The NYO's full masthead listing, with every name and title, is here. An awesome piece of work. Keep in mind that Si Newhouse, keeper of a crumbling empire, is still so in love with The New Yorker he wants to marry it and will cut every other magazine to pieces before he makes David Remnick fire anyone.

Total Number of "Critics": 11
Total Number of Staff Writers: 66(!)
Total Number of "Editors" of One Sort or Another: 31
Total Copy Staff, Fact Checkers, and Editorial Assistants: 40
Total Art, Photo, Layout, and Cartoon Staffers: 43
Total Number of Staffers with "Makeup" in Their Titles: 6

That does not even cover all the miscellaneous positions! It makes the New York Times Book Review look positively anorexic. Ah well. The best magazine in America can hire whoever it wants, *HINT*.

[John Koblin's full NYer masthead]

2. Eat some pork buns.

3. Eat some steak.

4. Eat some Gray's Papaya.

5. Eat some wings.

6. Eat some tacos. Pork tacos.

7. Eat some bacon (but don't be obnoxious about it).

8. Eat a bacon cheeseburger.

9. Eat some turkey. Some jive turkey.

10. Just be a vegetarian, and understand that most meat-eaters do respect your views, but that they're not as complicated and complex as you'd like to think they are, and that most people are actually, yes, quite aware of the arguments you'd like to "respectfully" make, what they're doing, the various reasons why it's uncool, and that we should eat more vegetables, and that we don't need to be guilted about it, and if we did, we'd read Michael Pollan's book instead, or at the very worst, Elizabeth Kolbert's New Yorker review of Jonathan Safran Foer's book, which is both (A) quite great and (B) will save you $15 or $20 and save us from hearing you opine on what you read by the guy that wrote Everything is Illuminated talking down to all of us about eating our vegetables.

11. STFU.

The lawsuit centers on a story Jared Diamond wrote last year about tribal wars in New Guinea. Forbes reports that the plaintiffs in this suit include Daniel Wemp—Diamond's "chief source" for the story. Wemp says he's not as murderous as the world's most famous anthropologist would have you believe.

Diamond's account says 30 people lost their lives during a three-year clan war that began after a pig ransacked someone's garden. Mandingo and Wemp, who served as Diamond's driver on a trip to Papua New Guinea, say only four people died, the war lasted three months and the conflict didn't start over a pig in a garden, but an argument over a card game.

And he's still upset about being called a pig thief! The New Yorker's sticking by its story. If anything good comes of this, it'll be to make reporters stop using their drivers as their main sources. You listening, Tom Friedman? Stop it.
[Stinky Journalism also has numerous debunker pieces on Diamond's story. Pic of random New Guinea resident via Flickr.]

Who's happiest of all that one huge financial news outlet (Bloomberg) bought another huge financial news outlet (Businessweek)? Flacks. Via Media Decoder:

"I think that News Corp. has reduced their reporting of core financial markets at The Wall Street Journal. and they haven't had a lot of competition, but now they will, which is great for those of us who are working to help companies get their message across," said Paul Taaffe, chief executive of Hill & Knowlton. "This is a big deal for financial news the world over. It is a total game changer for companies trying to release information, because now there is competition, and competition elevates everybody's game."

Huh. What he's actually saying here is "Bloomberg combining with BW means there's less competition and fewer news outlets, which makes the job of PR people easier." Fixed.


Big Think interviewed the New Yorker's Calvin Trillin. What did he have to say? Well, he says that kids these days don't really know shit about journalism, not like they used to, at least; and then in the second clip he says kids these days don't know shit about real journalism, not like they used to, at least. And he's right!


And meanwhile: The New Yorker has hired somebody. That's crazy! Well. They hired Nick Trautwein away from Penguin Press to replace departed senior editor Emily Eakin, who left the mag for medical reasons, according to John Koblin. Still. Hire?? Crazy!


Conde Nast dumped much of the sales staff at Brides and replace them with ex-Cookie staffers. But that might not have been the brightest idea—Keith Kelly says that move has caused "the magazine to hemorrhage ad pages." Well that's a totally unexpected consequence of an otherwise savvy management move. NOT, haha. Zinger.


The Washington Post has hired Katherine Zaleski away from the Huffington Post. Who's she? A well-connected, wealthy young woman with her own El Dorado apartment. Uh, journalism pays!

But other than that, Tad Friend's long-awaited profile of Nikki Finke, the proprietress of Deadline Hollywood, sadly missed the mark. We feel bad for Friend, because after having endured the exhausting emotional odyssey that is writing about Nikki Finke, whose limitless capacity for outrage and rhetorical combat are well-known to anyone who's been saddled with the task of profiling her (as are her perverse charm and cultivated vulnerability), he came up with what Finke accurately described as a "clip-job." After all the endless conversations and quarrelsome e-mails—some cc'd to attorneys—from Finke to Friend and his boss, New Yorker editor David Remnick, we'd hoped Friend would have come up with something meatier.

The story of Nikki Finke, it seems to us, is summed up in this paragraph from Friend's profile:

She has noticed a recent reduction in mendacity, perhaps because of her zero-tolerance policy: "I tell them, ‘If you care so little about what my site has to say, then you won't care what I have to say about this.' You call it bullying, I call it promising." Seeking coöperation, Finke has called potential sources "morons," banged the phone down, or e-mailed them to say, "I'll have to publicly humiliate you" or "WHO IS IN CHARGE OF THIS STUFF? Who's in charge? Because I'm about to explode." Asked about the name-calling, Finke says, "And how do you know they weren't acting like morons?" When I mentioned a few other examples, Finke responded, "Oh, boohoo! They're calling that bullying? What, it's a playground, where I'm taking away their milk and cookies?"

Well, what about those other examples, then? What, precisely, does Finke mean when she threatens to "say something" about "this"? The reason Sweet Smell of Success was a good movie was that there were knives, and people got stabbed with them. There's much wringing of hands about Finke's tactics in Friend's tale, but he doesn't really get the goods on the actual tactics themselves. Lets hear about those "promises." Let's hear about what stories Finke has gotten by threatening to "publicly humiliate" sources that refused to cooperate (or "coöperate," in the New Yorker's paleo-Germanic rendering of the English language.)

If Nikki Finke is running around Hollywood blackmailing people for information, then let's have it. The anecdotes that Friend brings to the table about how Finke got certain stories are interesting, but say more about Finke's usefulness to the moguls who are capable of positioning her "eight to twelve per cent above the facts, a little window dressing of protection, of delay, of shading, or of burying something" than her own little tricks for convincing people to say what she would like them to say.

We don't know for sure what those tricks are, or if Finke does in fact use them. But we know that there are things about her—or allegations about her—that she successfully kept out of the story, because she told us so: "I found Tad Friend, who covers Hollywood from Brooklyn, easy to manipulate, as was David Remnick, whom I enjoyed bitchslapping throughout but especially during the very slipshod factchecking process." It's of course cosmically and beautifully appropriate that Finke triumphantly boasts about successfully deploying the sort of smokescreen that she bemoans as wheedling spin when her subjects try it on her. It's also cosmically and beautifully appropriate that Finke writes that the way to school the New Yorker is to "act like a cunt and treat Remnick like a putz and don't give a fuck" just a few characters after detailing the "months and weeks and hours" of her time she spent on participating in the story and attempting to control its outcome. Trust us: Nikki Finke gives a fuck.

The most striking line in the story, from our perspective, was this one: "One top studio executive says, 'Nikki's blog you have to check, and the others you have to delete from your in-box.'" A top studio executive thinks he has blogs in his in-box? These people are idiots, and they deserve—the truly powerful ones, at least—the worst Nikki Finke has to offer them.

"I'm too superficial to read The New Yorker because it's so unrelentingly boring. Even the cartoons suck these days," begins Finke's post reacting to the profile. Touche, babes! I feel you. But occasionally they come out with something interesting, and this—in or out of context—is definitely one of The New Yorker's more valiant efforts. Too bad it's so mediocre. Highlights:

• The New Yorker loves to write about bloggers as secluded, melodramatic cretins sniping away from the comfort of their living room while they're too socially anxious to do anything else. Which is true. Also, we learn her cat's name:

  "...In seclusion she manages to seem ubiquitous, covering the golden acres from Santa Monica to Sunset-Gower from a home newsroom containing six phones, a laptop, and her cat, Blue. Her all-knowing voice on the phone is reminiscent of Charlie of "Charlie's Angels"-yet she salts her site with references to her diabetes and dental work, drawing readers into the drama of her daily struggle."

  
  

• Finke does drams. Watch her recount the tale of her learning Dick Cook was being canned/leaving Disney: "Finke told me, 'I literally ripped the I.V. out of my arm to leave the hospital, and I would have had the story an hour earlier if I hadn't stopped to get an antibiotic.'"
  
  
• This was nice: Studios hosting dinners with Hollywood journalists having a salon about how the journalists were going to do their jobs. Finke didn't show, naturally.

  "In April, 2007, Stacy Ivers, who was then in charge of media relations at Universal Pictures, invited about thirty people-a mixture of journalists and P.R. executives from the studios and talent agencies-to dinner in Laurel Canyon. Ivers's idea was that the two camps could mingle over salmon and lemon bars, and hash out Hollywood's new rules of reporting. Ivers's dinner, attended by most of Hollywood's top corporate publicists, as well as by Fleming, Waxman, the Variety reporter Anne Thompson, the Hollywood Reporter's film editor, Gregg Kilday, and a Los Angeles Times editor, Sallie Hofmeister, among others...."

  
  

• Several allusions comparing Nikki to the communist witch hunts of Hollywood, including Warner Bros. studio chief Jeff Robinov.
  
  
• Nikki just making fun of Friend:

  After a moment, she added, "I did call Peter ‘Ovitz's buttboy' "-a suggestion that Bart was too submissive to the former agent Michael Ovitz, an enduring adversary of Finke's. "I can't help it!" she said, laughing. "It's like meanness pours out of my fingers!"

  
  

• Finke talking to her cat and her assistant the same way: "She was often funny and warm, and at times appealingly distractible, breaking off to talk to her assistant ("I can't eat this-no offense, but it's gross! Yuck!") or her cat ("Yeah, there's food there-what the hell is your problem?")."
  
  
• Nikki Finke, the lonely, sad blogger:

  "One Saturday evening, after we concluded a three-hour call, she phoned back twenty minutes later to say, "Everyone tries to portray me as sad, pathetic, lonely-that's not me at all." "I don't think of you that way, Nikki," I said. "You don't know anything about my private life," she said, quietly. "That's probably true." "O.K."

  
  

• Nikki Finke, the depressive maniac:

  "There was a constant undercurrent of a kind of financial and professional desperation," her friend Bernie Weinraub, who was then the Times' Hollywood correspondent, says. After Finke's book was cancelled by Dial Press, in 1996, she wept so intensely that Lisa Chase, who edited a column Finke was writing for the New York Observer, called the Los Angeles sheriff's department and asked them to check on her. Deputies arrived at Finke's apartment at the same time as Weinraub, who had also spoken to Finke and grown concerned, and when she opened the door, sobbing, holding a knife she was using to open a package, the deputies shouted, "Put down the knife!" Later, Weinraub would jokingly blackmail her about that moment-and Finke would tease him about the time he'd fallen asleep while interviewing Jim Carrey.

  
  

• Nikki's excuses for missing deadlines, two of which I've used: "‘I was locked out of my apartment,' ‘I had food poisoning,' ‘I was being evicted.'"
  
  
• Endeavor agents talking to Friend about Ari Emmanel's handling of Finke during the Endeavor-William Morris merger:

  "Ari fed Nikki perfectly," one Endeavor agent says. "He used her just enough to help the merger."

  
  

• The only person Finke's afraid of:

  Finke is tickled by such bluster, and says that the silky David Geffen is the only person in town she's actually afraid of, adding, "I'm sure he'd take it as a compliment." (Geffen, perhaps cultivating his reputation for veiled menace, said, "Just say I had no reaction at all.")

  
  

• And finally, Finke's kicker:

  "I don't think for a minute these people like me," Finke told me. "They talk to me because that's how the game is played. They'd like to ignore me, but they can't. The best way for them to think of it is: I get bitch-slapped today, and someone else'll get bitch-slapped tomorrow."

That person—or people—according to Finke's blog post, are David Remnick, Tad Friend, and most of the New Yorker's working masthead. But before we get there, let's do a quick rundown of the language used in Friend's piece:

• Finke portrays many of the town's leaders as jackasses who golf at exclusive preserves
  
  
• Jeff Zucker, the C.E.O. and president of NBC Universal, is "one of the most kiss-ass incompetents
  
  
• "Stick it where the sun don't shine, you asswipe," she recently counselled a CBS publicist.
  
  
• Nikki wrote it like the runaway bride was a whore."
  
  
• In October, 2007, Finke posted a story about Jeff Robinov, Warner Bros.' president of production: "Warner's Robinov Bitchslaps Film Women."
  
  
• "I did call Peter ‘Ovitz's buttboy'"
  
  
• "Then you see a comment-maybe from someone who's in an insane asylum-saying, ‘When I worked there, he shit in the kitchen sink and wiped his ass with $100 bills.'"
  
  
• Nikki's response was that I was a pussy.
  
  
• "New Line was left holding its dick"
  
  
• "starts whining like the pussy he is,"
  
  
• A source of Finke's says, "Somehow I've become like the poster child for her-I'm her bitch."
  
  
• Ray Stark once told Finke, "Girlie, if you ever fuck me, I'm going to personally come over to your house and give you a hysterectomy."
  
  
• "You make me sound like a wuss!"
  
  
• bitch-slapped today, and someone else'll get bitch-slapped tomorrow

And that wasn't even a thorough search. This thing's full of awesome Finke-isms. But the bottom line is that the juciest stuff in the profile about Nikki—she changes posts on the fly, she can be shifted by her sources, some people are afraid of her, some not so much, she's a rebel, an outsider, comes from money, lives a mysterious life, is kinda kooky—are things we already knew or could've guessed. The best part of this story, of course, is Nikki's reaction.

Hollywood Manipulated The New Yorker the title of her post proclaims. How does she go after the New Yorker? Her full assessment, in its most basic form is

As I expected, it's an amusing caricature, only occasionally true but hardly insightful. Still, I'm relieved that The New Yorker didn't lay a glove on me.

Ah, but there's more. Finke argues that Friend's reporting was mediocre, and that he and the New Yorker got totally played by Hollywood. Back to the bullet points, one more time:

• Her time was wasted.
  
  
• The best stuff she gave Friend wasn't even used.
  
  
• She spoke with Friend on piles of pre-conditions only.
  
  
• Friend's work was "no better" than David Carr's NYT profile on her.
  
  
• She found Friend "easy to manipulate."
  
  
• She enjoyed "bitchslapping" New Yorker EIC David Remnick "throughout but especially during the very slipshod factchecking process"
  
  
• The New Yorker "bent over" for Hollywood.
  
  
• Brad Grey's flack Steven Rubenstein got every reference in the story to him deleted.
  
  
• Harvey Weinstein had "cunt" replaced with the word "jerk" on his quote.
  
  
• More on Hollywood "had their way" with the New Yorker, and then this Eminem-esque kicker: "You, too, can make The New Yorker your buttboy. Just act like a cunt and treat Remnick like a putz and don't give a fuck."

Jesus.

I contacted Tad Friend, David Remnick, and deputy editor Pamela McCarthy at The New Yorker for comment on Finke's rebuttal. None of them replied. The New Yorker's PR director, Alexa Cassanos, did:

No, no comment from David or The New Yorker. Thanks for checking though.

I figured I'd fire one Finke's way since she's having such a great morning. What'd she think of the New Yorker's silence? Also: what she thought of the article's assertion that she could be "(positioned)..to some degree."

I have no idea what that sentence means. I do know that in the 3rd graf of the story it reads, "she's very, very, very accurate, extraordinarily so..."

And that, right there, is the Nikki Finke story: playing her own press as hard as the subjects she covers try to work her, and when occasionally caught in the middle, celebrating the nihilism of her bloodsport with a hearty "who cares?" Finke is Shiva, a force of destruction, kinda crazy and overly obsessive, caring only about how respected and powerful she is, and taking it by brute force. She's playing her game by rules she makes up as she goes along, elbows out, and occasionally tossing around doublespeak to back her transgressions and fouls. It's really quite fun to watch even if, as Finke might suggest, you have no reason to give a fuck.

Brazilian newspaper O Globo: What is it even talking about? The paper says "It's war!" because the New Yorker published an article this week about Rio's hellacious favela violence—right when the city's trying to get the Olympics. Conspiracy, clearly! Hey O Globo, the whole "It's war!" thing is what they were talking about. Duh.


We missed this yesterday: Mediabistro millionairess Laurel Touby's exit interview. "Exit" meaning, "She's taking a grand worldwide vacation for a few months, whatever, she's already rich." Laurel sez, "People are constantly asking me for personal advice or one-on-one help, and I've thought for a long time that if I just write it in a book it will be very helpful for entrepreneurs." Just don't take advice about email from her.


Yesterday was the NYT's annual "State of the Times" thing where the big execs stand up and tell the staff what the hell's going on and answer some questions. We hear it was boring. No final decisions yet on how the paper will go forward with its inevitable paid online content move. But Pinch Sulzberger did, allegedly, get off one funny line. Yea, video or it didn't happen.



Rachel Sklar is all mad because stupid Capitol File magazine headlined a story about Diane Sawyer, "Woman on Top."
Women. Geez.

Friday, October 16

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

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

Saturday, October 16

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

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

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

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

Sunday, October 17

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

Noon: Photography with Platon. Fashiony!

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

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

The McKinsey consultants are zeroing in on Vogue as one of their early targets for "restructuring" and whatnot. We imagine that means that they went in, ready to do their cost-cutting, and were frozen by fear when they stared into Anna Wintour's black pools of eternity (eyes). Now she is proceeding to spend just as much money as ever—Keith Kelly says her normal European tour of fashion shows is a go.

Wintour's European entourage, which is usually about 10 people including her creative director, fashion director, several top stylists, European market editor, beauty editor and Publisher Tom Florio, is estimated to cost the company close to $250,000 in travel expenses.

Something's gotta go, to pay for the $30 pommes frites at The Ritz in Pair-ee. That "something" is...whatever they can take away from the New Yorker, which hasn't had a staff member who could kick a McKinsey consultant's ass since AJ Liebling left. David Remnick's magazine has lost its coffee stirrers.

Luckily the fundamental scientific principles governing the motion of heated molecules and liquid dynamics tell us that milk will mix itself into coffee without being stirred by an outside force. Well done, McKinsey.
[Pic: Getty]

The New Yorker's Book Bench blog discovered these sad, young, hard literary men, all of whom say they work in "law, publishing and high technology." When these hard guys meet up, they just don't talk about books, they also do hard things like playing paintball and gambling and shooting guns and engaging in contests involving feats of strength. The group's founder, who goes by the hard name of Tanaka, had this to say about why he started a book club exclusively for Boston's rock hard swinging dicks:

I started this club as an anti-establishment book club that spits in the faces of the traditional girlie clubs where people don't discuss the book, and just drink wine and talk about relationships. I have a good number of smart, successful friends who are very well read, and want to kick ass like I do. Throw in beer, competition, and seedy locations, and we had the perfect recipe to have fun while motivating us to continue to read and kick ass collectively.

According to their website, these hard boys love books by hard authors like Cormac McCarthy and Ernest Hemingway, but hated C. D. Payne's Youth in Revolt because it just wasn't hard enough for their tastes. Shockingly, there are no Chuck Palahniuk books on their list of past selections, but just give it some time — after reading Chuck they'll probably all spontaneously drop their pants and start masturbating in front of each other, because that's the type of shit hard guys do when they're totally intellectually stimulated, and there wouldn't be nothing gay about that at all because it's all about being hard baby!

Long live the Scorpions! If there's one thing this world needs more of, it's "anti-establishment" book clubs.

To get an idea of how all this came to be, here's what the New Yorker's Andrew Essex wrote about the friendship between Pynchon and Lotion in the 1996 TOTT piece:

The writer and the rockers first met in Cincinnati... After the show, the older guy, who was wearing a Godzilla shirt and ill-fitting pants, swung by to offer his compliments. He introduced himself as Tom. Jim Ferguson was reading "Slow Learner", Pynchon's collection of short stories. He'd left his copy backstage in a New York rock club, where Pynchon had been invited to watch the show. Pynchon saw it and asked, "Who's reading my book?" "I said, 'No, that's my book,'" Jim recalls. "It didn't register until 1 got onstage... After that, Tom began showing up at Lotion performances all over the country. An unlikely friendship was born. A year later, the members of Lotion are still a bit stunned by their guardian angel.

Recently Essex contacted the magazine to say that he and the New Yorker's vaunted fact-checkers had been tricked by the band all those years ago.

When asked about the article last week, Lotion's lead singer, Tony Zajkowski, now a graphic designer at Wired, blurted out, "Oh, God, you got the big bullshit story!" Shortly afterward, the bassist Bill Ferguson, who now works on the Times Magazine copy desk, admitted that they had fed reporters at various outlets an account designed to be "as Pynchonesque as possible." The bandmates had repeated their story to a New Yorker fact checker, who did his best to confirm details. Pynchon, then as now, was unreachable, and when the story came out he raised no public objections.

The band says that Pynchon did attend some of their London shows and actually wrote some liner notes for an album after they met him through his accountant, who happened to be the mother of the band's drummer, but he was nothing even close to being a groupie who attended rock shows in Godzilla T-shirts and ill-fitting pants. They did the whole hilarious thing for shits and giggles, a hoax that stood for 13 years, and for that the former members of the Lotion deserve a tip of the proverbial cap.

Als' fascinating argument is that Jackson's otherness was formed because he was gay, but couldn't express it because of his religious mother, domineering father, and the homophobia that exists in the black community.

In black urban centers across the US, where Jesus is still God, men who cannot conform to the culture's edicts-adopting a recognizably heterosexual lifestyle, along with a specious contempt for the spoils of white folk-are ostracized, or worse; being "out" is a privilege many black gay men still cannot afford.

Of course, this isn't the first time that anyone has called Jackson gay, but it's entirely different to base an entire article on the assumption that he was. Creative manifestations of his homosexuality, according to Als, include his turn as an "effete" scarecrow in The Wiz, his Judy Garland-esque costume for the Victory Tour, and, of course, everything having to do with him and gay icon Diana Ross.

And there were the songs he wrote for women-early idols like Diana Ross or his older sister, Rebbie-songs that expressed what he could never say about his own desire. "She said she wants a guy/To keep her satisfied/But that's alright for her/But it ain't enough for me," Jackson wrote in the 1982 Diana Ross hit song "Muscles." The song continues: "Still, I don't care if he's young or old/(Just make him beautiful).... I want muscles/All over his body."

Or, maybe he was just, you know, writing a pop song. What we know about Jackson's sexuality doesn't seem to point to the fact that he was actually gay. He was married to women more than once (not that he would be the first 'mo to wear a wedding ring, but...) and that he had some inappropriate relationships with young boys. Just because the victims of his alleged abuse were male does not mean that he had desire for grown men.

So, please stop saying that Michael Jackson was gay. Though gay couples are allowed to marry in several states and homosexuals are flouncing all over mainstream culture more readily these days does not mean it is accepted by a majority of the population, and we don't need any negative role models. After all, Harry Homophobe isn't going to say, "Wow, that gay Michael Jackson wrote 'Billie Jean' and that song rocks. Gays are so wonderful and creative" he's going to think, "Wow, that gay Michael Jackson was so gay that he had to touch little boys and try to make them gay. Gays are disgusting." The last thing we need is to re-convince people that gay men are not child molesters.

It's unfortunate that Als had to push his argument to including Jackson's sexuality, because he was clearly "queer" in the sense that he was a figure that lived outside of society's typical edicts about race, class, culture, and sexuality. He was a "freak" (even Als concedes that fact) and was treated as such.

However, his freakishness may have come from many places—his unnatural celebrity at a young age, the public scrutiny he lived under, living under the contradiction of his church-going mother and his Hollywood father—but it didn't come from being gay.

Michael [NYRB]

Playboy actually first excerpted Nabokov's Ada or, Ardor back in 1969, when they were a very popular and highbrow titty mag. But the years have not been kind to Playboy, because the years invented the internet, and everyone forgot both how to read and how to masturbate to magazines.

And do you know who we don't envy? Playboy's literary editor, Amy Grace Loyd.

So. Vlad Nabokov, one of the most brilliant English-language authors ever, had not finished his last work, The Original of Laura, when he died. And he demanded that it never be published, because he was a bit of a perfectionist. Vlad's son Dmitri complied with his dad's wishes for many years, until he decided to just let it be published, because why not. So "super-agent" Andrew Wylie took over, and Amy Grave Loyd attempted to woo him with orchids, a reference to Ada.

Ms. Loyd was disappointed, figuring the honor of first serial was more likely to go to a place like The New Yorker, which had its own long history with Nabokov, and had in fact just last summer published one of his newly translated short stories. Ms. Loyd's worry was not unfounded: Mr. Wylie had indeed sent Laura to the The New Yorker months earlier. But as it happened, according to a source at the magazine, the fiction department was not interested. (Fiction editor Deborah Treisman had no comment.)

On the first of June, Mr. Wylie changed his tune and wrote to Ms. Loyd asking her what, hypothetically, Playboy would be willing to pay for an exclusive.

They were willing to pay more than they have ever paid for a book excerpt before, and they were willing to pay this much without even reading a word of it. And it kinda turns out that the book might not be very good! "There are parts of it that are much more cohesive than others. But I found it fascinating in that way," Loyd says.

But 5,000 words of The Original of Laura will run in the December Playboy, presumably next to reviews of the latest in hi-fi gear, Canadian whiskey ads, Gahan Wilson cartoons, a lengthy Q&A with Mort Sahl, and nude pictures of Barbara Carrera. Pick it up at your local newsagent!

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.

image: via

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.

image: via

True story, no hipster-grifter! We also have a panel including Emily Gordon of Emdashes, Troy Patterson of Slate, and Eric Easter of EbonyJet to talk about all this code-of-omerta breaking going on via Dan Baum. We can fix this!

We are also going to present "The Ten Tat Commandments" (c.f. Notorious BIG) while looking at some of the most ridiculous tattoos ever, courtesy of tat-curator Aviva Yael.

(Oh, and for those unfamiliar: I'm T.A.N. — The Assimilated Negro, for short — and I rock the mic here every Saturday afternoon. )

But for now, we toss it to French girls walking through the streets of music with text boxes over their girly parts. Woot.

image: via

We talked to Dan Baum on the phone today. He told us the story of the last time he talked to Gawker—in 2007, after the magazine decided not to renew his contract. When we "revealed" that NYer writers are on one-year contract, Pam McCarthy, the New Yorker editor who deals with writers and their contracts, sent Baum some rather passive-aggressive emails, culminating in her allowance that well, if speaking to Gawker helped him sell books, then she could forgive that "there was a bit more there about how we do contracts" than she would like.

Which raises the question: What the fuck does the New Yorker care if the unwashed public knows they give out yearly contracts? A year later Baum took to Twitter and gave out way more details about his own contracts there, down to the dollars-per-word. "We're all reporters" ostensibly dedicated to openness, Baum said. "I just think it's hilarious that this created such a stir...It's a magazine. It is not an organ of state security. It is not a sacred temple."

Of course, the New Yorker has always been insulated and touchy. That was part of its "charm!" Tom Wolfe pointed this out decades ago in a story called "Tiny Mummies!" which made fun of the magazine in its William Shawn days. The opening words:

"Omerta! Sealed Lips! Sealed lips, ladies and gentlemen. We are editing the New Yorker magazine, Harold Ross's New Yorker. We are not running a panopticon. Not exactly!"

Even then, secrecy for absurd reasons was a given. As was an inexplicable fervor amongst the magazine's priesthood!

The New Yorker was in a class by itself. One went to work there and one—how does one explain it?—began to get a kind of...religious feeling about the place. There were already a lot of...traditions.

And those traditions remain! After Wolfe's piece ran he was bombarded with condemnation from a long list of the magazine's most famous writers. Although there was also quite a bit of "Don't dish it out if you can't take it" reaction towards the New Yorker, which enjoyed publishing takedown pieces.

So, some things never change: The New Yorker is insular, easily offended, and America's best magazine, and even though you know all about their contracts now, you still can't get a job there.