A few things:

1. This is stupid.
2. The Deep V-Neck has been going in and out for years, over and over again. It doesn't even disappear for decades at a time, the only regard it shifts in is who ends up wearing them, and what continent (Europe or America) they live in.
3. Because, for the moment, American Apparel—a popular company—is selling them, and pre-packaged hipster fashion is what's selling, that must make it a trend.
4. If NY1's Pat Kiernan is laughing at it, it probably isn't. Or it's just stupid.
5. This story will inevitably reference Saturday Night Fever, Europeans, when people starting wearing the necklines lower, the first person the author thinks came up with the coinage of "heavage" (which, honestly, sounds like a better euphemism for barfing than it does low-cut men's necklines), the people who like it, the people who don't like it, and where it's going mainstream. Etc. Really, though: go ahead and think of every trend resurgence that might've referenced Saturday Night Fever, and whether or not it actually turned out to be a trend. Exactly.

Guys have been wearing shirts unbuttoned or with lower necklines for a while, all that matters is, again, who's wearing them, and how sleazy the person wearing them is (or the kind of sleaze they want to project). There's business sleaze, hipster sleaze, emasculation complex sleaze (chest hair, everywhere), and then just sleazy-sleaze. And like the Supreme Court's definition of obscenity, when it comes to different stripes of sleaze, you know it when you see it.

But, you know, because we all have slow days, you get Heavage. From Cheetahs to Heavage. What awesome way will newspaper writers think of to make guys look like total dickbags next?

Anyway. Stay turned for my piece on Sandcank Tigers, where I detail the women who try to get men who wear sandals with cankles to attempt to get to second base with them only to have them get rejected and cry like the vulnerable, cankle-having, sandal-wearing sissies they are. This is a real thing, you know?

Heavage. Jesus.

[Image of Gossip Girl's heavage-sporting manmeat via Bauer-Griffin]

You all know James Franco started a run guest-starring on the ABC soap opera General Hospital last month. Like us, you were probably puzzled as to why a famous film actor was appearing on a daytime drama. James Franco is here to explain it to you in today's Wall Street Journal op-ed: "A Star, a Soap and the Meaning of Art: Why an appearance on 'General Hospital' qualifies as performance art.'" Which, OK, this would have been fine if the entire piece consisted of the words: "It doesn't."

Instead, Franco takes us on a trippy, po-mo journey into metaworld to argue that his appearance on General Hospital was a subversive piece of performance art. Franco begins his op-ed as a young naif wandering through paragraphs asking: "Is this art?"

I was recently treated to an early prototype of a dessert that Marina Abramović, the "grandmother of performance art," created with the pastry chef Dominique Ansel. It's a cylindrical pastry with a lychee center sprinkled over with chili powder and raw gold. I was instructed to kiss a napkin that had been printed with a square of gold powder that would transfer to my face before eating the dessert. This way the dessert would pass through a golden gateway before it was ingested. I did as told, then suggested to the chef that it needed more chili. Was this art?

This depends: were you standing naked in a bathtub holding a freshly-killed ox's heart while doing it? Art! Otherwise, Abramovic was just making a clumsy pass at you.

But, yeah, good question: What is art? And why did all the most attractive but least attainable girls in college study the history of it? Art, according to Prof. Franco, is disruptive. By starring in General Hospital:

I disrupted the audience's suspension of disbelief, because no matter how far I got into the character, I was going to be perceived as something that doesn't belong to the incredibly stylized world of soap operas. Everyone watching would see an actor they recognized, a real person in a made-up world. In performance art, the outcome is uncertain-and this was no exception. My hope was for people to ask themselves if soap operas are really that far from entertainment that is considered critically legitimate.

We will point the reader to another of Franco's performance art piece—er, films: 2006's Flyboys (Tomatometer: 33%). Like the General Hospital piece, Flyboys inspired us to question if that film was "really that far from entertainment that is considered critically legitimate." Well, we just saw The Road (Tomatometer: 72%) and, yeah, it was a much better movie.

Art also depends on context, according to James "Slavoj Zizek" Franco (Wall Street Journal, 2009):

As Ms. Abramović told me over our dessert tasting, performance art is all about context. "If you bake some bread in a museum space it becomes art, but if you do it at home you're a baker." Likewise, when I wear green makeup and fly across a rooftop in "Spider-Man 3," I'm working as an actor, but were I to do the same thing on the subway platform, a host of possibilities would open up... It would be about inserting myself in a familiar space in such a way that it becomes stranger than fiction, along the lines of what I'm doing on "General Hospital."

You're right, James Franco, it is all about context. For example, if the context of these sentences was an undergraduate art history paper then you would get an A+ and a smiley face. However, these sentences appear in the Wall Street Journal, which is a famous newspaper that relies on the quality of its content to attract readers and advertising dollars. Less quality = less newspapers. So, in the context of writing a terrible op-ed in a newspaper and thus endangering print publications everywhere, you are—how did Jon Stewart so eloquently put it?—hurting America.

With the question of "What is art" expertly shot down like so many German fighters in the 2006 film "Flyboys", Franco returns to meditate on his General Hospital stint:

After all of the Franco episodes are aired, my character's storyline will be advanced in a special episode filmed in a "legitimate" New York gallery. One more layer will be added to this already layer-heavy experiment. If all goes according to plan, it will definitely be weird. But is it art?

Holy crap, we just had a crazy thought: What if this editorial in the Wall Street Journal is also a piece of performance art meant to disrupt our preconceived notions of the Wall Street Journal's editorial standards? WAIT: Are... are we at this very moment just puppets in the Imaginarium of Dr. James Franco—trapped in an endless series of nested performance art pieces? Oh God. We need to ground ourselves using something that is absolutely not art. Does anyone have a copy of Whatever It Takes?

Is it art?

John Koblin puts a number on the Wall Street Journal's recently announced plans to move into New York City metro coverage: $15 million. "You could drive a truck through the space between the wonderfully titillating tabloids and the perceived self-seriousness of The Times," says one PR man in the NYO. It's a big enough budget to help fill that gap. Although Rupert would prefer to just drive that truck directly over the Times.

And that's his smallest ongoing fight! Much bigger, in the grand scheme of things, is Rupert's willingness to be the media mogul who shouts out loud the thing that all the other media moguls grumble under their breath: Google is stealing from us! Why just yesterday, Rupert said:

"There are those who think they have a right to take our news content and use it for their own purposes without contributing a penny to its production. Some rewrite — at times without attribution — the news stories of expensive and distinguished journalists who invested days, weeks, or even months on their stories — all under the tattered veil of fair use."

He has (some of) a point! And even more remarkably, Google knows it. The Googleplex announced that they're going to (somewhat) close the technological loophole that allowed you to use Google News to jump over pay walls and read stories for free. Instead of being able to go to Google News, type in a headline from, say, the WSJ, and read as many stories as you want without subscribing, now Google "will allow publishers to limit non-subscribers to five free articles a day."

Rupert gets results. The New York Times is probably offering him a free Weekender subscription right now, to try to soften him up. But don't get it twisted: He's just begun to fight. He likes this stuff!

The most popular story on WSJ.com today has been their semi-exclusive about Joe Lieberman saying he's never going to vote for a health care bill with the public option. If you heard about Lieberman making news on health care today and went to Google "lieberman public option," you'd get these results. The shaded red boxes are the News Corp. properties: WSJ.com and Foxnews.com. Those would disappear, but there would be no shortage of results showing you what Lieberman told the WSJ in the top results.

But let's say you were really motivated to find the specific Wall Street Journal story about Joe Lieberman derailing health care and you searched "lieberman public option" and "wall street journal." That would currently bring up the story in question, as well as the Fox News result and an old WSJ blog post. But it would also bring up plenty of other sites that can tell you what was in the WSJ story. Those all likely will also provide a link to the WSJ story, but if they put up the pay wall Murdoch has promised, why would you bother to click through?

Lastly, here's a search for "lieberman public option" and "wall street journal," but with results from WSJ.com and FoxNews.com filtered out—in other words, what Google would return if they weren't allowed to index News Corp. pages.

All but the top two results — irrelevant HuffPo stories — show you exactly what Lieberman said in the Wall Street Journal. And would conceivably show you a link to the WSJ. So, no big loss.

This is the same existential dilemma diet writers face. After all, there are only so many permutations of "eat less, exercise more" available in the English language. Likewise, we all know the basics for swine flu (wash hands, cover mouth) and are reaching critical saturation with the advanced stuff (tamiflu shortages, virus hot spots) which means medical journalists have to get creative if they want to send us into H1N1-induced panics these days. But don't give up hope! Here's a lesson from The Wall Street Journal's Rebecca Smith on how you, too, can send the reading masses scrambling for the Purell:

1. Open with a banal fact that everyone takes for granted.

Neckties are rarely, if ever, cleaned.

2. Describe how said banal fact is actually menacing.

When a patient is seated on the examining table, doctors' ties often dangle perilously close to sneeze level.

3. Bolster the argument with expert consensus.

In recent years, a debate has emerged in the medical community over whether they harbor dangerous germs.

The British Medical Association already decided the issue. It recommended in 2006 that physicians jettison "functionless" articles of clothing, including neckties, "as superbugs can be carried on them."

4. Quell doubt with confusing quantitative evidence.

An 2004 analysis of neckties worn by 42 doctors and medical staffers at the New York Hospital Medical Center of Queens found that nearly half carried bacteria that could cause illnesses such as pneumonia and blood infections. That compared with 10% for ties worn by security guards at the hospital.

5. Add a dash of controversy for flair...

But many doctors favor ties for the air of formality they lend the profession.

6. ...And a pinch of creative solutions to really dazzle 'em.

That has turned into an opportunity for April Strider, founder of SafeSmart Inc. The St. Augustine, Fla., company sells ties treated with a stain-resistant coating that the company says thwarts microbes.

Congratulations, you just wrote a scary and/or enlightening article about the swine flu epidemic. If you're lucky, you'll get top billing at the front of your publication and a stipple illustration to boot. [WSJ]

Murdoch was on a panel with Indian mogul Ratan Tata and Mexican billionaire and future New York Times owner Carlos Slim. The question that elicited Murdoch's bizarre reference to New York Gov. David Paterson was clearly directed at Fox News: "How do we bring more civil discourse to the discussion, and stop appealing to the populists on the right and the left?"

One way would be to not pay people millions of dollars to pursue bizarre conspiracy theories and call the first black president a racist—but that's not the Murdoch way! No, Murdoch's slurred, barely coherent answer blamed politicians, including Paterson, who, it's important to note, is "blind, and can't read braille, and doesn't know what's going on." And therefore is responsible for the lack of civil discourse in our political conversation. Class act. Good thing Murdoch has leftie liaison Gary Ginsberg at hand to smooth this over for him.

We're just going to throw this out there: Rupert Murdoch is not well. This senseless gaffe, on top of his strange and uncomprehending assertion last week that Barack Obama is indeed a racist just like Glenn Beck said and that no one at Fox News has ever compared Obama to Stalin when they obviously do on a nearly nightly basis, make him seem strange and muddled. He's getting old, and it's showing.

The conference had another highlight—Slim's defensive and belittling discussion of his minority stake in the New York Times. Asked why he loaned a quarter of a billion dollars to the struggling paper, Slim responded with a casual, "Why not?" before nearly interrupting the panel's moderator to point out that on top of a 14% interest rate, he'd received warrants in the deal. Asked to elaborate on the value of media investments, Slim started with, "I think the New York Times will pay. It was credit, with a high yield, and warrants." How reassuring. Slim did offer a perfunctory defense of the Times as a business, calling it one of the best newspapers in the world. Then he offered to lend money to the Wall Street Journal at 12%, two points better than he gave to the Times.

• Rupert Murdoch is still willing to pour money into the New York newspaper wars, "decline of the newspaper industry" be damned. He will not rest until he can claim superiority over the NYT as a general interest paper in the NYC market. Or he will die trying, literally!
• People most likely to be angry about this: The WSJ's Boston bureau, which was recently closed.
• People who should be most worried about this: New York Post staffers. Every dollar Rupert puts into the WSJ is a dollar that he's not putting into the Post. Which already has very good local coverage, in a vile tabloidy way.
• People who may view this news with keen interest: The 100 New York Times newsroom staffers who have to be gone by the end of the year. "Hiring," you say?

Not, obviously, that he is off the hook for Gitmo et al, but this is a useful corrective (especially because it is aimed, theoretically, at terrified conservative WSJ-readers) to the "but he hasn't done anything yet" bitching. He did a bunch of things that Democrats have been unable to accomplish in years of trying, like the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay act, children's health insurance expansion, setting aside lots more federal land as wilderness that Sarah Palin will want to drill in, the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Preventions Act, and killing the F-22 and a couple other defense boondoggles.

Also, according to the Wall Street Journal, all of the lobbyists are quitting! That is wonderful news, for everyone! Soon we will be back down to a respectable late-'90s era number of lobbyists in DC, arguing for a health care reform package that consists of mailing every American free corn and offering them payday loans to buy more corn.

Colleagues,

Today we told our team in Boston that we are closing the bureau in its present form. The economic background to the closure is painfully obvious to us all. An investigative function will remain in Boston, but the core reporting team will be disbanded, though all nine reporters affected will certainly be able to apply for openings elsewhere on the paper. Coverage of the Boston mutual fund industry will switch to the Money and Investing team and we are creating an enhanced New York-based education team.

Any such decision inevitably stirs apprehension and uncertainty, but there are no plans, nascent or otherwise, to close any other U.S. or international bureau. Meanwhile, the Newswires bureau and the MarketWatch team in Boston will remain at their present staffing levels.

That there has been truly great reporting under the generalship of Gary Putka out of Boston over many, many years is not in doubt. But we remain in the midst of a profound downturn in advertising revenue and thus must think the unthinkable.

Robert

Eccentricity has its charms, of course, but woman cannot survive on excitement alone! But thanks to the magical duo of Michael Bloomberg and that other guy who keeps threatening to run for political office again before recalling how much he likes to golf, NYC is now a magical wonderland where street cleaners dedicated to their craft slap giant green post-its on your car windows if you dare obstruct their work. This new NYC populated by Cornell grads where the NYPD tows its damn breakdowns is the reason Bloomberg will be Mayor forever and ever!

But what is this?

New Yorkers are fleeing this Utopia for Florida? Well, yes. Turns out all this wonderful service comes at the cost of some of the highest tax rates in the country, which... well, duh.

Things have gotten so bad, Manhattanites are moving to the Bronx and Brooklynites are moving to Staten Island. The end times are here, people!

If you're looking for someone to blame, the Wall Street Journal helpfully suggests you look under "Liberals: Just Desserts."

[Pic: AIP History Center Web Exhibit]

The most basic definition of insider trading is: information that isn't available to the public shareholders of a company is given to sketchy assholes who already have more money than you, first. That way, said assholes can buy or sell stock based on whether or not a company's about to blow up or be royally screwed. Once the information becomes publicly available, the stock price is either too high for you to buy or your stock's already been screwed because they sold their gigantic loads of the company off before you could. And you would've bought and/or sold your stock because you know that when a company produces a bunch of planes that explode nine seconds after takeoff, you should probably sell your stock.

So: insider trading is bad, right? Bad for morals, bad for the economy, bad for people who get manipulated by other people by shady backdoor deals, right? Wrong, motherfuckers! Bwah. Ha. Ha. says the Wall Street Journal's suspiciously named Donald J. Boudreaux. How is this possible? Let's learn. Dr. Evil Donald J. Boudreaux suggests that because it's hard to tell what's a sketchy secret and what isn't, it (A) wastes the time of federal authorities, (B) it keeps asset prices "honest" by telling the truth about what their real value is and (C) it helps the market adjust rather quickly. Watch how he phrases this:

Time to stop telling horror stories. Federal agents are wasting their time slapping handcuffs on hedge fund traders like Raj Rajaratnam, the financier charged last week with trading on nonpublic information involving IBM, Google and other big companies. The reassuring truth: Insider trading is impossible to police and helpful to markets and investors. Parsing the difference between legal and illegal insider trading is futile-and a disservice to all investors. Far from being so injurious to the economy that its practice must be criminalized, insiders buying and selling stocks based on their knowledge play a critical role in keeping asset prices honest-in keeping prices from lying to the public about corporate realities.

Well, considering the small fact that federal authorities completely fucked the dog on Bernie Madoff, I'd say that anything that even remotely resembles something that might cost people who don't have the money of megalomaniacal bajillionaires a few bucks is probably worth the time of federal authorities. Also, a stock's "real value" is based on information attained through sketchy means? No, I'd say that's an asset's "shadow value." Its real value is based on the people whose fortunes are turned by it that can't afford (or, inversely, shouldn't be allowed) to have it do so. Information that insider trading works off of should be made public, not hunted out and used for profit; the big point Frederick von Dumbass is missing is that letting illegal information be freed up for legal use once obtained by white collar criminals makes said propriety information even more proprietary.

But I don't have a column at the Wall Street Fucking Journal, so, you know, I wouldn't know my ass from my face when it comes to money, which is to speak nothing of Mark Penn's Microtrends (For You To Buy Into, That My Clients Would Like You To Buy Into) column.

Boudreaux's column goes on to cite examples from the gas "crisis" of 20 years ago that allowed Big Unleaded to screw our parents in the tank, and the potential of Big Pharm to inflict damage on the public's health and wallets. Which is fair, but also, why we have regulatory agencies that exist to vette out this kind of thing. The second we let people with access to insider trading use it—people on Wall Street, guys who sit in front of their computer every day for hours at a time scanning forums for the slightest piece of corporate gossip—is the second we put the markets even further out of control of the majority of people who are layman's stockholders. This would be like letting the biggest Star Wars fanboys write the plot of the next three movies (and look what happened when we bought into George Lucas writing the screenplays for the last three).

Even more curious is how the Wall Street Journal allowed themselves to run this kind of complete nonsense without anything remotely resembling a counterpoint; they're big press. People who don't know Wall Street read the Wall Street Journal. This is dangerously stupid rhetoric. It's funny when Clusterstock does it, because they're mostly read by psychopathic, gossipy market obsessives, and because they often to have the counterpoint up five or ten minutes later. This is a little different. This is just patently ridiculous.

"Marissa unintentionally encourages promiscuity," managing editor Robert Thomson said. Uh, really? Yes! Since the font used to attribute quotes on this Google News page is too small for Thomson's taste, search chief Mayer is encouraging "digital disloyalty" among readers who are the actual legal property of the Wall Street Journal.

"Why isn't the font size bigger?" Thomson demands. Seriously, Marissa. What do you know about designing websites in comparison to the leering, name-calling newspaper lackey of digital media genius Rupert Murdoch?

Whispers emanating from the Journal's parent, News Corp., have the paper on track to lose $100 million this year, says one tipster. That's hard to believe, given the $59 million contribution that Journal publisher Dow Jones made to News Corp.'s bottom line as recently as the last quarter of 2008. But Dow Jones profits fell in both of the quarters reported since, according to public earnings reports. News Corp. didn't give precise figures for Dow Jones or the Journal, but did disclose that all News Corp. newspapers saw combined profits fall 97 percent January through April and revenue fall 24 percent in the three months after that.

The Journal could cut some costs by slicing its ridiculous video army down to one guy, plus a cameraman with a cheap recorder, and maybe a video editor. After all, as Current TV's Brett Erlich has show, it's possible to create some seriously fun financial programming with bare-bones production values. Or the Journal can just keep imitating cable news networks, even to the point of absurdly saying "we're running out of time," as the host did toward the end of today's "AM Report." After all, it's not like News Corp. owns a real financial net of its own, or anything.

UPDATE: Dow Jones says it uses "less than 10 staffers" to make the video, and Business Insider has updated its post to reflect that assertion, adding it got its earlier number from "people involved in the show."

Now, credit where credit's due: a few weeks ago, John wrote:

You do not want to miss the weekly festival of swooning self-regard and misty incoherence that will be Peggy Noonan's "Study Group" for undergrads this year, during her fellowship at the Kennedy School's Institute of Politics.

Let's see how on the money he was. Tipster, take us away:

After about an hour with the woman, I'm happy to report that she seemed incredibly inebriated, and seldom more than a little coherent. Peggy was a ridiculous and hilarious person to speaking with any authority on anything at all.

It gets better:

First of all, she spoke. Exactly. As. She. Writes. She emphasized these fragments by pounding on the desk with each word. Her eyes focused, and and more frequently unfocused. A couple of times she spit onto her brown vest and pretended it didn't happen. She looked older than her press photos. Ms. Noonan spoke in a sing-song, condescending voice reserved usually for developmentally delayed 2nd graders. After she completed a thought, she'd pause and smile, staring at the air in front of her, reflecting on her impeccable delivery and overreaching wisdom. She used baseball metaphors more than twice.

I'll count that as a double. More, please:

She isn't teaching a class. It's a study group. It's just two hours of listening to a woman who should not be permitted to operate heavy machinery.

Sometimes, this job does itself. Here are your Peggy Noonan Goes to Harvard quotes. Someone get this woman to a kegger. Or at least a regatta. I've provided context with them strictly with emoticons. I think, for all intents and purposes, they otherwise speak for themselves:

• "I'm not a brain surgeon. You have to be a professional. I did my best and I didn't kill anybody. I can't remember what the point of my answer is." : )
  
  
• "You know, and the problem with George W. Bush, is that he made the whole world so nervous. Y'know!" :-O
  
  
• "My study group is about being a person who thinks things and believes them and turns them into words that convey thoughts and feelings." : /
  
  
• "You never have to feel that you're not allowed to think what you think." (>.<)
  
  
• "I wasn't sure I could wear mascara every day. One should dress. One should wear mascara when one can." 8<
  
  
• "I wasn't sure I could stay awake all day. This is one of the major stresses of life - making sure you can stay awake all day. I happen to think sleep is one of the most important things in life. Trying to wake up, trying to fall asleep. I don't know why I'm talking about this." :,(
  
  
• "It's not a faux pas to love your country. Its history. Its traditions. Love it. Bring that love into the world. Share it and the world looks at you and says, ‘Oh, I get it!'" :D
  
  
• "My best advice for you is never feel bad about being a loser." :-#
  
  
• "You Have To Let Your Freak Flag Fly." >°,,,°<

So when you look at the numbers, the heyday of the Soccer Mom is passing. They will continue to exert a measurable influence, but in a world of evolving microtrends, they are on the decline. And on the rise are single, urban workaholics, Internet-junkie empty nesters, and new immigrants taking root.

So, Mark Penn's Trademark Microtrends of The Future:

"Single, urban workaholics"= Alcopops
"Internet-junkie empty nesters"= Masturbating Bears
"New immigrants taking root"= Happenin' Latins

Pay this man one million dollars, at once.
[Pic: Getty]

For some ungodly reason, Harvard's Kennedy School of Government saw fit to make Noonan a fellow this year. As part of the application process, candidates are asked to write up a syllabus of the course they will enlighten impressionable young undergrads with. Noonan wrote hers like she writes her column: She poured a glass of white wine, put on some Commodores, curled up in a big comfy chair with a Snuggie, and turned on the crazy.

Herewith, annotated selections from the syllabus for "CREATIVITY IN JOURNALISM, IN POLITICS AND IN LIFE: A Writer's Perspective, a study group led by IOP fellow Peggy Noonan, Tuesdays 4:00-5:30 p.m., Faculty Dining Room."

A writer tries to make clarity out of confusion, to capture reality, to see what is. A good writer is trying to be alive. A columnist says, "I think this is true, I want to tell you about it, please listen to me, let's think about it together."

Oh, lord. I don't think we're thinking what you're thinking, Peggy.

It is often said that writing is a solitary act, and that is true –- it's you and your brain, your soul and your response to something that's happening either in the world or in your head. And you bring to it, to this subject, what knowledge you have of life, and of man, and of history. But at the same time it is not a solitary act if you are lucky enough to have an audience for your work.

OK, follow closely kids, cause this gets complicated and I'm not going over it again: Writing=You+your brain+your soul+the larger of either your response to the voices in your head OR the voices on the teevee DIVIDED BY everything you know TIMES the square root of your audience. WRITE THAT DOWN.

Ronald Reagan was interesting as a political figure in part because when he spoke there was a quality of mutual listening going on, a listening so intense it was like a form of communication. He would make his case and illustrate his points and you'd sit in the audience and think, "Yes, that's true, I agree" or, "Hmmm, I'm not sure."

Or you could think, Gosh, I'm a little chilly. Maybe I should switch to bourbon. Is it four yet? Oh well. This white wine's a little cold, though. Why did I choose the white wine? Oh, I wanted to polish off that bottle, that's right. OK, I'll just finish it off and then warm myself back up with the Knob Creek. I wonder what they would taste like if I mixed them together? My kingdom for an electric Snuggie! You know what's wrong with our culture? No one stands anymore—Ronald Reagan could stand, and he could walk, the way our fathers stood and walked when there were wars and everyone wore hats and carried handkerchiefs. A handkerchief is like a smile—a wry little smile that says, "Everything's going to be OK, miss. You just don't worry, we'll take care of everything." Are there handkerchiefs on the internet? Maybe there are, but I don't think so. I think we need a handkerchief, to lift us up and carry us back to when things like people and dogs and trees really mattered. Why are we always so angry? God I'd love 15 minutes in the back of a car with Lionel Richie. Where was I? You could think that, too.

So: onward, to a writer's life.

Session One:
Introduction: An Overview:
Who I am. Where I am from. What I have done. My career. Being a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan; being young at CBS News when it too was young, and the Tiffany Network, and carried itself like the greatest army in the world, with spirit and élan and pride, and not a small amount of conceit.

No, not a small amount at all.

Session Two:
"What It Is to Work In a White House."
You've seen the television show The West Wing, on which I was for a short time a consultant. You've read What I Saw at the Revolution, or should have, God knows. Is there more to say? Yes. Herein I say it. Here's where I start: What a privelage, what a great exhausting drama, to do what you are doing, which is: Living History.

What an idiot, you are, to do what you have done, which is: Misspell "privilege."

Session Five:
"What It Is to be a Columnist."
"My column? I call it my pillar!" William Safire is said to have said. What columnists are trying to do. Why they do it. How they do it. Why it matters. Our guest will be, one hopes, a great columnist.

Great columnists. Write. In sentence fragments. Because. It's hard. To write complete. Thoughts.

Session Six:
"What It Is to Write A book?"
To write a book is to swing for the fences. Books last. The great CBS News anchor Charles Kuralt once said in my presence, gesturing toward the television, "That doesn't last, but this" – he gestured toward a book case – "does." (Actually if Google has its way maybe this will change; maybe they'll delete us.) But until they do, books are forever. I've written eight. All nonfiction. Let's talk about them, about the writing of them, and let us have as a guest a great book writer.

Let us!

Session Seven:
"Where Is America now, politically?"
And where exactly should it be? I have some thoughts.

No you don't, Peggy. You do not have any thoughts.

Is it good that what was essentially a media monopoly has been broken? Yes. And it's bad, too.

Knob Creek time!

Session Eight:
"Wrap Up Session."
What did we learn? What can we conclude about the writer's life? What interests you about politics? What is good about modern media, and what is bad? Let us talk about journalism, politics, and life.

This woman is a national fucking treasure. There's also a video of Noonan explaining the class, which she apparently confused with an appearance on Sesame Street.

Like Dan Kearns! Dan Kearns is a construction worker from Florida, and because there is no construction in Florida anymore, he does not have very much to do. So he decided to rename himself "Snipe" and hike north on the trail with guys named "Angry Hippie" and "Dance Party." This is "a symbol" of either "a jobless recovery or of a still-deepening recession" and there are data that prove its a trend:

Typically, about 1,000 hikers leave Georgia each spring in hopes of completing the trail in one all-out trek. This year, trail monitors say, close to 1,400 hikers were in the first wave, with hundreds more following behind through early summer.

People who start at the bottom and hike up are called "NoBos," and people who do it the other way are called "SoBos." The Journal notes: "NoBos and SoBos are reminiscent of the hobos of the Great Depression, though there aren't so many of them this time."

"Hiking the Appalachian Trail" was invented by South Carolina governor Mark Sanford, and while there is a lot of talk of actual hiking through Virginia with modern-day ex-banker hobos or whatever it actually means secretly flying to Argentina to have sex with a woman who isn't your wife.