Archives: January 2006

“So…who are these people that you write about, just other people who write about other people?”

It was a fair question, posed by a friend of mine. It’s been hard to explain to civilians, as it were, why exactly this job has been so all-encompassing for the last ten months. How can I explain to them how funny TimesSelect jokes are? Why Katie Couric‘s legs are a symbol of the seismic shift in the world as we know it? Why referring to Jack Shafer as “Our Dark Lord” cracks me up, even now as I’m typing?

I haven’t been able to in ten months, which is why my best friend has no clue who Maureen Dowd is (though I can tell you that she considers men very, very necessary) and a recent boy I dated didn’t know the difference between Anderson Cooper and Stephen Colbert…when they were both on the TV screen at the same time. (I swear to God that one’s true.) I’ve candidly admitted in the past that I knew very little coming in; now, thanks to a 24-hour diet of news and spin, I can at least hold my own in an email exchange with Jay Rosen (but not a long one).

It’s kind of goofy (but if you are a regular Fishbowl reader you expect no less), but I now have a genuine affection for this beat and for those it covers (even the ones I’ve never met. I’m lookin’ at you, Howie Kurtz, oy what a punum). I had a mini-epiphany last night about why, and it goes back to the notion of being a mensch. I do actually believe that most of us genuinely are in this to add something to the equation and effect a little good. That’s one of the reason the outrage over James Frey is so heartening — it’s kind of amazing that such a cynical bunch of bastards can be so offended that someone lied.

As it turns out, it’s kind of a prerequisite for being one of those people who people like me who write about other people who write about other people write about (yes, we’re the luckiest people in the world). If you didn’t get that well, be grateful that I’m returning to the world in which I am actually edited. In the meantime, before this gets too maudlin, I just wanted to thank all of you for being a mensch (there, Brian Williams, a Golden Girls shout-out just for you!). For the FishFriends&#153 amongst you — you know who you are, all of youse — I thank you so much for every bit of fact-checking, tip-dropping and media-whoring (just kidding, Bucky!). It has been so much fun to do this with all of you, and I can’t even believe you let me for so long.

Or that you read this ridiculously long post. What, you don’t have work to do? Look forward to prose far more elegant and precise come tomorrow when MB stalwart Greg Lindsay steps into the fray, with support from MB’s own Dorian Benkoil and Aileen Gallagher. In the meantime, “The Fishbowl Final” will resume tomorrow, and I’m excited for that. But otherwise, this is so long, and farewell, and auf wiedersehn. You know the drill.

Thanks so much for this wonderful, amazing, inspiring experience. Sorry for being sentimental, I’m Canadian. So, by the way, are Bonnie Fuller, Sheelah Kolhatkar, Graydon Carter, Samantha Bee, Pat Kiernan and Malcolm Gladwell.

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Fishbowl is dizzy with delight: rock-star philosophe Bernard-Henri L&#233vy loves us! Well, actually, he signed our book but that’s good enough for us. Ever since he rocketed to the top of the NYmag charts two weeks ago (via Carl Swanson‘s wildly popular review of “American Vertigo”), the city’s been ga-ga for all things BHL (plus he was lionized by Tina Brown last Thursday at the NYPL). Fishbowl sent a super-special correspondent to his talk with Adam Gopnik at the 92nd St. Y on Sunday: supa-FishFriend&#153 “Magnus,” who is ridiculously smart and ridiculously opinionated (and ridiculously…never mind. But, his nickname is “Magnus”). This is his report. If you’re looking for a quick summary, you won’t find it here. If you wished to God you could attend and want to feel as though you’re living the dream, pull up a chair and stay awhile. Love him, hate him, BHL is certainly entertaining. Magnus, the floor is yours.

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You really don’t have to have read any of Bernard-Henri L&#233vy’s (BHL)’s books in order to have a negative opinion about him. That’s why I couldn’t wait to crack the virgin seal of Sunday’s NYT to read Garrison Keillor‘s smackdown of BHL’s new book “American Vertigo”. After I tell her all about it, Fishbowl makes me her “super-special correspondent” and sends me to BHL’s talk at the 92nd Street Y that very evening. Before heading out, I quickly tear through the first 230 pages of “American Vertigo” that make up his “Voyage en Amerique”. (I guess they figured “Voyage through America” sounded a tad corny). This is no book report, so I’ll leave it to the real critics to divine how a people might “become not intoxicated by their autonomy but drunk on their independence.” Suffice it to say: it takes a lot of brass to accuse Henry Kissinger of uttering “a litany of self-satisfied platitudes” after you’ve spent almost two hundred pages spewing banality with the kind of abandon I haven’t seen since I was freshman in college.

92nd St. Y, BHL — it’s reasonable to assume that there will be a fair number of Jewish people in attendance, but I totally forgot BHL’s other main constituency: Euros. Air kisses abound. Heading into the lobby, I run into two friends whom I last saw at La Goulue and the Neue Galerie benefit back in December. (Ed. Magnus is a FANCY FishFriend!) It dawns on me that the upperclass twits that pop up in the party pages of Tatler must be the English acolytes of BHL, what with their open shirts and all. To top it all off, who sits down three seats next to my balcony seat but Gilles Amsallem from French Tuesdays. I recall Liesl Schillinger‘s deadpan take on that whole scene in the Talk of the Town a while back. It turns out their website is shilling a BHL appearance at the Barnes and Noble in Union Square on Monday. But that’s another story.

Adam Gopnik, Francis Fukayama and more, after the jump!

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You know the story: girl writes article, girl publishes article, article is ripped off by a foreign publication, second girl reads foreign publication and gets an idea for a great article. Second girl writes article. Chaos ensues.

If the articles were attractive starlets and the foreign paper were a charming rake who genuinely wanted to love them both, it would be a perfect February vehicle for Matthew McConaughey. If, however, the first girl is Alexandra Wolfe who wrote a story on ambitious parents hiring Mandarin-speaking nannies to help prepare their children for the global economy which was published in New York magazine on April 4, 2005, then that must mean the other girl is Samantha Marshall of Crain’s, whose article on ambitious parents hiring Mandarin-speaking nannies to help prepare their children for the global economy appeared today. Ouch.

The two stories feature the same Upper West Side little moppet, Hilton Augusta Rogers, and her nanny, Shirley who speaks Mandarin to her. Both stories feature the same experts, Clifton Greenhouse from the upscale Pavillion Agency, which places nannies and au pairs. The Crain’s story says that Shirley has been Hilton’s nanny for six months. Which is funny, because the NY Mag article was published in April – ten months ago.

I spoke to Samantha Marshall today, who said she was shocked to learn that New York had run a story. She’d gotten the idea (and the sources) from The China Daily, which cites little Hilton, her parents, Greenhouse and trumpets the Chinese-nanny trend. It also ends with the anecdote that opens the New York story.

Marshall said she’d run a Nexis search and found nothing (because New York‘s archives aren’t in Nexis)*, and nothing had turned up in Google. (In Fishbowl’s Google search for “mandarin manhattan nannies” the China Daily story was first and the New York story was fourth.) Marshall also said that she’d interviewed all her sources herself; she’d “had absolutely no idea.” Said Marhshall, clearly frustrated: “If I had known that New York had done the story I never would have pitched it.”

So, what do we take from this? I’m inclined to believe Marshall — knowing the story was out there and ripping it off wholesale is both egregious and boneheaded in the extreme — but it is an instructive lesson. Lifting stories is easy, checking up on them is not (for some examples, check Regret The Error). I guess the moral of the story is to check and check and then check again. Another moral of the story is not to trust Matthew McConaughey in February. That new movie with Sarah Jessica Parker can’t be good.

UPDATE: Wow, get me Hilton Augusta Rogers’ press agent — that kid’s been all over. Turns out the China Daily story was syndicated from Der Spiegel. New York magazine apparently doesn’t need to be in Lexis. Thanks to DaddyGreg for the info. Oh, the temptation to make a “who’s your daddy?” joke. But I will refrain.

*To find a story from New York, you have to search either Dialog, WestLaw, or something called “FirstSearch.” Or, you know, Google. Screenshot from the trusty FullText Sources Online, that tells you which archives are where after the jump, courtesy of MB Associate Editor and Fishbowl stalwart Aileen Gallagher.

January 31, 2006:
New York families think global, seek Chinese nannies [Crain's]

January 6, 2006:
Chinese nannies are the latest New York trend [China Daily]

April 4, 2005:
Parents are Teaching Their Infants Chinese to Compete in the Global Economy [New York]

Related:
What “Ode On A Grecian Urn” has to do with copyright [PressJournal]

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• Don’t sit on the couch! You’ll ruin it! Take your shoes off! No food in the living room! Please, make yourself at home: Apparently the Vogue team is seriously looking at putting out yet another Vogue-brand magazine called Vogue Living. Apparently Anna Wintour has been wanting to do so for years (thwarted by Domino?). With the Vogue brand on the march domestically and international Vogue shelter titles, it looks like everbody’s starter home just got a bit more expensive (hmm, wonder if the announcement of Blueprint was a factor). Sara James has the scoop. [WWD]

• This is meta, and that’s saying something considering we’re talking about James Frey: Yikes! A Moscow paper is trying to out the outers of the faker as fakers — apparently The eXile had done their own piece outing Frey as a non-scary non-tough guy with a non-sordid history. The Smoking Gun’s Bill Bastone says “nyet.” It was an easy punchline, yes, and I took it. Dos vadanya. [NYP]
• The Woody Allen Popularity Scale: Who’s more culturally important? No one, according to the march of Esquire covers through history. The mag has used Woody Allen on the cover a whopping five times according to number-cruncher Kyle Du Ford at Big & Sharp. Perspective: Clinton – 2, Sharon Stone -3, Truman Capote – 2 (both in 1976!). [B&S]
• The mind Boggles: Only yesterday I revealed Fishbowl’s secret passion for words linked by letters in a shakable cube. Today, Paper mag staffers answer my geeky prayers by hosting a Boggle tournament. I plan to go after watching The State of the Union with the sound off and “Dark Side of the Moon” playing in the background. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain! [PaperMag]

As Fishbowl has mentioned, the NYT‘s new sports magazine PLAY comes out on Superbowl Sunday, which is this Sunday.

PLAY is an interesting animal, a start-up mag with great cred and instant circulation of roughly one million*, courtesy of the Sunday Times. It also has instant cred in editor Mark Bryant, late of Outside (with three ASME Excellence Awards) and big dreams of being everything to every sporto: (“It is a magazine for all sports enthusiasts, from serious fans to those who lean more toward playing sports than watching them”).

I wondered how advertisers would see it – my guess was that the NYT would bag some new clients. Which, according spokesperson Diane McNulty, is exactly what has happened. According to McNulty, new advertisers in PLAY include the NFL, plus other sports leagues, athletic watches, and alcohol brands, plus “high-end sports cars and SUV’s that we don’t normally get, but are running in this publication for the sports/outdoor environment.” The issue will have 50 pages of advertising — “most of those campaigns being new to The Times.”

Wow. Big haul. There are gender implications to this, obviously — suddenly advertisers are jumping at an opportunity that typically is not associated with women (though if I could drive I’d want a cute sports car, and also, Malcolm Gladwell is a boy and he doesn’t like SUVs). Says McNulty: “The common thread is that they want to align themselves with a sports magazine that is unique — a thoughtful, intelligent New York Times approach to sports.” I would guess that another common thread is market research, but since I have done none, that’s all I have to say about that.

What you’ll find in PLAY this Sunday besides ads that know you’re discriminating and wonderful: Mark Levine‘s different-we-promise Bode Miller piece; Michael Lewis on football, specifically “the person who made the play that changed the course of Super Bowl I” and, indeed, football itself (factchecker, factchecker, check me a fact…); Chip McGrath, Joe Nocera and Michael Sokolove; plus Freakonomics duo Stephen Dubner and Steven Leavitt, on loan from the NYT mag. I know what you’re wondering: where are the chicks? Answer: draped all over that Lamborghini Ultra!** (We kid, we kid.) McNulty assured me that the mag is replete with female writers and photographers including writers Jennifer Allen and Gretchen Reynolds.

p.s. I’m pretty sure there’s no such thing as a Lamborghini Ultra.

*UPDATE: I originally used the 1.6 million Sunday circulation number from the NYT corporate site but Diane McNulty has more specific numbers: 800,000 paid copies in the NY area plus 150,000 bonus circulation outside of the NY area, for an approximate total audience of about 3 million readers in print and on-line.

Mark Bryant Comes Out to PLAY [Big & Sharp]

Related in audio:

Come Out And Play [Offspring]

I was secretly glad that New York magazine was on hiatus for the week because it gave me the chance to monitor the “Most Popular” feature and see what was moving, which was super interesting (finally, Vera Wang gets her moment in the spotlight!). But after two weeks of nipping back to the NYMag website, I got a jolt last night when I clicked back and found an entirely new look.

Yes, I knew it was coming; an email from rep Betsy Burton yesterday at 11:38 am let me know it was re-launching that night. Nonetheless, it was a shock — where was the bold red? What were all these new nav buttons? Was it me, or were there way less bylines? It’s hard for me to be objective here because I hate website redesigns (Daily News, I miss the old blue); it’s no different with New York. What can I say: I’ve grown accustomed to its [inter]face (Lerner and Loewe still relevant? Check).

So I will restrict my comments to matters of utility and aesthetics. The new look is sleek and navigable, with lots of blue a la Salon (my comments on that redesign apply here). I like that they seem to have added a daily component, though I would love to be able to click on “Daily New York” and get a page for that day (blog blog do I hear a blog?). I like the “Backstory” feature accompanying some articles. Great idea. (Links here would help too.) I clicked on the Ryan Adams pic to see what THAT backstory would be but there was none. Yes, the kid won’t stop releasing albums, but that just means there’s plenty of ink on him). Links to previous articles keep people on your site longer.

I don’t have the old website handy to compare, but I’m pretty sure that bylines have far less prominence. Why? New York has great contributors; readers and surfers recognize names. Bring ‘em back. Your people deserve the credit. Good example: I’d never click on “New Novel by Writer NY Moms Love to Hate”; I would, however, be eager to see what Culture ed. Emily Nussbaum had to say in her first byline since going on maternity leave (link here now that you’re interested).

Newsletters: good; going from “Most Popular” to a generic “Most Emailed” box, meh. As we all know, that isn’t the only gauge of what someone might want to see. I’m actually being quite serious. Monitoring who prints what when etc. has been an eye-opener.

By the way, I’m no web designer or anything-else designer. I’m just someone who spends a lot of time in front of the computer, and a lot of time on the New York website. Also, I’m self-important. So take these comments with that in mind.

On April 28, 2005, I had been in this gig for less than a month and had no clue who most of you were. Right. So it’s not surprising that I, not unlike Wendell Jamieson, had no clue what “Overheard in New York” was until July (after Michael Malice had invited me to his birthday party, btw).

Which is why I had no idea until this second that OHNY had actually broken the Katie-Holmes-and-Tom-Cruise-Are-Actually-Serious story, like so:

Gawker Stalker, I Think You Missed One
Katie Holmes: He introduced me to his kids! And he’s taking me to Rome on a private jet this weekend.

–Starbucks, Waverly Place

Pretty hilarious. Apparently Tucker Carlson was fascinated by that last night when he had OHNY’s Michael Malice on to chat about the new OHNY book. Intrepid Fishbowl correspondent Bucky Turco was on hand to see, photograph, and opine. Appaently Michael made a point of saying that it’s not a blog, its’ a website that is updated daily (in reverse chronological order, no less. Honey. That’s a blog. Not nice to mislead the Tucker). Here’s my favorite part:

At one point Tucker equated the overheard stuff with wiretapping and Michael kind of responded, but there are no wires.

Hilarious. I love that. Then Tucker said that he’d expect some privacy if he were on a payphone, proving that he’s never lived in New York City, where the payphones are OUTSIDE. Said Malice: “I don’t believe in the right to privacy, its not in the constitution.” No doubt he will be watching tonight’s “State of the Union” address with interest.

Funny note: both Tucker and Malice have semi-unusual tie habits: Tucker’s is his bowtie, which has gone from unfortunate fashion choice to jaunty calling card, and, though we can’t tell from this photo, Malice’s is his ubiquitous hacked-from-a-tie arm band (under which, we have no doubt, is a tattoo which reads “Fuck The Bullshit It’s Time To Throw Down”).

Related:
“Overheard in New York” and the NYT: Coincidence, but no Malice aforethought [FBNY]

Ted Koppel wrote his first Times Op-Ed column!

Shafer LOVED it.

The NYT‘s coverage of Memoirs of a Geisha actresses is Gong Show, sez Tom Scocca.

Maxim…India? Yep. Sold out in a day, according to Maxim UK editor Greg Gutfeld. Over 80K copies.

The NYT’s search for truthiness…yields four hits. (But one of them’s a Stanley correction.) Still, three-fer usage by the paper of record? Those word people were right.

New Yorkers are clearly mourning the loss of Wendy Wasserstein, lioness of the contemporary theatre and, by all accounts, a warm and lovely woman. The NYT obituary celebrating her life and career is already #4 on MEL; at the Village Voice, theater critic and playwright Michael Feingold remembers her giggle, and at Bloomberg, legendarily tart critic John Simon (late of New York) only has nice things to say, calling her “delightful” “funny…and fun to be with” and a mensch (to get a sense of just how rare these compliments are, see Liesl Schillinger‘s excellent review of Simon’s criticism). Both remember her intelligence, humor, wit, sparkle and skill.

They are, of course, not alone in that regard; there will no doubt be more stories and op-ed essays to come. Below are just a few examples.

Wendy Wasserstein, Chronicler of Women’s Identity Crises, Dies [NYT]
Wendy Wasserstein [Village Voice]
Wasserstein’s Wit, Humanity Reflected in Plays: An Appreciation [Bloomberg]
Recalling the Stages of an Uncommon Life [NYDN]

Jon Friedman isn’t fooled by Oprah’s rigteous piety, and Joel Stein is an annoying fly that must be swatted away: That’s the general theme of Jon Friedman’s column today, plus Bode Miller is a press-mongerer. Even so, it was fun to watch. [MW]

Watch an episode of Sex and the City. They say it far more succinctly. n+1 thinks they’ve discovered dating, that dropping SAT scores is hot. Here’s a dating tip: it’s not. [n+1]

Two more Alessandra Stanley corrections: Honestly, the mind boggles. [Gawker]

Farewell to a 60 Minutes director and a part of history: Longtime — nay, founding — 60 Minutes director Arthur Bloom died from lung cancer. It was Bloom’s stopwatch that famously opened 60 Minutes almost since its inception, and that iconic image and sound is inextricably indentified with 60 Minutes to this day. [NYT]

In case you were wondering…Media-macher-turned-crusading-Canadian Michael Ignatieff was victorious in the recent Canadian election, taking the riding of Etobicoke-Lakeshore, connecting with locals, and actually, it seems, making a go of it. Vive le Canada! [Globe & Mail]