"You're going to request meeting with Charlie on three separate occasions in his hometown of Los Angeles. First, a standard in-person interview of a couple hours or so. Second, you'll be a fly on the wall as Charlie conducts some business related to the film’s release. If there’s any postproduction left, that would be ideal—would love to see him in the editing room, for instance. Maybe even riding along with Kaufman as he heads to the grocery store. Then you do a follow-up interview—by phone if necessary. I'm confident once you meet him and form a rapport, you will come back with plenty of material and we'll strategize from there."

Well, the grocery store part sounds fun! You know there are a bunch of journalism professors out there making their students read this right now.

[The Process]

Our choices:

"Bill Gates
Dara Torres
Julia Allison
Lance Armstrong
Steve Jobs
Charlie Kaufman
John Hodgman
Bill Clinton
Michael Phelps"

OK! So I'd check off the Wired do-not-want cover list... um, JA, of course, plus the swimmers Torres and Phelps because they're not tech people (also an article about special aerodynamic swimsuits might be interesting), and Clinton, I guess. Does that help?

The true goal was never “fame” at all. I wanted two things: 1) editors to publish my work, 2) people to read my work. I wanted to be like Nora Ephron - able to exist creatively with an audience and relative financial freedom...

I did over two dozen print interviews and 350 television segments in the last year - and probably over 500 in the last two years. I taught my brain to think in soundbites, in PR nothing-speak, to project authority on subjects I have no real knowledge about [emphasis so added]. It’s a game … but I’m a bit tired of playing it. Now I need to unlearn much of that.

All of this left me little time to actually do what it was that I set out to do in the first place - which is to communicate, to explore, to wonder, to interview fascinating individuals about their own discoveries - and yes, write.

...I suppose that if I get lost along the way back to my roots as a writer, I can always head up a marketing firm...

You hear that, everyone? Julia Allison is tired of "playing the game" of self-promotion and being famous for nothing!

And we know this is so because she posted it to the website her company started to broadcast online her life as the star of a new Bravo reality show.

[Non Society]

A note from Karl Taro Greenfeld:

I wrote all the articles. that story was actually written for Details but they killed it and then I sold it through my friend Chris Seymour to Tokyo Journal—I had once been the editor their and so there were numerous reasons why I didn't want to use my own name. Wired saw the story in Tokyo Journal and called Chris who told them to call me. Kevin Kelly, the wired managing editor at the time bougth the story from me and understood the whole situation. Even weirder, The Face ran a version that had both my name and Chris' name on it.

Summary of what happened, as far as we can tell: Greenfeld wrote the piece for Details. It was killed. He sold it to the Tokyo Journal (which he used to edit), which ran it under a different byline. Wired saw the story, liked it, bought it, and ran it under Greenfeld's byline, knowing the entire backstory. The different names given to the hackers in the LAT Magazine piece and the Wired piece hasn't been fully explained. So while we originally wondered if this was a plagiarism issue, it turns out to just be a case of a writer reselling his own work.

By Christopher Seymour, Tokyo Journal:

By Karl Taro Greenfeld, Wired:

Karl Taro Greenfeld's description of a hacker named "Kojack" in Wired:

Karl Taro Greenfeld's description of a hacker named "Snix" in the LA Times Magazine:

In a lengthy post this month dedicated to chewing out the Times for its criticism of him, Honan writes:

Why, this may shock you, but here's the thing: Cocaine is exceptionally fun. LSD? It genuinely alters your perception. I'm not suggesting that you do either of these. Both conspired, unsuccessfully, to kill me and I would no more try either today than I would attempt to put a rattlesnake in my anus. I am older and wiser and recognize that the benefits are not worth the risks. Despite my swinging-dick persona on Twitter, I'm more this guy than that guy. Drugs, especially highly addictive ones like speed or cocaine or heroin or ones with powerful psychological components like LSD, tend to not be worth the price you pay for their use.

We agree! But since the Wired article was all about stimulating brain drugs, the writer's own history might have been worth a mention—particularly after it turned into a controversy, because it serves to strengthen his case against the Times' criticisms, not weaken it. We're on your side, Mat!

And what exactly does a "swinging-dick persona on Twitter" talk about?

One, the Times thinks the magazine has enough brand cachet to get people to take drugs. Laughable, but flattering for Wired. Two, notoriously wrong Wired ("Push" internet will kill the Web browser! Tech's "Long Boom" will continue forever!) has stopped even pretending people take its advice seriously. As the Times noted elsewhere today, the magazine has successfully transitioned from the sterile, fact-based technology reporting it was once at least marginally associated with (day-glo typesetting aside) to the unverifiable buzzmaking at the heart of lifestyle publishing. The result: advertising and circulation are both on the march. See, drugs really do give you a boost!

[Times, Wired]

Wired.com contributor Quinn Norton supports any technology that can improve upon the human form. She's already had a magnet installed in her finger that let her feel electricity going through phone cords and her laptop. (And here I am, like a sucker, stuck with only taste, touch, sight, hearing and smell, when a sixth sense like magnetism could be a total lifesaver. The problem with evolution is that it doesn't adapt to technology fast enough.)

In a talk at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, Norton pondered how society would react to a miracle drug, one that could "reduce your need for sleep, increase your concentration and make you smarter, with minimal side effects." She says it'd usher in a New Enlightenment! We think the government would ban it for civilians and give it to soldiers. But it's cool, because in the future, we'll all have connections to army drugs.

(Scientists are already hard at work developing this miracle drug. Scientists funded by the Defense Department, natch.)

The new model is based not on cross-subsidies — the shifting of costs from one product to another — but on the cost of products falling fast.

The last debates over free versus pay online are ending. New York Times. Casual games. Google.

Two trends: 1. Extension of cross-subsidy to more industries. 2. Anything that touches digital networks feels the effect of falling costs. Transistors, storage, or bandwidth: at a certain point, they're cheap enough to be safely disregarded.

From the consumer's perspective, there is a huge difference between cheap and free. The gap is why Google doesn't show up on your credit card.

Free doesn't mean that someone isn't making money. The monetary benefits of Craigslist are distributed among its users.

The priceless economy's six categories:

• Freemium (tiers or a pro version, one percent of users support the rest)
• Advertising
• Cross-subsidies
• Zero marginal cost (online music)
• Labor exchange (Yahoo Answers)
• Gift economy (Wikipedia)

Manufacturing and distribution? Reputation and attention are the new scarcities.

Digital technologies have become too cheap to meter.

Before Boing Boing blogged the segment yesterday, the last popular Wired story to float around the web was Rex Sorgatz's analysis of Wired's first issue, long before Condé Nast took it over, turned it mainstream, and put Anderson in charge. One ad featured a fully nude baby peeing into the air; articles were hard to read. And the thing was really geeky. "These people actually had opinions about routers and ethernet cables!" says Rex.

Now they have opinions about Lonelygirl15. The magazine has been Tina Browned. They review Transformers; they print an infographic about how to hit on girls with your iPhone. Which is fine with me (especially since I wrote that last one), but it's entertainment, and it's about as groundbreaking as Maxim.

So yeah, it's neat to see Wired's editor play with unmanned planes. But until I see him invent a new model, the dude ain't geeky enough.

• Max out keywords, but still make a readable phrase.
• Be specific. No one clicks on "A story about a man that you won't believe," unless you miraculously make it to the front page. It's a gamble.
• "AMAZING" is the "A+++ WOULD BUY AGAIN" of Digg. It's stupid and gets complaints, but it works. What you lose in dignity, you will recover with pageviews.

Gold star for anyone who converts this week's New Yorker into Diggable headlines.

I'm not talking merely about tech and gaming journalists who write about sex and porn. Wired is doing its job when it analyzes the business of porn; Gizmodo is just playing when its staff leaves the CES tech conference for the AVN porn conference next door to poke fun at the dildos. Gaming journalism doesn't need to sanitize itself; gaming gets dirty and so should the writing. Plus, well, I wanna read about sex.

What needs to stop is the boy's club, in which women are only featured as sex objects. Forget being offended by it; I'm just sick of it — if I want titillation, I'll go to porn or, you know, an actual woman. Maybe I'll read Esquire, where they at least pretend to respect an actress's work before showing off her calves. See, it's not just that gaming journalism is obsessed with sexy women, it's that the obsession takes such an awkward form. The practice is found all over the industry. Some examples:

• Porn Stars Love Video Games! Popular site GameDaily interviews porn stars about whether their boyfriends can play video games, and which game characters they'd like to get with. In the interest of service journalism, each micro-interview is smaller than the photo of the porn star above it. (No male stars, natch, but then again who ever wanted to hear something from the mouth of a male porn actor?) GameDaily also wants you to read "Babe of the Week" and "The Most Outrageous Boobs in Gaming."
• Strip Halo 3: Porn stars get naked on video while playing a shoot-em-up with ugly guys.
• Shooting Range: Industry leader Electronic Gaming Monthly sent a team of girl gamers to a shooting range to test their real-life skills. Am I picky for being annoyed that they were chosen for hotness?
• Digital Lust: Now folded, Gamestar Magazine was an unapologetic tits-and-games mag. These "behind the scenes" photos from a holiday gift guide shoot looked so much like the start of a soft porn gallery, I felt surprised when I scrolled to the bottom and saw the model still had some lingerie on.
• Gaming's kinkiest costumes: "Got a fantasy? Chances are there's a game to match," promises this gallery from Games Radar. The copy is full of "then go talk to a real girl" asides, which only make it sadder that the site is so desperately reaching for the never-touched-a-girl audience.

The industry is addicted. Like a GOP presidential candidate, they're too afraid of losing the base to appeal to normal people with reasonable options. No wonder they're losing attention to mainstream coverage (who says GQ can't review video games?) and sites like Penny Arcade, a biting comic and review site in which a pre-teen girl — the niece of one of the authors — is the maturest, most capable gamer. Gawker Media's gaming site Kotaku, says editor Brian Crecente, goes out of its way to stop boy's-club coverage. Both sites have enjoyed years of rising traffic.

Sure, it's probably unhealthy to train men to treat women as sex objects. Screw that, it's unhealthy to the industry to alienate half its audience, and likely most of the other half too, particularly the part that's not living in its Mom's basement with little disposable income. We're not aching for a flash of tit from a girl made of polygons; we're not desperate to hear that our favorite girl from Bang Brothers wants to cuddle with Raiden from Mortal Kombat. We have money, we consider ourselves normal and maybe even cool, and we want to buy video games that don't suck.

Chuck Klosterman asked in 2006 why there was no Lester Bangs of video games. Writer Clive Thompson answered the cultural critic in Wired News: A. No one would hire him; B. He's already here and he writes Penny Arcade; C. The research takes too long; and D. The medium needs a new approach. I say E: The 18-year-old future Lester Bangs of video games is at some site being forced to compile "Twenty Hottest Asses of Xbox 360."

Earlier: Glaring Omissions

• Holy crap, Ian Urbina did a lot of work in this piece on kids who just want to sell magazines but wind up hanging out with meth-addicted prostitutes. Only 11 months and one week until the next Pulitzer deadline! [NYT]
  
• The Post is all broken up about that fireman fuckup the News ran last month. Seriously, you can feel Keith Kelly's deep, deep compassion. [NYP]
  
• Meanwhile, the Post's Col Allan pulls a Uriah Heep act. [NYO]
  
• "What Wired does well on a consistent basis is force the readers to think." So it's sort of like the opposite of a Jon Friedman column. [MarketWatch]
  
• New political editor at Times; deeper web integration at political desk. [LAObserved]
  
• Helen Thomas not seated in front row of White House briefing room for first time since the Fillmore administration. [The Politico]
  
• Getty looking to expand. [NYP]
  
• Rodale: Likes abs. [WWD]
  
• Brian Williams bans tabloid news and we love him more each day. [TVNewser]
  

Readers demand to know not just what goes on in the newsroom, but what's inside the very journalists themselves. Compulsory, daily staff MRIs posted to Flickr. Stool samples analyzed and reported via RSS feed after every meal. YouTube video of paychecks (amounts visible!) personally handed to each employee by Si Newhouse, with online poll choosing who may eat (and what they may eat) at the Conde Nast cafeteria when visiting the corporate parent. Live-updated Javascript widgets for determining the olfactory toxicity in any Wired News office bathroom. Monthly trepanation of Chris Anderson's brain, on live streaming video, to find out what he's thinking and to relieve pressure of scary big ideas. The print magazine becomes a black-and-white reprint of Wired reporters' last 1,000 blog posts, while the blogs become slickly produced online editorial content featuring X-ray schematics of hot dogs or whatever else readers demand at the end of each day. Everything must be visible and participatory! From now on, not being able to know something automatically makes it mission-critical information. Not wanting to know something makes you an enemy of freedom of information. And thankfully, once everything is transparent, there's nothing left to see.

What would radical transparency mean for Wired? (Part 2) [Long Tail Blog via Boing Boing]

When [Conley] first saw the space, Rolling Stone came to mind, and so did the adjectives "funky, hip, young-at-heart, irreverent, adventurous." Now the property offers free massages to band-tour managers and can boast that David Bowie, Linda Ronstadt, Faye Dunaway, Johnny Depp and John Candy have slept there.

Magazines as Muses: Hotelier Finds Inspiration in Titles such as 'Wired' [Ad Age]

Unfantastic Plastic [NYP]

Earlier:: Gawker's coverage of Alex Kuczynski
Related!: A Hard Look in the Mirror [NYM]

Wired News has removed three articles from its website after an internal investigation failed to confirm the authenticity of a source used in the stories.

"Tribal Curse Haunts Launch Pad" (June 27, 2006), "NASA Boosts Heart-Monitoring Tech" (July 7, 2006) and "Don't Flush It — Breathe It" (July 14, 2006), all by Philip Chien, relied in part on quotes and citations from Robert Ash, described in the first two stories as a "space historian" and in the last as an "aeronautical engineer and amateur space historian."

This would probably be a bigger deal if, you know, anyone actually read Wired News. But we're sure they'll handle this in the appropriate manner; it's not like they lack experience in this area.

Wired News Writer Faked Info [Wired]
Wired Amends Stories With Fabricated Quotes [Slashdot]

Here's a sad example of vlog Beet.tv video-stalking bloggers — bloggers! — through the party celebrating the launch of Wired editor Chris Anderson's book The Long Tail on Wednesday night at Tribeca Cinemas. Thrill to blurry footage of the top half of Dealbreaker's Elizabeth Spiers's head, plus Gawker Media's own Nick Denton, shot monolithically (and unawares) from below. Oh yes, and musician David Byrne. He probably has a blog too, the sumbitch.

And Next They'll Be Responsible for Jason Calacanis' Car Crash [Jossip]
Chris Anderson's Long Tail is a Wonderful Book —- and He Sure Knows How to Party! [Beet.tv]

In Wired's next issue, and just up online: a fascinating feature by Steven Johnson on defense in the age of van-borne nukes. Johnson whose book Emergence delved into the evolution of cities argues for a barrier of radiation detectors around major cities, and explains how it would work.

We need to make sure that van stays 14 miles away from the Capitol. And the way to do this isn't with Star Wars technology death rays beaming down from space. We need an older technology, as old as cities themselves. We're talking about a wall.
Stopping Loose Nukes [Wired Magazine]

An excellent essay by Dave Winer on West Coast media. "Some people out here on the west coast (not me!) thought we should expand from being the heart of technology into publishing. Our answer to the NY Times, Washington Post and Time/Newsweek would be the Industry Standard, Salon, Slate and Wired. Heh. Fat chance. The Standard is gone and the rest are hanging by a thread, and these days, no one outside a loony bin [3] is predicting that the New Economy will wipe out all that came before it. All those pubs did was try to clone the print model on the Web, and if you want be a revolution, you have to be more clever than that. (Clue: Let your readers write for you.)"
· Coast vs Coast [DaveNet]

   The first media party since I arrived in New York, the Slate event at which Jacob Weisberg was unveiled as the online magazine's new editor. I have to gush.
   Sure, the crowd were bitchy. A New York Sun reporter was overheard dishing the dirt on the embryonic newspaper to Kurt Andersen, formerly of Inside, who will of course keep the information entirely to himself. And it was all inside baseball. What did Ned Desmond's new title at Business 2.0 really mean? As if anyone really cares. Everybody hates Wired's Chris Anderson except for James Truman and Si Newhouse. Not true, actually. Most people who know Anderson think he's a smart and charming guy.
   But, dammit, New York media people are witty, and that isn't a word I've used in a while. Even the speeches - by Weisberg and Michael Kinsley, his predecessor - were entertaining. Kinsley, who said the change in editors was what Microsoft called a reorg, told a couple of good Redmond jokes. My walker for the evening, recently transplanted from San Francisco, said she was exhausted. Too many smart people, and the obligation to make intelligent conversation.
· Slate's new editor based in New York [Seattle Times]