Well I think we know who it's not:



Jessica Lange: hair looks good, but the eyes look all senile and disoriented. Possible?



Oy, Edie Falco. But it's nowhere near as scary as the Wikipedia photo she has not to my knowledge made any attempts to alter, so it's probably not her.



Ha ha ha, Lypsinka



Oh God it's totally Ellen Barkin, duh. Maybe don't pose with Julianne Moore next time, lady! But what a week for the phantom plastic surgery shadow, huh.

So let's examine that tranche for a second: here we have Wurtzel, drawn to David and his big, serious, ambitious, meaty, unfrivolous gold standard of a book; David, drawn to Wurtzel by her fucking leotard and perhaps her nebulous promise to impart upon his serious asset some sort of value-unlocking sense of "buzz"…signing onto one of those confusing, fuzzy subprime relationships that were all the rage, still are. The fine print is almost amusing to us now: the hazy fundamentals and wild histrionics and bombastic promises dependent on "trajectories" neither has any clue how — neither is socialized to have any clue how — to redirect toward a soft landing.

Yes, you have done that sort of fucking.

From a 1996 account of his reading at the KGB Bar:

The critics aren't the only ones angling to prove that they get it. Wallace's contemporaries have shown up at his public appearances in force. When he read at K.G.B., Elizabeth Wurtzel, the author of ''Prozac Nation,'' claimed a spot near the front of the room. The following night, at another jampacked reading, this time at Tower Books in the Village, Ethan Hawke lurked in the back. And at the official book party two nights later at an East Village club, M. G. Lord, the author of ''Forever Barbie,'' can be seen chatting up another novelist of the moment, A. M. Homes. Between puffs of their cigarettes, many people whisper what Wallace says he does not want to hear: he is the current ''it'' boy of contemporary fiction.

And here's how Wurtzel remembers it:

For some stupid reason, no one ever had the sense to separate the truly desperate from the merely decadent, we were all doing too many drugs together at the same time, the people who could handle it with the people who were going to end up dead and worse, and we were too young to see where all this was going to lead. And into this mess walked David Wallace one spring evening, do-rag and all. I don’t think he exactly told me that he was a genius, but I must have gotten that impression, because I believe I was instantly impressed by something about him. Maybe it was just the way he was so open and curious, or the way he was so taken with the silver lamé leotard I was wearing.

And here's Wallace, probably a year later:

"I like not being part of the literary community in New York, particularly in the last year and a half," said Wallace. "[There's] a bizarre pecking order that nobody cares anything about except people who are in that world."

And that was true, and it is true, and it's not just the literary community, but a whole throbbing island that longs and yearns and bleats for the fucking pecking order of it. And as soon as the pecking order is established, it longs to cheat the order, whether it be with scotch and sex and lame leotards or phony credit-default swaps. At some point it became possible, in industries including but surely not limited to literature, to unload one's darkest, most distressed assets — addiction and narcissism and numbness and contempt and incuriosity and selfishness — at a handsome profit, so long as you packaged it all with naked pictures and quippy quotes, and that is exactly what Wurtzel did, again and again, until she finally got sick of it quit for law school. For her that was the solution; it's hard to imagine anyone couldn't go far to rehabilitate oneself merely by evacuating New York:

By appearances, it would have seemed to me that David was doing great, living in Southern California, writing terrific books and pieces, recently married, teaching at a prestigious college. I am not stupid enough to believe that depression does not afflict a person whose life is good, but if he could get by in a hovel in the middle of the Midwest, surely these elements of happy life—love, sunshine, stability—had to be a plus. These things are real, genuine, the stuff depression blocks you from even getting close to. Furthermore, I thought David, at 46, was at a safe age, when things are most likely to be okay or okay enough: the mad search for sex and success that consumes one’s twenties, and then leaves a hangover into your thirties, is done with; the sense of failure, the feeling that it’s all been a waste, that hits after 50 hasn’t come yet. Middle age, which might be a crisis, can also be a calm.

But it wasn't. Who knows why. There is no answer to why some self-obsessed cokehead slut could cash out and get clean and get good and re-channel her energies to the point that she felt she had something to live for while such a merited specimen as Dave, with his voracious mind and evident hard-won goodness and doting students and wife and support system and all that deeply-felt regard of the literary community he'd left behind, did not. There is no answer at all, which is why the fucking pecking order is so stupid to begin with. Which brings me to the comment on the website of New York Magazine, where Wurtzel's uneasy remembrance of her hazy fuckbuddyship with Dave initially appeared, that inspired me to post about this at all:

Elizabeth Wurtzel, predictably, is still beating on the dead (flea-bitten) horse of her undergrad depression. What's more, she wants to trot out the well-known fact that by widely spreading her spindley arachnid legs, she may have garnered Dave Wallace's attention over a misspent weekend in the mid-1990s. We can forgive Dave, who probably hadn't encountered much self-involved, desperate-to-stay-in-the-game pussy at that point. But can we forgive this spent harridan or NY Mag for their faux-sepia toned muckraking? Harder to imagine.

To which I can only reply: try to imagine forgiving them all, Wurtzel included, reader. To withhold forgiveness at a time like this, in a town like this, is simply to persist in the cowardly humoring of the delusions born of the propulsive myopia that won Wurtzel the profitable antipathy of all those peckers that chose to pay attention to her in the first place.

On Saturday, September 13, the Trader took his 8-year-old son to his first Yankees game, against Tampa Bay. “My 8-year-old is asking me questions about the economy. And I’m thinking, You should really think about baseball,” the Trader said.

The Trader paid for great seats. They sat fieldside in the languid summer afternoon, six rows from the Yankees dugout. When the Yankees took the field, the Trader’s son erupted in cheers.

“Jeter! Jeter! Jeter!” he yelled, but the players jogged out to the field, with scarcely a glance toward the stands.

“Daddy, why doesn’t he answer?” the son asked.

And suddenly, the Trader boiled with anger. He had done his part, put in the sixteen-hour days to buy his kid the best seats in the stadium. Lehman, and the career he signed up for, was disappearing in front of his eyes. Yet the Yankees were losing, and Derek Jeter was still going to take home his $21 million, and he couldn’t even bother to show some gratitude. It was a fantasy world, out of touch.

“Those guys have the easiest job,” the Trader thought, “when it’s clear they don’t care. Fuck, in my next life I want to be a baseball player.”

Um, sorry, Trader, I think in the next life people like you get born in Yemen or something! Also, some professional athletes are trying to bail out the likes of your troubled financial systems, God knows why, you ungrateful ungrateful asshole.

1. For instance, they totally rejected the worthless albeit true rumor about Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain's bad toupee and embraced the ex Goldman banker wholeheartedly. He looked like Clark Kent, therefore he would save his company with magical superpowers and common decency and it was really as simple as that.

2. Conversely, they did not like Lehman Brothers CEO Dick Fuld. Did not trust his eyebrows. And seized an early opportunity in June to lambaste him for being a style nazi. He was superficial! And people like that are always way too concerned about what other people think, and they overlook what's inside. Korean Development Bank was no more likely to save him from his deluded sense of reality than Elizabeth Wakefield was Bruce Patman.

3. Early into their shift steering the John Thain love train, they hired a prominent astrologer to see what was in his stars for the year. Just to make sure their instincts were correct. WERE THEY EVER.

The Merrill Lynch CEO's cool troubleshooting at the company looks like it will earn him performance-based compensation (maybe a bonus for his plan to solve the stock-drop debacle?), but the new moon this Friday that links the sun, moon, and a brilliant Uranus, will bring news of sudden changes in relation to Mr. Thain's career path, and he's going to respond in a way no one expects!

See, because this is Wall Street, where it is expected that CEOs are too busy smoking pot and playing bridge — and John Thain plays bridge!? — to notice when they need to sell their company rightthefucknow.

4. They pressed the Lehman Brothers is too obsessed with shopping to have a healthy balance sheet angle when CFO Erin Callan left abruptly. They did not particularly dislike Erin, but they did not approve of her nude lipstick. Indeed, it was ugly.

5. Yeah, and then in July the world's preeminent financial journalist of the era James Stewart advised readers to switch their money into undervalued financial stocks.

Those egghead debate team Pulitzer types always seem to miss out on the action. Sigh.

*And also, Jessica Pressler, who is, as I have disclosed previously, my BFF.

my friends and i went to the NY Mag sponsored highbrown backyard bbq today.
and it was a total failure. first of all it was in some gross parking lot on the east river, so there goes the "highbrow" part of it. second, i dont think they actually bbq'd anything. it was supposed to be a bbq with some sort of tacos, fruit salad, mexican corn, peach cobbler, and beer—tickets were $25 and sold out a few days ago, so you think they would know how many people were there. it was from 1-5pm, we got there just before 3 they were out of: beer, corn, peach cobbler, utensils. so essentially we paid 25 bucks for a stupid cold taco and a couple cubes of watermelon. CJ (from top chef) was there—drinking bourbon and apologizing, "they didn't tell us there were going to be 600 people here" and attempted to give my friend an impromptu soup out of some taco sauce (gross, but they didn't have spoons anyway). i dont even know if that band played either, they were blasting some sort of awful dance music through blown speakers. now i'm stuck with a year subscription of ny mag that i dont want, ugh.

—-—-—-- Forwarded message —-—-—--
From: Yuan, Jada
Date: Thu, Aug 21, 2008 at 1:39 PM
Subject: Survey

(unnecessary stuff redacted—Ed):

Two other things: It's come to my attention that at least one party crasher and one overly ambitious editor have been using these listings to get into events, so I'm going to have to start removing contact info. I'll provide that upon assignment..

So nice try, crashers, but she's onto you. So are we! From a tipster:

"Jada's party crasher Is a man who tries to RSVP under the name Daniel Hartman, obvs trying to play of Darrell Hartman's name since Jada uses him to cover sometimes.


He recently tried to do it for an event I was doing, for which Jada had already rsvp'd too. So I emailed and asked her if she was sending a freelancer, she wasn't and wasn't happy about it.


He also claimed to write for the "Style" section of NYM, um, what? There isn't one idiot."

For this week's examination of the ideal surgically-enhanced face, New York's Jonathan Van Meter spoke with the publisher of a fashion magazine. 'When I told her I was working on a piece about plastic surgery, she leaned in and whispered, “You must talk to David Rosenberg.” Then my friend, who will turn 60 next spring, confessed that she had just plunked down a $4,000 deposit and will be going under Rosenberg’s knife for a face-lift later this year. All told, it will cost her $30,000, including recovery in a fancy hotel and a private nurse attending to her every need.'

The source's name wasn't explicitly revealed in the piece, but there simply aren't that many fashion magazines; there are fewer female publishers; and a basic Nexis search shows that Elle's Carol Smith (pictured here next to New York's plastic-surgery cover) turns 60 in May 2009. In case there was any doubt, Van Meter's "friend" was once his colleague at Vibe magazine, where he was editor and she was publisher in the early 1990s. It didn't take long for Portfolio's Jeff Bercovici to make the connection, and extract an embarrassing admission from the Elle publisher that she was the one with the birthday plastic-surgery plans.

According to Bercovici, Van Meter declined to confirm whether Smith was the publisher in question. Given the obvious clues he so carelessly left, his belated discretion is redundant.

“Andrea Mitchell, myself, all of us in the Washington bureau—Morning Joe has become a staple for us,” Russert told me...

Russert had chuckled when I brought up the recent partisan critiques of NBC News. “That’s nothing new,” he said. Besides, with someone like Scarborough, “it’s not as if people are trying to present him as a news anchor. He’s not. But even though he’s a conservative Republican, he’s not afraid to criticize his own party. And I think people find that refreshing.”

Then there's this from Time editor Mark Halperin:

“I was totally skeptical, and now I’m totally won over,” says Time editor-at-large Mark Halperin, a political analyst at ABC News. “I was a huge fan of Imus, but Joe has taken that real estate and turned it into something—and I say this without hyperbole—revolutionary. There’s no other show that does what they do. They’ve really found a new form.”

And from former NBC evening news anchor Tom Brokaw:

Tom Brokaw summed up the consensus opinion when, a week or so later, he poked his head into Griffin’s office and said, “Scarborough. Who knew?”

So there have been two basically glowing profiles for Scarborough in as many months. Perhaps his shot at helming Meet The Press is not as weak as it initially appeared, assuming he even wants the job.

[New York]

Felker started New York in 1968 as a "new journalism" window into the workings of the city's power structure—but one that defined the power structure broadly, and explored how the city's different spheres collided with each other:

Thirty years ago, not long before his fellow owners and Rupert Murdoch squeezed him out of the magazine he had founded, Felker defined New York very simply as a guide to "how the power game is played, and who are the winners." And Wolfe, his early superstar, has said that "Clay's real interest, although I'm not sure he ever thought it out conceptually, was status and how it operates in New York. ... In New York Magazine, Clay really wrote an enormous novel about the city. ... It was his vision, his plot—a huge novel called The City of Ambition."

Designed as a sort of urban-centric antidote to the New Yorker's more eclectic musings, the magazine fostered a ton of talent, including Tom Wolfe, Gloria Steinem, and Gail Sheehy, Felker's future wife. He lost the magazine to Rupert Murdoch in a hostile takeover in 1976. He would go on to hold a series of editorial jobs at a kaleidoscope of titles, including Esquire, the Daily News, the Village Voice, and US News & World Report. But none would approach the legacy that he left with New York.

Kurt Andersen says that Felker, the middle American emigre to the big city, simply took his mental playbook of how New York worked "literally, and published it in weekly serial form." And look around: that's what everyone—including us—is doing today. For that, we must all acknowledge that Felker's mark will never disappear, as long as this city stays full of smart people with a burning ambition to talk.

[NY Mag]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. Bright Lights, Big City, by Jay McInerney

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

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

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

6. The Devil Wears Prada, by Lauren Weisberger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From one longtime magazine editor:

Listicles: Back in the 1970s (maybe earlier too), Esquire did occasional
spreads called "The Red-Hot Center," in which they'd map out their hierarchy
of, say, Hollywood, or the publishing industry, etc, in discs of saturated
color at various removes from the aforementioned center. They were
considered definitive and brilliant, though hard to say if that was really
so without seeing one again. I can't give you an exact date, but maybe David
Granger has one on hand.

We'll look into that!

From an anonymous email tipster:

For an early prototype of the approval matrix, check Spin’s front-of-the-book, Exposure, circa 1997-1998, when Michael Hirschorn was editor. The now-familiar dots-on-a-grid concept ran just about every month for a while. Not as pretty as VF’s, but arguably a lot funnier.

"The magazine I write for ran an online item in which men were asked what they'd rather do than sit through the movie, and the answers ranged from eating someone else's booger to being mauled by Michael Vick's pit bulls," Edelstein said on NPR. "Excuse me, but I happen to be confident enough in my heterosexual masculinity to enjoy seeing how the female half lives, loves, and wears fabulous clothes — and on my side, I have the Zohan."

Now, we're not sure which feathers were ruffled exactly, but ruffled they must have been as Edelstein sent a staff-wide email today as a mea culpa:

Dear Colleagues:

Permit me to clarify something in Serena's media roundup of yesterday. In discussing Zohan on CBS Sunday Morning and NPR's Fresh Air last week I did cite the Vulture item on what men would rather do than see Sex and the City—"eat someone else's booger," "be mauled by one of Michael Vick's pit bulls," etc. I said I personally liked the movie and resented having my manliness impugned. THIS WAS TONGUE-IN-CHEEK. I thought the Vulture item was very funny! My point was that Adam Sandler's Zohan was an Israeli war hero, a stud muffin, AND a flamboyant hairdresser and would have no problem ju-jitsuing bad guys (or Vulture editors), jumping into bed with women, and going to Sex and the City with me. Never would I seriously attack my brilliant colleagues in public; on the contrary, I hoped my remarks would bring their great efforts more attention.

Back to your regularly scheduled programming...

• "a nonsmoking Japanese man drinking his coffee with an alcoholic beverage—another slowing agent—would likely feel caffeinated 'about five times longer than an Englishwoman who smoked cigarettes but did not drink or use oral contraceptives.'"
• "(Unhealthy behaviors, too, tend to stick together: Fewer than 5 percent of smokers eat breakfast daily.)"

We can't wait for the Brunch issue!

What Good is Breakfast? [NYM]

He is prone to writing sentences like, “Look at M1, M2 and M3 FED money supply. They have gone parabolic for the last 6 years,” as well as sentences like, “Y’all are fucking finished and the asshole Brokers who pumped this shit up will get ass-raped!” He went through a period in March 2008 during which he promised to “reframe from using profanity.” (Short-lived.) He’s posted comments such as “First order of Business: Citigroup is planing to sell 400 Billion dollars of their assets. I find this very scary. I think they need to raise their capital base.... The upcoming Depression will prove we overstepped out boundaries. And out children will pay for our folly.”

And he’s posted comments such as, “Real Estate is fucking over!!!!! Real Estate is fucking over!!!!! Real Estate is fucking over!!!!! Real Estate is fucking over!!!!!” His posting style is so schizophrenic that one might suspect he is either (a) several very different people posting under the same name or (b) schizophrenic. He sometimes sounds like he’s locked in a basement somewhere, surrounded by newspaper clippings on all four walls.

He touches down in comment threads like a rhetorical Tasmanian devil, huffing and puffing in such a hysterical manner as to become, well, kind of hysterical—as when he wrote this (and I’ve made every effort to retain the integrity of the punctuation), in response to an item about Clinton Hill titled “Price Cuts at 936 Fulton Street”:

WHAT?!!!!! Already?!!!! NO!!!!!!! Everyone wants to live on Fulton St. This can’t be happening…… Please help me.… please.….

****Sobs into sleep*********

Chuckie getting ass-raped.

(Chuckie, for the record, appears to be The What’s generic name for the average white Brooklynite. Either that, or it’s a reference to Chuck Schumer. Or possibly Chuck E. Cheese, though it’s not clear why anyone would want to ass-rape Chuck E. Cheese.)

The writer of the article tries, and fails, to figure out who The What is, and uses him a springboard from which to raise issues of anonymity, class anxiety, sublimated anger, fame in the modern era, etc. etc., much as Emily Gould did in her piece in the Times magazine on being a blogger. Which is all well and good, but all that hand-waving is just an excuse to reprint bitchy comments from the What and other Brooklynites, not that anyone should have a problem with that.

The only truly significant issue raised by the story is who will be first to write a big article about blog lurkers. Who are they, and WHY DON'T THEY SAY ANYTHING?

[New York]

• $100,000 worth of cigarettes. Which, depending on the brand, would've bought you tens of thousands of packs. They would be a bit stale, but you could still clean up on a Harlem streetcorner.
• $100,000 worth of magazine subscriptions. You would be sad and probably poor. But maybe they will be worth something in another ten years, on the eBay, when we all read Conde Nast's Gawker Magazine on the Kindles because print is even deader.
• $100,000 worth of blog. You would be a zillionaire, just like Nick Denton and Jason Kottke.
• $100,000 worth of funny photos of cats. ZOMG SO RICH.
• $100,000 worth of access to the Clintons. Sorry, bro.

Relative Investment [NYM]

Even when Wakemen is engaging in mild chastisement—there are not enough ladies (or black people) in New York's "This Is New York" issue!—she can't help but mention how she "want[s] to be Ariel Levy or Emily Nussbaum when [she] grow[s] up." But New York left all her lady heroes off their list of important things from New York! Like "bisexual folk singer Ani Di Franco" and fictional character Carrie Bradshaw.

"To be fair," Wakeman says, fairly, "there's several nice articles on the inside of the magazine extolling New York City's imprint on film, TV and literature. In it, we see diversity that actually reflects cultural demographic reality: Susan Sontag, Toni Morrison, Spike Lee. And the intro to the whole package is about Rhoda, the Mary Tyler Moore spin-off." But! "Where's Gloria Steinem in all her kooky-glasses-wearing glory?" And! "Wasn't Erica Jong's book Fear of Flying (a huge book in its time) set partially in NYC? She's a photogenic lady."

"And[!] what about the character of Carrie Bradshaw or real-life actress Sarah Jessica Parker? Hello? Remember that show, Sex and the City?" Vaguely!

It may seem like we're being mean here but we actually do find Ms. Wakeman to be totally adorable. Stick with Sklar, Jessica! She'll keep you on the straight, narrow, and earnest!

Oh and yes there probably are too many white men in New York this week but it's New York Magazine, the only black person they've put on their cover in more than year is a certain Senator from Illinois.

New York Magazine's 'This Is New York' Issue Cover: Very White, Lots of Dudes [HuffPo]

Sometimes it can be sad to be newsworthy. Sorry, Charlie!

Oh, but what about school head Thomas Kelly, the guy who fired Andrew Trees and Mr. Janice Minn? Turns out, he's a bit of a schmuck.

Tom Kelly was selected to run Horace Mann by the school's board, over the protest of the school's staff. He came from a public school background, and had done admirable work with mentally handicapped kids, but he also allowed a construction companies to dump their toxic garbage all over school grounds.

Here are the dumps in question. Kelly justified this by pointing out that the companies were nice enough to place brand-new athletic fields on top of the landfills. Critics counter that these fields will give the kids cancer and also they are illegal. The State of New York closed the fields and the taxpayers were stuck with the bill for cleaning them up.

Here's a fun factoid: the toxicity of the fields was revealed the same fall that Kelly started at Horace Mann. Then-Attorney General Eliot Spitzer is a Horace Mann alum. His wife Silda is on the board of trustees—and was on the search committee that picked Kelly.

Spitzer only sued one of the three towns that took the cancerous construction garbage through illegal no-bid contracts. It was Eastchester, not Kelly's town of Valhalla. Take from that what you will!

In 2006, the Valhalla field finally reopened, mostly safe for use. Mostly.

The soil was analyzed for PCBs, pesticides, metals, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and volatile organic compounds. Most chemicals for which testing was performed were not detected in the soil, according to the DEC. But of the chemicals that were detected, most fell below state safety guidelines.

Levels of PAHs above state guidelines were found only in sample TP-7, which was the soil taken from the steep slope on the western side of the athletic field, facing Columbus Avenue. In that sample, the DEC acknowledged that levels of PAHs exceeded state guidelines, but concluded that "routine exposure to soil on the slope is probably unlikely." The agency noted that the District should maintain the grass cover on the slope to further reduce the potential for exposure.

(During Kelly's Horace Mann tenure, the school got artificial turf for its athletic field, which is not located on top of a cancerous dump.)

The Alligator Sunglasses Lady

This mysterious lady is a Horace Mann trustee. Her daughter started the offensive Facebook group that caught the attention of history teacher Peter Sheehy. So, naturally, one day she marched up to Sheehy and teacher Danielle McGuire (the target of the Facebook group) and had an insane argument with McGuire about how the teacher invaded the daughter's privacy and read daughter's secret journal by browsing the public Facebook group the daughter started. Then alligator sunglasses woman accused the teacher of calling another kid a Nazi, which almost got the teacher fired, even though it didn't happen. So—let's meet Alligator Sunglasses Lady!

Her name is Wendy Siegel. She's on the right. Her husband is Stephen B. Siegel, chairman of Global Brokerage for CB Richard Ellis.

"Jeffrey Robbins"

This is the little boy who harrassed Danielle McGuire for being a liberal who tried to talk about minorities in class, which upset young Robbins very much. He accused McGuire of calling him a "Nazi" and even claimed to have a tape. Of course, he didn't. His personal hero is Horace Mann alum Roy Cohn, though one wonders if he knows about the closet queer thing. The spoiled little shit also ended up class president! According to a tipster, the charming young Upper East Sider has two doctor parents, got early acceptance to Columbia, and recently "cancelled a meeting of the women's issues group at HM because he didn't like them." Here he is in the Horace Mann yearbook!

Confidential to Columbia: this kid? Really?

This week's Horace Mann controversy involves Facebook. Students were using the semi-public, pseudo-private space to attack their teachers. And even though seeing a teacher running errands is a perverse (and often etc.) experience, Horace Mann teachers are people, too, and were quite offended to be called "bitches" online.

Of course, parents, who are paying over $29,000 a year to send their precious and precocious little tykes to Horace Mann, were equally offended by the teachers' touchiness. Facebook is private space, they claimed. And we're not paying you to have an opinion, we're paying you to get our kid into Yale. And in the fall out after Academy X, the satirical novel about an unnamed private school by Horace Mann teacher Andrew Trees, parents were also annoyed that Trees got away with publicly mocking the school while students (customers) were getting chastised for "blowing off steam" online.

And in the end, the kids could do whatever they want. They kid who started the most offensive Facebook group was recently elected class president. That should help his chances with Princeton. The school itself had no comment through their P.R. agent.

(Another option for concerned parents is to not send their kids to a school with a P.R. agent.)