If only we had news of an old white man in the media (THEME)... Hello, Lewis Lapham! The NYT checks in on him, just because, and finds him still wearing nice suits and putting out Lapham's Quarterly, which is still a going concern. Here is pretty much everything about Lewis Lapham in one single anecdote, in which, fresh out of Yale, he interviews for a job with the CIA:

The first question he was asked in the interview was, "When standing on the 13th tee at the National Golf Links in Southampton, which club does one take from the bag?"

"They wanted to make sure you were the right sort," Mr. Lapham recalled. He found the question off-putting and dropped his spy ambitions for journalistic ones (although he points out that he knew the right answer - a 7-iron).

What the hell is Lou Dobbs doing now? He is reportedly talking to CNBC, about maybe having a show there? Lou Dobbs and Sheriff Joe in 2012!


And speaking of old TV guys doing things: Charlie Rose is going to be writing a column for the new Bloomberg-ed BusinessWeek! Strange, since they canned Maria Bartiromo and all her famous cronies already. Anyhow Charlie's column will "offer insights into and takeaways from" things, which is how he hits you from two angles.


More college kids out of control, when it comes to journalism! The Arizona State J-School invited Sheriff Joe "Crazy Racist Xenophobic Joe" Arpaio to come talk, but he "was cut short Monday night when a group of protestors broke into song." Hopefully that song was Reggaeton.


And finally: National Geographic Adventure is for sale.

Which is why I can't get mad at your hasty political backtracking. Something about that would be so "typical Democrat self-immolating," so "Nation of Whiners" of me. Instead I will leave you with this story: yesterday I attended a panel on income inequality at Barnes & Noble featuring my own personal Jesus, Wall Street Journal columnist Tom Frank and former Harper's editor-in-chief Lewis Lapham. Tom's new book The Wrecking Crew is a hysterically funny survey of the hysterically vast destruction Republicans and their unabashed contempt for government have unleashed upon the government. If we were more like them, we would have figured out a way to convincingly get voters to substitute out "America" for "government" in that last sentence, but no. We are just so relentlessly self-critical! I heard one spectator whine about how he would vote for Ralph Nader or Ron Paul before Obama. Asked another, a late arriving senior citizen, afterward: "But did they let the Democrats off the hook? The Democrats always let the Republicans start wars!" And while it was true, it was the sort of rhetorical question that was its own explanation. Which is to say, Janice Min, I see some dirt on your shoulder, could I brush it off for you?

To an im-

portant personage Russert asked one

or two faintly impertinent questions,

usually about a subject of little or

no concern to anybody outside the

rope lines around official Washing-

ton; sometimes he discovered a con-

tradiction between a recently issued

press release and one that was dis-

tributed by the same politician

some months or years previously.

No matter with which spoon Rus-

sert stirred the butter, the reply was

of no interest to him, not worth his

notice or further comment. He had

sprinkled his trademark salt, his

work was done. The important per-

sonage was free to choose from a

menu offering three forms of re-

sponse—silence, spin, rancid lie. If

silence, Russert moved on to anoth-

er topic; if spin, he nodded wisely; if

rancid lie, he swallowed it.

Worse, even, than Lapham's words is the overenthusiastic praise he presents from Russert's establishment friends.

Madeleine Albright, Clinton's Secretary of State: "As a public official, it was really, first of all, a treat to get on the show."

Cheney aide Mary Matalin: "He never treated [politicians] with the cynicism that attends some of these interviews. So they had a place to be loved."

Sam Donaldson, ABC: "He [Russert] understood as well as anyone, maybe better than

almost anyone, that the reason political reporters are there is not to speak truth to power... but to make those who say we have the truth — politicians — explain it."

It's easy to fall in love with Lapham's alternate view:

Long ago in the days before

journalists became celebrities, their

enterprise was reviled and poorly

paid, and it was understood by work-

ing newspapermen that the presence

of more than two people at their fu-

neral could be taken as a sign that

they had disgraced the profession.

Related: Lewis Lapham Mag is the New Ambien

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

• Sulzberger to Morgan Stanley: "I'd like my money back, thanks." [Fortune]
  
• New Japanese glossy mag about evil foreigners stirs up controversy. [Guardian]
  
• Time Inc. spending the money it freed up with layoffs on web crap. [MediaPost]
  
• Why a federal judge dismissed Steven Hatfill's lawsuit against the Times. [NYT]
  
• Enough about Maria Bartiromo, what about the dude who allegedly plowed her on the plane? [Forbes]
  
• Lewis Lapham: "Stand on the back of talent. Ride the surfboard of genius." Crest the wave of bad metapors. [AdAge]
  

...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]

And, since you're obviously wondering, we too are also very pleased, if only for slightly different reasons: Roger Hodge is undeniably hot. Like, Kyle McLachlan but way better. The hotness runs deeper than you think, too:

Mr. Hodge was born and raised in Del Rio, Tex., and as the son of a rancher knows his way around cattle, sheep and a gun. The family spread is now a hunting ground, and Mr. Hodge's gimlet eye extends beyond raw copy to the scope of a rifle.

Dear, sweet God. Can't you just imagine Hodge working hard on the ranch? The intense Texas heat forcing him to go shirtless, his muscles glistening in the sun as he surveys the land, trusty rifle in hand...

Oh! Sorry. Didn't realize you were still here. After the jump, the full release from Harper's.

****************************
ROGER D. HODGE TO BECOME THIRTEENTH
EDITOR OF HARPER S MAGAZINE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

November 29, 2005 John R. MacArthur, president and publisher of Harper s Magazine, today announced that Roger D. Hodge would become Editor of the 155-year-old monthly when Lewis H. Lapham assumes the title of Editor Emeritus in the spring of next year. Roger Hodge joined the magazine as an intern in June 1996; after his internship he was hired as a fact checker. Hodge has made significant contributions to the magazine throughout his tenure: he joined the magazine s acclaimed Readings section in 1997 and edited the section from 1999 to 2003; in December 2000 he orchestrated the relaunch of the magazine s website, Harpers.org, and created the popular Weekly Review. In the fall of 2003 Hodge left the Readings section, and in December of 2003 he oversaw a radical redesign of Harpers.org; that month he also began writing a monthly print column, Findings, a compendium of medical, scientific, and environmental absurdities drawn from recent news reports and scientific journals. Hodge was named Deputy Editor of the magazine in November of 2004.

Hodge, 38, was born and raised in Del Rio, Texas, where his family has been in the ranching business for five generations. He attended the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee and eventually made his way to New York City in pursuit of a Ph.D. in philosophy at The New School for Social Research. Hodge received a master s degree but abandoned his dissertation to work at Harper s Magazine. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and their two sons.

Hodge will be inheriting a magazine that is the strongest it has been since it was redesigned in 1984. Newsstand sales are at their highest level (43,287 average for the first nine months of 2005), and the renewal rate is 72.3%, an historic high.

Harper s Magazine, founded in 1850, is the oldest continually published general interest magazine in the United States.

Harper's Set to Name Its Next Editor [NYT]

Which is just what we were about to do, until we read this sentence in the press release:

In addition to editing the magazine and writing over 300 essays for it, Lapham, over the past 29 years, published 13 books and established himself as one of a handful of the country s public intellectuals.

And then we realized: We kind of hate him, the prolific bastard.

Editor of Harper's Will Retire [NYT]
Lewis Lapham to Become Editor Emeritus of Harper's Magazine [Harper's]

"He began to praise her beauty and speak to her, romance her," Mr. Lapham recounted, speaking of Mr. Polanski and Ms. Telle, strangers until that moment. "At one point he had his hand on her leg and he said to her: 'I can put you in the movies. I can make you the next Sharon Tate.'"

Testifying in a libel case setting Mr. Polanski, 71, against Vanity Fair magazine, which reported the anecdote in an article in July 2002, Mr. Lapham said that the incident was embedded in his memory. "I was impressed by the remark, not only because it was tasteless and vulgar, but because it was a clich ," he said.

Whereas Lapham sharing cocktails at Elaine's with a movie director and a model, hey, that's fresh and original.

Lapham Takes Stand in Polanski Libel Trial [NYT]