A future where weed is legal, and we all walk around with mini-computers in our pockets.

I saw this Slate article breaking up the finer points of how the government can make money via the taxing of marijuana, and I thought, not a bad subject for a convo on Gawker. So let's get to it:

Sparking us up: Internet celebrity Jason Mulgrew who blogged his way into a tv development deal, then smoked his way back to blogging. Dude's a hero.

As a regular (some would say "heavy," others might say "awesome") marijuana user living in the only state in the Union run by a man who once got paid $10 million to ask a kindergartener "Who is your daddy and what does he do?," I, for one, am greatly in favor of the legalization and taxation of marijuana. Not because it might help my friend Amy, whose recent CA State unemployment check bounced. Nor because it might help my help Lauren, a dedicated teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District who almost certainly will be laid off in the next few weeks. And not even because I want to help out poor ol' way-in-over-his-head Arnold, who's learning that the California budget is an even more formidable opponent than the Predator (apparently the budget does not bleed; therefore, he can't kill it).

No, I am in favor of the legalization and taxation of marijuana because it would help me. Next time I'm sitting in my living room, stoned as fuck, awash in a sea of empty bags of Doritos and mesmerized by the same Tivo'ed episodes of "Wildboyz" that I've seen two dozen times before, I will not have that lingering feeling that maybe I'm not actualizing my full potential. Instead, I can stay seated where I am, content with the knowledge that with my legitimately purchased weed, I am doing my part to help save my state for a full-blown budget meltdown. A good American citizen, am I.

Now pass the Doritos – my favorite part is coming up. This shit is hilarious!

Dude, Doritos are so good they should totally be illegal! Word. Now we're gonna take two-and-pass it off to Jeff Weiss, regular contributor to the LA Times, LA Weekly and the editor of Passion of the Weiss.

Other than home prices in the smog-strangled Inland Empire east of Los Angeles, no other local product has plummeted in price more than marijuana. As both a lapsed Jew and a smoker, this is probably the greatest development in cultivation since the development of Novia Scotia salmon farms and Bialy bagel mass-manufacturing. The genesis for the supply and demand declivity is obvious: 1996's Proposition 215-which made it impossible to prosecute California physicians and patients who follow "guidelines in recommending or approving the medical use of marijuana."

On paper, this conjures visions of white lab coats and concerned medical professionals scrutinizing you for stress, neuroses, and anxiety-or Alvy Singer Syndrome, as I told the genial quack who wrote my "recommendation." In reality-as any cursory Google Search, perusal of the LA Weekly, or stroll down Venice Beach would tell you-marijuana is already essentially legal, with even the infirm and mentally feeble able to score.

In Los Angeles, the number of marijuana dispensaries currently approaches that of unemployed actors. They sell weed lollipops, weed cough spray, weed ice cream, weed brownies, and enough Hindu Kush to pacify Kashmir. Shit's like Roald Dahl meets Redman. The city is now feebly attempting to crack down on storefronts that illegally sprang up in the wake of a 2007 moratorium on new pot shops. Half my high school classmates have abandoned the train wreck that is California real estate for growing True Train Wreck.

In a time of fiscal crisis, the question of taxation is less a matter of legalization, but more common sense. Provided it hews closely to regular sales tax rates, states should be able to have their space cake and eat it too.

Ok. But we're all lowly blogger/writer types who are happily pelted with pennies as long as we can "live the dream". What about real people, with real money? Luckily, where I panhandle there's a hedgefund guy who loves to chat me up before telling me he doesn't have any change on him. He offers this from an investor perspective:

In California alcohol is taxed by the metric (gallon) and potency (proof).  The reason California will have trouble doing the same thing with weed is that it is easier to grow weed for personal consumption than it is to brew alcohol or grow tobacco.  It puts a whole new twist on Mrs. Obama's gardening self-sufficiency initiative.  Any hope of a material revenue stream would have to be based on licenses for pot bars, other public smoking areas and possibly personal licenses similar to a driver's license.  I'm not sure how much social appeal a bar full of stoned people has, but my guess is it's a niche audience once the novelty wears off.  Even if a personal license is issued, by law pricing could not be economically discriminatory and it would be difficult to enforce civilian compliance.  That means that the tax revenue is not likely to be a game changer for the California economy.  Does every little bit help?   On the plus side, it would require minimal new bureaucracy since similar licenses are already issued by the state and local governments.  Additionally it would take away a very profitable revenue stream from criminals.  On the negative side is the potential threat of unintended consequences.  If marijuana is legalized in California, invest in seeds, Miracle Gro and tin foil.

Miracle Gro: Buy Buy Buy!

Well we can't leave a subject like this without consulting Redman, can we? What say ye, Redman?

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So yeah, people are saying by the end of this year we'll have more jobs and money! Obviously that's straight up awesome, on the surface. But down deep we can't deny how The Recession has comforted us during moments of self-doubt, and how we might actually miss it, just a little, once it's gone. So I got some peeps to discuss how we should celebrate, offering us a blinkered light at the end of the tunnel, to the light at the end of the tunnel.

First up: Jozen Cummings is the Articles Editor for VIBE Magazine and VIBE.com. You can check out his blog here.

To many, CNN's news that the Great Recession will likely come to an end in 2009 is good news, but to me, it's bittersweet. Sure it's good to hear that things like the unemployment rate will quit rising like the sun, and things are getting back to "normal," but what people don't understand is "normal" is what got us in this mess in the first place, and I'm not entirely sure everyone has learned their lesson.

You see, I have always been broke and it gave me great comfort knowing the rest of the country was coming over to my side of the financial pool. For the past few months, I've been going to the club and it's been good to see more people hanging out by the bar buying one drink at a time like me, instead of popping bottles at a table in VIP. All of a sudden, my dates were no longer bugging me to take them to nice, expensive places, knowing that times were hard. Instead, they were cool with my offers of Netflix and Papa John's.

If you ask me, these hard times were just what we needed to reassess our values, get back to basics, and recognize that often times, life's simple pleasures really can't be bought. Hopefully, most of us will not forget these past few months but if we do, let us remember the words of the great Notorious B.I.G: "Mo' money, mo problems"

Where the true players at, throw your roleys considered opinions and emotions to the sky? I can get down with that. Next up: Melissa Lafsky, creator of Opinionistas.com, deputy web editor of Discover Magazine, and former editor of the New York Times' Freakonomics blog.

So the National Association for Business Economics is proclaiming that the recession will be over by the end of the year. Before we resume hemorrhaging our savings on panda-skin Jimmy Choos and gem-encrusted nail clippers, it's worth noting that the heavily pro-business NABE (former presidents include Alan Greenspan) didn't actually admit we were in a recession/downturn/Dickensian clusterfuck until the smack end of 2008.

Still, if the Great Recession does hightail it this year, I'll miss it. There's been something comforting about watching everything we've been taught to value liquefy into a river of shit. Plus when else will we get to see so many colossal hypocrites stripped down so publicly, like a daily Albee climax. The haute monde, the scions of capitalism — they were all exposed as liars or morons (or both), while everyone else was a deluded casualty. We got to watch, read, and blog while the system collapsed under its own hubris, flushing the white collars out of Midtown and Wall Street like a burst dam. There was nowhere to go but down. Sure took the pressure off.

(For the record, I haven't been cackling and stirring my cauldron while the six-figure types get the proverbial Prada loafer up the ass. But I'll admit to smiling once or twice while I munch my daily Triscuit rations.)

Of course, no one likes too much bad news (regardless of whether it's true), and this whole vacuum of delusion and incompetence is starting to grate on the nerves. Enter the shouts of redemption: The banks are lending! The consumers are consuming! The end is near! Sure, the stomach of capitalism is still churning out bile — but, as a well-preserved lawyer once informed me before slathering her face with embryonic stem cells, "Perception is reality." If we think the recession is gone, then who's to say it isnt! (Besides the people who may actually know, that is — but no one ever listens to them anyway.)

Word. This recession is over when WE say it is! So let's close this out with Abiola Abrams; TV personality, author of Dare, host of talk-variety show PlanetAbiola.com — and, oh yeah, recent cast member of VH1 reality show "Tough Love".

It's December 09. The recession is over kids. What are we gonna do today? Go to Disney World? Nope! Same thing we do everyday T.A.N., try to take over the world. Let's say a prayer of solace for retailers who won't have to con us into buying cheap crap by saying it will make us "recessionistas" or con us into buying expensive crap by calling $6,300 handbags "an investment."

Phew! Dust off your recessionary malaise, let's go shopping. Oh wait, let me call my immigrant parents first and tell them that maybe they can get their retirement back on with their 401Ks 75% thinner. And let me reassure the old people on my Harlem block as I prance to the new Starbucks on my corner not to worry because the bread line they were standing on before the recession will still be there. And luckily for me, as an author who has hosted shows for BET and is a recent VH1 reality show alum— and shameless promo whore (clearly)— that there's still the free clinic if I fall into a snafu because Simon and Schuster doesn't offer health insurance.

Thank the goddess that I learned how to live on a salary of fifteen bucks a year when I decided at 16 that I wanted to blab on TV for a living like Oprah, write books (kinda) like Jane Austen, and make art films like Spike Lee. It was already challenging to line up my next TV Correspondent gig and get published before the collapse. The main effect that the economy has had on my life is to totally depress everyone around me.

But some people do prosper during any downturn so without sarcasm. I ask, why not us? Now that I've racked up $100G in student loans and declared bankruptcy I can be introspective enough to say that wealth and abundance are states of mind. I continue to have real prosperity because I have solid friends and family, shopped at TJ Maxx before it was hip (um, it is hip, right?) and don't give a damn if my bag has someone else's name on it. So TAN, to celebrate the end of the recession, I think that I'll pimp myself out on a non-union reality show gig and allow them to edit out my tantrums and general spoiled bitchiness as the syrupy sweet "Miss Picky" in the name of empowerment and social experiments … Oh good-done? Rock on!

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So yeah, should be a solid lineup for your schmoozy Saturday afternoon.

With all the media-hubbub over Obama appointing the first Hispanic (or is it Latina?) female to the Supreme Court, we were surprised no one went to the BX to find out how they're reacting to "Sonia from the block" getting the nod from Obama to sit on the high court. So we did that.

Then, the headlines about the recession being over are accumulating fast. It's kind of sad, no? We got Jozen Cummings (Vibe), Melissa Lafsky (Discover), and Abiola Abrams (BET, VH1) to offer suggestions on how we should celebrate.

Finally, since "empathy" has been such a big topic of conversation this week, somewhere in the mix we're going to run a "Political Empathy Matrix" and scattergraph some of the week's top storylines.

I saw this video over by Ta-Neezy this week. Realized it makes the perfect song for the Saturday afternoon shift. So let's toss it to De La Soul, singing that assimilated favorite, "Saturdays"

Oh, I'm your host for the next couple hours. Call me, TAN.

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Not that I'm going to do an interesting post about our reverence for the old guard of Black heroes, versus our sustained dismissal of hip hop (read: contemporary Black) heroes or anything. It's a holiday weekend, baby! But just wondering.

Anyyawn, thanks to Sasha Grey, and my discussers of feminist issues: Jill, Amanda, Jess, and Matt. Support your artists!

I'm signing off. It's 9PM. Black bloggers got to get home before the freaks come out! By home I mean the bar, of course. Fek and I took our time to indulge, and make sure this blogging day was as relaxed and spread out as possible. It's the weekend!

Send all your complaints about tainting the feminist conversation via gawker, or gawker via feminist taint, to my internet PO BOX. If you see Sasha Grey, tell her I look forward to talking it out.

Before I peace-out this bitch, here's a clip of Biggie, modern Black hero, twenty years ago, at the age of 17.

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Hmm, well I guess his speeches are a little NSFW. See y'all next weekend.

So. This "feminism" is a big broad issue. Almost makes me want to start a sister-gawker-weekend-offshoot to hit it from all angles.

But in lieu of that bit of destimulation, I got the provocative Jess McCabe — who recently had her words manhandled by The Observer — to share her thoughts on the differences between the feminism scene here in the states, versus the UK.

Jess edits The F Word and enjoys the shit out of punk rock and 18th century literature:

First off, this is a really important to include: I'm just an individual. I get an overview of feminist activism in the UK to an extent, as editor of The F-Word, but I'm not in a position (as if anyone is) to make any definitive statements about what UK feminism is. As I said in my response to the Observer, it's inaccurate to talk about feminism as though it's this one specific ideology, it's a multitude of threads, of feminisms.

That said, I do think there are differences between feminisms in the UK and feminisms in the US.

Just as one example: rape conviction rate in England and Wales is about 6.5%, and in Scotland it's 2.9% - the lowest in the European Union and, as I understand it, much worse than the US, so trying to turn that around and advocating for reform of how the criminal justice system and police deal with sexual violence, and tackling myths about rape, is a high priority for many feminists here - I think that's one reason that feminists have rallied around Reclaim the Night marches and Million Women Rise.

Another sort of difference: the controversy over the WAM! conference charging so much for entry seems strange from a UK perspective, given that feminist events and conferences here are either free or charge a few pounds entry at most. It doesn't result in the conferences being 100% accessible or perfect by any means, but I do think it points to a difference.

In terms of feminist media, the biggest difference is just that there is so much more of it in the US. That's partly because the US is a much bigger country, I'm guessing, but in the US there's make/shift and Bitch magazine, and lots of very large feminist blogs, as well as a huge number of smaller blogs. We have Subtext Magazine, and a lot of feminist blogs, but still.

I wouldn't call US feminist media superficial at all (ed note: I asked); Jezebel has more of an emphasis on celebrities, but I don't think that's true of wider US feminist media.

Matt Ufford will serve as our shot of testosterone. His dudely credentials include being the founding editor of With Leather, and current writer of television blog Warming Glow:

Here's the problem with Double X so far: it has yet to make feminism more inclusive. By adopting Slate's technique of dressing up illogical contrarian ideas in fancy words, it serves only to further cloud the goals of feminism, a movement that already has enough trouble speaking its own name, much less providing a unified front.

Feminism doesn't need an offshoot of Slate magazine; it needs a simple, coherent definition like Anna Holmes's that appeals to common sense (and maybe an ad campaign to remove the brand of the "f-word"). What feminism needs is honesty. And that, I think, is why Jezebel has attained success with both women and men: the writers are smart and independent, but more importantly, they're honest. Like many others, I found Moe Tkakic's and Tracie Egan's glib attitudes towards sex and rape last June saddening, but I couldn't fault their honesty. And to use that as a foundation of an argument for why Jezebel isn't feminist is to call me a misogynist for saying I'd like to have unprotected sex with Scarlett Johansson (I would. Very much).

The infighting that stems from feminists saying that other feminists are hurting feminism doesn't help the cause of women's rights, it merely reinforces the tired stereotype that all women are catty. How can a movement grow supporters in the middle if it's caught up in arguments on the fringes? If, for example, a man such as myself – registered Democrat, pro-choice voter, ERA supporter, bikini proponent, porn watcher – gets discouraged from identifying with the feminist movement because he admires and desires the female form, then feminism is hopelessly disconnected from the mainstream acceptance it deserves.

Stop fighting about what feminism is, and start recruiting more feminists.

We are all feminists! Hear us roar!!!

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Did you know that women are less happy these days? And that research didn't even include the fallout from finger-wagging Slate-offshoot Double X. ME-OW!

One of the more salient criticisms to come out of the cat-fighting over who/how/what a feminist is these days came from Jez editrix Anna Holmes f-word laden diatribe: Basically many mainstream media type outlets take higher profile sites like Jezebel and use them as avatars for smaller-niche issues. Say, feminism. This despite those sites having an ostensibly broader agenda. This allows them to make arguments about, say, "the state of feminism", without needing to integrate the likely-overwhelming and argument-splintering fodder the best feminist-focused sites provide.

But, we have the power now! And I rounded up some feminist media peeps peepettes and asked them to weigh in on the new Lady-blog in town:

First up: Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon. She herself has been roasted over the feminist-media fire a few times, does that mean she's sympathetic?

I can understand why the new online magazine Double X wants to distinguish itself from other women's sites like Salon's Broadsheet and Jezebel, but I'm unsure that the way to do it is by publishing a bunch of "contrarian" articles that blame victims instead of rapists for rape and argue that now that women make ¾ of what men do, we're living in a dystopian, man-hating matriarchy. Poor Christina Hoff Summers! If women even got up to 1/3 of seats of federal power, she'd have to steal her male family members away to live in one of the few places on earth where a man can get justice. Perhaps Saudi Arabia?

The problem with the Slate brand is that they're all about trying to push the envelope and shock, but they seem to think the way to do this is by plugging into narratives that are, by any reasonable measure, still the staid conservative beliefs that actual rebels are trying to overturn. Victims of gendered violence have only themselves to blame? That's not a brave thing to say—-that was the internet's consensus on the Chris Brown/Rihanna situation, and sadly, that's what many rape victims face when they enter the justice system. Men need twice as many rights and privileges to feel equal? That's the argument of 95% of popular comedies now, and the prevailing notion in most American households where women still do most of the housework, even if they have full-time jobs.

Double X has a lot of fine writers that don't write this reactionary nonsense, but right now you have to comb through a lot of sexist crap to get the gems. But I can't say that it won't draw the readers—-the only thing conservatives like more than hearing their own baseless beliefs echoed back at them is to pretend that pushing the status quo is rebellious.

Got that, Slate? You are white, male, and boring. (Slate Rebuttal?: "Why white, male, and boring is no longer white, male, or boring!") Next up is Jill Filipovic of Feministe:

DoubleX premiered by attacking women who don't report being raped, urging Michelle Obama to wear pantyhose, and sounding the death knell of feminism — impressive, even for an offshoot of a website that thrives in large part by passing off half-baked traditionalism as intellectual contrarianism. To DoubleX's credit, it has a great editorial staff and some amazing writers to balance out the purely inflammatory ones; less appealing is Slate's arguable ghettoization of women's voices, it's ongoing offensives on women's rights, and the differences in how the two sites cover and categorize stories (both have News & Politics, Arts and Life, but Slate offers Business & Tech while DoubleX lists Kids & Parenting).

No one expected DoubleX to be an exclusively feminist blog and its editors are quick to assert that they're about more than just feminism, but the magazine does seem to be suffering from a crisis of consciousness. If feminism is dead, why the obsession with feminism? If women's lives are so fantastic that men are now the "second sex," why do we need a lady-mag offshoot of a more successful boys site?

Of course, DoubleX exists in part because of the feminist writers who cultivated strong and engaged online communities, and who worked to mainstream feminist thought into online political discourse. The ongoing DoubleX-related conflicts have only gained traction because feminist readers and writers have voiced their discontent, and larger media souces have (wrongly) picked up the story as a cat-fight or an intergenerational battle. The cynical part of me suspects that the inaugural flamethrowing was a ploy for traffic; I can't imagine why else anyone would publish a noted conservative hack like Christina Hoff Summers or recycle a 1998 Time magazine cover. But I'm holding out hope that DoubleX turns out to be a pleasant surprise, and that instead of continuing its embrace of anti-feminism and its finger-wagging at women who drink or forgo nylons, it'll address the seldom-covered issues that actually impact women's lives — even if that makes it one of those "feminist" blogs.

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Who knows what other surprises we'll have in store. Maybe George Bush will start tweeting how he really feels, and then Cheney will most definitely be in the building putting him on blast. But you know what? Even if that doesn't happen, it'll be fun, because we'll both be here. And when we get sick of each other, we can leave, and then come back... What or why am I typing right now?

Before exiting stage left, I want to remind folks where to holler if you need me. Thanks to Susan Orlean, Emily Gordon, Eric Easter, Troy Patterson, and Aviva Yael for their contributions. Support your artists! We're gonna close this puppy out with Sade Adu singing a poignant love-ode to ridiculous tattoos. At least, that's what it is now.

Sade & WTAN Present: Like A Tattoo from weekendvids on Vimeo.

Wear it like a tattoo, y'all.

See, Dan Baum had more to say about Susan Orlean, and we thought it only fair to give the lady a chance to respond in full. Why? Because we are children, and have yet to put down childish things. Soooooo, from the hallowed halls of the New Yorker to the fecal-crusted basement of WTAN on Gawker: we present, Susan Orlean.

Why, oh why did I find myself mixed up in the Dan Baum brouhaha (by the way, was the word "brouhaha" ever more appropriately used than in this instance? I think not.)? Chalk it up to medium and message, which were very different reasons I felt compelled to reply. First, the medium, which was the lesser of the two reasons, but still, I was irked by the endless stream of tweets from Mr. Baum — I felt like I was sitting at one of those horrible dinner parties where one person insists on doing all the talking, and in this case, talking backwards. This is not a federal offense, of course, and there are far stupider things on Twitter everyday, but using the form in that way definitely drew attention and almost demanded a reply (I suppose a simple, "Could you please shut up?" would have been fine, or a gentler "Excuse me, don't you have a blog where you could put this story up? Twitter is, um, for short messages, did you notice?" but it was provocative; I ignore about eighty percent of the things in my Twitter stream (as I bet most people do), but this endless posting had me on the edge of my seat — compelled to read but not happy about it.

But this would ordinarily amount to me nothing more than me complaining about it over dinner to my husband. But then comes the message. Discussing details about salaries, contracts, hiring, firing — I think it's indiscreet and unprofessional, but that's just my opinion; if Mr. Baum wants to, he's entitled. Even airing opinions that I happen to disagree with strenuously — that the atmosphere at the New Yorker is "creepy", for instance — is his right. It's just that Baum's characterizations seemed so off-base that I couldn't help but respond. I'm not an apologist for the magazine. It's an institution I am very loyal to and very proud of, so it was maddening to read his account, suggesting that the New Yorker is a strange, dysfunctional place full of whispering freaks, headed by a capricious, vengeful editor-in-chief. Huh?? In a court of law, Baum's testimony would be practically inadmissible; he's a writer whose contract wasn't renewed (not "fired", as he describes it — but whatever), obviously wounded and disappointed. Bias alert! I've been at the magazine since 1986, enjoyed ridiculous amounts of freedom to write what I want, gotten paid extremely generously, mouthed off a number of times when I disagreed with editing changes, and been granted great liberty for book leaves and family demands. Even after so many years as a staff writer, I remain in awe of the quality of the magazine, its history, and its ongoing excellence. Bias alert! My own testimony is equally tainted, I admit.

I have never met Dan Baum, and I wish him well. He hasn't asked for my advice, but here it is, anyway: 1. Don't be fooled by the one-way mirror quality of Twitter; it's a peculiar medium that is more invasive than it might feel. 2. If I ever hire someone, please call and remind me to have him or her sign a "No tweeting when I get fired" clause. 3. If you decide to publish in a very public forum details of something that is somewhat personal, don't complain when people respond in a somewhat personal manner. 4. When you are objecting to something written by a woman, using the word "twat" (as in, "[Orlean] launched a series of twit-for-twat responses..") is not usually advisable.

Now, let's all get back to work.

Susan Orlean is the author of the children's book, Lazy Little Loafers, and when not barking @Twitter works on her biography of Rin Tin Tin, to be published by Little Brown.

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If you missed it while paying attention to the world at large: earlier this week typically-dignified New Yorkerers started pulling each other's hair and wrestling in the nude! Journalistically speaking, of course.

So what else could I do but round up some more mud and jello and media peeps and tell 'em all to 'rassle through the weekend: What of these monolithic media institutions and their "culture"? Would-be twitter-philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once quipped "the will to a system represents a lack of integrity", so perhaps Mr. Baum is right to give us a peek inside the machine? Shows character! No magazine or editor is bigger than the power of an "idea", darnit!

Or maybe you disagree. Let's see what my guests think:

Appropriately setting things off is Emily Gordon, the founder of blog-shrine and sanctuary for all things New Yorker, Emdashes.

The older an institution gets and the thicker its mythology, the more everyone involved—inside and outside—will grouse. Magazine workers, like residents of gentrified neighborhoods, are accustomed to hearing that people used to have more patience for eccentricity before it all went to hell. There could be an anthology of complaints by stung writers for any number of vaunted magazines, especially the ones that have the luxury of rejecting most of their supplicants. The anthology for The New Yorker would have a distinguished roster: from John O'Hara to Mavis Gallant to James Atlas. Still, many of these same writers were and are deeply grateful to be in the magazine at all.

Who wouldn't be? Even the prickliest of blog commenters reluctantly admit it's the magazine to beat. The New Yorker's populace and process have inspired plenty of wails and retorts over the past 80 years (and the same goes for Harper's, The Atlantic, The Nation, and on and on). The web just makes them searchable, and Twitter makes them into addictively bitter little snacks. I prefer Daniel Baum's long-form writing about New Orleans, Mexico, and his many and fruitful future subjects to his pulling back of the Remnickian curtain.

"It's not a magazine, it's a mission," Harold Ross once said, but any magazine is also a series of relationships and a social hive, for all its buzzing productivity. But even bees will eject a visitor from a foreign hive, or a worker who strays from his assigned task. It's not fair, but neither nature nor The New Yorker, as Baum knows, guarantees freedom from devastating turns of fate.

I think that means, "get over it, Mr. Baum." Next up Troy Patterson, who slaves as Slate's television critic, and recently argued for the genius of The Golden Girls. Surely he appreciates the spirit of rebellion:

In the matter, the general matter, of Former Writer v. Eustace Tilley, there is no improving on the fine analysis of the late John Leonard. His subject was a slew of books by former residents of the house of Mr. Shawn: "As if from Atlantis, Babylon, Brigadoon, the heart of darkness or a progressive preschool food fight, refugees from William Shawn's New Yorker flee the catastrophe of Newhouse directly into lurid memoir. Because they have injured feelings and scores to settle, they tend to bite one another on their kneecaps and pineal glands." Thus, turning Tilley's monocle back at him, Former Writer resembles, as often as not, The Penguin or Mr. Peanut. Or perhaps, in the case of Renata Adler, Count von Count.

Adler really does have a vampiric touch, which is what makes her Pauline Kael takedown so great and her "Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker" so pointlessly cold-hearted. "As I write this, The New Yorker is dead," Adler wrote in 1999, in a book that fumes like dry ice. I can't be the only person to think that statement silly. But who are we to begrudge a writer her disgruntlement or his grudges? We—you all, them over there, whoever—are the voyeurs fanning the flames of an ashtray fire, just because the magazine is very fancy and because, in Tom Wolfe's phrase, it has—or used to have, or whatever— a code of omerta. But every magazine is unhappy in its own way, duh.

Hmmm, well about Eric Easter who serves as the VP of Digital & Entertainment at EbonyJet; another media institution:

There's a pretty simple reason why this is a problem. Magazines don't want anyone to hear about how they do contracts because almost no mag has a standard way of doing contracts. The value of one writer or the next is subjective and one guy's contract almost never looks like another guy's when it comes to money, or usage rights for that matter. Plus, any contract in any business is seen as a bond. Unless you're an NBA draftee or a government contractor, revealing the details of a contract, is seen as breaking an assumed bond.

Nevertheless, people in the media business pretty much suck at handling the media. Go figure.

Awesome. No advocates for Baum here, the baums. Heh. But maybe one of you proles can sympathize with his struggle? If you can, do so now, or forever hold you peace. A bit later Susan Orlean, one of the central protagonists in this Hundred Hours Twitter War will have a few things to say...

.... after this commercial break, natch.

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Robert Lanham author of the Hipster Handbook, and internet writing syllabi had to weigh in:

Let's assume this thing isn't a hoax or an art project by a recent Oberlin grad who thinks he's bohemian because he found bedbugs in his beard.

Do you tap the family trust fund? Do you idolize Dan Deacon? Are you SO not worried about getting swine flu 'cause that shit only happens to poor people?

They're not looking for hipsters. They're looking for entitled idiots. And wait, before you say it, I'm well aware. The terms ‘hipster' and ‘entitled idiot' have been synonyms for close to a decade now. But come on, isn't hipster rage about as tired as PBR and trucker caps? Of course there are plenty of ridiculous, pretentious idiots in Williamsburg-and New York as a whole for that matter. But would you rather be living in a stripmall in the exurbs of Richmond where alt culture consists of seeing The String Cheese Incident perform on Friday at that state-run amphitheater next to Applebees? (I'm from VA, so I can make fun). Personally, I'd rather be in a place like Williamsburg where people appreciate film, music, and fashion, even if I do have to put up with people named Unicornicopia and the neighborhood's other goofy excesses.

I hope the hipsterhood reality series is for real. That way we can pin all our hipster rage on a handful of dipshits and begin recognizing the difference between artists, people who are cool, and entitled morons. We clearly need a few sacrificial lambs and anyone who would answer that casting call is a perfect fit.

Indeed. Next up, we had to get a Jewish perspective — so often the jewish females don't get to weigh in on matters of hipster import — herewith: Rachel Shukert, currently doing more hand-wringing over her fondly-reviewed original production The Noisemaker's Apprentice, has provided an alternate version to the original recruiting pitch.

Douchebag Reality Show Made By Douchebags for Douchebags Seeks Douchebags.

Did you wake up today around 1:30 EST in your industrial loft, spend three hours in front the mirror figuring out the outfit that makes you look most like a male teenage prostitute in a Bulgarian gypsy encampment in 1981, and take a leisurely stroll down Bedford Avenue while smoking a Parliament and pretending to speak Spanish to the guys in the bodega? Do you have a tattoo that has been written up in a trend piece in the New York Times Style Section? Did you get the tattoo after the story came out? Are you simultaneously an aspiring musician, screenwriter, documentarian, filmmaker, fashion designer, and visual installation artist, while displaying no visible talent or determination in any of these fields? Did you used to be a vegan until the new Bedford Cheese Shop opened? Have you ever used your knowledge of cheese to impress a date? Does your mother give you shit about your handlebar moustache, or did you just stop talking to her?

Do you consider 25 "old age" because you've never talked a girl older than that into sleeping with you? Did you try to talk me into paying $45 for an old tie with a stain on Bedford the other day, because it was "vintage"? Are you not worried about the swine flu because it's a government conspiracy, just like 9/11? Did you make sure to wear your keffiyah when you went home for Passover? Were you recently the victim of the Hipster Grifter? Have you claimed that you were a victim of the Hipster Grifter, or told all your friends that you fucked the Hipster Grifter, even though you actually never met? Do you privately think that some of the Hipster Grifter's pick-up lines were pretty hot, and plan to try them out once the dust has settled? And most importantly, what are you going to do this summer now that everyone is actually poor?

If you live in Williamsburg, are between the ages of 18-25, and are cool with opening your doors to a camera crew (your seven roommates, their occasional sexual partners and ironically named cats will have to be cool with it too), please send us the following:

• Photo of yourself (this may be all we need)
• Five things that make you a douchebag.
• A short description of yourself and why you want to be on the show, apart from promoting your band.

haha. got you hipsters! To close it out before we let the commenters have their way with this, we close it out fem-bloggy style courtesy of Beck Sharper from Harpyness:

First of all, nothing will ever top "Hipster Olympics", which all you hipsters (and those of us who hate you) can see for free on YouTube.

This reality TV show is about 10 years past relevance, IMHO. I think the whole Williamsburg hipster thing has reached its apex, then had a backlash, then a backlash to the backlash, and now most of us regard them roughly the same way as the rats we see on the subway tracks—skeevy, probably disease-ridden, wouldn't want one in our personal space, but an otherwise unremarkable fact of New York City life. Maybe it'll be all edgy and urban to folks in Duluth, but the rest of us are too over it to even bother slagging the hipsters, let alone watching them on TV.

Also, the dumbfuck casting agent who says "you won't be required to live on an island" has obviously never seen a map of New York City.

Look like we have a consensus hipster-fatigue thing going on. But what say ye hipster commenters? Or are you too busy figuring out how to impress the producers? Honestly, I wouldn't mind seeing more hipster chicks on television. Holler.

image:via

So in our second installment of my singular video mission of getting The Roots to not only be house band for Fallon, but also America, and Gawker, we have ?uestlove discussing the paranormal depths of his magazine collection, Puffy's relationship to new media, and the sobering consequences of having a band-member who Tweets 100 times a day.

The Roots Interview Pt.2 from weekendvids on Vimeo.

Jeff Chang discusses the "privatization of the imagination" in a piece called "The Creativity Stimulus." He shares his thoughts on Taylor's Stimulus package below:

OK first off, Mr. Taylor, stop dissing Detroit. Auto companies and generations of corrupt politicians have run the city into the ground, not the other way around.

Look. Everyone who has spent time and money pursuing an advanced degree is ambivalent about the experience, likely salty about the investment-to-return ratio, and guilty of writing an impenetrably dumb paper or two. But that shit ain't beans next to the ruination of another great American city. So stop.

Taylor's essay is nostalgic for the days when school leaders felt themselves kings because their elite research universities would drive change in business and government, an era best captured by University of California president Clark Kerr's 1963 ode to the university-industrial complex, The Uses of the University. It was a manifesto of the technocracy that produced the Vietnam War, The Best and The Brightest, and, in reaction, the student revolt.

Behind the breezy futurism, in other words, Taylor's a smelly old throwback. He seems to prefer consolidation-and-"downsizing" in an era of local renewal, the starving of arts and creativity amidst the cultural turn, and the sagacity of a few over the wisdom of crowds. In his world, all profs have to give up is tenure. Students lose method, rigor, and both intellectual breadth and depth. And since we know profs will never give up tenure…

But if we're gonna talk real change, let's consider these steps first:

1) Provide equal access to graduate education. Elite schools created bigger aid packages for poor and middle-class students only under threat of Congressional legislation. Taylor stops just short of saying there should be fewer grad students. Maybe he realizes how pathetic he'd look asking to close the door when students of color are only beginning to get in.

2) Recognize graduate student labor. Taylor notes how underpaid grad students are and how their work is central to the functioning of the research university. He outlines their intellectual and financial serfdom. So why won't universities to allow grad student unions to form? Why shouldn't grad students be granted powers in campus and departmental governance? Why not pay them justly for their intellectual work?

3) Preserve the humanities. Not just for Dan's, Kate's, and my sake. Anyone who believes that creativity doesn't have an impact should review the events of the past year or so.

4) Increase equity. The crisis of the university is not, as Taylor says, a problem of over-specialization. The research university is both symptom and cause of a nation increasingly losing the battle on segregation and the wealth gap. So the solutions ought first and foremost to be about advancing the ideas and structures that are transformative. If not for multiculturalism and affirmative action, Barack Obama would not be president. William Bennett knows.

Point is, the university needs to change first-like Detroit-from the bottom up, not the top down. Taylor is staring at the problem from the wrong end.

Macy Halford has done the Talk of the Town thing and helms The New Yorker's Book Bench. Maybe working within those hallowed halls of pretension will leave her sympathetic to Taylor's plight?

I have to second my interlocutors that Taylor has missed the point on what's wrong with the place of universities in our society-especially around questions of access, labor, and the threat of free-market models of information and profit.

I'll step back from these political questions, though,which you all have amply addressed, and ask a couple of ethical ones (not that these are entirely separate). Thinking about pedagogical ethics, Taylor's public mocking of a colleague's student strikes me as a flagrant misuse of power. But it's only part of his broader disdain toward the culture of his institution and the individuals within it, a loathing that comes through in his suggestions: cutting departments in half and teaching via Internet, streamlining paths of inquiry, forcing grad students to adopt a curriculum "structured like a web" so that they can enter jobs "in businesses or nonprofit organizations." Each of these is no less sinister for being vague and impractical. Each strives, essentially, to rid the system of its most human elements-effectively abolishing the teacher-student relationship, regulating personality and desire. It cuts to the most basic questions of the purpose of the university within society: yes, universities serve the market with ideas, but at the core of their added value is a set of guidelines and procedures (including the footnote) which aims to balance the independence of thought with accountability.

Obviously, this doesn't always work: there is plenty of academic work that is sloppy or misleading. But if we remove the aspiration, and the commitment to the openness of information at its foundation, why would we keep universities around at all? The laziness of Taylor's Op-Ed and his turn from pedagogical ethics provide a good example of the kind of argument we end up with when we don't take that accountability seriously.

I can't help thinking that Taylor's are the rantings of a man who has simply opted out of the rigors his profession demands-who has moved on from pedagogy to pedantry. He no longer offers his students actual instruction-rather than teaching them how to write papers, they produce "treatments" in "video-game format" (and in his vision of the future, thanks to the Internet, no one will even need to show up to class); he tells them to do what he "could never imagine doing." It hardly needs be said, but without tenure, I doubt Taylor would have the luxury of muddling what are serious issues facing universities today from such a visible and prestigious platform.

By the way, those dusty medievals whom Taylor so disdains had a word for this kind of argument: sophistry.

That's right, Professor Taylor! Beware the sophist!

Annnd, that's it folks. Are you exhausted? Maybe you want to take a nap and then come back and read it again? Totally works sometimes! Still, by the end of the weekend I'd like to have all this edumacation reform business taken care of so I can finally get some smarts up in this brizzain. Knahmean? Don't make this into Season Six of The Wire, have me slinging crack out the back of this blog and whatnot.

Oh, almost forgot. Dead Prez would like to weigh in as well:

So Professor Taylor's main thesis:

If American higher education is to thrive in the 21st century, colleges and universities, like Wall Street and Detroit, must be rigorously regulated and completely restructured. The long process to make higher learning more agile, adaptive and imaginative can begin with six major steps

And he outlines his manifesto for reform in six points. All of it raises central questions about the purpose of education in our new information age. I got some peeps to discuss:

Kate Perkins is the managing editor of smarty-pants literary magazine N+1

The ivory tower, traditionally, has stood as a haven for the kind of scholarship that is at least indifferent to the pressures of the socioeconomic order – if not actively subversive to it – whereas today it's essentially a gold-plated monument of industry. Private universities charge tuitions affordable only to those in the same tax brackets as professional athletes, guaranteeing the next generation of American aristocracy. This is why schools like NYU (which do of course have innumerable fluffy ‘interdepartmental' study programs like the ones Taylor recommends) look absurd when their students – among the most powerful and privileged citizens in the country – are staging a protest on their nearly privatized Washington Square Park campus: their tuitions have a direct and transparent role in the erosion of the public good.

Even state and city universities disproportionately fund ‘profitable' departments in the axis of techno-pharma-sci-finance researches that yield the greatest gains in funding and reputation. CUNY's "Look Who's at CUNY!" campaign, e.g., advertises the achievements of graduate students and research fellows in ‘important' fields like ADD research and biotechnology. In this sense, graduate programs already do act as the "problem-focused programs" Taylor endorses. When universities operate in service of profits, though, it becomes difficult to tell what their responsibility is with regard to social problems and who, exactly, their problem-solving serves. It's easy to imagine a "Water program" serving not the public but the corporations monopolizing the means of its distribution, at, say, Black Water University.

If Taylor's right to describe the crisis of education as an industry crisis, it's not because, like automobiles or high finance, universities are inherent pillars of American capitalism. It's because social contribution does not equal surplus value. The genuine social utility and social prestige of universities should be based on their institutional independence from The Powers That Be. Taylor's 6 Steps make for relatively useless suggestions, since none of them relieve scholarship from its burden of profit. He's concerned with changing the internal structure of universities, rather than with restructuring the academy's place in the social order. Until that happens, no matter what bureaucratic rearrangements and curricular changes go on, they'll continue to produce the class divisions that make them institutions for the elite, by the elite.

Next up: Dan Kois, who services both sides of his brain via blogging for NY Mag's Vulture blog, and co-helming his own literary-ish endeavor At Length magazine.

In reading Kate's reply, I thought back to this article in Friday's Times, an follow-up of sorts to Mark Taylor's op-ed, currently hovering a few slots below it on the Most Emailed List. It's about a kid from California, currently somewhere between middle-class and lower-middle-class, having trouble finding a way to pay for college. In some ways it suggests that America's private universities may be doing a better job than we old people might imagine of challenging the traditional class distinctions of university life.

This kid applied to Cal, UC-Davis, UCLA, and Stanford. And now he can't pay for school, even though he got into all three of the public universities — because even in-state tuition to public universities, on top of room and board and hilariously overpriced textbooks written by your handsy professor, is way too high for his parents to afford. (Cal offered him $212 in scholarship money.) Too bad he got rejected by Stanford — that quasi-Ivy would have paid for him to go there. For kids whose parents aren't rich, great private schools — if you can get in — can be a better deal than public schools.

Of course, Brennan did not get in to Stanford. Only a select few underprivileged in America will make it through the rigors of growing up poor or lower-middle-class, the even more difficult rigors of high school, and the arguably even more difficult rigors of applying to private universities, to take advantage of this opportunity. And whether those select few will get out of those private schools without having been completely Ivyfied is a whole nother question entirely — you could make a good argument that giving a kid from a poor neighborhood a Harvard diploma effectively nullifies her poor neighborhood from all future economic consideration.

As Kate says though, Taylor isn't really talking about restructuring the academy's place in the greater social order — he's talking about shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic. Anyone who's ever been taught by a hapless grad student or, like me, has been the hapless grad student teaching unmotivated undergrads knows the system is broke. Anyone who's snoozed through a tenured mummy's umpteenth lecture on Pompeii or finished an arcane thesis only to find that no one cares about it or wants to give him a job knows that university culture needs fixing. Might Taylor's recommendations work? Sure, maybe. Maybe not. Who the hell really knows? I do know if on my first day at UNC they'd told me I could major in Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life, or Water, I would've been pissed.

Sure, some kids go into college loaded for bear to solve the world's problems (Education majors), or at least with a concrete sense of what they want to do to exacerbate them (Business majors). But what about the rest of us, who trundle off to college without a clue? My major was Dramatic Arts. Then I got an MFA in fiction writing, for God's sakes. Do either of those suggest a kid with a firm grasp on his future? Add to the hopeless ones like me the many, many students who, reasonably, just want to spend their formative years drinking, fucking, and reading great books. They're already majoring in Life, baby.

Hmm, smells like education by RSS Blog-feeds to me? We have two more contributors coming, but what do all of you smart guys and gals think?

So yeah, I used to blog for The Roots and okayplayer, and about a month ago I did this long interview with them. Turns out they're fans of Gawker, and traffic to their website, and with the band making the mainstream America move with Jimmy Fallon, I wondered if maybe we could do something similar here in blogland. Make them the unofficial quasi-sorta house band of Gawker, on the weekends, in my afternoon slot.

What follows is a little over a minute of ?uestlove talking about that initial transition to the Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. In it Ahmir describes the band as slaves with three masters (or in his words, a band with three demographics). One of them being Lorne Michaels.

What is a slave with three masters to do? I'm thinking the Gawker commenter community is the best source of advice on the subject. This is just a whim of an idea, so there are no specific rules. But the band holds a weekly residency at the Highline Ballroom, and we can arrange for whomever provides the best advice on the matter to get free tickets and meet the band backstage etc. Perhaps, even discuss how to handle it when Lorne pops in.

Here's the clip. If this sounds good, fire away. If it sounds retarded, let me know other ideas. And we'll try and do better next weekend.

Talking with The Roots (pt. 1) from weekendvids on Vimeo.

Tom Breihan wrote the popular Status Ain't Hood blog for The Village Voice. Now he writes for Pitchfork:

First things first: This Asher Roth album is going to sell. Sorry, kids. This guy's label has done as good a job of introducing a new artist that any major could be expected to do in 2009. It doesn't matter if the tastemakers like it or not, since the folks in charge have done really masterful work convincing everyone the world that the tastemakers like Roth, that Roth is a serious bottom-up grassroots phenomenon who's risen through the internet ranks and convinced begrudging serious rap higher-ups of his worthiness.

The majors learned a long time ago that any white rapper needs big-time co-signs from famous black dudes before they can cross over to white pop audiences; those co-signs are what makes it OK for the white pop audiences to take the white rapper seriously. Asher doesn't have anything on the level of Dre signing Eminem, but that mixtape with Drama and those YouTube clips of actual rappers half-heartedly endorsing Roth are enough.

Plus he's got a legit party-anthem hit single, one with an incredibly canny sample underlying it. Then there's "Lark on My Go-Kart", which is not actually a good song, but which does have that Seth McFarlane pop culture reference onslaught working for it; it's the sort of song that makes people feel smart for getting the non-jokes. Seth McFarlane is bullshit, but he's remarkably lucrative and popular bullshit.

So I have to admire the beauty of Roth's marketing campaign. In Asher, the majors have this appealing, well adjusted kid who can sort of rap. And they've finally landed someone who knows how to use the internet. Asher's maybe the first pop rapper other than Soulja Boy who knows how to use all this silly web 2.0 bullshit to lend himself the appearance of massive success.

It's as close to a perfect storm has we're going to see anytime soon. My guess is he sells 300K in his first week, at least. If a second single manages to stick, he'll go platinum, easy. If Asleep in the Bread Aisle was actually a good album, he'd sell twice that.

Next up on the mic, the festively-haired Touré who is often seen talking about things on tv, and has written for Rolling Stone and The Daily Beast:

A lot of people feel resentment about the ascension of Asher Roth because they didn't realize that Asher is inevitable. If it wasn't him, it'd be someone else; if it wasn't now it'd be next year.

Many of us are still holding on, deep in the cranium, to that 80s mentality, when hip hop was black and relatively underground. We are as far from that as the Somali pirate is from home. Asher is the face of the majority of hip hop fans. It's inevitable that eventually one of them would get onstage. It seems shocking to see a blonde suburban kid getting buzz so quickly while your favorite grimy black super-wordsmith is still struggling to get heard but the music biz isn't a meritocracy. It's never about who's the best. If it was they'd just raid the southern Baptist churches. There's tons of great singers there. But they need lookers and more they need salespeople. If Britney Spears was on American Idol she wouldn't win because she can't sing (or dance). But Britney can sell a song and a persona and a brand. That's what the music business is about. Asher may not have the skill of Doom but he's intelligently presented an image that's appealing to many hip hop fans who enjoy listening to and looking at someone who reminds them of themselves. There's nothing wrong with that.

It may irritate some hip hop fans that Asher is suburban and doesn't pay homage to black culture and the ghetto (things Eminem does) but suburbia thinks hip hop is theirs and they're not wrong. Asher isn't unique, he's going to be followed by many more like him. Once upon a time rock n roll was filled with black artists. When your grandkids roll around you'll tell them once hip hop was filled with black artists. Hopefully they won't look at you like you're crazy. (By the way, Tom, I'm looking at you like you're crazy for that line "silly web 2.0 bs." Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter aren't silly or bs. This is the way the world connects today and it's not going away soon. But if it's any consolation, my grandfather agrees with you.)

Closing it out is the feared and respected Byron Crawford of XXL and his own eponymous website:

It's obvious Asleep in the Bread Aisle is gonna be a miserable commercial failure. The first sign was the other day, when Asher Roth went on XXL talking about how the label failed to ship enough copies to stores. At first, I thought there might be some truth to this, since these rap labels have been known to fuck things up like that. Then it occurred to me: if the label really thought this album would be a commercial success, why would they only ship 100,000 copies to stores the first week? They probably realized the demand just wasn't there. Maybe they read a post I wrote the other day about how it's obvious people don't really give a shit about Asher Roth, despite all of the support he's received from the TIs. Then it was announced yesterday that Asleep in the Bread Aisle is only expected to sell about 70,000 copies its first week out. Which gives the lie to Roth's claim that the label didn't ship enough copies to stores.

The real question is: why isn't Asleep in the Bread Aisle the commercial success we thought it might be? It could be that the album sucks balls. I know it's gotten a few favorable nods from critics, but those people are obviously on the TIs' payroll. My boy Ian Cohen over at Pitchfork gave it a 2.7, and I'd say that's about accurate. The album was leaked to the Internets a good 10+ days before it hit the streets, on 4/20. Maybe hundreds of thousands of people were planning to cop, like they did that Lil Wayne album last year, but then they heard it and decided to get some weed instead. If the album was even aiight (say, a 5.7 on the P-fork scale), it probably would have sold way better. The streets are hungry for bullshit right now - that new Jadakiss album sold about twice as many copies its first week as Asher Roth is expected to sell, and it's a Jadakiss album. If the album was genuinely worth a shit, we might have a new Eminem on our hands. I think there is still a hunger for a great white hope in hip-hop, even though we're living in an age when race is supposedly no longer relevant.

Maybe you'd like to form your own opinion? Here's the Lark video:

Asher photo via: Emily Sandifer

So coming up in 15 minutes, we're going to talk White Rapper 3: The Chronicles of Asher Roth, the melanin-challenged eminem-inflected emcee who released his album this Monday (4/20). He's got the pop MTV and EW buzz behind him, and Eminem has grasped for his brother's hand in solidarity (making them the Martin & Malcolm of white-rappers, I s'pose?), but I have Tom Breihan (Pitchfork), Touré (Rolling Stone, The Daily Beast), and Byron Crawford (XXL) weighing in on the merits (or lackthereof) of the album and related media narrative.

Then I want to try something different with this Roots clip we have. Make it like an open caption, but with video or something. And we might give stuff away! If you're into that. Are you? Well stay tuned, and we'll figure it out then.

Also: Yesterday I took a trip to Spanish Harlem (SpaHa, stand up!) with celebrity photog Diana Levine; it was sort of a Ghetto Pass Illustrated treasure hunt for pictorial gold. You can let us know if we found any.

Finally, did you know next month (May) is Black History Month? There's a manifesto and everything! Stay tuned and we'll get you up to speed.

wordemup.

So, yeah, I love the Vice magazine angle on this story. Did you know you can score a job — a legit job, in a recession! — at a popular magazine by just being cute and charming? That's some tangible real-world lesson shit for the kids right there. If you're in the market, you might want to lose the paper printouts and get your résumé tattooed on your chest! Cooooool.

So I sent some of the Vice editorial staff a blind email on the matter, but no response (probably too busy doing background checks on the rest of their staff, understandable). But I did hear from former heart-and-soul of Vice, co-founder Gavin McInnes. He shared his unique perspective:

I realize hindsight is 20/20 but how awesome would it be if you knew a chick was a hipster grifter but didn't let on and dated her anyways? She'd fake cry during intercourse and tell you she wants to have your babies and you'd be all, "I know Kari. I've never loved anyone this much." How intensely dark and fucking weird would that be!?

You'd have to constantly avoid situations where you give her cash and you'd have to sleep with your credit cards up your ass but, as we've learned from seducing strippers, the more dough you put out the more you're seen as a dolt. She'd actually appreciate the challenge. Oh what a heavy thrill it would be watching her out of the corner of your eye, trying to predict her next hustle. Anyone with a junkie roommate knows how challenging this can be. You'd have to keep your laptop at work and all your CDs would need to go into storage but cheating a cheater must make you feel like God. I bet your hands would shake at the end of every encounter.

If you don't find this kind of idea exciting, you are precisely the sort of pussy hipster grifters prey on – and you deserve it.

Gavin McInnes founded Vice Magazine in 1994 but recently left to start Street Carnage with another assimilated negro.

Ha. Yeah, that's right you labia-lobotomized hipsters. Suck it.

Well after being enlightened to the edgy alternative universe perspective, I wanted to get grounded again in the reality of what's happening on the streets. So I talked to Doree, the journalist who broke the story, AND former Gawkette:

TAN: Will you be staying on top of the Grifter beat for the New York Observer? This story brings to mind Season 5 of The Wire, when they "surrounded" the homeless story once it got sensational enough. There's probably an entire subculture of grifters and aspiring-grifters out there waiting to be exposed?

Since the story ran I've heard tales of other grifters people have had the unfortunate experience of coming into contact with. They're certainly an intriguing group of people, but you just feel like at some point it starts just being sad more than anything else—the grifters themselves seem to have some serious mental health issues and the people they target are so emotionally and often financially drained from the experience. My (armchair) analysis is that it's partly the need to feel loved and taken care of (see Kari's constant hospitalizations under questionable circumstances) but taken to an unhealthy level. Connected to that is wanting to have power over people (Kari's suicide attempts and "pregnancy" scares, tellingly, seemed to come when it seemed like a guy was about to leave her, or when he was on tour with his band—she would make it so that he "couldn't" leave her). I think people with these kinds of issues are also deeply, deeply lonely; in one of my follow-ups to the original story I told about how she made up intricate lies to get someone to go to a concert with her. Many of her victims also said that she always seemed to have something to offer people, and I would bet that she did that because she was nervous about being alone.

But I think there's also the thrill of getting away with it all; knowing they have the power to manipulate people to such a degree must give grifters a kind of high. Kari knows she comes off as friendly and personable, which is why she's able to manipulate people so skillfully.

True that. Well here's hoping Kari reaches out to Doree, it'd be nice if they could work together on giving us this full story.

Finally, after those updates I'm thinking business now. And if you're a blogger, that means book deal. Many of the commenteratti think there are some big-time royalties to be earned on this story. Are they right? I asked a big-time book editor if they're hot on the meme:

As we say in the business, "there's no there there." Girl meet boy, girl dupes boy. Girl has bitchin' tats and boy possibly has Asian fetish. Boy loses girl, money and self-respect. The End.

Sounds kinda like an Ethan Hawke novel, now that I think about it. Which is the first sign publishers should stay far, far away.

And who would write the thing anyway? Kari? Yeah, because she's exactly the kind of person you can trust to honor a contract and a cash advance. So...no. Not gonna happen.

It's also worth pointing out that there have been a bunch of juicy stories that have gotten major play in the NY media fishbowl recently that have yielded exactly ZERO book deals. Anyone remember the DABA girls? They managed to dupe the NY Times into writing a serious trend piece and then released a statement saying "Oh, it was satire! Totes jk, y'all." But of course, right after they were "exposed" a story appeared in Fashionista saying they had a book deal—and sites like Jezebel jumped all over the book deal story. Now, no book deal was ever made—it was a classic case of getting a little notoriety and then planting some leads in the hopes that a publisher would bite. No one did. The agent still has not sold that b.s., nor will she. Ultimately there was no there there, and while someone might have taken a flyer 5 years ago when we were more flush, these days, publishers are a lot more wary about throwing real money around. Kari will just have to find some other sucker to fund her hipsterness. And really, I have complete confidence she will.

A senior book editor who prefers anonymity considering the sensational nature of this story

image: via