It's Fashion Week, so Thursgay Styles has plenty of ground to cover: the "cascading" spring styles, seating at the shows, the sweater-jacket as a fall staple...and the MisShapes. Really? The MisShapes? How fascinating! Who are these downtown darlings you speak of?
• Apparently Apple made some sort of announcement yesterday. [Gizmodo]
• Is the White House spying on journalists? That's the kind of thing that can get you fired! [CBS]
• Hewlett-Packard Chairman forced out for investigation that spied on journalists. [USAToday]
• Of course, sometimes journalists act like spies. [NYO]
• NYT sells off its TV stations to focus on print newspapers, digital media, and launching new glossy magazines about sections that already exist every other month. [NYT]
Times couch potato Virginia Heffernan can finally sleep at night: Lonelygirl15 — AKA Bree, a YouTube user whose video diaries of her life as an beautiful, home-schooled nerd captured the hearts of chronic masturbators near and far — has been definitively exposed as a fake, a calculated effort to create an online drama in hopes of developing a movie from the resulting buzz. You care, right? Maybe someone in marketing should, because at one point, over 700,000 YouTube views were devoted to this girl. On her corporate blog Screens, Heffernan has made Lonelygirl15 into her great white whale, first proclaiming the girl deserving of her own television show (July 28); since then, Heff's devoted 15 posts to the cult of Bree. And today, finally, Lonelygirl15 earns her place in the "real news" pantheon with Heffernan's story published on actual newsprint.
Make sure you keep Saturday night open; it's the birthday celebration for Times media reporter Kit Seelye. [Update: Looks like it's actually for Kit Roane of US News & World Report. Well, NB to Kit: if your invitees don't actually know which Kit you are, you probably shouldn't have invited them.] The invite made its way to our mailbag this morning (so hurt not to be directly invited, even if it's in Brooklyn); Kit's well-meaning friend, who sent out the email, might've forgotten about the importance of the BCC field:
• Blogs: worse than the sixties. [NYT]
• Walter Scott, Walt Whitman also guilty of "sock puppetry." [NYT]
• Joe Hagan throws pretty much everything but the revelation that Bill Keller loves "The Wire" into this profile. [NYM]
• New magazine to battle Portfolio for that all-important douchebag demographic. [NYT]
• Speaking of douchebags, it's hard to identify to twattiest statement in this profile of the Flavorpill folks, but we're going to settle on, "We've been called the Cond Nast of e-mail." [NYT]
• Apparently, people wanted to see pictures of Suri Cruise. [WWD]
• Bill Gates has no iPod. Thank you, Donny Deutsch! [copyranter]
• Hewlett-Packard hired private investigators to obtain journalists' phone records. Because there's nothing more interesting than a list of sex-talk lines called on the company dime. [NYT]
• The statistics in that Slate teen hummer piece suck. [Stats.org]
• Maureen Dowd is too worth more than "Always Crashing in the Same Car." [Newyorkette]
• Is the lonelygirl15 story over finally? Please? [Screens]
We've always assumed Alessandra Stanley got the TV critic sinecure as a consolation prize for not rising farther at the Times; you'd figure as a former foreign correspondent, she'd at least be able to bring some of that reportorial skill to her review of The Path to 9/11, the controversial ABC mini-series suggesting that Bill Clinton and Osama Bin Laden planned the attack on the World Trade Center together one boozy night at the Viper Room. Well, as Think Progress notes, not so much:
For the launch of its website on Wednesday, Radar published an exclusive about Fake Writer James Frey: rather than face a potentially pricey class-action lawsuit from Frey's emotionally wounded readers, Random House would offer a refund only to those who have a dated receipt from their original purchase of the book (so they'd probably have to pay off maybe three people, two of whom have been saving receipts since the Depression).
Today in Thursgay Styles, insta-trendbot Stephanie Rosenbloom explores the issue of spying — on your children, your friends, your lover — in the digital age. The pitch obviously stems from Rosenbloom's guilt over reading her significant other's email, but seriously, swear to God, he just left the window open!
Last week, the New York Times' business section tut-tutted at Forbes.com's selling itself to advertisers with best-possible audited site traffic (15.3 million visitors in February) when that figure has been slightly revised down by the auditor, not to mention much less impressive recent numbers (7.3 million visitors in July). Forbes.com exec James Spanfeller claimed the poor July showing conflicted with their much more cheerful internal log numbers, and could thus be discounted. High card always wins! The NYT also grumbled about the percentage of Forbes.com visitors actually going to the latter's car-sales site, not to mention traffic-whoring like the "career women" debacle, "American's Drunkest Cities," etc., rather than content ostensibly of interest to the business reader (or advertiser). Ignoring all that, Spanfeller complained that NYTimes.com prefers its own optimistic internal traffic numbers, so Forbes.com is hardly alone in that respect — something the competing NYT biz section should have noted for transparency's sake. NYT business editor Lawrence Ingrassia admitted that Spanfeller was right, but added that the point didn't "warrant a correction." Just because you're correct doesn't mean you get a correction, see.
• Rich dudes who want to be media magnates "look to the inherent worth of personnel and resources able to enlighten and expose, report and reflect, with a voice that can be heard above the din." Funny, we thought it was for the pussy. [Chicago Tribune]
• The UK Telegraph is looking to cut about seventy jobs, leaving us to wonder who'll be left to edit their vicious screeds against Polish plumbers and other assorted immigrants. [Guardian]
• Times questions Ana Marie Cox's "journalistic chops"; presumably it's only okay for her to write book reviews and op-ed pieces. The reverse Maureen Dowd transition, though? No sale. [NYT]
• Who wants to buy into a dying industry? The rest of said industry. [MarketWatch]
• Bee Shaffer, ex-journalist? Put us down as doubtful, but hope springs eternal. [IvyGate]
Your knuckle-dragging commute to work was probably a bit more painful today, as the summer is officially over (and thank God — was it just us, or did it kind of suck this year?). Labor Day gave us three or four government-sanctioned days of binge drinking, and naturally all hell broke loose at the Times building, where countless staffers made painful, last-ditch efforts to look good in ill-advised white pants. Amidst this end-of-summer madness, the Gray Lady FINALLY decided to acknowledge that billionaire financier Jeffrey Epstein has been accused of allegedly soliciting deep-tissue handjobs from underage girls in his Palm Beach mansion.
Having been an awkward adolescent and an only slightly less awkward young adult, we understand the difficulties facing today's youth when it comes to their bodies. There's so much societal pressure to be perfect, and the internet is only making things worse. So when the Times decided to take on the evergreen issue of the "College 15," that extra weight a lot of students put on in their first year away from home, we were really excited to see that they chose a photograph of a regular college student, someone we could relate to, an average girl just struggling in her own way with the personal demons of a bar raised too high.
Because of an editing error, an article on Saturday about Shawn Green, a right fielder for the Mets who is a source of pride to his fellow Jews, misstated the population of Jews in New York City. It is about one million, not two million.
This week's white-knuckle Times Book Review features a an over-educated Yale graduate reviewing the new novel by an over-educated Yale graduate. Which, everyone is going to want to read that, right? Then there's the super pretentious review of a super pretentious book that name drops every author who's ever died. And then a bunch of fawning letters to Joe Queenan who wrote about reading in which, finally, the snake of the New York literatti swallows its own tail, drinks its own Kool Aid, and bores the rest of us to death. After the jump, our own over-educated Yale graduate, Intern Alexis, tries to keep it all down.
Poking around a bookshop in Paris last December, I came across a small handsome book. It was an unjacketed volume, bound in severe black cloth of the sort usually associated with spanking erotica. Picking it up, I found that it was actually more like a breviary, the title embossed in gold, the edges of the pages gilt, with a ribbon bookmark in ecclesiastical red; "La Base" is, in fact, a stylish little cookbook.
If you read this week's Observer, you might have seen this article about Gary Spitz, a 42-year-old ball boy at the U.S. Open. If you read yesterday's Times, you might have seen this article about Gary Spitz, a 42-year-old ball boy at the U.S. Open. If you happened to be reading the Washington Post around this time last year, you might have seen this article about Gary Spitz, a 41-year-old ball boy at the U.S. Open. In 2002, USA Today had a fascinating glimpse into the life of Gary Spitz, a 38-year-old ball boy at the U.S. Open. And way back in 2001, ESPN took a look at a 37-year-old U.S. Open ball boy by the name of Gary Spitz.
