Vanity Fair offers a glimpse at some of the book’s contents, including several stories from LDS women who became personally acquainted with Romney’s “coldness.”

RELATED: Gingrich Super PAC Adviser Defends Anti-Romney Doc, Calls Him A ‘Low-Flying Vulture’

One such woman, Peggy Hayes, says she was urged to give up her baby after finding herself a single mother for the second time:

By 1983, Hayes was 23 and back in the Boston area, raising a 3-year-old daughter on her own and working as a nurse’s aide. Then she got pregnant again. Single motherhood was no picnic, but Hayes said she had wanted a second child and wasn’t upset at the news. “I kind of felt like I could do it,” she said. “And I wanted to.” By that point Mitt Romney, the man whose kids Hayes used to watch, was, as bishop of her ward, her church leader. But it didn’t feel so formal at first. She earned some money while she was pregnant organizing the Romneys’ basement. The Romneys also arranged for her to do odd jobs for other church members, who knew she needed the cash. “Mitt was really good to us. He did a lot for us,” Hayes said. Then Romney called Hayes one winter day and said he wanted to come over and talk. He arrived at her apartment in Somerville, a dense, largely working-class city just north of Boston. They chitchatted for a few minutes. Then Romney said something about the church’s adoption agency. Hayes initially thought she must have misunderstood. But Romney’s intent became apparent: he was urging her to give up her soon-to-be-born son for adoption, saying that was what the church wanted. Indeed, the church encourages adoption in cases where “a successful marriage is unlikely.”

Hayes was deeply insulted. She told him she would never surrender her child. Sure, her life wasn’t exactly the picture of Rockwellian harmony, but she felt she was on a path to stability. In that moment, she also felt intimidated. Here was Romney, who held great power as her church leader and was the head of a wealthy, prominent Belmont family, sitting in her gritty apartment making grave demands. “And then he says, ‘Well, this is what the church wants you to do, and if you don’t, then you could be excommunicated for failing to follow the leadership of the church,’ ” Hayes recalled. It was a serious threat. At that point Hayes still valued her place within the Mormon Church. “This is not playing around,” she said. “This is not like ‘You don’t get to take Communion.’ This is like ‘You will not be saved. You will never see the face of God.’ ” Romney would later deny that he had threatened Hayes with excommunication, but Hayes said his message was crystal clear: “Give up your son or give up your God.”

If Romney was indeed following church protocol, might the inclusion of this anecdote play into and fuel anti-Mormon sentiment among certain voters? Does this anecdote provide a valid and relevant look into Romney’s character? Does it impact your perception of him? Let us know what you think below.

h/t Vanity Fair

Vanity Fair announced his death today, adding a word from editor Graydon Carter:

There will never be another like Christopher. A man of ferocious intellect, who was as vibrant on the page as he was at the bar. Those who read him felt they knew him, and those who knew him were profoundly fortunate souls.

Christopher leaves behind his wife, Carol Blue, their daughter Antonia, and Alexander and Sophia, his two children from a previous marriage.

Vanity Fair, taking a break from its tried and true formula of featuring flaxen-haired starlets in pin-up poses on its cover, made Bieber its February cover model. And, in this case at least, it hasn’t quite paid off. Women’s Wear Daily breaks down the numbers:

The Bieber cover has sold 246,000 copies, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations’ Rapid Report. The ABC Rapid Report data is submitted directly by publishers but has yet to be audited by ABC, so the figure could be slightly adjusted.

But if the number holds true, the Bieber cover will be Vanity Fair’s biggest bomb since Will Smith graced a July 1999 cover while atop a black stallion to advertise the movie “Wild, Wild West.” The Smith cover sold 202,701 copies at the newsstand, according to ABC data.

The reason? Well, it would appear that the singer’s young fans aren’t routinely purchasing copies of Vanity Fair… and we’re willing to suggest that the men and women interested in reading about Julian Assange or Warren Buffet likely aren’t keen on carrying around magazines featuring lipstick kiss-covered teen boys on their covers.

What’s more, Bieber’s October 2010 Teen Vogue cover performed about 12 percent below the magazine’s average for that year, and his April 2010 People cover sold roughly 25 percent below that magazine’s average.

Hey. There’s always perfume.

h/t WWD

She writes:

This—this knitting of headlines and family dramas—has turned my memories into a composite of what’s happened both inside and outside of our house. Four years ago this month, I remember standing in a Long Island field, watching Alice ride as I dialed Bill in South Africa. He was there with Molly, and they were waiting to meet Nelson Mandela—but the purpose of my call was to tell Bill his mother had just died.

Here’s more:

We did go to India this past March, and the Times reporters were released. We celebrated the news with a raucous dinner in Delhi, before going back to the hotel—and back to the “news” that Molly had food poisoning. She missed seeing the Taj Mahal, as she was too ill—but she did become Twitter buddies with India correspondent Lydia Polgreen.

Which would you rather?

I suppose Vanity Fair readers might be the sort to be interested in the family life and personal musings of Bill Keller and his wife, as well as the type of readership for whom someone like Keller is something of a celebrity, his personal life being as newsworthy as his professional choices.

I’m not a Vanity Fair reader so while I understand, somewhat, the interest, I find Gilbey Keller’s piece indicative of something that troubles me about those in media, even though, by covering it, I’m a part of the problem. The angst!

The fact is that Gilbey Keller’s piece, while interesting and moving, sure, isn’t just one wife’s look at her husband’s work and its impact on their family. It’s a piece about a well-known man with a well-known job whose family is now also known.

While it is pleasant and satisfying and sometimes even educational to be able to glimpse into the lives of others – especially people who have the opportunity to travel to exotic locales where their children can contract food poisoning someplace other than the Muncie, Indiana Best Western – that’s not all that’s playing out in this particular article. The article also acts as a move that, whether calculated or not, serves to bolster the idea that those in the media, like Bill Keller, are included in our nation’s ever expanding definition of celebrity. That way, when they churn out articles about, say, how they think Twitter renders a person stupid or when they cast judgment on other news sources or even when they seek to malign this nation’s most beloved past-time – the rabid consumption of kitten videos – they do so from a position of knowledge and authority. And while I’d be somewhat keen on learning about Keller’s take on, say, running a paper, I’m not sure I’m particularly interested in his personal musings about a social network tool he, apparently, refuses to use to its full newsgathering potential. That is, I’m not interested in such an article beyond how it 1) reflects on his (and it was, indeed, “his”) paper’s reporting and 2) acts as an ironic and most likely highly calculated means of giving his New York Times column even more attention across social media platforms.

While my fellow Mediaite editors and I cover (and, for the most part, relish in covering) the fallout from the media industry’s and political sphere’s most bloated egos, it rings hollow to attempt to fashion an editor of a paper devoted to presenting “all the news that’s fit to print” as a personality in his own right – with his family and his oddly personal attacks on fellow media figures also playing a part in his celebrity.

I don’t necessarily want to know Bill Keller’s, nor new executive editor Jill Abramson’s, political leanings. That shouldn’t factor into the paper’s coverage, nor in the journalism of its individual reporters. And I don’t care much to hear either wax on about their thoughts regarding social media, particularly since I should be able to tell this from the manner in which their paper and web properties utilize or fail to utilize outlets like Twitter. I want the product to speak for itself, regardless of the person behind it.

Still, it would be cool to be able to tell people that my daughter happened to be Twitter buds with India correspondent Lydia Polgreen.

Of course, now that Keller can write op-ed pieces freely without carrying the weight and reputation of the paper on his shoulders, I’ll be more open to his musings. While probably vehemently disagreeing with his take on most things related to the changing ways we consume and share media.

Photo and excerpts via Vanity Fair

The extensive article, Meanwhile, Back on Capitol Hill, focuses on Diana Davis, a staff assistant to Republican Congressman Mike Rogers, and a cabal of young, morally frustrated young women who have been socially trained to believe connections are superior to skills and spunk superior to knowledge. They flit around the bars of Washington, D.C., looking for men to attach themselves to in order to perhaps one day move beyond intern or assistant status, and it is readily apparently that power is not just the ultimate aphrodisiac, but the only one that works. The ladies write joyfully in their diaries about the men they have met and the drinks they have gotten on Congress’s tab, and contemplate whether they have the stomach to go through with a full-fledged relationship with an older, better-connected man. “Maybe I’ll bag myself a Senator!” Davis said upon leaving to D.C. By the end of the article, it becomes unclear whether Davis’ dream would make her happy in reality.

Davis and her group of attractive women happen upon Rep. Weiner and a large group of Congressmen towards the end of the piece, after the September 11th attacks change mood of the nation’s capital. They hesitate to interact with the group of men cackling and feasting at the same establishment as them, but one of them dares engage:

Even Diana looks uncertain about actually venturing into the “boys’ club” sanctuary. “Not a woman in there,” she remarks.

Then Caroline, the aspiring journalist, feisty and hungry to taste everything Washington has to offer before returning to Britain, settles it. Leaning back, she taps the balding guy on the arm as he returns from the men’s room. “What’s going on in there? Why are you all having so much fun?” she asks.

The man grins. “Those are a group of congressmen who are friends of mine. I thought they were hungry. They needed to kind of let themselves go.” He pauses. “And they are doing that.

“Come in and meet the rowdy crew,” he says. And with a toss of her hair, Caroline stands up and goes in.

The women are heckled as they enter. “Tell us your name and where you are from,” says one of the men. As if on a game show the women comply, one by one. When Caroline says she is an intern, the largest of the group, a white-haired man with a big belly and big laugh, roars, “We’re afraid of interns.” He throws his knife at a lean man named Mike, at the other end of the table. Mike is unamused. He threatens to throw it back. Another guy, rotund and jolly-faced, stands up and does an impression of Marlon Brando doing Don Corleone. The others think it’s hysterical.

Diana whispers that there is no way they can be congressmen. She figures they are businessmen. She wonders how she is going to get out.

They are congressmen—although at first they pretend not to be. One, the youngest, with a tiny goatee, introduces himself as Anthony, an auto-parts salesman. The others call him “the Jewish kid” and make fun of his beard. Their real names and states are as follows: the auto-parts salesman is Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.); the lean Mike is Michael Capuano (D-Mass.); the jolly guy who imitated Brando is John Larson (D-Conn.); the man who was worried about interns is Robert Brady (D-Pa.).

Davis notes that her own Congressman, also from New York, was not engaging with the jocular crew because he had just returned from New York, where the loss of the World Trade Center and everyone in it had left him somewhat hollow. “I think you really have to be in New York to feel it properly,” he tells her, and the article fails to mention that among the group celebrating inside was, in fact, a New York City legislator.

The “auto-parts salesman,” who Davis didn’t initially identify as a Congressman, ends up taking a liking to her, though it isn’t mutual. The article notes that it took Rep. Weiner a day to “hunt down Diana’s email address” and invite her to his office, after boasting the night before that “he’d be going to Manhattan to inspect the World Trade Center wreckage with the president. They’d be traveling together on Air Force One.” Davis spent the day, according to her friend, staring at his photos on his official website, but eventually lost interest as he had invited her to his office “in person,” which she “thought was kind of cheesy.”

And thus concludes the cameo of the current news cycle star in the life of this young, ambitious (in all the wrong ways) staffer, which serves to prove nothing but does color the attitudes of those we send to Washington with quite off colors. While Rep. Weiner doesn’t seem to partake in any of the heckling– in fact, it sounds rather like the other Congressmen enjoy roasting him as much as the girls– participating in said patriarchal culture so close to the nation’s biggest modern tragedy does about as much to dissuade the casual observer from thinking he doesn’t have the character of a person who would have inappropriate photos of himself lying around as his refusal to identify the photo currently in question as either his or not his. If not helping to elucidate any guilt, the piece at least feels eerily prescient that those who covered him, even a decade ago, seemed to be keen on associating him with some shady behavior that blurred the lines between business and pleasure.

He is set to appear in the upcoming thriller Arbitrage, starring Richard Gere as a hedge-fund magnate whose firm Carter’s character is trying to overtake. The film, which also stars Tim Roth and Susan Sarandon, has already begun filming around Manhattan.

Carter is no stranger to the big screen, having produced several documentaries and having inspired the book – and resulting film – How to Lose Friends and Alienate People [Ed. note: Mostly Irrelevant Fact of the Day: I was an extra in this movie. And that still didn't prompt me to watch it.] in addition to appearing in the remake of Alfie.

h/t New York Post

Such is the case with a letter Trump sent to Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter in response to a May 17th blog post on “VF Daily,” written by Juli Weiner. Trump printed out the offending post – along with several other blog post print-outs and newspaper clippings – and sent them in a bundle, along with an embossed, personalized note card (Which Weiner notes was of “surprisingly thin paper stock.” Cue monocle drop!)

Trump’s “letter” contained various handwritten suggestions and complaints, including that the picture used in the original post was “bad” (“No surprise!”) and that the post’s author was a “bad writer.” Trump also asked “Who is Ben Smith?” (That would be Politico writer Ben Smith.)

Now, we’re fairly certain the Unwritten Rules of The Internet generally frown upon dismantling online criticism point-by-point in this manner, but we have to admit: It’s this sort of thing that keeps us glued to Trump. You never quite know what he’s going to do next, but you can be sure that it’s going to be 1) big, 2) loud and 3) will prominently include his name, whether in form of giant gold letters or a (thin) embossed note card. You stay golden, Mr. Trump.

Update! Our lovely sister blog, Styleite, let us know that, in May of last year, Trump also sent them a printed blog post with handwritten commentary. What beef could the mogul possibly have with a blog devoted to fashion? Apparently, Trump was incensed over accusations that he wears a toupee. “It’s ALL mine (for better or worse),” he wrote. We’d always thought it was spun in heaven by baby angels.

You can take a look at that note right over here.

Check out his letter to Vanity Fair, below:

h/t Vanity Fair

Nice singing. But how can having girls in the audience make these cartwheeling, foam-party fags straight-sexy?

Berk, who describes himself as the “Fun and Faggy editor” for VF, found himself at the blunt end of some criticism–including from me at the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association blog–both on VF’s website and across the web.  Prominent bloggers including Perez Hilton–who knows a little something about f-word controversies–and Towleroad highlighted the controversy.  The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation tweeted about the column.

All the publicity ultimately led Berk to update his column late Sunday evening, where he removed the term (and eliminated the “Fun and Faggy” descriptor on his Twitter profile).  Here’s Berk’s explanation.

I would like to apologize sincerely to anyone I offended with the use of the term “fag” (now removed) in this “Gay Guide to Glee” column. As an openly gay writer writing in an overtly overblown style, my intent in using the word in this offhanded way was to continue my consistent efforts to confront and challenge stereotype, to unpack the way in which language works, and to deconstruct the clever gender politics at play in the scene I described: teasing out the purposeful incongruity of this (foamy) attempt to make the conspicuously gay Dalton Warblers seem “sexy” to females. Anyone with even a whiff of familiarity with my writing will know that I am, and have long been, a tireless agitator, here at VF.com and elsewhere, for gay rights, as well as a huge supporter of everything Glee has accomplished in advancing a meaningful dialogue about homosexuality in our popular culture—and in our youth culture in particular.

Berk’s argument is that he was confronting stereotypes and that by “reclaiming” the term “fag,” he was actually flying the rainbow flag for gay rights and identity. It’s an argument that many commenters on the column made at VF and one echoed in the gay blogosphere. Like an African American rapper using the “n-word” as a badge of honor and confrontation of racism, so too is a gay writer’s use of the term “fag.”

But what Berk discovered was that a blow for equality can often backfire when people don’t understand the context.  Berk assumes that people know him and know his writing, so people should understand the context.  There are, however, few writers who have the kind of following that allows them to use the term “fag” without it raising some eyebrows.  There is always a danger for any writer–or artist–in assuming their audience is either so small or so large that the reader will be “in” on the context.

You also get the sense that Berk used the term not just to “deconstruct the clever gender politics” on Glee, but also because it’s the kind of phrase that he tosses around within his social group: gay men and gay-men loving women. Like the n-word, the term “fag” may be a word people toss around as an “in-group” word where everyone realizes there is no harm intended.  What you say over cocktails with your friends sounds very different when used by a group of strangers at a football game.

I’m not going to suggest that a writer can never use the term “fag” and its variants. But it’s important to never underestimate the impact of the term of your audience or the lack of familiarity your readers have about you.  Even gay writers can’t assume they are free from criticism just because they are trying to “confront and challenge” a stereotype in an otherwise breezy review of a television show about a high school glee club.

What follows is an extensive exploration of Morgan’s career, and an analysis of Piers Morgan Tonight, before wandering off into a discussion of Sarah Palin, Kate Gosselin and the 2012 elections. On PMT, Wolcott makes the assertion that as an interview show, Larry King Live was campy but compelling, and Piers Morgan Tonight isn’t:

Where Larry King Live served it up hot and crazy from the grill, Piers Morgan Tonight was handing out canned hams.

Wolcott’s chief complaint with Morgan’s interviewing is a tendency to fawn over his guests, rather than produce surprising moments (you know, being dangerous). But Wolcott’s not quite ready to label Morgan a failure, especially not with his tireless drive to push the show to success across every media platform known to man:

Who is to say he won’t succeed? I, for one, have learned never to bet against naked unadulterated shameless relentless ambitious careerism that can eat through steel wool (so many examples come to mind!). Morgan’s use of Twitter and other social-network platforms boosted CNN’s youth demo in its initial weeks, manna to advertisers.

Then again, knowing Morgan, he might just love this story and be having it framed for the office wall as we speak. He’ll certainly tweet about it, as his executive producer Jonathan Wald did today, answering the author’s ‘is he returnable’ question with a quick “Um, no. Next Q?”

Vanity Fair presents a revealing profile of Dorsey, attempting to answer the following very important questions:

So why have you heard so little about this man who is one of the visionaries of the Digital Age? Why don’t you know that in 2000 he dropped everything to pursue a career in botanical illustration? Or that he studied for a year to become a certified massage therapist, or more recently took classes in fashion design (making an impressive pencil skirt), or has already set his sights on his dream job: mayor of New York City?

The magazine’s profile shows Dorsey to be an a quiet, press-shy, intellectually curious man (with a penchant for maps), utterly obsessed with the ways people communicate (and, um, the human clavicle). Twitter, for instance, is the result of Dorsey’s fascination with the way succinct way taxi cab drivers keep in touch with one another and with their dispatchers via radio.

Dorsey was formerly Twitter’s CEO, but was eventually pushed out after he was deemed to be a less than satisfactory manager. He does, however, remain a chairman and is the company’s second-largest individual shareholder.

It’s all refreshing to learn that, like nearly everyone, Dorsey had second thoughts about the course his life was taking:

Having second thoughts about programming once again, he enrolled in a fashion class at Apparel Arts, a trade school in San Francisco, and began designing and sewing clothing. “I was fascinated with jeans,” Dorsey explains, “because you can impress your life upon the jeans you wear. The way you sit imprints on the jeans.” It was another nod to the idea of maps. In the same way, botanical illustration, he points out, is the best method for rendering the details of a flower—nuances that even the best cameras can’t capture. And to properly do massage, Dorsey says, one has to map the contours of the body.

And, now, I will never sit down in a pair of jeans without thinking about Jack Dorsey. Can’t wait until Darren Aronofsky directs The Other Social Network, starring Andrew Garfield.

h/t Vanity Fair

Naturally, there are supporters of each. The New York Times’ Gail Collins goes for Social Network because she is “in awe that people could make an enjoyable film about the start-up of a Web site,” while her colleague David Brooks chooses Grit “on the basis of the young girl at the core of the movie.” So which film has the edge in this competition?

True Grit appeals to all: “I like the movie fine, and you’re welcome to like it too. But there’s a subset of older fans who want us to know — aggressively, emphatically, citing chapter and verse — exactly why The S.N. is such a great movie, an important movie, a movie for our times, says Karen Stabiner in the Los Angeles Times. We should likewise ask whether younger movie fans will even watch True Grit. Call it a “remedial exercise,” because it acts as the “antecedent” to The Social Network‘s “glossy and gee-whiz fun.” At a time when “everything is instantaneous,” Grit is “the cinematic equivalent of the Slow Food movement, and just as tasty.”

Actually, Social Network does, too: Who knew that “the origin of the massive digital domain was a complex and layered tale worthy of our attention,” says Daniel Hubschman in the New York Post. It has a lot more going for it, too, with an “extraordinary cast and crew” who al shine. “Rarely can a movie be both specific and universal in its themes, but The Social Network is at once about a band of misfit geniuses who stumbled upon fame and fortune and an entire generation of young adults reaching for its piece of the American Dream.” That’s a solid recipe for the year’s best movie.

Maybe there’s room for an outsider yet: “True Grit will definitely get a boost from being the last, most-talked about movie, and probably from being the film Academy members took their families to see in theaters over the holidays,” says John Lopez in Vanity Fair. And while some argue Social Network is “too dark for the Academy,” it is still the “‘It’ film of the moment.” Voters and critics are rightfully scrutinizing and examining the virtues that the two films extoll. “So, which does the Academy prefer: nobility quietly extolled, or tragedy lamented with bravado? Who knows, maybe it will be The King’s Speech after all.”

Depicting Wikileaks and The Guardian as the “matter and anti-matter” of all journalism, author Sarah Ellison digs through a herculean amount of sources to find the true dynamics behind the centuries-old paper and the 4-year-old revolutionary website, and what she finds is not pretty. Her profile is riddled with what have become typical horror stories of Assange’s behavior and personality– that he was excessively controlling of his documents and volunteers and his hunger for transparency often clouded good judgment on what to release. Much of it we have heard before, from both Assange himself and those close to him, like Wikileaks Disgruntled Employee of the Month (and OpenLeaks founder) Daniel Dormscheit-Berg, but while the tensions at the non-place that is Wikileaks HQ have surfaced before, the strife between Wikileaks and its collaborators has been held mostly behind the curtain.

By far the most colorful story in Ellison’s feature is the time Assange threatened to sue The Guardian over Wikileaks documents that escaped his control. Assange snapped at the paper when, having received one of the large packages of secrets released late last year from another Wikileaks source, The Guardian set up to publish it, without Assange’s permission and at a deadline Assange disapproved of. In response, Assange stormed the office of Guardian head Alan Rusbridger, “pallid and sweaty, his thin frame racked by a cough that had been plaguing him for weeks,” and threatened to sue. Patching up this wound, Ellison explains vividly, was “a process involving a great deal of coffee followed by a great deal of wine.”

The struggle didn’t begin or end with that anecdote, but that certainly seemed to be its climax. Ellison understands the struggle partially as the side effects of opposites attracting, and partially as a result of neither team Wikileaks nor team Guardian fully understanding each other:

“One of the oldest newspapers in the world, with strict and established journalistic standards, joined up with one of the newest in a breed of online muckrakers, with no standards at all except fealty to an ideal of “transparency”—that is, dumping raw material into the public square for people to pick over as they will. It is very likely that neither Alan Rusbridger nor Julian Assange fully understood the nature of the other’s organization when they joined forces.”

As a result, the newspaper tried to handle Assange with “kid gloves,” she explained, while doing a balancing act on its own expenses. That the financial situation for Wikileaks was dire is a pretty well-known fact; half of the website is ads begging for donations. But Ellison highlights the economic dilemma over at The Guardian as well– despite having a unique funding system that keeps it higher afloat than most newspapers its size, it has to contend similarly with the end of print journalism, and the fact that, despite their impressive web traffic, they have been unable to successfully translate this into a viable financial solution for the future.

Even more shocking than the lack of money on the part of the newspaper, however, is one line of the piece that suggests Assange’s ammunition has run out. “He is short of money and short of secrets… the whole thing has collapsed,” an anonymous source discloses in the piece. That he is without money or viable support will not keep Assange from being dangerous, but without his armor of government secrets, he would be at the end of his rope. Of course, Assange and Wikileaks still claim a package “that could take down a bank or two,” speculated to be about Bank of America or a similarly massive American enterprise, which would contradict the claim that there are no more secrets. After this package, however, and given the mainstream media’s highlighting of alleged leaker Pvt. Bradley Manning‘s solitary confinement, it’s difficult to see where more secrets would come from or who would send them to Assange. And for Assange, being a man without secrets would make him a man without recourse.

He faulted Douthat, a conservative columnist for the New York Times, for lending credibility to the Tea Party movement and distancing it from the John Birch Society. It’s quite the opposite, writes Hitchens—if not worse. He criticizes Beck for “inciting [his followers] to read the work of W. Cleon Skousen, a man more insane and nasty than [Birch Society founder Robert] Welch and a figure so extreme that ultimately even the Birch-supporting leadership of the Mormon Church had to distance itself from him.”

He goes on to say,

So, Beck’s “9/12 Project” is canalizing old racist and clerical toxic-waste material that a healthy society had mostly flushed out of its system more than a generation ago, and injecting it right back in again. Things that had hidden under stones are being dug up and re-released. And why? So as to teach us anew about the dangers of “spending and deficits”? It’s enough to make a cat laugh. No, a whole new audience has been created, including many impressionable young people, for ideas that are viciously anti-democratic and ahistorical. The full effect of this will be felt farther down the road, where we will need it even less.

But if your cat still isn’t laughing, there’s plenty more where that came from. You can read about all the things that make Christopher Hitchens “curl [his] lip” over at Vanity Fair.

Check out the Vanity Fair headline below. (I did not read beyond the headline because it is so dopey that I figured the rest of the article was blah blah blah.)

I have been at Fox News Channel since Glenn Beck arrived and I have never never heard any Fox employee say Glenn Beck is despised. Despised? Where do they get this stuff? Whether you agree with Beck or not on lots or none, the fact is that Glenn Beck is very cordial and nice to his colleagues. People talk about that. Despised? Not at all. Even before he came to Fox from CNN’s Headline News, the people I knew at CNN said he was very nice. Despised ? Nope. Vanity Fair just made that one up.

Not “making up” exactly. Had Greta bothered to read beyond the headline she would have realized VF was simply picking up on the NYT Mag’s big cover story on Beck which notes half way through that things are not all roses between Fox and Beck:

When I mentioned Beck’s name to several Fox reporters, personalities and staff members, it reliably elicited either a sigh or an eye roll. Several Fox News journalists have complained that Beck’s antics are embarrassing Fox, that his inflammatory rhetoric makes it difficult for the network to present itself as a legitimate news outlet.

The NYT meanwhile was picking up on Howie Kurtz‘s report from last March that all was not rosy between Fox and Beck. So maybe less a case of Vanity Fair making up than picking up. Either way, always a good idea to read past the headline, especially in these heady days of SEO-friendly headlines.

Sarah Palin

That’s the theory at the gay online magazine The Advocate. The editors at Advocate.com argued the “emasculating” terms used by Palin were “code words” to slam the openly gay Gross, who is an Advocate contributor.

Palin didn’t mention Gross by name while talking Thursday on Sean Hannity’s WABC radio show, but she seemed to be referring to the article — and pointedly used emasculating words that have long been used as euphemisms for homosexuality — when she called reporters who publish “rumors” about her “impotent,” “limp,” and “gutless.”

I’ve heard a lot of “code words” questioning the masculinity of gay men, but “limp” and “impotent” were new ones to me. The folks at the gay Republican group GOPoud seem to agree, issuing a statement to Joe Jervis at JoeMyGod taking-on the Advocate.

It is The Advocate, not Sarah Palin, who is guilty of ‘gay-baiting.’ I don’t think most people associate the words ‘impotent,’ ‘limp,’ or ‘gutless’ with being gay – I know I certainly don’t. If the folks at The Advocate think these words are euphemisms for being gay or lesbian then I think that speaks volumes about their own internalized homophobia. Governor Palin was absolutely right to use the words she chose to describe the pathetic hatchet job penned by Mr. Gross.

GOProud, which is hosting Ann Coulter for a “Homocon” event in New York City, definitely knows how to get some attention and the Advocate appears to be a perfect foil. As Chris Geidner of the Washington, D.C.-based LGBT magazine MetroWeekly says, “[r]egardless of who’s right, score one for GOProud for finding a way to get people talking on a Friday before a long weekend about words and what they mean.”

A couple of other interesting shakers on the list include Nikki Finke who clocks in at 93, and J.J. Abrams who merits spot 50. Mad Men fans will be excited to hear that the team behind the show ranks number 43 on the list. You can view the full list here and scroll through the top five below.

#1 Mark Zuckerberg (1 of 5)

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What is perhaps most amazing about the profile is that it took this long for it to come about. For a woman who has been the subject of spectacular amounts press attention very few details about her personal life, or any life behind the public face and Facebook page, have come to light. Ironically, if Palin wasn’t so secretive none of the things revealed in this profile would be terribly interesting; for the most part it’s pretty basic stuff. But the newness of it subsequently makes it hard not to wonder if this marks some sort of turning point for Palin and the press. Certainly her public persona appeared to take a hit following her puzzling support of Dr. Laura’s N-word debacle (her Facebook and Twitter have been notably tame since), and Sunday’s NYT op-ed calling for the Dems to come up with their own Palin appears to have hit a nerve. Not that Palin is going anywhere, not by a long shot, but one gets the sense her time of skating through all the attention with nary a nod to the public outside a handful of controlled mediums be coming to a close. In the meantime here’s a short selection of passages from the VF profile including some solid speculation about the woman who may be the voice of Palin’s Facebook page. Read the full piece here.

Update: Ben Smith thinks you should take this piece with a grain of salt: “[M]y takeaway from the magazine piece is more that you can really write anything about Palin.” A takeaway that arguably adds to the conclusion Palin’s press avoidance is beginning to work against her.

Palin and the press: “Her on-the-record statements about herself amount to a litany of untruths and half-truths.”

She keeps tight control of her pronouncements, speaking only in settings of her own choosing, with audiences of her own selection, and with reporters kept at bay. (Despite many requests, neither Palin nor her current staff would comment for this article.) She injects herself into the news almost every day, but on a strictly one-way basis, through a steady stream of messages on Twitter and Facebook. The press plays along. Palin is the only politician whose tweets are regularly reported as news by TV networks.

The woman behind Sarah Palin’s Facebook page

Palin’s most unconventional hire is a novice media consultant, Rebecca Mansour, a 36-year-old Los Angeles resident who has been identified in news stories as a screenwriter. Mansour has said that she volunteered for Obama early in the 2008 campaign and then became disillusioned. Not long after the election…[Mansour] co-founded the most popular pro-Palin blog, Conservatives4Palin, known informally as C4P.
[...]
By mid-August, her byline, long the most prominent one on C4P, had vanished from the site.But her voice, or at least a voice that sounds much like hers, was about to turn up in another venue…After Mansour’s voice disappeared on C4P, however, Palin’s voice on Facebook and Twitter started sounding increasingly provocative and irascible…This summer, in her capacity as a SarahPAC staffer, Mansour insisted to a reporter that “anything that goes out under [Palin’s] name is hers.” Palin’s virtual voice does sometimes have the ring of authenticity. But often it sounds less like Palin herself than someone else’s fantasy version of Palin at her most vitriolic. On one occasion Palin’s virtual voice contradicted remarks she made in a TV interview two days later.

Andrew Sullivan Alert

Palin delivers basically the same speech she gave 18 hours earlier to the Tea Party group in Independence. You could pretty much replace the word “constitution,” from yesterday’s remarks, with “Bible,” and be good to go. Then Palin departs from the script and speaks as if from the heart, describing her fear and confusion upon discovering that Trig would be born with Down syndrome. “I had never really been around a baby with special needs,” she tells her listeners. For what it’s worth, this statement is untrue. Depicting the same moment of discovery in her own book, Palin writes that she immediately thought of a special-needs child she knew very well: her autistic nephew. Such falsehoods never damage Palin’s credibility with her admirers, because information and ideology are incidental to this relationship.

For someone who loves the common folk, Palin is apparently a bad tipper

Palin does not always treat those ordinary people well, however—it depends on who is watching…The only time I heard of Palin giving a generous tip was in St. Joseph, Michigan, after the owner of Kilwin’s chocolate shop, on State Street, sent a CARE package to Palin’s suite, and Palin walked to the store to say thank you. She also wanted to buy more boxes of candy to take home. When the owner would not accept her money, Palin, encircled by the crowd that had jammed the store to get a glimpse of her, pressed a hundred-dollar bill into the woman’s hand, saying, “This is for the staff.” That Ben Franklin was the talk of State Street the whole rest of the day.

And has a Terrible Temper

The intensity of Palin’s temper was first described to me in such extreme terms that I couldn’t help but wonder if it might be exaggerated, until I heard corroborating tales of outbursts dating back to her days as mayor of Wasilla and before. One friend of the Palins’ remembers an argument between Sarah and Todd: “They took all the canned goods out of the pantry, then proceeded to throw them at each other. By the time they got done, the stainless-steel fridge looked like it had got shot up with a shotgun. Todd said, ‘I don’t know why I even waste my time trying to get nice things for you if you’re just going to ruin them.’ ” This friend adds, “As soon as she enters her property and the door closes, even the insects in that house cringe.

Sarah Palin the Sound and the Fury [Vanity Fair]

Hitchens began explaining the way he found out about his disease, saying that he had been waking up increasingly weak and pained, but attributed it to exhaustion. “I woke up feeling like death,” he said, “I’ve had that, but this was not like that… I thought maybe I’m dying.  So I managed to get to the phone and call emergency services… they looked at the scan [and] they said you need to see an oncologist, it was the first time I really listened to the word, to the name oncologist. I thought it was a bit nicer than being told you¹ve got cancer but not much.”

Knowing that Hitchens’ cancer was the same type that killed his father, Cooper admitted that he feared heart attacks because his father died of one, but Hitchens admitted no “filial piety about the disease that killed your father.” Instead, he noted that he was 18 years younger than his father when he was diagnosed. “You said you burned the candle at both ends,” Cooper noted. Hitchens’ response: “And it gave a lovely light.”

Hitchens also gave what Cooper called “the subtlest anti-smoking message I’ve ever heard”: “I might as well say to anyone watching, if you can hold it down on the smokes and the cocktails you may be well advised to do so.”

On the topic of prayer, Hitchens noted that the prayers about his cancer– both the people praying for his health and those who have “lavish websites… praying for me to suffer and die”– are meaningless to him, even “Everyone Pray for Hitchens Day,” which he says has been designated to be the 20th of September. “I don’t think souls or bodies can be changed by incantation– or anything else, by the way.”

The entire fascinating interview from CNN below:

The photoshoot for the magazine was taken on Judy Garland’s old yacht (which is uncomfortably ironic considering Garland’s death of a drug overdose and Lohan’s problems with substance abuse). Sources told Gossip Cop that the photoshoot encapulates “some of the most beautiful photos of Lindsay” ever taken.

The interview should be a fascinating read and will be eagerly anticipated by fans and detractors of Lohan alike.

Check out the rest of the details of the shoot and interview in Gossip Cop’s exclusive story here.

Beating out broadcast outlets and newspapers, the results come the same weekend MSNBC’s President praised FNC CEO Roger Ailes‘ ‘brilliance’.

The CBS News/Vanity Fair poll asked respondents to name their “most trustworthy” source, from a list of Fox News, CNN, “other major broadcast networks,” New York Times, Wall Street Journal and The Daily Show. Overall, the cable news networks came away with a whooping 61% of the vote – CNN had 32% and FNC with 29%. The entire rest of the broadcast TV community came in 3rd, with 13% and the NYT had just 8%.

There was a breakdown between Republicans and Democrats too, and while CNN dominated among Dems and FNC among the GOP, CNN got more than 20% of the Republican “vote” while more than 10% of the Democrats polled picked Fox News as most trusted.

The numbers are staggering, and continue to prove that cable news has a relationship with viewers that is more comfortable and trusting than the other forms of news dissemination. For CNN, the title of “most trusted name in news” continues to bear out, even as ratings fall. For FNC, the close 2nd should be a point of pride for its journalistic bonafides, especially considering the right/left breakdown.

While MSNBC wasn’t specifically listed in the poll (they could have been grouped with NBC for the broadcast networks, but really they should have been separated out), MSNBC’s Presidents Phil Griffin had his own praise for his competitor network, Fox News. In an interview with the Chicago Tribune‘s Phil Rosenthal, Griffin had this to say about Ailes and his first-place network:

“He’s changed media. Everybody does news differently because Roger’s changed the world,” Griffin said over coffee on a visit to Chicago the other day. He was taking a break from making a case for his own cable network to ad buyers here to make the case for changes in the media landscape to a reporter. “Roger early on figured it out and was brilliant.”

Griffin didn’t hold back about his former network, CNN, either. “The media universe has exploded, and it’s a different world,” said Griffin of CNN’s former dominance. “I don’t go along with this idea that CNN has, that somehow they are doing the Lord’s work and we are simply regurgitating what people think.”

Both the poll and Griffin’s comments highlight something we already know – the three cable news networks are more divided than ever.

(image via)

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The Vanity Fair article is straightforward, sleazy and, if you’re into that sort of thing, wildly entertaining. The Opinionator piece is a thoughtful conversation-starter questioning what message it would send American children if Woods managed to come out of this scandal a golf legend having only to give up a couple of million dollars (not all that much for Woods) and an hour with Oprah Winfrey. “Does redemption that comes easily, without major atonement, send a message that transgression is no big deal, and wind up encouraging self-destruction?” he asks. The answer is yes, it does, but just because Woods is trying to avoid to spotlight doesn’t mean it has been– and will continue to be– a difficult experience for him. And the media is mostly to blame for that.

Tiger Woods was not a compelling human being before his sex scandal and even given the most interesting narrative a mundane person could get, a bout with “sex addiction,” he is still generally uninteresting. Even his mistresses are only remarkable in number, not style. But sex sells no matter how boring the participant, so media outlets are keeping the ball rolling for as long as they can cash in. They are, however, also indefinitely prolonging Woods’ public shame and misery, and the longer that goes on, the more of an example he becomes for public figures who consider behaving badly.

To think the psychological consequences of being the laughingstock of a nation will be lost on someone whose only focus in life (besides the waitresses) was his career is a bit short-sighted. From the comfort and anonymity of our computers, of course being a topic on The Insider for four months doesn’t exactly sound like a prison sentence, but it’s nothing to scoff at, either. Woods lost all of his public dignity literally overnight– more than enough to drive anyone insane. His transgressions, however, are grave enough to merit that and much more, and it’s the responsibility of the entertainment industry he works for to hold him accountable. Unfortunately, that means the Vanity Fair article won’t be the last of it, and the light at the end of the tunnel is nowhere in sight, but America will just have to suffer right along with him.

While it’s not the majority, 50% is a pretty high number. So should we celebrate this as a big win for civil rights in America? Well, maybe not. A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll recently asked Americans the question “Do you personally think that homosexual relationships between consenting adults is morally wrong, or not a moral issue?” and 48% answered “Morally Wrong”. At first glance, it might seem like a shift in opinion. However, the CNN poll was held only two weeks before the Vanity Fair one (February 12-15 compared to February 26-March 1) and that would be a pretty big shift in the normally glacial-speed progression of civil rights.

There are a few ways to interpret these results. First, we could assume that one of the polling companies is better at random samples than the other. Secondly, we could decide that all polls are inherently faulty and should never be looked at as fact. Or finally, we can just imagine that there are a bunch of Americans out there who feel that all politicians are “morally wrong” to begin with and it’s silly to nitpick which sins are acceptable.

Conflict or not, both polls show some interesting data.

– Gawker’s Ravi Somaiya crashed the notoriously-uncrashable Vanity Fair Oscars party last night, and describes some of what he saw.

Gawker’s Ravi Somaiya made it into the Vanity Fair Oscars Party uninvited last night for “seven minutes in total,” and today described (with pics) some of what went down in the extremely hard-to-crash event. Besides the interaction with Rupert Murdoch and everyone’s favorite pilot Chesley Sullenberger, he also ran into Anjelica Huston before getting run out of the event.

Here’s the security he encountered:

This year it was rumored that, in addition to the scores of regular security guards and bomb-sniffing dogs, there were undercover ex-CIA agents on hand to keep the A-listers safe and the riffraff out.

Check out VF’s official party coverage here.

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I have some questions about this story, but let’s take this a step at a time. Verini describes how he showed up late for lunch with an already-reluctant Taibbi, to get some material for the article:

I mentioned some of the Exile pieces of his I planned to write about, and he said, “That was covered in the book.” I told him yes, that was true, but the book had been published in 2000, and, frankly, I didn’t think it was very good.

“The book wasn’t good?” he said.

“No, I didn’t think so,” I said.

“My book?” he said.

“Yes, the Exile book. I thought it was redundant and discursive and you guys left out a lot of the good stuff you did,” I said.

At this, Taibbi’s mouth turned down and his eyes narrowed.

So far, I’m with Taibbi on this. My mouth would “turn down,” too (some people would just call that “frowning”), if some guy I barely wanted to meet showed up late and told me I was doing him this favor because my work sucked.

“Fuck you,” he snarled,

That’s about right.

“Fuck you,” he snarled, and then picked up his mug from the table, threw his coffee at me, and stormed out.

Wow, he went from zero to Joe Pesci in Goodfellas like that. Now, maybe I’m getting hung up on details, but here’s where the story gets a little dubious for me:

The restaurant was packed with customers, and they all turned to watch as I sat there, stunned, coffee dripping from my face. The waiter arrived with the milkshake Taibbi had ordered.

After Verini’s deconstruction of Taibbi’s scowl, there just seems to be something missing here. Like the part where he runs around the restaurant, screaming “My EYES!” Was it an iced coffee? That’s an important detail.

Here’s another question: At this point, why is your headline still “Lost Exile,” and not “Matt Taibbi Maimed Me With a Hot Beverage?”

But, I digress. Verini then follows Taibbi, who just threw coffee on him, out of the restaurant to try and talk him down:

After wiping myself off a bit, I went outside, where Taibbi was putting on his coat, and asked him to calm down and come back into the restaurant. He walked up to me, glaring, beside himself with rage.

“Fuck you!” he yelled. “Did you bring me here to insult me? Who are you? What have you ever written? Fuck you!” I tried to talk to him, but gave up when he walked away. I went back inside, paid the bill, left, and began walking up Sixth Avenue. Halfway up the block, I turned around, and Taibbi was behind me.

“Are you following me?,” I asked. He walked toward me, raising his arms as though preparing to throttle me or take a swing.

“I still haven’t decided what I’m going to do with you!” he said.

“Are you kidding?,” I asked.

…But the anger in Taibbi’s eyes was genuine, and, after some more glaring, he fumed off. That was the last I saw of him.

So, the guy just threw coffee on you, which you survived by virtue of your hidden Wolverine healing powers or something, and now he appears on the street like Nosferatu, and you don’t give him a key-fisted throatpunch? Call a cop?

The really weird part is that Taibbi then ended up participating in the article anyway, via email, and none of those emails apparently said “BTW, sorry I assaulted you and stalked you like human prey afterwards. I’m switching to Sanka.”

The whole thing sounds like one of those apocryphal bad-boy-image-burnishing tales, like the Jake Tapper gum story. I don’t know Taibbi, I only met him once. He was in Philadelphia doing a segment on the Democratic primary for Real Time. We shot the breeze for about half an hour, and he sure didn’t seem like a hair-trigger psychopath. In fact, he kind of annoyed me by smiling too much. Am I a clown? Do I amuse you?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying Verini made it up. How could he? It’s just a really weird story.

For the record, I tried (unsuccessfully) to get ahold of Taibbi to get his side of the story. If you’re reading this, Matt, maybe you can fill in some of the blanks.

For such a mainstream print media association, acquiring talents developed at the shamelessly vulgar, hilariously quirky self-described “friendly little warblog” is a bold step to take, even if the simultaneous hirings were unintentional. While Cox has overshadowed her role as the blog’s founder with many other distinguished lines on her resume and Weiner will be tempted to stray from her political pedigree at a cultural institution like Vanity Fair, both writers are direct products of a new medium that has directly caused a great number of headaches at newspapers and magazines. That their training ground was on the freewheeling extreme of the already irreverent blogophere goes beyond a statement: it’s a commitment to keep one foot in the murkier waters of the political world and attracting a new audience to talent bred online, possibly hoping the favor will be reciprocated. Welcoming Cox to GQ was of particular political signficance, as Michael Calderone explains at Politico. It is a sign the magazine would like a greater voice in the political media community, and “looks like a way for the magazine to maintain more of a daily presence in the capital.”

The influx of bloggers into the print world their existence threatens to destroy is a good sign for the latter, and an olive branch to the former indicating that perhaps there can be some form of peaceful coexistence. Conde Nast has nothing to lose from the merger, and blogs like Wonkette are becoming, in their own way, polished and seasoned institutions that can be trusted to produce “Conde Nast-level” talent.

This was big news, for Murdoch.  Kingmaker and warmonger, proprietor of the most Fair and Balanced vehicle for right wing rancor around, Murdoch had nonetheless struggled, over the past few years, to reprise his successes with the broadsheets and cable-box online.  Indeed, Michael Wolff, of Newser and Vanity Fair, went so far as to suggest that the reflexively bellicose Murdoch (“War is Murdoch’s natural state,” Wolff averred) had gone to battle against the net.

So Murdoch was feeling understandably happy on the occasion of this briefing – his inaugural digital success.  Though, in truth, independent observers ascribed Newscorps’s resurgence less to the success of Murdoch’s paywall-scheme, or any other of Newscorps’s gaspingly clever cyber-ploys, than to an upswing in the global advertising markets. But why let facts like that get in the way.  Murdoch was feeling, to put it mildly, keyed-up.  Still, it’s hard to imagine any other media grandee, however tickled – and they do get grand, these grandees — giving a statement to the press quite like this.  The transcript reads like a séance with an unusually smug Ming emperor.  The Australian quotes him:

“Excuse the immodesty but News Corporation’s pre-eminence as a content creator comes as the debate over the primacy of content is over,” [Murdoch] said, referring to his campaign to get consumers to pay for online news and entertainment. “Content is not just king. It is the emperor of all things electronic. We are on the cusp of a digital dynasty in which our company and our shareholders will profit greatly.”

One helplessly appreciates a figure who, forgoing the default bromides of the press conference, addresses his public in this sort of balls-out, oracular style.  As a soundbyte, it certainly beats the hell out of, say, ten seconds of Bill Gates.  You want predictions, of the high-strung, brazen, self-applauding variety?  Murdoch’s your man.  Still, it all makes one want to give one’s Bible a double-check.  Was it the meek, or The Murdochs, that were destined to inherit the earth?

In case you haven’t heard, this year’s Vanity Fair Hollywood issue is extremely monochromatic. Over the years, VF has often included at least one, sometimes two, people who can check an ethnic box other than Caucasian, but not this year. The lack of color in the cover story is surprising, and — to be honest — pretty disappointing. Not the least because….well where is Gabourey Sidibe, whose jaw-dropping, and now Oscar-nominated, debut performance in Precious floored just about everyone. Really? Getting an Oscar nom your first time out doesn’t merit a cover nod?

The article opens by describing Abbie Cornish’s “cupid’s-bow lips, the downy-soft cheeks, the button nose.” As  Joanna Douglas on Yahoo’s Shine blog pointed out, there are a slew of non-white actresses (Avatar’s Zoe Saldana? Slum Dog Millionaire’s Frieda Pinto?) who could have shared in the pastel-clad glory on sun-soaked grass.

But that’s not the only curious component to the current VF issue.  Two of the actresses in their “New Decade: New Holly” article were actually  featured in 2008 as “Hollywood’s New Wave.” Yup. Some of yesteryear’s up-and-comers are…still up-and-coming?  Behold:

That would be Kristen Stewart on the left and Amanda Seyfried on the right, both of whom also landed this year’s cover.

So what difference does two years make in budding-starlet time? A lot. In 2008, Amanda Seyfried was best known as the girl in Mean Girls whose breasts could tell the weather, and now, she’s established herself as a presence on HBO’s Big Love, as well as the go-to-girl for remakes of Nicholas Sparks books (Dear John and Letters to Juliet–not Nicholas Sparks but eerily similar–come out within the next few months.)

And as for Ms. Bella Swan? Well, despite the fact that she’s raked in millions and obtained an astronomical level of fame that will allow her to land almost any role she desires, she looked much happier back in ’08. Twilight had yet to break, and in these photos, she seems much happier with her nascent level of fame. Or perhaps it’s because she got to fondle Blake Lively’s derriere:

Either way, the fact remains that both Seyfried’s and Stewart’s careers have skyrocketed since Vanity Fair first pegged them as faces to watch. So why have they once again been named a face to watch? Was there such a lack of talented, actresses that Vanity Fair felt compelled to feature these starlets twice?

“Twitter is crack for media addicts.” – George Packer

New technology invariably brings, along with change, a torrent of anxiety about what that change will look like.  This anxiety can be eloquent.  It can also be less than eloquent.  Those who quailed at the prospect of a world quickened and mechanized by the Industrial Revolution, for example, had the good luck of finding a spokesperson in William Blake, the unofficial laureate of Ludditism.  “And was Jerusalem builded here,/” asked Blake mournfully, if not quite grammatically, of an English countryside raped and blackened by industry, “Among these dark Satanic Mills?”

Of course, nobody listened to Blake.  None of the movers and shakers, anyway. England kept on getting raped and blackened – and kept on keeping on, with the end result that some of us have spent hours of our lives we will never get back at Stansted Airport.

But still, successful or not, Blake clearly knew a thing or two about getting the most out of his tetrameters.  Technology depressed the hell out of Blake – but that depression, that anxiety, got expressed poetically.

Not so anymore.  The new technophobia – induced, primarily, by the new media – is all prose.  “Twitter is crack for media addicts,” wrote George Packer in a recent blogpost.  Among the elite group of Twitter-wary readers Packer’s blog attracts, this post drew a mixed reaction of applause and fond disdain.  To be fair, Packer’s metaphor wasn’t exactly a lunge at the literary, something Packer’s amply capable of when he feels like it.  It was a mild shot at David Carr, the NYT’s media critic, who recently devoted a whole book, The Night of the Gun, to his off-again, on-again, generally star-crossed romance with a crackpipe.  But still, the phrase “crack for media addicts” rates so far beneath the Blakean in every category (Blake, after all, thought introspection strong enough stuff to cleanse the Doors of Perception) that you can’t ignore it.  In its vulgarization of a venerable mode of dissent, Packer’s post stands out as a herald of a new mood.

The other thing to say about Packer’s post is that it’s not unique.  Far from isolated, when Packer makes an overdrawn, detrimental comparison of Twitter to something else, a chorus lines up behind him.  Saying Twitter is really a lot like something that a lot of us, really, dislike has become the favorite new, if slightly nervous, pastime for a media convulsed by technological innovation.

Examples, anyone?  Why not a catalogue?  Twitter is, first of all, an atrocious party – “deafeningly banal” in the words of one Guardian columnist.  “Twitter is like a tragically hip New York night club,” USAToday.com quotes Bob Warfield, CEO of Helpstream, as saying. (This sentiment was echoed, rather more cheerfully, by Sarah Evans, “a publicist and self-described ‘Twitterholic.’”  Vanity Fair quotes her: “Twitter is like going to a giant cocktail party, every day . . Except you don’t have to get dressed up!”)  Or is Twitter, instead, a gun – a utensil of self-destruction?  “Giving some celebrities Twitter is like giving a kid a loaded gun,” the LA Times quotes Allan Mayer, head of the strategic communications division at the publicity firm at 42West.  (Reading this, one thinks of Norman Mailer, who said of the photographer Diane Arbus, reviewing her portrait of him, “Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like giving a hand grenade to a baby.”)

However one feels about the above, one is bound to  get a little queasy hearing what Michael Fraser has to say.  A former burglar-turned-burglary-guru for the BBC’s Beat the Burglar series, Fraser solicitously offers that “[Burglars] gain confidence by learning more about [people via Twitter], what they are likely to own and when they are likely to be out of the house, and then target appropriate victims.  I call it internet shopping for burglars.”  Gulp.

All this represents the politer end of the spectrum.  For it gets, needles to say, a lot sourer.  “Reading the world off Twitter is like peeking into a Connecticut prep school and claiming to have seen America,” wrote Kerry Howley of Slate. Smug, incurious, upper-class, classist — Twitter, it occurs to you, ought to make a run for the Senate.

You can find a lot in this vein.  There is, really, no end to it.

Still, I think the nadir, the rancorous rockbottom, must be the following.  Responding to the NYT’s Bill Wasik, who argued in a July, 2009 op-ed that the Internet had usurped New York’s status as the top destination for young creative talent, the TNR’s Jason Zengerle posed a question that, in some circles, doubles as a casus belli: “Is Twitter the new Williamsburg?”

Perhaps, as the technology improves and expands, a decline in the critical discourse surrounding it – or, rather, clinging to it, like so many barnacles – is inevitable.

Still – Williamsburg?  It is time to put the gloves back on, gentlemen.

There is a lot to deplore, especially for the senior media, about the dawn of Twitter as a viable news-medium.  There is a lot to jeer at and criticize.  But the counterpoint, at the moment, is all off.  The jeering is obliterating the critique.  The trashing and bashing has become blinding.

Packer doesn’t scoff at Twitter, even as he recoils from it, and we should credit him for that.  But the sensational trope — Twitter as crack — has the effect of sensationalizing the bigger observation until it lapses into a kind of shtick: “[Twitter] scares me . . . because I don’t think I could handle it. I’m afraid I’d end up letting my son go hungry.”  Even worse, it has the effect of freeing Packer of the onus to investigate an anxiety that is neither trivial nor his alone.  As his post goes to show, we are still awaiting – the Luddites among us with baited breath – the eloquent counterargument the phenomenon of Twitter demands.

Anyway, CBS News decided to take the best ideas you probably thought up while you were high and ask a bunch of Americans in the latest 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair poll. Click through for the results to that question and more!:

Here are your results – peruse them all and enjoy.

And here’s a breakdown:

• Let’s start with the A-Rod/Uncle Sam scenario. Here’s the full question: “Whose likeness would make the best updated Uncle Sam?” 71% of respondents were like, ‘what the hell is this question?’ while 29% decided to pick an answer. Here’s how CBS summed up the results:

Morgan Freeman is great at playing God but only 11 percent of those polled think he can fill Uncle Sam’s shoes. Only five percent think our uncle should become our aunt and despite their good looks, older versions of Matt Damon, A-Rod and Keanu Reeves won’t be gracing recruiting posters any time soon.

Wait, you didn’t think Neo would be the new symbol of America?

• Staying with the sports theme, CBS/VF asked about the “top sports role model.” There weren’t many choices – two tennis players, one football and baseball player, a race car driver and a snowboarder. 45% took none of the above.

• Since awards shows are in the news, this is timely: “Which award show is a ‘must see’?” 68% of America said who cares.

• How about more existential. If you could live at any time in history, what would you pick? “Right now” is the top choice by far, with the Wild West coming in at #2.

• And one more. They want to know what phrase you would “like to say” in your lifetime. The top response was “beam me up,” because America either wants to go to space or they are big fans of Sci-Fi conventions. The second choice: “I’ll take popular songs for $600.” And with the bronze, “I will faithfully execute the office of president.” So 13% more Americans would rather go on Jeopardy than become President. But more people would rather say “beam me up.”

The point of all this? I love America, and you should too. At least that’s what Uncle Older Alex Rodriguez wants.

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There’s nothing wrong with that — everything in Vanity Fair is Vanity Fair-ized, it’s Vanity Fair. And I love the idea of leaders in what is unquestionably THE platform of the last year being singled out by VF as worthy of its usual accolades of fabulosity. Because the world of Twitter is different. And having 1.6 million followers did change things for Felicia Day, and does give her the kind of clout that didn’t exist back in the olden days of even a few years ago. And they do have clout — the clout of spreading the word, of being members of a club that still has relatively few members (as of right now, just 208 people have over a million followers). This includes three of these women: Day, travel journalist Stefanie Michaels (1.4 million) and marketer Amy Jo Martin (1.2 million).

Not that the others are anything to sneeze at. New media strategist Julia Roy has 31K followers, and when she retweets you, you notice (I’m sure the same goes for Sarah Evans (33K), and she is welcome to demonstrate in person!). Pop17 video-blogger/lifecaster Sarah Austin is the baby of the bunch at 24K, but don’t underestimate — yep, that’s her giving away passes to CES on her Twitter feed, sponsored by Ford. The point is, they’re all influencers, in a space where influence multiplies over and upon itself because everyone’s tweeting and retweeting each other, reinforcing those bonds and the power of that reach. What it amounts to: real online power. And Vanity Fair is about nothing if not power.

Which is why it sort of rankled to see the stupid, twee Twit-speak used in this piece. Writer Vanessa Grigoriardis — who has protected her own tweets on Twitter, clearly ignoring the advice of her interview subjects — write a sentence like this: “For tweeple, e-mail messages are sonnets, Facebook is practically Tolstoy.” Tweeple? Really? Isn’t there enough of a variety on Twitter now, of people from all walks using it for a broad range of purposes, some fun and frivolous, some important and serious, that we can drop this dismissive terminology? And for all the trenchcoat-draped love given to the online celebrity of these women, I gave a sigh to see the sample tweets she used: “getting highlights before class,” “I hrd u had fun!,” “Wah, missing my twittr time!” I’m looking at the Twitter feeds of these women right now and I’m seeing both Roy and Evans up in arms over the H&M – Walmart destroyed clothing fiasco, outraged that it would not be donated (Evans’ Twitter bio mentions “non profit” and “social good”; Roy, who I follow, often tweets about charitable stuff). Austin is covering CES, Martin strikes me as a pretty hard core and focused professional, and as for Day, her latest tweet just took me to this great article that backs up where I’m going here. Here’s her tweet:

It was an honor to be included in the picture, but I can’t disagree w/these pts re: the Vanity Fair article http://bit.ly/5qw1au

The article: “Why Does Vanity Fair Hate the Women of Twitter?” from GeekWeek by a woman who goes by Kiala. She cites a line that made me double take, too:

“It so happens that they are nice girls — the Internet’s equivalent of a telephone chat line staffed by a bunch of cheerleaders”

I…what? I’m sorry, did Vanity Fair just refer to six successful women who have worked very, very hard to achieve success as “a bunch of cheerleaders who chat” WTF VF?

I got no problem with cheerleaders — or cheerleading, in the sense of being upbeat, encouraging, sharing, open and engaged, which is what all these women are — but wow do I have a problem with using it to buttress the impression of flighty, dippy girls obsessed with themselves, their highlights and their twitter followers. No. There are people like that, but not these people specifically, and not people who are engaged and involved on Twitter in general.

I don’t want to go through this and say, this is sexist, that is anti-Internet, Vanity Fair is glib and less interested in exploring a new emerging power community than framing it with the tropes of the bygones. No again! This is an article whose time has come and these women as much as anyone demonstrate the power and possibility and flexibility of the platform (though just for VF’s audience who may be new to the concept: Yes there are men on Twitter. Ha, ha. But also, there are minorities on Twitter and old people on Twitter and even — gasp! — balding, paunchy, unstylish people too. And some of them are even “twilebrities” themselves. What was that Day said about it being a democratizing medium?). Grigoriardis may not have been the best person to write about it, since she does little to explain how the community in which these women are such players actually functions, but it’s certainly time to acknowledge that Twitter has created a whole new universe of interconnectedness and influence and — importantly — results.

The women in the photo above are excited and proud about this article, and they should be — it gives a decent overview of the space and rightly casts them as leaders within it. But for someone like Grigoriardis, who usually does more thorough, smart, illuminating work, I would have liked to have seen better.

I tried to think of articles about Twitter that I’d recommend over this VF piece, and immediately came up with David Carr‘s recent meditation on the subject, and Will Leitch‘s profile on the founders for New York magazine last year — both attempts to seriously grapple with the whys of the phenomenon. Then I realized what this piece reminded me of: Maureen Dowd‘s asinine interview with founders Biz Stone and Ev Williams in last year’s NYT. Both that and the VF article seem to share the same contempt for Twitter, and for the strange creatures who would bother with it. If I knew nothing about Twitter I’d read Grigoriardis’ piece and think it was stupid, too.

Luckily for me, I can go right to the source. Felicia, Julia, Sarah, Sarah, Stefanie, Amy – I’ll see you online.

Related:
Vanity Fair on Twitter fame: Twembarrassing [CNET]