ArtsJournal blogger Jan Herman found the cartoon, and joins others in accusing Taibbi of "rank anti-Semitism" for the, um, vivid language he's used to characterize Goldman Sachs. Those charges are ludicrous. There's nothing anti-Semitic in vigorously attacking Goldman for its use of revolving-door politics to secure profits in good years and back-door taxpayer bailouts in bad years. And we sincerely doubt that Taibbi went trolling through Nazi-era cartoons in search of the perfect image for his opening paragraph.

Still, there are unavoidable resonances here—the octopus is supposed to be Winston Churchill, but that's a star of David over his head and that appears to be blood dripping from his tentacles—that certainly don't help Taibbi's cause. So let's retire the phrase, shall we? That includes you, Goldman employees.

But if Rolling Stone thought they could cheat the web out of a every drop of Megan Fox info available to humanity, on the weekend when her new film Jennifer's Body opens, they are about to learn a about this brave new world.

There might have been a day when there were stories about things that weren't Megan Fox but frankly, we can't remember back that far. Since the sultry wackjob from Tennessee became the internet, a million new forms of reporting have been discovered to chronicle her all the aspects of her complex personage. The gal with an unhinged take on every piece of modern life has challenged the world's media to document each and every pearl of fascination to fall from her lips. And thus it became the work of an army of reporters to report on the Rolling Stone piece.

Here then is your guide to the complete reporting of Rolling Stone's report:

• Us.com, The NY Daily News and many others, led with Fox's revelations of youthful self-mutilating antics, with her affirmative answer to the standard interview question, have you ever cut yourself? Us quoted Rolling Stone quoting Fox elaborating, "But I don't want to elaborate. I would never call myself a cutter."

•Perez Hilton led with the elephant in the room of the Megan Fox beat, her fiery but exciting temper. He quoted Rolling Stone quoting, "My temper is ridiculously bad. I've had to say to Brian, 'You have to go and stop talking to me, because I'm going to kill you. I'm going to stab you with something, please leave.' I'd never own a gun for that reason. I wouldn't shoot to kill. But I would shoot him in the leg, for sure." Hilton editorializes on the theme, writing, "Ohhhh, just in the leg? Umm, PSYCHO!"

•E!Online put the spotlight on Rolling Stone's spotlight on Fox's thoughts on men's thoughts about vagina. After quoting her assertion that she has a "powerful, confident vagina," E! quotes the quote, "Men are scared of vaginas. [A woman is most powerful when she is] completely in charge of her sexuality."

•MTV News wisely choose to focus its reporting on the subject of the pictures themselves, describing them in perhaps the least evocative phrase ever written, "The 23-year-old starlet looks like a femme fatale ready for a day at the beach."

But all this of course is just the first draft of history. The final story of what Rolling Stone's Megan Fox profile meant will not be told until the dissertations are written, the seminars held and the votes tallied long after we all are gone.

The problems facing Rolling Stone's online presence is that, well, they haven't had one. Since the late 90s, they've spread coverage of celebrities, politics, and music too thin. A destination full of Matt Taibbis, David Frickes, or celebrity gossips is one thing. Trying to do them all in the same publication is another, and it resulted in the literal and figurative sizing down of the publication.

Wenner needed to do something, so he fired an editor and brought in Steve Schwartz from Reader's Digest—yes, that Reader's Digest—as his, uh, let's see here...Chief Digital Officer. Great, well then. When Schwartz isn't commandeering the bridge of the Enterprise, he's gonna be piloting a different kind of ship. The kind that sinks before it can even set sail. Ahoy!

"I think there was the concept of, let's partner with a company that had experience in this space early on," said Schwartz, who plans to relaunch the site in January with new community and customization features. "A lot of companies spent a lot of money in trial and error mode." That said, he conceded, "It hasn't evolved nearly as much as we'd like it to."

Since Schwartz's hiring and their Unemployment for Christmas layoffs, they've made great strides, kinda capitalizing on Matt Taibbi's audience, and...that's it.

Eight months later, their Twitter's mostly an RSS feed of articles, interspersed with the occasional pieces of news. Even JetBlue's got a better Twitter. They don't have a Tumblr, their Facebook presence is mediocre, and their big high tech strategy involves one of the most reviled dinosaurs of the internet. What rhymes with BUFFERING?

Rollingstone.com will have a chance to update its music-listening technology; Wenner is determining if it will continue its partnership with Web music player Rhapsody, a joint venture with RealNetworks, after its relationship with RealNetworks ends.

Hm. Considering I can listen to whatever I want on Spotify or Pandora, amongst others, I would say that giving users the chance to interact with a widely available music player they hate isn't the most salient strategy. But this is what Wenner's spending his time "determining."

Forget the fact that Rolling Stone's losing breaking news traffic now (thanks, Brooklyn Vegan). Or that their Five Stars mean nothing anymore (thanks, Pitchfork). Or that their music analysis is being overrun (MBV), their political rockstar's still blogging for a political site that has their own writers working their own ad sales, and their movie critic is still Peter "Quotemaster" Travers.

Remember: Wenner has sites with pretty solid traffic(US Weekly), and as Maura Johnston noted, it still one of the biggest music destinations out there on brand recognition alone. But nobody cares about music enough to generate the kind of traffic the best music sites out there need to be competitive. That's not to say they couldn't become competitive, but it'd require the kind of intense online and editorial shakeup of direction and purpose they've never been able to make. And then flash back to Schwartz, who clearly doesn't understand Wenner's reluctance:

Schwartz admitted that Rollingstone.com is light on user engagement, which will be a big priority of the site relaunch. "The site that's out there right now-that whole notion of getting our audience involved in a dialogue is lost," he said.

It's pretty evident: Wenner's golden goose of ideals and ideology and influence on pop culture has to dignify—and even worse, compete with—the kinds of ragtag operations Rolling Stone once was back when Wenner first started it. Wenner's main man Hunter S. Thompson once wrote that "when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." Looks like Rolling Stone was too mainstream and stodgy to get going, and for the most part, still are. As Huey Lewis once sang: it's hip to be square.

Art Capital loaned Leibovitz $24 million last year to help her consolidate her gargantuan debts to her employer Condé Nast and others, taking the rights to Leibovitz's homes and photo archive as collateral. The deal also granted Art Capital the exclusive right to agent a sale of Leibovitz's photos, including any future photo shoots. The company sued Leibovitz last month, claiming she refused to cooperate with its attempts to sell the archive, which Art Capital says is the only conceivable way it will recoup the loan.

When we reported on that suit last month, we mentioned that Art Capital was also mad at Getty Images for announcing what looked like an agency agreement with Leibovitz in March, in apparent violation of the Art Capital deal. What we didn't know at the time was that Art Capital had actually sued Getty in April, claiming that Getty pretended to be interested in buying Leibovitz's photo archive in order to gain competitive advantage in negotiating its own agency deal with her.

According to a judge's order allowing parts of Art Capital's suit to go forward, Art Capital claims that Getty CEO Jonathan Klein and vice president Matthew Butson masqueraded as potential buyers for Leibovitz's photo collection, gaining access to information about it including the "number of shots, rolls of film, exposures, and public works" in the archive, the precise terms of Leibovitz's arrangement with Vanity Fair, and the fact that Leibovitz owned some of her work for Rolling Stone "without restriction." As part of Art Capital's negotiations with Getty, the order says, Art Capital proposed that Leibovitz promise to do eight photo shoots for Getty over the next two years. All-in-all, Art Capital—which made Getty sign two confidentiality agreements—valued the package at $50 million.

But in March, Getty offered a "low-ball bid" of $15 million, and Art Capital stopped negotiations and turned to another buyer. Eight days later, Getty announced its own deal with Leibovitz, which Art Capital says "used verbatim the two-year, eight-shoot collaboration with Leibovitz that [Art Capital] had proposed." In other words, Art Capital claims, Getty violated its confidentiality agreement in order to get closer to Leibovitz and figure out what she had, what she was worth, and what she was willing to do. Getty didn't buy the archive—just the eight shoots—but Art Capital says that Getty's interference scared off another unidentified potential buyer, presumably because the Getty deal appeared to muddy the legal waters as to who was actually representing Leibovitz—and who wants to spend $50 million on pretty pictures when a raft of lawsuits is in the offing?

Interestingly, according to the order, Art Capital was apparently demanding a $1 million loan payment from Leibovitz the week before the Getty deal was announced. And the Getty deal itself apparently paid $1.1 million, which Art Capital contends is "far less than her market rate." So it may be that Leibovitz was desperate for cash to make her payment, which Getty used against her as a bargaining chip.

The reason we didn't know about the suit until now is that Art Capital filed it under seal, and the complaint itself isn't available via the New York Supreme Court's web site (we haven't gone down to the courthouse to check the physical file). What is available, however, is a judge's order allowing two of Art Capital's claims against Getty to go forward and laying out the basics of the dispute. CityFile found it yesterday and linked to it—pointing out that the judge repeatedly misspelled Leibovitz's name. In addition to allowing Art Capital to proceed with claims of breach of contract and tortious interference, the judge denied Art Capital's motion to keep the case sealed, so presumably the full case file will be available soon.

Spokespersons for Getty and Art Capital did not immediately return phone calls.

You can read the order here.

Maybe you were thinking like we were—That last night would a night for bottles popping all over town as Goldman's finest masters of the universe once again grabbed the city by the ballsack to celebrate yet another successful sodomizing of the American economy.

Nope. They're laying low, wisely we might add, something our pals at Cityfile learned when they contacted Goldman communications chief Lucas van Praag (Yep, that's really his name!) to find out where the party would be at, to which van Praag said the following:

Neither Lloyd Blankfein nor anyone else at Goldman Sachs has plans to celebrate our second quarter results.

Whoa! Well isn't that just a bucket of ice water poured down the ole britches?! Nevertheless, we have faith that the Goldmanites won't be able to contain their bonus-happy enthusiasm much longer and that they'll be back out on the town dropping what most people make in a month on bottles of fancy champagne before you know it. And when they do, we'd be very happy if you told us about it!

FInally, Matt Taibbi's much talked about Goldman article for Rolling Stone is finally up on the magazine's website. Go read it. Everyone should.

Lloyd Blankfein Plans to Make it a Bloackbuster Night [Cityfile]
The Great American Bubble Machine [Matt Taibbi/Rolling Stone]
pic via

It's great that he's out and unabashed about it. Well, at least unabashed about it now. And whether or not he was under contract from the Idol people to be tacit about his boning preferences, he still could have said something. But he didn't! Because, he didn't want to be like his lame gay Idol enemy Clay Aiken. He told our best friend Vanessa Grigoriadis:

Right after the finale, I almost started talking about it to the reporters, but I thought, ‘I'm going to wait for Rolling Stone, that will be cooler. I didn't want the Clay Aiken thing and the celebrity-magazine bullshit. I need to be able to explain myself in context.

Wait, what's that? In the context of still rock 'n roll badass publication... Rolling Stone? Sigh. But anyway, we're way too mean to him, aren't we? Foisting the weight of a movement on his bewinged shoulders and all. Lambs doesn't want that. He just wants to sing:

I'm trying to be a singer, not a civil rights leader.

Oh, don't worry. No one thought otherwise, bubbe.

Anyway, he also reveals that he decided to do Idol while high on drugs at Burning Man. Because, somehow, he figured the show would be the only way to be "taken seriously." Hah.

Anyway. Congrats everyone!

If you haven't already read Carr's piece, and we highly suggest that you do, here's the gist of it: One night last week, Carr went out to two parties in the city. One was the New York Observer's farewell to longtime editor Peter Kaplan, the other was an Internet Week-themed event hosted by Guest of a Guest and College Humor. What Carr reported on in his story were basically his thoughts and feelings as he experienced them stepping into these two seemingly diametrically opposed parts of the modern media world on the same night.

The two parties and the people who inhabited them could not have been more different existing within the same ecosystem. The Observer party for Kaplan was held at a swanky Fifth Avenue locale in Midtown, the Century Club, that's long been a favorite haunt of big name New York City writers and journalists. The other party, the Guest of a Guest/College Humor party, was held on the rooftop of a chic hotel, the Hotel on Rivington, on the Lower East Side.

At the Observer party, Carr made note of the "aura of elegy" that seemed to be hanging in the room over the course of the night. At the Guest of a Guest/College Humor party, Carr noted that there was "no elegy on the roof deck of the hotel, only thumping techno, a hot tub and hordes of young people staring at the lights of Midtown in the distance."

Again, two opposite worlds existing within the same ecosystem feeding off the same food sources, one which appears to be dying slowly with each passing day, the other growing and thriving rather vibrantly.

We highlight David Carr's column today not for any reason other than it struck us as a simple but poignant portrait of the state of media today. We felt sort of moved by it, and we can easily see it being something that will be read in the future as a sort of stick in the historical water showing exactly where the tide of the media world was at this moment in time. It was, we think, an incredibly accurate and somewhat moving snapshot.

With all of that said, we have to add that reading Carr's piece made us feel a bit sad. As we write this, we're surrounded by remnants of the old media world. Strewn all about the floor around us are copies of the New York Times, New York Post, Wall Street Journal, and New York Daily News, not to mention the latest copies of Esquire, Rolling Stone, and the New Yorker, as well as a couple of recently purchased books. We love all of these things, we love the way they feel to the touch and the way we feel inside when we touch them, and each day we try to wrap our brains around life without them, but we just can't seem to do it. On the flip side, we're completely ingrained into the tapestry of the internet, the very beast most often credited for the ongoing decimation of the old media world, so we obviously have a huge stake in the survival of the new media world as well.

In short, we're torn over all of this. We wish we were smart enough to come up with a solution that would allow both worlds to coexist and thrive, but we just can't seem to do it, nor does anyone else seem to have a viable answer at this point. We also realize that things die and that these things dying is hard to accept and is often the cause of tremendous grief, even though the death of these things usually means that some other things will be granted lives. Regardless of how hard it is to accept the possible outcomes, it will certainly be interesting to see how all of this plays out in the future.

The one thing we are sure of is this—-That David Carr, though we don't always agree with him, is one of the best around at chronicling what is taking place right now within the modern media ecosystem.

In One City, Two Soirees Ages Apart [New York Times]

Back in April Jeff Bercovici of the now defunct Portfolio speculated that Taibbi's absence from the Rolling Stone website was the direct result of publisher Jann Wenner's famously clueless web strategy.

You might wonder why Wenner, the magazine's owner and editor in chief, would allow a marquee writer to peddle his talents elsewhere rather than on Rollingstone.com. I wondered that myself — until I remembered hearing from a source that Tabbi had offered, during last summer's presidential campaign, to blog for the site, for free, only to be turned down by Wenner, who worried that it would detract from his work on the column.

As of this writing the last post on Rolling Stone's Taibbi Unbound blog is dated March 2nd of this year and implores readers to check out their National Affairs blog, where they can check out their "favorite Taibbi broadsides," but when readers follow the link there is nothing written by Taibbi on the National Affairs blog. Everything is written by Tim Dickinson, save for a single post written by Sean Woods.

I contacted Bercovici over the weekend to see if he'd picked up any additional information on the matter after his Portfolio post ran.

"Nope, didn't really find out anything beyond what I put in that item. Jann Wenner was too stupid and/or cheap to see the value of Matt Taibbi as a blogger, so he went to a place that will let him write whatever he wants and promote him. He's True/Slant's biggest traffic getter so far, by a comfortable margin, I think."

Yes, Taibbi is blogging up a storm over at True/Slant. He recently posted another vicious spanking of the pornstached Friedman, expressed bewilderment at the peasant mentality so pervasive in America today, and explained why Yankees' general manager Brian Cashman is an utter failure at what should be the world's easiest job.

So what gives here?

Yesterday I received a short message from Taibbi saying that his True/Slant material will soon be posting to Rolling Stone's website, and that much of Bercovici's Portfolio post was incorrect.

"I have a blog at True/Slant and the same material is going to be on the RS site very shortly, once my page there is redesigned. Portfolio got a number of things wrong in that story."

By all accounts Taibbi seems to be a good guy and we're willing to take him at his word. However, there certainly appears to be so much more to this story. If you work at Rolling Stone and have some insight you'd care to share anonymously, please, by all means, feel free to indulge us.

In industries like media, vast swaths of entry-level jobs have long been reserved for kids whose parents payed their freight, usually indirectly. Perhaps daddy invested in the property in question; mommy gave an exclusive interview; grandad let the editor's kid into his exclusive preschool. Or maybe the family just shelled out to keep their kid fed and sheltered during a lengthy unpaid gig .

But usually a scrappy outsider without rich parents could grab a toehold and quickly begin to make a living. That, the Wall Street Journal reports, is getting rarer as white-collar job-hunting comes to resemble something out of Grapes of Wrath. Among the sadder examples of pay-for-play cited in "Buying Your Kid An Internship:" "a one-week internship at a music-production company sold last month for $12,000."

The proceeds went to charity; similar donations can score internships at Rolling Stone and at Elle.

There are also placement companies like "University of Dreams," which charges $5,000 to $10,000 to get you into an (unpaid) internship at places like "fashion house Donna Karan International or public-relations shop Ruder Finn." Two months housing is included so, wow, tremendous value.

When will employers cut out the middlemen and start treating their internships as revenue streams, a la the Philadelphia Inquirer? Probably around the time the first big cluster of fashion, media and PR firms emerge from bankruptcy and realize how hard it is to make money the old-fashioned way.

(Image via)

An indeterminate number of people were let go in "big layoffs" in production, sales and marketing, a tipster tells us. Most of the recent cuts are said to be recent hires, at the Us Weekly and Rolling Stone publisher for less than a year. (More info? Shoot us an email.)

Let's review the history:

• "Big layoffs" across titles (sounds like) on Jan. 8.
• At least three editorial staff let go from Rolling Stone Dec. 19, just before head honcho Jann Wenner heads off for his annual long winter break.
• Four or more Rolling Stone staff, including the online editor, let go in early December.
• "Several online people, several marketing people, an assistant, a sales rep and three unnamed people from Men's Journal" in early November.

Rolling Stone

Now he can take his annual long vacation in Sun Valley without that "to do" hanging over his head. Asshole.

Wenner's Us Weekly alone throws off $75 million a year in profit. Wenner Media revenue is around $400 million annually. The company couldn't wait 10 days to fire some more people?

It doesn't matter how much severance the ex-employee sare getting. That's not the point. The point is that Wenner would rather enjoy a less stressful vacation, or save a few days vacation pay, than do the right thing and suck it up for another week and a half so these people can enjoy the holidays. The Dec. 10 round? Fine. But Dec. 19? You terrible jerk.

One of the layoffs was a writer Wenner hired away from Newsweek in October. Another layoff, an editor, came from GQ in March. Maybe you can ask for your old jobs back, guys! (Ha ha, just kidding, they're taken, forever.)

"It was heartbreaking, but we just had to make some tough choices," Rolling Stone Managing Director Will Dana told Keith Kelly of the Post.

Well, you guys certainly made some choices. The dick choices.

May yours gifts turn to coal, every last one of them.

(Picture via Scrooged)

Writes Binelli:

In person, Pitt is warm and funny, but is also, at least while he's being interviewed, an extremely fidgety guy. He paces. He musses his hair. He tears little pieces of dried apricot into smaller pieces before popping them into his mouth. He rubs his knee so intensely it brings to mind Lennie from Of Mice and Men petting a rabbit. All of this might have to do with the fact that, despite his repeatedly proven talents as an actor, Pitt remains, for a large number of people, a creature primarily of tabloid fascination. Did he cheat on his ex-wife with his current partner? Will they have another biological child? What war-ravaged destination might they visit next? Does the mustache make him look hot or porn-y?

As for the interview, Binelli gets Pitt to spill about his work, his life, and his thoughts — and there are some revelations.

On Pitt's crappy movies, like The Devil's Own and Meet Joe Black:

"I got lost in the wilderness of fame a bit. There are all of these opportunities you're supposed to be taking. And I got really discombobulated."

On growing up in a religious community:

"I just found it so stifling, my religion. I know it's very comforting for other people. And it was too much of what you shouldn't be doing instead of what you could be doing. I get enraged when people start telling other people how to live their lives. It drives me mental. This Prop. 8 thing just drives me mental."

On his new film, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button:

"I find Benjamin is about those universal things we all share — that 95 percent that makes us all the same, wherever we are in the world. Our loves, our hopes, but also the loss that we all walk around with and hide very well, and the ultimate notion that we're all expendable. To me, it's a counterstatement to this divisive period we've been in, where we focused on the two, three, four, five percent of ways in which we're different."

On the future:

"I have this fantasy of my older days, painting or sculpting or making things. I have this fantasy of a bike trip to Chile. I have this fantasy of flying into Morocco. But right now, more and more, it's about getting the work done and getting home to family. I have an adventure every morning, getting up."

One has to wonder, is this a man who gets bored easily? Who loves being on the go? Who dreams of never slowing down? Who dreams of never settling down? And with six kids — and possibly two more on the way — is his family "adventure" enough?

Brad Pitt: The Rolling Stone Interview [Rolling Stone]

MediaWorks: Why not try to turn RollingStone.com into something that has a much larger reach online that reaches tons of people who don't touch the print edition?
Jann Wenner: Why undercut the print edition? You're just going to undercut the print edition. There's a finite audience for reading about music. And they like the print edition. They find it valuable and on and on and on.

Wenner is, once again, not even pretending that the Rolling Stone brand is intended to appeal to young people, who tend to do their reading online. This is like that time he called Facebook "kind of a teen thing" — unlike RollingStone.com.

But presumably his strategy is based on a careful study of revenue flows, demographic surveys, competitors that sort of thing. Right?

MediaWorks: No favorite blogs or other sources of news?
Jann Wenner: You know what the problem is? Finding enough time to read and raise children is just like, whoof.
...MediaWorks: How much of Wenner Media's ad revenue comes from digital operations?
Jann Wenner: Honestly, I don't know.

Jann Wenner should be fired. Too bad there's no one who can actually do that.

Excerpts detailing Wallace's difficult time fitting in at Amherst were already released, but the longer print version reveals that Wallace had a similar reaction to pretty much everything that happened in his life.

His instructors at The University of Arizona MFA program didn't help:

He wanted to write the way he wanted to write — funny and overstuffed and nonlinear and strange. The teachers were all "hardass realists." That was the first problem. Problem two was Wallace. "I think I was kind of a prick," he said. "I was just unteachable. I had that look - 'If there were any justice, I'd be teaching this class' - that makes you want to slap a student." One of these stories, "Here and There," went on to win a 1989 O. Henry Prize after it was published in a literary magazine. When he turned it in to his professor, he received a chilly noise back: "I hope this isn't representative of the work you're hoping to do for us. We'd hate to lose you."

When Wallace sent out The Broome of the System to agents, he got back notes that included the line "Best of luck in your janitorial career." When success finally did come, same old Wallace:

He worked at a health club in Auburndale, Massachusetts. "Very chichi," he said. "They called me something other than a towel boy, but I was in effect a towel boy. I'm sitting there, and who should walk up but Michael Ryan. Now, Michael Ryan had received a Whiting Writer's Award the same year I had. So I see this guy that I'd been up on the fucking rostrum with, having Eudora Welty give us this prize."

This is all to show how deeply Wallace's depression entered every part of him. A bad reaction to his longtime anti-depressive of choice, Nardil, caused him to go off the drug during the summer of 2007, but that would be the beginning of the end:

That summer, David began to phase out the Nardil. His doctors began prescribing other medications, none of which seemed to help. "They could find nothing," his mother says softly. "Nothing." In September, David asked [sister] Amy to forgo her annual fall-break visit. He wasn't up to it. By October, his symptoms had become bad enough to send him to the hospital. His parents didn't know what to do. "I started worrying about that," Sally says, "but then it seemed OK." He began to drop weight. By that fall, he looked like a college kid again: longish hair, eyes intense, as if he had just stepped out of an Amherst classroom.

Twelve bouts of electroshock therapy and an aborted return to the Nardil later, Wallace couldn't find his own level:

"He was just desperate," his mother says. "He was afraid it wasn't ever going to work. He was suffering. We just kept holding him, saying if he could just hang on, it would straighten. He was very brave for a very long time."

Wallace and his parents would get up at six in the morning and walk the dogs. They watched DVDs of The Wire, talked. Sally cooked David's favorite dishes, heavy comfort foods - pot pies, casseroles, strawberries in cream. "We kept telling him we were so glad he was alive," his mother recalls. "But my feeling is, even then, he was leaving the planet. He just couldn't take it."

One afternoon before they left, David was very upset. His mother sat on the floor besides him: "I just rubbed his arm. He said he was glad I was his mom. I told him it was an honor."

Wallace's belated funeral happened this past Thursday, and media coverage tended to focus on what a shock and surprise his death was to the literary community. To some, it wasn't a shock at all.

The Lost Years & Last Days of David Foster Wallace [Rolling Stone]

In 1984, Costello left for Yale Law School; Wallace was alone senior year. He double-majored — English and philosophy, which meant two big writing projects. In philosophy, he took on modal logic. "It looked really hard, and I was really scared about it," he said. "So I thought I'd do this kind of jaunty, hundred-page novel." He wrote it in five months, and it clocked in at 700 pages. He called it The Broom of the System.

Wallace published stories in the Amherst literary magazine. One was about depression and a tricyclic anti-anxiety medication he had been on for two months. The medication "made me feel like I was stoned and in hell," he told me. The story dealt with the in-hell parts:

You are the sickness yourself.... You realize all this...when you look at the black hole and it's wearing your face. That's when the Bad Thing just absolutely eats you up, or rather when you just eat yourself up. When you kill yourself. All this business about people committing suicide when they're "severely depressed;" we say, "Holy cow, we must do something to stop them from killing themselves!" That's wrong. Because all these people have, you see, by this time already killed themselves, where it really counts.... When they "commit suicide," they're just being orderly.

The Lost Years & Last Days Of David Foster Wallace [Rolling Stone]

New York magazine's daily online chats about the election are usually just mildly interesting, since the journalists involved tend to be overly polite to one another, because who knows who you're going to be sending a job application to someday? Even Gawker Media veterans and that Daily Kos maniac act all pleasant. But Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi has never been one for such fraternal niceties, and when nymag.com threw him a sparring partner from National Review, the predictably caustic lefty went to work with his fangs, at one point typing, "tell me you're not ashamed." It was awesome and just really uncomfortable at the same time. Highlights:

It started out pleasantly enough:

M.T.: So how are you feeling about McCain's chances today?

B.Y.: I've just finished an article for National Review... about the headwinds McCain faces. I was going to look at three, and then I started to list them. I stopped at ten...

M.T.: Yeah, that's a damned shame, too. I feel really badly for the guy.

Feigning sympathy for the other side — very civil, Matt. Let's start to smack the guy around a little bit in the next question though, OK?

M.T.: ...There is absolute justice in his facing a "headwind" from the financial meltdown, from the unpopularity of the Iraq war, and so on. How is that a "headwind"? That's just self-created unpopularity...

B.Y.: Did I suggest that headwinds are unfair?

The vicious part of the debate then followed, consisting of Taibbi and the National Review guy, Byron York, trading partisan, grossly oversimplified accounts of the Wall Street meltdown.

Taibbi argued the Wall Street meltdown didn't arise because of homeowner mortgage defaults but "because of... myriad derivatives trades" like credit default swaps, financial instruments investment banks and others used to hedge risky mortgage holdings and keep potential mortgage losses off their books, and which speculators used to effectively short-sell certain bonds, thus amplifying the woes of banks.

In fact, buying the swaps was just one way financial firms threw caution to the wind risk.They also recklessly rated and bought dodgy mortgages, which are in fact defaulting to a disastrous extent, which is why many swaps were exercised and discovered to be worthless.

York, though more balanced, tries to pin some blame on "Democrats' desire to give mortgages to people, particularly minorities, who could not afford them," which is also a nasty distortion. In fact, the private sector was eager to issue and securitize subprime mortgages by lending to people of all income levels on terms they really couldn't afford — no money down, no documentation, teaser rates, etc. The returns were just to good. This is why many subprime loans were pushed on people who could qualify for regular loans.

Anyway, reality need not intrude on a nice ideological catfight! Emphasis added:

M.T.: You don't think the unregulated CDS market was a major factor in the current crisis?

B.Y.: ...I believe that many of the problems in the mortgage area can be attributed to the confluence of Democratic and Republican priorities: the Democrats' desire to give mortgages to people, particularly minorities, who could not afford them, and the Republicans' desire to achieve an "ownership society," in part by giving mortgages to people who could not afford them...

M.T.: Oh, come on. Tell me you're not ashamed to put this gigantic international financial Krakatoa at the feet of a bunch of poor black people who missed their mortgage payments... The effort of people like you to pin this whole thing on minorities, when in fact this whole thing has been caused by greedy traders dealing in unregulated markets, is despicable.

B.Y.: ... Fannie became more reckless in 2006 and 2007 than they had been in the scandal-ridden tenure of Franklin Raines (who departed in 2004)... [Decent point!]

M.T.: What a surprise that you mention Franklin Raines [really??]. Do you even know how a CDS works? Can you explain your conception of how these derivatives work? Because I get the feeling you don't understand.

B.Y.: ...When you refer to "Phil Gramm's Commodities Future Modernization Act," are you referring to S.3283, co-sponsored by Gramm, along with Senators Tom Harkin and Tim Johnson?

M.T.: In point of fact I'm talking about the 262-page amendment Gramm tacked on to that bill that deregulated the trade of credit default swaps.

Tick tick tick. Hilarious sitting here while you frantically search the Internet to learn about the cause of the financial crisis — in the middle of a live chat interview.

B.Y.: ...We've gone on for fifteen minutes longer than scheduled, and that's enough. Thanks.

M.T.: Thanks. Note, folks, that the esteemed representative of the New Republic has no idea what the hell a credit default swap is. But he sure knows what a minority homeowner looks like.

B.Y.: It's National Review.

OK then!

More like this, please, if only because it makes the comments section a lot more interesting.

The Guardian shrank in 2005:

The boring old Wall Street Journal shrank back in 2005 too, before, even, Rupert Murdoch swung aboard from his fearsome and mighty pirate vessel.

And the New York Times shrank this summer. (Though, really, things have been shrinking over there for a long while.)

In fact, lots of American papes are adopting the smaller "Berliner" European-style.

Once the tech world starts crumbling too, leaving nothing but angry and empowered robots and a few huddling, gossip-starved masses, look for Gawker to simply be a single string of 1's and 0's—at which, of course, you'll chuckle and say "Oh, ho ho. That Lindsay Lohan v. 7.6! What a card! Do you think she's really an androisexual?"