... Except if you're New Criterion assistant editor Stefan Beck.

(Ed. Fishtern Maureen Miller is back to enlighten us on recent controversies surrounding the it-lit boys at n+1 and all things Kunkelicious. She is deeply linked, as usual.)

Friday afternoons are always the best time to get intellectual, so we thought it was high time pointed out that Beck is hardly indecisive -- zing! -- about Benjamin Kunkel and all things N+1:

In wartime Britain, an oil-rationing poster asked: IS YOUR JOURNEY REALLY NECESSARY? Of the four young men who founded the magazine n+1, I have to ask: is your journal really necessary? It may be in the public interest to save ink for a worthier cause."

Yay, nerd feud! But why do we fuss about a neocon journal's musings on a semiobscure intellectual magazine? Because Beck's real vitriol is for "it-mags," publications of the McSweeney's/Believer variety that the 'smart set' (and, sometimes, we) read. Of course, it might have helped Beck's case to consider Kunkel in the context of, well, a few other "it-mags," like Topic, the oh-so-stylish non-fiction quarterly published by the smartypants Yale tagteam of Blake Gilpin and David Haskell? Or these others Ron Hogan at GalleyCat namechecked a few months ago? They're not exactly covering the same material, or writing in the same style, but they are competing for the same audience, and since the 'smart set' has only so many hours in the day to be smart, we'd like to know which it-mag makes us "smarterer."

It's also worth noting that Beck himself only graduated from Dartmouth in 2004, meaning he's around 24, meaning he might be just a little upset that the 'smart set' thinks publications like N+1 speak for him. (Though he is editing a smartypants anthology coming out this spring, working title The Dartmouth Review Pleads Innocent: Twenty Five Years of Being Threatened, Impugned, Vandalized, Sued, Suspended, and Bitten at the Ivy League's Most Controversial Conservative Newspaper. We're trying to get our heads around that one, and no, we didn't make that up.)

Literary/intellectual feuds aren't exactly the fruit of the blogosphere, but Fishbowl was curious if the lit-bloggers who loved the Neal Pollack/Dave Eggers feud a few months ago were giving this any play. After all, Kunkel is the new Eggers (who is the new Pollack? who is the new pre-Strokes-lovin' Jay McInerney?) Turns out few of them are too into this, though there are a few words flying around. Alicublog snarks "N+1 deserves a few knocks," just not with the self-seriousness Beck applies, and Chekhov's Mistress criticizes Beck's political bias. We also kind of love Conversational Reading's skepticism about N+1's fear of a national "reading crisis," and Atlantic Monthly fun-servative Ross Douthat also weighed in on the issue while guesting for Andrew Sullivan online. There, Douthat writes that "the gang at N+1... are neither as great as they're made out to be, nor as bad as Stefan Beck suggests." But who's making them out to be so great other than Scott? In fact, where do you get copies of N+1 or these other "it-mags" at all?

Send your ideas, and your personal hierarchy of zeitgeist-y literary impresarios, to fishbowlny AT mediabistro.com.