He did a remarkable job of not saying much. At 8:15 the party had barely begun at the downtown hotspot, known for its strict velvet rope and the racy performances on its main stage, the gregarious Tank Jones and his brother Marvin (in the role as Levi's trainer) were some of the first people to arrive. They installed the one-time human campaign prop at a table in the corner of the balcony so that several PR people could start the parade of press. The rest of the venue was practically empty, but everyone was clustered around Levi.

As the Observer's John Koblin interviewed Playgirl's spokesman Daniel Nardicio about the future of the magazine, the Levi interviews started. Everyone made way for a camera crew from Entertainment Tonight, which has exclusive access to Levi for all the behind-the-scenes action for the photo shoot that is taking place right now (if everything goes according to schedule). We didn't get close enough to hear what they asked during their ten minutes with Levi.

As they clear out, there were more print interviews to do. Michael Musto came by to say hi, but he interviewed Levi at his hotel earlier. I asked Musto if he was a good interview. He said yes, but agrees that it's hard to get him to say much. Jo Piazza from CNN came in and taped a few second with the Johnston crew. Before she started her interveiew, Tank said he's not answering questions about Sarah Palin or about suing for custody of Tripp, Levi's son with Palin's daughter Bristol. Then he flirted with her a little bit as she squeezed in next to Levi to ask her questions. Most of the questions were the same all night: How is this different from Alaska? What is he going to show? Is he ready for the shoot? Does he know that he's a gay icon? Will he do more porn? What does the future hold?

Levi always answers with the fewest words possible. This may make him appear a bit dim, but it seems a smart move for a guy who's standing around a bunch of people paid to turn any utterance he makes into "news." With the reporters gone, he quietly joked with Tank and Marvin.

When Piazza was done, he joked a bit with Nardicio, teaching him how to tuck a dollop of chew under his lip. "Don't you throw up on this table!" Tank chided. A PR person came by and said there were more interviews to be done. "I know. This isn't my first rodeo," Levi said. Another reporter sat down, this one from People. They knew to send a pretty girl.

When she left, the PR man told Tank that Page Six boss Richard Johnson wanted an introduction. Tank responded, "We're not talking to them. No pictures, nothing." The PR man conveyed the message to Johnson. "He just wants to say hi," Mr. PR pleaded with Tank. But Tank had made up his mind: No Levi for Johnson. "That's fine," said the Page Six editor before heading back downstairs. After he left, Tank complained about a Page Six item accusing Levi having a small dick and thus afraid to do any full-frontal shots: "That's not true!"

There was a break in the action and a PR girl brought by the trophy Levi will receive later in the evening: an 11-inch dildo made of silver. Everyone at the table laughed nervously and made jokes about how Levi isn't going to accept a dildo. Levi returned his trophy to the nice lady and said, "I can't believe I just won a giant silver dildo." He and Tank conferred and decide there can't be any pictures taken of him holding it, so they plan to have Nardicio take the stage with him and hold the award.

Then the photographers arrived. In groups of two, they came by the corner, their flashbulbs blinding in the dark club. Levi knew to look directly into the camera and then occasionally look away to blink. He didn't look like he was having any fun. When all that was over, he passed some time ogling the scantily-clad go-go dancers down below. Tank said, "Those are all real women right? I don't want to look if they're not real women." Another laugh. Nardicio tells them that they're all real women. I pointed out that there were definitely some drag queens in the mix. "That's OK, I didn't want those ones anyway," Levi responded. He told me that he hadn't had any time to go out and party while in New York City. "It's been all work. I'm all about business," he says. "But I like New York more each time I come here." What does he think about this event? "It's different," is all he'll say.

As the show starts, Gawker alum Joshua David Stein showed up asking questions for New York magazine. It was getting loud, the house was full. Tank informed him they'd do an interview later. Levi leaned over the balcony to watching the award ceremony on stage and performances by the likes of boy/boy/girl aerialist trio Mantryx. When the intermission came, the crew decided to go outside for some air.

Out on the sidewalk, it is a whole different scene. Dressed in identical tuxedos like they all went shopping at the same men's store earlier that evening, they moved as a unit. Flanked by two enormous black men, Levi wasn't easy to approach. That didn't stop the reporters. Kelefa Sanneh from the New Yorker came up received a stern lecture from Tank about not asking about Palin or custody. Sanneh started his round of questioning but was cut off by the arrival of two 20-something guys who made up TMZ's camera crew. They'd been tailing Levi and his crew ever since they arrived in New York and seemed almost like old friends. Sanneh backed off, to avoid getting captured by their camera. TMZ doesn't care about restrictions and they began asking about custody and Palin. Tank demurred. "Come on, you know better than that."

While Tank was distracted by dealing with the TMZ mess, Jacob Bernstein from The Daily Beast snuck up and peppered Levi with questions and scribbled furiously in his notebook. A male-female duo from Hollywood Life sidled up and began asking their own questions and with a Flip camera. After the questions, the Hollywood Life crew each took their picture with Levi. With Levi alone again, Sanneh came back for a second attempt at an interview. This time, though, he talked more to Tank that Levi. It's easy to go that direction, since Tank is a gregarious quote machine while Levi answers everything with about three words.

Levi was scheduled to accept his award as soon as the ceremony restarted after the intermission. The PR girl shadowing him told him and Nardicio to go hang out at Nick Denton's table so they'd be right next to the stage. but there isn't any room at the Gawker Media overlord's table. Levi headed instead for socialite Tinsley Mortimer's table where photographers eagerly snapped the unlikely pairing. Joshua David Stein returned for his promised interview, but Levi said he needs clear it with Tank. Stein rebutted that Tank had already cleared it, but Levi — who either didn't remember, didn't care, or simply wanted to protect himself — turned him down again, this time a little more firmly. Marvin stepped in and said they'd talk to Tank and do the interview later.

Levi asked who he needs to thank in his speech which he obviously hasn't thought about until then. Nardicio told him to thank Fleshbot and The Box. Levi added that he should also say something about the upcoming issue of Playgirl and to tell people to buy it. He is all business.

When his award was announced he and Nardicio went on stage where Levi successfully avoided being photographed with a big silver dildo. His speech was exactly what he planned: He thanked Fleshbot and The Box and then told everyone to buy his issue of Playgirl.

After leaving the stage, he meets up with Tank and Marvin and they head out the door. He has to get up early to work out before his big shoot. Our colleague Irin over at Jezebel got her questions answered about the type of ladies Levi likes and JDS eventually got his interview, making poor Richard Johnson the only person denied the chance to exchange banalities with the man of the hour. Levi, like he said, was all about business, and last night his business was spectacle.

Top three photos by Hee Jin Kang, bottom by GuestofaGuest

Media writer Ken Auletta explored the purported arrogance of Page and co-founder Sergey Brin in his Google book. From an exceprt in the New Yorker (subscriber-only link):

Diller... recalled visiting Page and Brin in the early days of Google. Diller was disconcerted that Page, even as they talked, stared fixedly at the screen of his P.D.A. "It's one thing if you're in a room with 20 people and someone is using his P.D.A.," Diller recalled.

"I said to Larry, ‘Is this boring?' "

"No. I'm interested. I always do this," Page said.

"Well, you can't do this," Diller said. "Choose."

"I'll do this," Page said matter-of-factly, not lifting his eyes from his handheld device.
"So I talked to Sergey," Diller said. "I left thinking that more than most people they were wildly self-possessed."

Then a couple of years later, the co-founder of Twitter, who used to work at Google, straight up "laughed" at Diller, at a conference. Barry Diller gets no respect from the kids these days.

Friday, October 16

"Paired readings" with New Yorker writers. It has a wine-snob connotation that will go over well! At 7, try Daniyal Mueenuddin and Salman Rushdie. At 9:30, Jonathan Lethem and Colson Whitehead. Count the stereotypical Brooklyn writer types in the crowd and report back to us!

Or better yet, skip both those things and go see Roger Angell, Adam Gopnik, Ariel Levy, Mark Singer, and Judith Thurman standing up on a stage and telling "stories about life at the magazine." Narcissistically alluring! I hope Roger Angell tells the one about when an argument over the literary merits of baseball vs. boxing led him into a fistfight with AJ Liebling, after which Angell ended up in the hospital with irreversible brain damage. Or did we just make that up? Show up and find out!

Saturday, October 16

At 10 a.m., Ariel Levy interviews Rachel Maddow. That is brutally early, so it better be good and full of bawdy discussion of lesbianism. Also at 10: A panel featuring our favorite human calculator Nate Silver, and another one about advertising featuring Steve Stoute. If you guys got together I bet you could make some money.

At 1 p.m., Malcolm Gladwell gives a talk on "The Curious Case of Michael Vick." In fact there was nothing curious about his case at all. Sounds unbearable(-ly intriguing! Send us a report of the five biggest Gladwellian leaps of credulity.)

At 4, an interview of Tyler Perry. How does he come up with so many similar characters? Ask him!

Go have dinner, then at 10 p.m. the theater nerds can go see Tilda Swinton talk to Hilton Als, and the music nerds can go see Steve Earle, and the real music nerds can just follow Sasha Frere-Jones from event to event all day, glancing at him bashfully from beneath their iPods.

Sunday, October 17

Foodies can walk around with Calvin Trillin and eat dim sum. Highbrow alcoholics go drink beer at noon with Burkhard Bilger who btw picks like the best story topics of anyone. There's a whole slew of New Yorker writers talking about themselves and their work. Take your pick. (I bet they love this shit. Can we get a festival, over here? Unfair and classist.)

Noon: Photography with Platon. Fashiony!

At 4 p.m. they close things out with "Shouts & Murmurs Live," featuring Woody Allen, Simon Rich, George Saunders, and a host of other people who—we're guessing—are funny writers but are not, in fact, master stand-up comedians. Skip this and go see whatever's happening at Upright Citizens Brigade. It costs like five bucks and will probably be funnier.

Hope you didn't read all the way to the end of this and miss your chance to buy tickets. That would suck.

The shady ass Rendon Group is profiling journalists who want to embed with the US Army to determine how pro-Army they are. P.J. Tobia got ahold of the profile they did on him! "His most recent article is neutral-to-positive while his previous work has been neutral or neutral-to-negative." Whoever wrote that gets paid way more than actual journalists, btw.


Kansas City Star columnist Mike Hendricks decided to apply for an advertised position at a PR firm like so: "I would be happy to submit an application, but I'd hate to be wasting your time and mine if it turns out this is some minor league position with a paltry salary." Haha! You tell them what is what, Kansas City Star columnist Mike Hendricks.


You will want to be making friends with Amelia Lester, because she is 26 years old and the brand new managing editor of the New Yorker. She's a Harvard alum! And a foreigner. Amelia hey let's go hang out, oh did I mention this story idea I've been kicking around? I did? Here, have another drink while I tell you again.


In the second quarter of '09, newspaper ad sales were down 29% compared to a year ago. But hey, what is a $2.8 billion hole to an industry as strong as newspapers?

The reviews are starting to come in and evidence is contradictory. On the positive side, Lisa Schwarzbaum from Entertainment Weekly gives it a B and says it's, "cinematically dazzling, to be sure, 
 enhanced by an meticulously chosen retro soundtrack." In New York David Edelstein gushes.

Even more than his other genre mash-ups, this is a switchback journey through Tarantino's twisted inner landscape, where cinema and history, misogyny and feminism, sadism and romanticism collide and split and re-bond in bizarre new hybrids. The movie is an ungainly pastiche, yet on some wacked-out Jungian level it's all of a piece.

Oh, but his fellow Gothamite David Denby couldn't disagree more, and rails against it.

Like all the director's work after Jackie Brown, the movie is pure sensation. It's disconnected from feeling, and an eerie blankness-it's too shallow to be called nihilism-undermines even the best scenes.

Even the trades are split. Variety comes out in favor:

By turns surprising, nutty, windy, audacious and a bit caught up in its own cleverness, the picture is a completely distinctive piece of American pop art with a strong Euro flavor that's new for the director.

And The Hollywood Reporter against:

Otherwise the film lacks not only tension but those juicy sequences where actors deliver lines loaded with subtext and characters drip menace with icy wit. Tarantino never finds a way to introduce his vivid sense of pulp fiction within the context of a war movie. He is not kidding B movies as he was with Grindhouse nor riffing on cinema as with Pulp Fiction and the Kill Bill films.

The only people who can come to a consensus are the British where both the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph hated it.

Damn, now it looks like we're going to have to save Harvey Weinstein from bankruptcy and pay our $12.50 to try to figure out for ourselves whether or not it's good. God, critics are even worse than Nazis.

The latest purge will cost 13 Conde receptionists their jobs, according to John Koblin. The most famous of those, Keith Kelly reports: The New Yorker's "guy who is absurdly overqualified to be a receptionist". [Or not—See update below].

The most eyebrow-raising of the cuts was The New Yorker's jack-of-all-trades, Charles Stanley Ledbetter, who had been praised in book forwards as a beloved figure by The New Yorker Editor-in-Chief David Remnick.

A 20-year veteran, Ledbetter had been a curator of The New Yorker Gallery, and had worked on several book projects, including the humor book collection "Fierce Pajamas" and a collection of business cartoons from the weekly magazine.

The New Yorker, of course, could not simply have some underling there answering phones; they had a Renaissance man for whom signing for packages was just a way to fill the time when he wasn't plotting a new (invitation-only) art exhibition in the magazine's lobby. The Village Voice described Ledbetter (pictured) in a 2001 profile:

Like so many on the edit staff at The New Yorker, C.S. Ledbetter is not content to simply do his job, which ranges from reading unsolicited manuscripts to working the phones. Fiction writing and pastels are two genres Ledbetter has turned his hand to in the past. But in his latest bid for immortality, The New Yorker's underground cult leader has turned the reception area, on the 20th floor of 4 Times Square, into an art gallery, decorating it as if it were his own home.

Ledbetter even wrote a letter to us once. Ah well; C.S., you were meant for bigger things. Conde is a little low-rent for you now, anyhow. You all see what's happening here, don't you? Conde is turning into Hearst: a once-mighty and glamorous company where the expense accounts were no object, being painfully transformed into just another cost-cutting paper-pusher. (No offense, Hearst). The new greeter in the lobby of the New Yorker, and every other Conde mag: "A phone."
[Pic: Paula Gillen]

UPDATE: The New Yorker's PR person tells us that although the magazine is losing a receptionist, it is not losing Ledbetter; they're keeping him on staff by moving him into an editorial position. Specific details are still being worked out. So, whimsy lives! Receptionists, however, still do not.

Like the Kodak pitch didn't you come away from that thinking, "I need this Kodak film carousel to display pictures of my pristine family or else I'm denying them my affection." All of the fictional (and sometimes real) products that made their way into Don's pitch room have been marketed as though they extensions of one's personality. Be it a can of shaving cream or a cup of coffee, each product says something about you that you want people to know.

That's why reading this piece in the New Yorker about a Mad Men ad meeting is cringe-inducing.

Alison Hoffman, the marketing director, described a Web-site promotion that will allow users to create their own "Mad Men" avatars, choosing among different ties, pipes, crinolines, and pearls.

"We're still adding accessories," she said.

"We need more purses!" someone suggested.

Next, Theresa Beyer, the vice-president of activation (another thing that didn't exist in the sixties), outlined a tie-in with Banana Republic, including a contest for a walk-on role. "Banana Republic has really taken this promotion to the nth degree," she said. Then she announced an activation coup: the Mets had just agreed to designate a "Mad Men" seating section at one of their games.

"Get out of here!" Theano Apostolou, the head of publicity, said.

"The exciting thing is everyone in our section is going to have a fedora," Beyer went on. "Of course, the band around it will have to be Mets colors." The marketers cooed: happiness.

Unhappiness! Mets seats? Ugh! Are we also to expect another long caravan of subways shrink-wrapped in an eye-assaulting Sterling Cooper theme? It's embarrassing to step into a train car that's been hijacked by advertisers. Train passengers will keep their eyes on their shoes generally, unless they be thought of as saps. So how well will sitting in a cramped plastic chair with a giant Don Draper silhouette at the Mets game evoke the themes of necessity, luxury, or personality? You can't just slap a logo on something and call it a "branding exercise ."

Thankfully though, the ladies are onto something with the clothes and the avatars. Those are direct extensions of our personalities. Things we want but are convinced we need and Mad Men can give them to us. Indeed, if there's activity that takes more time than putting an outfit together it's the agonizing amount of time I spend looking for the right avatar. Recently, I settled for nice cropped picture of a fictional red head named Joan Holloway.

Gladwell being Gladwell, he arrives at his conclusion using thousands of words, large portions of which are devoted to riffs on card games and British invasions of Turkish islands, among other things, but his main point is this:

Since the beginning of the financial crisis, there have been two principal explanations for why so many banks made such disastrous decisions. The first is structural. Regulators did not regulate. Institutions failed to function as they should. Rules and guidelines were either inadequate or ignored. The second explanation is that Wall Street was incompetent, that the traders and investors didn't know enough, that they made extravagant bets without understanding the consequences. But the first wave of postmortems on the crash suggests a third possibility: that the roots of Wall Street's crisis were not structural or cognitive so much as they were psychological.

Now, I read Gladwell's piece and do think that his argument has some merit. However, I have a fundamental disagreement with something, and it is this: I believe that the psychological roots of the Wall Street crisis, the same roots that Gladwell is saying were the driving force behind everything that went wrong, would not have existed if it were not for the massive cracks in the structural and cognitive foundation of the banking industry. In other words, the incompetence of regulators combined with the blissful ignorance of the players involved joined to create a perfect storm of ego-tripping. You follow?

Now, surely a strong argument can be made that if the human psyche weren't so Goddamned flawed, then the other factors wouldn't have affected it in the first place, thus all of the blame falls squarely at the feet of humanity's vast psychological faults, but then you're just getting into a great big "which came first, the chicken or the egg?" argument, and honestly it's 5:40 in the damn morning right now and I'm only confusing myself the more I write about this, so just go and read the thing yourself and make up your own damn mind, okay?!

Cocksure [New Yorker]

Reports the New York Times:

Since 2001, the Central Intelligence Agency has developed plans to dispatch small teams overseas to kill senior Qaeda terrorists, according to current and former government officials.

(CIA Director Leon) Panetta scuttled the program, which would have relied on paramilitary teams, shortly after the C.I.A.'s counterterrorism center recently informed him of its existence. The next day, June 24, he told the two Congressional Intelligence Committees that the plan had been hidden from lawmakers, initially at the instruction of former Vice President Dick Cheney.

Current and former officials said that the program was designed as a more "surgical" solution to eliminating terrorists than missile strikes with armed Predator drones, which cannot be used in cities and have occasionally resulted in dozens of civilian casualties.

Today's Times piece confirms what's been widely rumored of late—That Leon Panetta's June 24th disclosure to members of the Senate Intelligence committee had everything to do with Dick Cheney's rumored covert ops squads that Seymour Hersh had spoken of. Whether or not any of this was legal appears to be open for debate at this point.

CIA Had Plans To Assassinate Qaeda Leaders [New York Times]

Gladwell begins with a recitation from the May U.S. Senate hearing on the newspaper industry, the one where David Simon spouted nonsense, and the one that has apparently become a sort of media Woodstock, dividing generations in the big ongoing publishing upheaval. Gladwell places himself firmly on the side of the oldies, and draws a tenuous parallel between the hearings and Anderson's book. Both apparently illustrate the stupidity of West Coast reefer hippies like Jeff Bezos and Arianna Huffington, who just hate selling content, or something.

In Gladwell's review, Anderson is constantly making imaginary pronouncements, which make him look like an idiot. He wants to turn the New York Times into Meals on Wheels, run entirely by volunteers! What a jerk. He says a free price is like "magic!" What?? And Anderson said nice things about YouTube, noted spectacular failure:

When you let people upload and download as many videos as they want, lots of them will take you up on the offer... Although the magic of Free technology means that the cost of serving up each video is "close enough to free to round down" [according to Anderson,] ...a recent report by Credit Suisse estimates that YouTube's bandwidth costs in 2009 will be three hundred and sixty million dollars.

Of course, Credit Suisse numbers may well be grossly overstated, and Gladwell doesn't mention that YouTube is expected to take in $241 million in revenue this year, twice one estimate of last year's sales.

Which isn't to say he's necessarily wrong about Anderson's book, or about Google's user-generated content being "crap." But it does show that, if you're looking for a long-term investment, a Free poster child like Google is probably a better place to park your cash than the magazine group where the two money-losingest titles have big fights over who has less of a grip on the future.

Panetta appears to be the first Obama adminsitration official to publicly voice what some in the media have been occasionally speculating, and what many have speculated in private conversation—That the recent Dick Cheney "Obama is going to get us all killed" media tour leads one to believe that Cheney may be secretly hoping for terrorists to strike again on American soil so that he can run around saying "I told you so."

A few miles from the agency's headquarters, which are in Langley, Virginia, former Vice-President Dick Cheney delivered an extraordinary attack on the Obama Administration's emerging national-security policies. Cheney, speaking at the American Enterprise Institute, accused the new Administration of making "the American people less safe" by banning brutal C.I.A. interrogations of terrorism suspects that had been sanctioned by the Bush Administration. Ruling out such interrogations "is unwise in the extreme," Cheney charged. "It is recklessness cloaked in righteousness."

In January, the Obama Administration banned the "enhanced" techniques that the Bush Administration had approved for the agency, including waterboarding and depriving prisoners of sleep for up to eleven days. Panetta, pouring a cup of coffee, responded to Cheney's speech with surprising candor. "I think he smells some blood in the water on the national-security issue," he told me. "It's almost, a little bit, gallows politics. When you read behind it, it's almost as if he's wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point. I think that's dangerous politics."

The other interesting takeaway from the piece was a passage on Panetta's desire to find new, less brutal interrogation techniques for use in the future.

Panetta is already forging ahead on one important reform: he plans to replace the abusive interrogation program with a legally acceptable, non-coercive alternative. A task force led by the Harvard Law School professor Philip Heymann has been advising him on a proposal to create an élite U.S. government interrogation team, staffed by some of the best C.I.A., F.B.I., and military officers in the country, and drawing on the advice of social scientists, linguists, and other scholars. "What I'm pushing for is to establish a facility where we develop a team of interrogators trained in the latest techniques," Panetta said. "That's the one thing I'm worried about, frankly. There just aren't that many people who have the interrogation abilities we're going to need." Heymann describes the effort to create "the best non-coercive interrogation team in the world" as the equivalent of "a NASA-like, man-on-the-moon effort" for human-intelligence gathering. He said that members of his task force have travelled to France, England, Japan, Australia, and Israel, in order to compile comparative information on what interrogators do. "We also went to the best people in the U.S.," he added.

Somewhere in America over the next few days, Dick Cheney's copy of this week's New Yorker will arrive and he'll read Leon Panetta's remarks. Agitated, he'll toss the magazine across the room in disgust, accidentally shattering the glass on a framed photo Mary Cheney and her spouse Heather Poe resting on the mantle. He'll then call out to Lynne to prepare his favorite beverage, and Lynn will oblige by bringing him a highball glass filled with puppy's blood, on the rocks, garnished with two Napfilion olives on a yellow plastic spear, and all will be well once again in Dick Cheney's world.

The Secret History [New Yorker]

Colbert's guest stint will mark the first time that Newsweek, which recently underwent it's second major design reconstruction in three years, has ever used a guest editor in its 76-year history. Meacham told The Observer how the idea came about.

Mr. Meacham said the idea was born from a lunch he had with Mr. Colbert at Gabriel's near Columbus Circle.

"I was just very impressed with the range of his knowledge and he had an almost encyclopedic feel for anything that came up," said Mr. Meacham. "As we think about ways to both inform and surprise readers of the magazine, the notion of having him as a guest editor seemed like a good one."

Meacham denied that the decision to bring Colbert in was a stunt similar to Tina Brown's bringing in Roseanne Barr to edit the New Yorker in 1995.

Mr. Meacham said his inspiration was when Bono served as guest editor of the Africa issue in Vanity Fair in July 2007.

"The notion of having someone who cares deeply about an issue and who wants to do something more than being profiled or writing a single piece has some appeal to us," said Mr. Meacham.

The Observer piece says that Colbert will write an essay for the issue, help design its cover, hand out assignments, pick pull-quotes to highlight, and feature "a number of unpublished letters to the editor Mr. Colbert has written to Newsweek since he was a kid."

Desperate PR stunt or not, we think it sounds like the most fun week of work Newsweek staffers will ever have at the magazine.

Newsweek Turns to Tina Tricks: Meet Guest Editor … Stephen Colbert! [New York Observer]
Image via Collider

Brushes has a companion app called Brushes Viewer that records the creation of a drawing from start to finish, and we've posted the video of Colombo creating his cover art below.

Washington Post dork Chris Cillizza admitted it.

CNET Newser Caroline McCarthy did not have to see a man about a horse.

Revision3 CEO Jim Louderback attempted to rent a car from a shoe store.

New Yorker Twitter controversialist Susan Orlean complained about an inanimate object, for a change.

Wired research editor Joanna Pearlstein rapped her job applicants' knuckles with a Twitter-shaped ruler.

Did you witness the media elite tweet something indiscreet? Please email us your favorite tweets — or send us more Twitter usernames.

So far Orlean is doing the punching, and Baum is just lying back and taking it. No fair!

Baum, who may or may not be using his Twitter experiment to drum up publicity for his new book (does it really matter what his motivations are if the end result is so damn smart and so damn good?), spoke a bit on Monday about the macabre aura present in the vaunted New Yorker fact-checking department...

I particularly liked the fact-checkers, who go way beyond getting names spelled right and actually do a lot of reporting. More than once, the fact-checkers uncovered information I hadn't had, found crucial sources I hadn't interviewed. It's like having a team of back-up reporters. They work like soldier ants, and are invariably cheerful. Their boss, Peter Canby, is a calm and competent gentleman. I must say, though, the office itself is a little creepy. I didn't work there. I live in Colorado. But I'd visit 3-4X a year. Everybody whispers. It's not exactly like being in a library; it's more like being in a hospital room where somebody is dying. Like someone's dying, and everybody feels a little guilty about it. There's a weird tension to the place. If you raise your voice to normal level, heads pop up from cubicles. And from around the stacks of review copies that lie everywhere like a graveyard of writers' aspirations. It always seemed strange. Making it to the New Yorker is an acheivement. It is vastly prestigious, of course. And the work is truly satisfying. Imagine putting out that magazine every week! Yet nobody at the office seems very happy. The atmosphere is vastly strained. I'd get back on the Times Square sidewalk after a visit and feel I needed to flap my arms. Get some air into my lungs, maybe jog half a block. And I came to realize I had a really good job. I could write for the New Yorker, but not have to be of the New Yorker. Therein lies the reason I'm no longer there.

One New Yorker writer took a bit of offense to Baum's assertions...





Susan Orlean later contemplated offering an alternative to what she obviously perceives as Baum's Twitter-trashing of her workplace...





Oh please do Susan. Twitter fight! Please do!