Hi Jim, great to see you." It took a moment to realize the minence grise had erred. But by then, he was outside, blowing Parliament smoke out on to the empty wintry street, and doing what he does best: retelling stories of Christmases past.

Harper's Christmas Party @ Pravda [Photos]

Favorite TV shows: The Wonder Years, Miami Vice, MacGyver.

Complexion: "Zesty salmon-orange."

Best Osama dialogue that could be a hip hop lyric: "Dance like a Caucasoid girl!"

His Prerogative [Harper's]

Earlier: The Greatest Terrorist's Love of All

Softball Index

Number of runs scored by the Harper's softball team in a game against The New Yorker last week: 4
Number of runs scored by The New Yorker: 7
Games, in a row, won by the Small Fries: 6
Approximate temperature of Riverside park at game time, in degrees
Fahrenheit: 86
Number of steamy avenues and crooked stairs endured en route to the
game: 5, 45
Approximate volume of nearby salsa music, in decibels: 120
Approximate number of condescending comments about our "baby blue" shirts made by Harper's: 6
Average age, in years, of the mismatched t-shirts worn by our opponents: 7.4
Solo home runs hit by intern Robert "Memphis Slim" Snowden, in two at-bats: 2
Ratio of at bats to home runs for Snowden: 1:1
Percentage of at-bats in which Snowden hit a home run: 100
At-bats taken by "Slim" Tim Farrington: 2
Number of innings that ended abruptly with Farrington popping out to right field, of all places: 2
Number of strike-outs pitched by Mort "the Fort" Gerberg, in two innings: 2
Number of runs batted in by Lila "Bye-bye" Byock in her first season at-bat: 1
Approximate distance that a ball hit by Harper's editor Ben Metcalf traveled into left field, in feet: 120
Number of bases attempted by Metcalf on said hit: 3
Number of seconds by which the ball, thrown to Jonathan "boom boom" Shainin, beat Metcalf to third: .5
Number of screaming, jumping Harper's players who called their editor safe: 8
Number of Supreme Court Justices who would have called him out: 8
Number who are legally blind: 1 [ck?]
Number of runs ahead and beers consumed by myself when we let him keep the triple: 4, 2
Blocks we traveled by Subway to reach our usual post-game bar: 44
Other teams at Tap-a-Keg during the evening pizza hour: 3
Fraction of those teams who have faced The New Yorker this year: 2/3
Percentage of those who have defeated The New Yorker: 0
Odds that The New Yorker will defeat The Nation, according to Vegas bookies: 2:3
Minimum number of years since The New Yorker team has won seven straight games: 12
Minimum number of years I'll be talking about it, if we pull it off: 12

UPDATE: Not to be outdone on the web as they were on the field, Christian Lorentzen of Harper's chimes in with this dispatch. You see why we're trying to shy away from the softball coverage, kids? Anyway, here you go:

Harper's Magazine congratulates Harold Ross's comic book for adults, also known as The New Yorker, for its 7-4 victory over America's oldest monthly, extending its winning streak to six games. On the field the weekly displayed discipline, resolve, a sharp-shooting propensity for hitting line drives to right field, and classy new baby blue jerseys. Indeed, the Eustace Tillers' play was as dignified and polite as the prose that weekly emerges in its pages. Harper's ragtag squad, meanwhile, was not without flashes flamboyant—at times bordering on psychotic—brilliance. At the hot corner, third baseman Wyatt Mason displayed the same tenacity that earned his literary criticism a recent National Magazine Award. In deep left field, Annotators Captain Ben Austen and Ben "AK-47" Pauker effectively neutralized New Yorker slugger Josh Hersh's bombs. Offensively, the judges of Best American Sliding will no doubt take note of the surly, hobbling, Kirk Gibsonesque B.S. Metcalf's legging out a wallop to the gap in left for a disputed triple. The team's other tripler, publisher-cum-shortstop Rick MacArthur leant new credence to the player-manager model discredited decades back by Pete Rose. Harper's salutes New Yorker staff writer Mark Singer's valiant but failed slide into pitcher-VP Peter Kendall at home plate, and wishes him a quick recovery from the collision. And everyone in magazines knows the interns are our future, thus shoutouts to artful pitcher Katie Jentleson, Hillary "Swamp Thing" Elkins in right, and scoring Icelander Chantal Clarke. Finally, the Readings Section, this reporter included, intends to improve its fielding in future outings, lest it come to be known as The Balk of the Town.