I swear, it seems like porn hasn't been this popular with the New York cognoscenti since Deep Throat was actually playing Times Square... this week, Pamela Paul's been talking about Pornified: How the Culture of Pornography is Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships and Our Families with all sorts of people. Last night, it was a New School panel with ACLU president Nadine Strossen, authors Nelson George and Ariel Levy, and City Journal columnist Kay Hymowitz. (I actually might have considered going to that one, if I wasn't already committed to talking about movie sex with Joe Bob Briggs—an event which went really well, by the way).

Next Monday, she'll be sharing the dais at the CUNY Graduate Center with Reason editor Nick Gillespie, sex columnist Rachel Kramer Bussel, and wee Ben Shapiro, "hired at age 17 to become the youngest nationally syndicated columnist in the U.S." He's now 21, and describes himself as "a staunch conservative on the modern politically correct campus." So it's no big surprise to learn that he considers "legalized and all-pervasive porn... an integral part of a sustained program by the forces of relativism, radical feminism, and nihilism to destroy our nation's moral foundations." This is in some ways just an unbashful version of Paul's own thesis, which pretty much sums up the difference between being published by Times Books (Paul) and Regnery (Shapiro).

UPDATE: After all that pontification on my part, they go and replace Shapiro with Robert Peters, the president of Morality in the Media. Who will also presumably be coming down on the "porn is bad" side of the debate.