Like most editors, John Capouya is not well known to the general public. There are, however, a legion of writers and reporters at publications like The New York Times and Newsweek who would attest to the high quality of his editorial handiwork. Now readers can see his talents directly: This month, Capouya, who is presently the deputy editor of Smart Money, released his first book, an exercise guide titled Real Men Do Yoga: 21 Star Athletes Reveal Their Secrets For Strength, Flexibility, and Peak Performance. He spoke to mediabistro.com recently about his book, his career, and yoga at the office.

I wanted to begin this interview by saying “namaste.” But I have no idea what it means, and whether a real man would say it.
The literal translation from Sanskrit is something like “the sacred in me salutes the sacred in you.” But in the context of my book, it could just as well mean “the real man in me salutes the real man in you.”

But why bring “realness” into this? Does yoga have an image problem among men?
It was men who invented yoga in India 5,000 years ago. But, obviously, in this country, it was mostly women who got there first, attracted by the physical benefits and, in some cases, the New Age ethos—so many men just assumed it was a women’s thing. But that’s really changing. There was just a Harris poll that estimated that there are now about 15 million Americans doing yoga and that 3.5 million of them are men. That’s about 23 percent.

How long have you yourself been doing yoga, and did the idea for the book come to you in a moment of ecstatic meditation?
I’ve been practicing about three years, and the book idea occurred to me in two moments. After I took my first few classes, I went to the bookstore to see if I could find a book which would help deepen my practice, because I wasn’t really understanding what was going on in class. What I saw in the bookstore was a sea of books with attractive women on the covers, wearing leotards and looking very serenely out into the distance. And having come from a yoga class that included plenty of men and was very rigorous, I just felt like there is nothing here for me. But I wasn’t smart enough to immediately seize on the marketing opportunity. It wasn’t until later when a friend of mine said, “Why don’t you do a book about yoga for men, you’re so into it?” I started writing the book about a year and a half ago. Since I have a day job at Smart Money, I’d work on it at night and on the weekends, and it took about eight months.

It must reflect my own stereotypical ideas about yoga that I was quite surprised to read in your book about all the famous athletes who now do it—and even more surprised by the pictures of them in action. Dan Marino does Downward Dog—who knew?
But it makes perfect sense. Who has more at stake in staying healthy than these guys, whose bodies are worth millions of dollars, whose entire careers depend on them being in the best shape possible?

This being mediabistro.com, it might be helpful to some readers to know whether yoga offers any ergonomic benefits.
Speaking as a desk jockey, I think it definitely does. It can help correct imbalances in your musculature and your spinal alignment, which are common problems for those hunched over a computer all day.

What do you do at Smart Money?
I’m in charge of the editorial that we do that isn’t about hardcore investing in stocks and bonds. We are a personal-finance magazine and we take that to mean almost anything that shows up on your personal or your family’s balance sheet, from travel to credit cards to college tuition, along with real estate and travel.

Since you’ve worked for a number of prestigious newspapers and magazines, your career path would probably be very instructive to a lot people starting out. So how did you start out?
I graduated from the Columbia j-school in 1981 and then became an editorial assistant at a Sport magazine, which doesn’t exist anymore. I was there for about 4 years and I worked my way up to a senior editor position. It was a great experience. There were a lot of talented people there, including David Granger, who is now the editor of Esquire, and David Bauer, who is the number two editor at Sports Illustrated. We had a good time and brought in a lot of good writers.

So right from the start you got on the editing track?
I did, but that was because there wasn’t a writing track; it was basically a freelance-written magazine.

Was there ever a point in your career where you detoured into writing?
After my four years at Sport, I left there with a contract to write a certain number of stories a year for them and I did that for two and a half years, mostly writing about pro basketball. I found freelancing enjoyable but a very tough go financially. The clients I was working for seemed to pay as much as any other ones but I still couldn’t make a good living. Then I had a chance to edit again. A friend of mine was starting up a regional magazine on Long Island called Long Island Monthly, which doesn’t exist anymore either, and I went to work for him, and I’ve been an editor ever since.

In your experience, what are some of the main differences between being a writer and an editor? And how would you advise someone who is just starting out and torn between which track to pursue?
I think that younger people should try both if they can because its something that you have to experience and I don’t know that you’ll know the answer until you do. I learned that I seemed to have a knack for editing. I found it very enjoyable to try to assume the voice and the mission of writers and help them along in ways that they seem to find agreeable. At its best, it’s a collaboration that benefits everyone, and there is a good deal of satisfaction to be had from the process of making things better. Earlier in my career, I found writing to be an agonizing, nerve-wracking process. I would stay up all night and rewrite endlessly and probably fruitlessly. With the editing, I got to use my intellect but it wasn’t so much of a neurotic process.

And how was it writing the book?
It came out very easily and enjoyably, so perhaps I’ve gotten over whatever it was that made writing such torture. It may be that I don’t hold the bar as high as I used to for myself. But I am happy with the situation. However many copies the book sells, I feel like it helped me get my voice back. What you do at a magazine, and what is great about it, is the teamwork. But at some point, if you have any sort of writer in you, you want to do something that is wholly your own. And that’s a challenge not only for magazine editors but also for magazine writers who must deal with editors who have their own ideas for how a story should read. So I feel like books are the refuge of the individual voice.

Among the places you’ve sacrificed your own voice for the greater good are The New York Times and Newsweek. What did you do at those places?
At the Times, I started as an editor in the Sunday Styles section and became the lead editor there. So it was assigning and editing feature stories, overseeing photo and layout, that kind of thing. At Newsweek, I was what they call the lifestyle editor. Which meant I oversaw a wide variety of beats, including television, family life, sports, and health. So one week I’d be editing a television package and then the next week I’d be on a cover story about asthma in childhood. The variety was great. The bad side of that was that so much fell under my collection of rubrics that it felt like I was always doing a cover story on something or other and it was a very demanding job. On the other hand, when you’re doing a lot of important stories at a place like Newsweek, you feel a bit like you’re helping to clarify public discussion and that is something that can be very gratifying. Plus, the writers were very good, and that really made it a pleasure.

Who were some of those writers?
There was John Leland, who is now at the Times. There was Jerry Adler, a fantastic writer who is still one of Newsweek‘s stars. I also worked with Rick Marin, who just published a book about his bachelor days called Cad.

Did you make an appearance in the book?
Yeah, I was the voice of reason who would listen to Rick’s adventures, shake my head, and sort of try to get him to see that there was another way of doing things.

And presumably you failed?
Totally.

Once you yourself decided to write a book, how hard was it for you to land an agent and then a publisher?
Finding an agent wasn’t a problem. I had a friend who introduced me to his agent, we got together, discussed some ideas, and he agreed to take me on. But my advice to others would be to try to speak to several agents before choosing one. And then go with an agent who is not only competent but also has a style of agenting that suits you. Some agents are hand-holders; others are sharks, focused less on the writer than on the deal. And you’ve got to make sure you’re comfortable with the kind you get. I’m saying this with only the experience of having written one book for one agent, but that is what I gather.

And how was it finding a publisher?
Well, I liked the idea. It seemed like such a no-brainer: Yoga was a big trend among women; now more and more men were doing it, and they were going to need a book. But no one wanted to touch it. I eventually found a very good publisher and it looks like things are working out very well, but there were a lot of rejections.

Who is your publisher?
My publisher is called Health Communications. They’re best known for the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, which has sold about a zillion books, give or take.

So how long will it be until we see Yoga for the Soul?
It’s under consideration, as they say.

Between you, me, and everyone else who reads this column, do you ever do some meditation or yoga poses in your office?
I have to say I have done yoga in here a few times. Right now, in fact. There are some poses that you can do when you are sitting down in your chair. There’s one that called the Easy Cow Face pose. I can’t imagine why anyone would call it that. I didn’t include it in my book, and if I did I would have called it something else. It’s basically a stretch reaching your arms behind your back—one from above, one from below—and clasping them in the middle between your shoulder blades. Then sometimes I get up and just do some stretching in the office when I feel like I’ve been in the chair for too long.

This Cow Face thing—do you do it with the door closed?
Absolutely.

Eric Messinger has never done yoga, but he does write for such publications as The New York Times, InStyle, Real Simple, and Parents. You can buy Real Men Do Yoga at Amazon.com.

Kate Betts has been remarkably successful: She was Fairchild’s Paris bureau chief by 27, Anna Wintour’s protege at Vogue, and then editor of Harper’s Bazaar at 35—the youngest editor ever to take over a fashion magazine. But she’s also faced remarkably intense scrutiny, even for the catty world of fashion glossies. She was called a traitor when she left Vogue, and at Bazaar she had to fill the shoes of beloved editor Liz Tilberis, who’d died months earlier. Her redesign was widely criticized, newsstand sales slipped (they’d been declining even before Betts took over), and she was fired in 2001.

But if there’s anything the magazine industry likes better than a spectacular failure, it’s a spectacular comeback, and Betts is ready to make hers. After a year and a half spent freelancing for the New York Times “Style” section, she just bowed her first issue of Time magazine’s new, biannual Style & Design supplement (one previous issue was published in February). She spoke to mediabistro.com last week about starting from the bottom, surviving the spotlight, and coming out on top.

Birthdate: March 8, 1964
Hometown: New York City
First section of the Sunday Times: “I’m embarrassed to admit it’s the real-estate section.”

You’ve taken over an established magazine and now you’re essentially rolling out a startup. How are the pressures different?
The pressure of Bazaar was, obviously, that venue existed for so long, in such a high-profile way, under Liz Tilberis before I got there, and this magazine didn’t really have that high of a profile or that strong of a footing in this market. They’d only done one issue in the U.S. before I did this one. And the pressure was to create something that was going to be interesting to the Time reader and also to the fashion industry, two very different audiences.

I wanted to give the Time reader an inside look at fashion but not make it too obscure and too over-the-top or detailed in a way that wouldn’t reach them. And, to be honest, that’s always been my interest in fashion—I’ve always been interested in more of a journalistic approach, even when I was at Vogue. When I started writing for the “Style” section, I was pleasantly surprised by the number of people who actually read the section. So it turned me on to writing for a much larger audience than I was used to. The excitement and pressure of this job is to speak to millions and millions of readers, as opposed to people who were just looking for fashion information.

You say you want Style & Design to appeal to the Time reader and also the fashion industry. What about the readers of fashion magazines?
Well that, to me, is the fashion industry, or an extension of it. When I say “the fashion industry,” I mean the industry but also people who are looking for fashion information and who already have a lot of fashion education.

What was it like going from writing for the Times as a freelancer to starting something practically from scratch?
I had been working at Time Inc. full-time since January, so I wasn’t like, getting out of my pajamas for the first time in two years. Almost! But I had to put together a little team. I brought the art director, Terry Koppel, with me, and I brought Andrea Ferronato, who I’d worked with at Vogue, as the photo editor. So we had that capsule team, and we had some great people here at Time who were assigned to help us move the issue through the system, because the system here is really gigantic and different. The most exciting thing for me, as a writer, was being able to use some of the writers at Time who I love, like Richard Lacayo and Michele Orecklin and Joel Stein, and to draw on the global bureaus. No other magazine that I’ve worked for has that kind of resource.

Are there other ways that the culture at Time is different from those at Vogue and Bazaar?
There is a great camaraderie here that I’ve never experienced. At fashion magazines, there’s a very distinct kind of ambience. Everyone who works here is, first of all, incredibly smart, which was sort of a shock. And, second of all, they’re all really helpful, and you do get the feeling that everyone’s working together toward the same goal—it’s not like this sort of backbiting thing. It creates a really nice can-do spirit, and Time staffers have worked together on much bigger and more important projects, and pulled together as a team in ways that are incredibly impressive.

Do you have a lot of give and take with the editors of Time, or does Style & Design have its own team?
There is a lot of give and take. All the editors here have been extremely helpful. The thing about the writers here is that they’re pulled onto all different stories at any time of day, so it’s hard to get their time. But the people that did end up writing for the issue were incredibly quick and professional about it.

Style & Design comes out twice a year. Will it occupy you full time, or will you be doing other work?
I’ve also been writing for the weekly edition of Time. At first I just did little trend things in the “Personal Time” section, and this week I have a story about Sofia Coppola in the “Arts & Movies” section, and I’m working on a few other things. We’re thinking about doing more frequency for Time Style & Design—we’re meeting on that right now.

One thing I found interesting about Style & Design was its meta approach: You’re covering the fashion magazines in a way you would never see elsewhere—you’d never read in Vogue about the photographer who shoots covers for Bazaar.
Yeah, it’s an interesting place. That is something we discovered as we were going along. I’ve always worked at either Vogue or Bazaar, so I didn’t really think about being in the middle or above those two. So it suddenly dawned on us that we were in the position to cover everyone.

Had you maintained a lot of your connections at those magazines, or did you have to go back and rebuild bridges?
I’d been in touch with a lot of the people I worked with at Bazaar, and some of them contributed to this issue. Mostly I just had to get back into the business. I was out of it for a year and a half, and I hadn’t gone to that many shows. I went to the menswear shows for the first time in Milan in June, and I went to the couture shows.

You know, it doesn’t change that much, the fashion business. It’s a business predicated on change, but the people in the business don’t really change. So everybody was pretty much in the same place as when I left. And I’d kept in touch with a few people just from writing for the “Style” section. It’s weird—I’ve always felt like an outsider inside the business, and so I’ve always taken that approach to covering it.

From your bio, it seems like you never had to slave away at an entry-level job.
No, no, no, no, no—let me just disqualify that right away. First of all, when I started at Fairchild in Paris, I was a reporter. I was reporting on the lingerie business and perfume launches—what everybody at Women’s Wear Daily has to start off with. That’s where you learn about the industry; that’s the baptism by fire. You learn about fabrics, you have to cover Premiere Vision, which is the big fabric fair in Paris, and you have to figure out who the perfume nose is at Christian Dior and the difference between the fragrances. You have to learn a lot about the people and processes of each industry within the fashion industry. And that’s the best way to learn about fashion.

When I went to Vogue after three years at Women’s Wear, I couldn’t believe that the market editors didn’t know about fabrics. I mean, of course the big editors, Andre Leon Talley or Polly Mellen, they all knew about fashion, but these junior editors, they had no way of learning the way that Women’s Wear editors learn: from going to fabric fairs and actually having to know what they’re talking about. So that was a great way to learn, and it’s definitely starting at the bottom. If they decide they want to cover something at the last minute in Dusseldorf, you have to get on the plane and go to Dusseldorf. It sounds glamorous, but it’s this gigantic trade show and everyone speaks German, and there you are: Find a story. But it was really fun too.

And then when I got to Vogue, when I started off, my office was literally a closet. Nobody would talk to me, and I remember sitting in there and crying for the first three months. It was pathetic. But the people there were these giant personalities. Especially at that time, because it was 1991—Carly Cerf de Dudzelle, and Andre, and Candy Pratts Price—it was like the ’80s were still going on. And I was writing captions for fashion portfolios and “Vogue’s Point of View,” that page of writing before the well. So these were not glamorous jobs. But I was lucky because Anna was a great boss in the way that she let me do whatever I wanted. There was always room to create and write and do new things.

You’ve had amazing success and also endured a tremendous amount of criticism and setbacks. How do you bounce back?
I don’t look at it as an amazing career, funnily enough. I look at it like, I’ve always worked really, really hard. I remember one summer at Vogue, I worked every weekend the whole summer. Covering the collections is a lot of work. I mean yeah, it’s really glamorous and you meet Tom Ford and blah blah blah, but you’re running around like crazy and reporting and it’s a lot of work.

But you’ve been watched so closely, both as Anna’s protege and then taking over Bazaar after Liz Tilberis. What advice would you give others facing adversity in their careers?
Well, it’s hard. The Bazaar situation was a very particular confluence of events—following in the footsteps of Liz Tilberis, taking over a magazine that was not doing so well, having a baby three days later, having a large turnover on the staff, and dealing with all that in the spotlight is a lot at once. It was one of those things where it was a job you can’t say no to, even though I was nine months pregnant. I think the most important thing in careers, and I think this a lot in my own career now, is you have to do what you want to do. I felt for a long time a tremendous pressure to do things other people wanted me to do, and when you’re young, that is probably the case. But you really do have to go with your heart. It’s weird, all the criticism and all the tough calls at Bazaar, and getting fired ultimately, those were all hard things to experience, but with hindsight, which is always 20/20, they were great experiences. I don’t regret any of it at all. It was an amazing opportunity to learn how to edit a magazine in two years, and get it over with. There are a lot of lessons there, but the thing I always come back to is, if you’re doing something you really believe in, you never regret anything you do.

Emily Fromm is a freelance writer living in New York City.

Chuck Klosterman is an incredibly talented yarn-spinner. He knows so well how to build a story and wring out its punchline and significance that you’d think he was raised by an ancient tribe of devoted oral historians. He has sense enough to know that Saved by the Bell should be enjoyed both genuinely and also not. He knows this balance, and so his writing tows a line between mocking and praising his subjects, which is ultimately a characteristic of modern humor: irony with actual affection; not wink-wink irony, just, maybe, wink irony.

That’s the real key to his success, but he was also greatly helped by a chance phone call from a rock star and a childhood in Fargo, North Dakota. From that childhood he mined his first book, Fargo Rock City, a tale of a young man’s enthusiasm for 1980s heavy metal—particularly Guns N’ Roses—that whimsically included his phone number in the introduction. David Byrne, of the Talking Heads, read the book, liked it, and called the author. That phone call led to other opportunities, and, soon enough, Klosterman was abandoning the Midwest for the high-flying life of a New York magazine guy.

Now a senior writer at Spin (“I go to all the meetings and I suppose, in theory, I help generate story ideas,” he says of his responsibilities beyond writing) and an occasional contributor to The New York Times Magazine, he recently published his second book, a collection of essays called Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto. Despite his concern that he lacks any career advice, Klosterman recently spoke mediabistro.com, talking about his book, his background, and how to react when someone pukes on you.

Not too long ago you were writing for daily newspapers, first in Fargo and then Akron, Ohio. It’s a pretty odd jump—maybe even a substantial one—to Spin.
I got to Spin because I put my phone number in the front of Fargo Rock City and one of the people who called me was David Byrne. He asked me to do a reading with Dave Eggers and Lydia Davis, and at that reading an editor from The New York Times Magazine who was in the audience asked me to start writing for him.

At about the same time, Charles Aaron, who also read “Fargo Rock City” and was at the reading, called me and asked me if I wanted to start writing for Spin. A whole bunch of months passed and I didn’t hear anything and then he emailed and asked if I could do a little piece on POD and Queens of the Stone Age. Then I also did an Ozzy piece for him, and so I got hired. Everything happened really fast. I can’t give people advice, because everything in my life changed completely in less than a year and it’s still not something I am used to.

For a lot of people being a rock journalist is about meeting their idols. How do you make a good interview out of questions these people have probably heard a thousand times?
The person you’re interviewing needs to know it’s an interview. If you’re writing fiction, there needs to be artistic tension. And if you’re doing an interview, you need conversational tension. After you talk to them, you’re not going to have a relationship with them, they’re not going to like you, they’re not going to be your friend.

One problem with magazine writing is that the people who do it often have not spent a lot of time doing hard journalism. I was fortunate that I was at newspapers for eight years, where I wrote at least five or six stories every week. You get used to interviewing lots of different people about a lot of different things. And they aren’t things you know about until you do the story. The biggest problem in rock journalism is that often the writer’s main motivation is to become friends with the band. They’re not really journalists; they’re people who want to be involved in rock and roll. Instead of being in a band, they figure, well I’ll just become friends with them.

How do I put this? There are a lot of smart people writing about music but not a lot of people who are interested in journalism writing about music. To me, every interview, even if you love the artist, needs to be somewhat adversarial. Which doesn’t mean you need to attack the person, but you do need to look at it like you’re trying to get information that has not been written about before. You’re trying to find new ideas in people. I always think to myself, what question I am least comfortable asking the person? And then I make sure I ask it early in the interview.

So that you have time to work your way out of that hole over the rest of the interview?
No. A lot of people have this strategy where if they have a hard question they wait to ask it to the end of the interview because they think the person is going to walk out. But what they have to realize is, is that if the person walks out, they have a pretty successful story.

Does this sort of adversarial tactic inform your essays?
The essays are different because ultimately it’s things I’m interested in, and I’m really just writing about myself and using those subjects as a prism. The essays are very solipsistic and self-absorbed, I’m totally conscious of that. To me, book writing is fun, and I basically just write about things that are entertaining to myself.

Clearly other people seem to find you entertaining as well—though perhaps not the New York Press.
That was really weird, a very weird thing. I got an email that day that said, “This guy you’ve never heard of has written a piece for a publication you’ve never read and is attacking what you look like and claiming you’re the anti-Christ.” I still have a hard time understanding how I would warrant that. But, I don’t know. It wasn’t hurtful, it was just strange. I’ve been asked about this constantly, and I compare it to how if you’re walking down the street and some schizo guy comes up to you and vomits on you: You wouldn’t be hurt by that, you’d just think it’s weird. I keep saying the word “weird” over and over again, but it’s the only way I can describe it.

Given that your writing is so infused with your personality, what kind of editorial feedback do you get—and how has it differed when you’ve written for newspapers, magazines, and books?
Book writing is a little different because, in my case, my editor is a year younger than me and basically has the same sensibility as me. So he only really does big picture editing. I’m edited less when I write books than anywhere else. That’s why writing books is so fun and I think everyone should do it. It’s the only place you can completely express your ideas in the way that is closest to the way you think them. An editor at a publishing house’s main job is acquiring, so if he picks something he obviously likes it already.

When you’re writing for newspapers you have all these parameters. You can’t swear, you have to use short paragraphs, all that. If you stay within those parameters, you have lots of freedom because you’re writing for the next day. If you’re reviewing a concert and it’s 11 o’clock at night, basically anything you write is going to get through.

At a magazine, everything you do is edited by a bunch of people, by committee, and a lot of them are, were, or think of themselves as writers. Part of that is because magazines worry about their voice. I could write the same piece about the same thing for Spin, The New York Times Magazine, and GQ, and they would all be different.

But they hire you because they like your style. After Fargo Rock City, you’re a personality and you come with a voice of your own.
Maybe, but I tend to be a difficult to edit because I am very sensitive about every word and every style of punctuation and every idea because I feel that when I write I’ve considered every alternative and chose the one that works best. I’m probably edited lightly and yet I probably over-react to it. I feel sorry for people who have to edit me. Which is why book writing is by far the most enjoyable. Really the only thing it’s based on is whether it’s good or not. No book editor, in my experience, is getting a manuscript and try to rewrite it.

You get typecast a bit as a pop-culture writer. Are you trying to beat that rap?
After Fargo Rock City I got all these offers to write about metal, and I thought, “Oh no, this is going to get me marginalized.” Then I realized it’s better to be known for one thing than for nothing. I mean, before, I wasn’t doing anything. Five years ago, I thought I was going to write for newspapers; if I worked really, really hard I could one day work for the Minneapolis Star Tribune. The biggest hurdle to writing Fargo Rock City was that I couldn’t afford a home computer—I had to get a new job so I could buy a computer. It could all change though. In five years, I could be back at some daily newspaper, which wouldn’t be so bad.

How did growing up in North Dakota temper how you write about pop culture?
People always say to me, “I bet when you were in college or growing up in North Dakota, you dreamed of working at Spin.” I never dreamed of that. It didn’t seem remotely possible. I had no idea how people got those jobs, I didn’t know what the steps were, it never even dawned on me. It seemed so outside the realm of possibility.

I grew up on a farm, and we didn’t have cable and only limited radio stations, so I wasn’t inundated with culture the way people in other parts of the country were. But I was really interested in it. I was hyper-fascinated with it, with music and film and television, but in a way I had a more normal experience—that is, closer to the average consumer—than a lot of people in more urban areas. Even though I wanted to experience all these things I was interested in, I couldn’t get them. So I had to think critically and culturally about what was available. In Fargo Rock City I talk about Guns N’ Roses a lot, which might seem strange to someone who had a larger spectrum of music to experience, but to me GNR was by far the most interesting band that I had ever found. And because that was the best thing available, I really fixated on it. I probably thought more about GNR, Motley Crue, and KISS than anyone else in America.

It’s just that what’s important there is different there than what’s important is here. Here, people care that you wrote a book or that you work in the media. In Fargo, they say, well, that’s a job. How well do you get paid? For example, for this book I was written about in Entertainment Weekly, and it was kind of cool because my mom asked me if Entertainment Weekly was a magazine or a newspaper.

Chris Gage is no longer a stalker. Photo by Lisa Corson. You can buy Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs at Amazon.com.

A bit more than a year ago, Martha Nelson took over as managing editor—the top job—at People magazine, widely considered to be the most profitable magazine in the country. More than that, though, the People people say more people read their magazine each week—nearly 36 million—than catch any other entertainment product during a week, including all the top-rated television shows and highest-grossing blockbuster films. Before coming to People, Nelson helmed another Time Inc. success story, InStyle magazine, which she co-founded in 1994, so she’s no stranger to celebrity news. But People also has a strong tradition of breaking news coverage, and Nelson’s been settling into that area while also confronting critics’ charges that the venerable magazine has been forced to move in a more tabloidy direction, driven by new competition from outlets like Us Weekly and In Touch Weekly. Nelson spoke to mediabistro.com late last month about that marketplace, her magazine, and why she’s got to keep her celebrity crushes secret.

Birthdate: August 13, 1952
Hometown: Pierre, South Dakota
First section of the Sunday Times: “I read the front section first, except on Mondays when I first look to the business section.”

Walk me through your career as it leads to InStyle and then People.
In college, I started as an editorial assistant at an academic journal. I began working at Ms. magazine after graduating, and later I became the editor-in-chief of Women’s Sports and Fitness, in San Francisco. I next was the editor of Savvy magazine in New York before working for Who Weekly, a People offshoot in Sydney, Australia. I was then an assisting managing editor at People before I left and launched InStyle—only to return a little over a year ago to People.

Why did you make that switch from InStyle back to People?
Well, I had a fantastic experience with the launch of InStyle, but the magazine was on a very strong course when the People job became available. The switch also meant that I would be returning to something I’d had a fantastic experience with before InStyle. Besides, it’s amazing to run one of the most influential magazines in the world, with one of the broadest readerships and the greatest breadth of subject matter that you will encounter. The mix of the entertainment-industry and celebrity news, combined with hard news and human interest, basically means that every topic I am interested in I can find a way to cover in People. There is no significant event that escapes us and I know what that was like, coming from InStyle. There, during 9/11, I watched the spectacular work that was done at People, and I thought about what a great job they were doing and how amazing it is to be on top of the news when something truly significant happens.

Have you found it difficult taking over such a well-established and perhaps set-in-its-ways magazine? I would imagine trying to make your own mark on it is a little like steering an oil tanker.
The thing about People is that while we are a big magazine with an enormous readership, we also are an organization that can move incredibly fast. This week we came to work on Monday and realized that what had happened in Miami with Celia Cruz was rather extraordinary, so we started up a story and did a special limited edition of the magazine with a cover of Celia Cruz just for Southern Florida—and it closed on Tuesday. So the organization can move so quickly and still thoroughly cover the news. We did a 10-page story basically overnight and arranged for a special distribution in Florida and created a cover for that special issue, all at the same time that we were also putting out the regular issue for the rest of the country. That is perhaps the benefit of our midweek deadline. A lot of things happen over the weekend so it is nice to have those extra two days in the beginning of the week. Plus, we are all about getting into consumers hands as much as possible before the weekend.

What sorts of changes would you like to see made to the magazine as your tenure continues?
Well, we’re always undergoing changes, but it’s a very slow evolution. Because our readership base is so loyal and so large, you can’t just come in and put a bomb under the magazine—because, frankly, it ain’t broke. But the magazine has evolved a lot in its history, and I think that right now with Rina Migliacchio as the creative director we are sort of stripping out some of the excesses of the previous design and streamlining it and really cleaning it up.

If you take over a magazine that is broken, it is almost imperative that you do something radically different because you have to announce to the world, “Hey, look, this really can get better, and this is different, so give us another try.” But with People, we didn’t have to face that situation. I walked into a magazine that was very strong and had a very loyal and dedicated readership. I don’t make all the design changes in a week—I make them as part of a process.

What has been the most rewarding change for you, or the thing that you have appreciated most, about switching from InStyle back to People?
In terms of personal satisfaction, I think it has probably been the work we’ve done on the issue of missing children in the last year. Both the magazine and I were recognized by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and also invited to the White House for the signing of the Amber Alert Bill. We have been credited by any number of people for the kind of attention that we brought to this issue last year and the fact that we were useful in the campaign in the California legislature to pass the Amber Alert Bill, simply by the fact that we had made the missing girls in California a cover story and we did another cover story on missing girls in Oregon. We also followed up with a number of other stories about this issue, and it is something that People magazine has consistently focused on. Usually, the kind of impact we have on such stories goes completely unnoticed, but for the people who are involved in this particular issue, the attention that we paid to them was and continues to be enormously impactful. These really are heartbreaking stories and our work does make a huge difference so, on a personal level, it is great to know that we have actually been able to be an agent for positive change.

How do you feel about the recent comparisons between People and Us Weekly?
I think this question is all about the competition in the field. It has become a more competitive field of late, but I actually enjoy the competition. I wouldn’t really know what to do if I was the lone player in this market. The competition is fun and energizing, and it helps to keep us on our game, and, really, it’s a very normal thing. Most magazines have competitors. That’s normal.

We are a very, very different animal from Us Weekly. You know, we compete on the newsstand with these other magazines, but we’re really uniquely differentiated in terms of our content, our size, and the loyalty of our readership.

Has this newer competition forced you to make any changes at People? Has Us, as some people say, forced People to move to more tabloidy coverage?
I think that one of the founding principles of our company, which People remains very true to today, is the notion that what we do is good journalism. We certainly see and hear a lot of stuff out there based on rumors, and we have a lot of reporters allowing us to hear every kind of news and non-news, but in the end, we don’t run on rumor. We run on fact. We sometimes see stories that are in other magazines or show up in other outlets that are based on reports that later are refuted, and that’s the kind of situation we will never find ourselves in. For us, it is really about the quality of the reporting and the trust with the reader, and that’s the No. 1 priority. People began as a celebrity magazine almost 30 years ago, as a chronicle of popular culture, and I think that we are basically staying very true to that mission. I don’t know if you have looked at our current issue, but it’s a good example of the kind of mix that is very natural to us. We have the Kobe Bryant story, the Jessica Lynch story, and the cover story on Angelina Jolie—a true mix of news, human interest, and celebrity. I am very comfortable in the celebrity world; I spent a lot of time covering celebrities and edited a celebrity style magazine for the last 9 years. So I don’t think there is anything unusual in our recent coverage. Celebrities are basic to People‘s makeup, and they always have been. People is about what’s happening this week, and our current issue is a good example of that.

Are there any issues from the last year that you felt would do better than they did saleswise, or that you were surprised about how they were received?
Well, last year, when we did the 9/11 anniversary issue, it didn’t sell as well as I had hoped, but I was still very proud that we had done it. I thought that it was the right thing for us to do. Every once in a while, you take a risk—we did a story called “When Baby Won’t Wait,” a human-interest story about all sorts of amazing births in unusual places, and that didn’t do as well as I would have liked either.

What have been some of the bigger newsstand winners in your editorship?
Oh, gosh, they range all over the place. Certainly Laci Peterson, Jessica Lynch, and Elizabeth Smart were all big sellers on the news front. On the celebrity front, Ben Affleck as the Sexist Man Alive was big, as were the stories on Joe Millionaire‘s Evan and Zora, our exclusive interview with Britney Spears last year, and our cover on Rosie O’Donnell as a gay parent.

Finally, who does Martha Nelson think is the Sexiest Man Alive?
That’s a good question. I don’t want to tip my hand because, you know, Sexiest Man is coming up very soon. I think that maybe you have to wait and read it in People. You can’t give these things away, you know. It’s proprietary information.

Jennifer Baker is a former editorial intern at mediabistro.com.

Wee tykes ask their mothers “Why?” and mothers invariably reply in an exasperated tone, “Because I said so.” Authors ask the same question of their copy editors, and the copy editors respond, “Because Chicago says so.” The Chicago Manual of Style is the last-word bad cop to the peaceful-relationship copy editor’s good cop. Supplemented by only a handful of guides, the big orange book is the final word regarding queries of all stripes and weights, demolishing questions with a wrecking ball’s veracity.

It was first conceived in 1906 by standards-obsessed copy editors and proofreaders in the manufacturing department of the University of Chicago Press. Originally called A Manual of Style (click here for that first version in .pdf form), only with the thirteenth edition in 1982 did the name change to The Chicago Manual of Style, in deference to how its users referred to it. It’s been 10 years since the fourteenth edition, and, for this go-round, Chicago has been rebuilt, refined, and refitted from the bottom up to withstand the tourbillion changes of the publishing landscape.

Anita Samen, managing editor of University of Chicago Press since 1993, held editorial positions at Lyceum, Macmillan, Scribner’s, St. Martin’s Press, Scholastic (“way back before the Earth’s crust cooled”), and worked as a freelance editor. Now, as the fifteenth edition of The Chicago Manual of Style is released, Samen spoke with mediabistro.com about her role in the manual’s rebirth, the significant alterations between editions, and of how a sexy 900-number could provide the Press a little supplemental income.

How big a project is assembling a new edition of Chicago, and how is the process of deciding what needs to be updated?
It’s a huge project to update the manual, and many people are involved. The director of our trade reference program is the acquiring editor, or fills the role of the acquiring editor, and my predecessor was the one who collected the big folder of letters and comments and sat at her desk looking at cut-and-pasted versions of the old manual, and went over every line to figure out what needed updating and what could stay as is. She also, starting in 1998, formed some informal listservs, and she would throw out questions about topics that had been raised. We also formed an internal task force at the Press that had members of literarily every department—IT, books, marketing, design, production—except perhaps for subscription and fulfillment. The trade reference director formed an advisory board, which is first time the manual has ever had an outside board of advisors.

What role did you play in this new edition?
I was part of a team of a half-dozen people that concentrated on revising the two chapters on documentation. We were particularly eager to include information on electronic citations. We did a lot of research using other people‘s guidelines and found that they didn’t really work for electronic publishing or publishing on websites.

I’m very proud of those two chapters. There is nothing anyone is likely to cite that’s not covered. We consulted with lots of people, including our colleagues in journals. Of the eight of us, four were from journals—our scientific and social-science journals—and we racked our brains to think of the kinds of things that people would want to cite. Also, our authors are incredibly comprehensive about the kinds of things they cite. So, among the eight of us and our authors, we were able to come up with a wide variety of instructions, like when you need an access dates, how to cite access dates, what do when a site has been taken down, et cetera.

How is Chicago different from other reference books like, say, Words Into Type?
Words Into Type was a wonderful book in its time, but it hasn’t been revised since 1974. Chicago is much more comprehensive even than the MLA, and we really can be used by anyone who works with words and is “publishing” his or her work in any medium—whether it’s putting it on a website, or writing corporate communications, newsletters, electronic journals, or books.

At what point does it become clear that an update is necessary?
We start thinking about the new one as soon as the previous one comes out. The fourteenth came out in 1993 and we began seriously in 1998 on this new edition, but we were collecting information all along and thinking about what we would need to change. It became abundantly clear when we looked at the way people deal with words now. In 1993, we all had computers and the Press was getting some of our manuscripts on disk, but now all our manuscripts are edited on screen.

Tell me about the most notable changes between the fourteenth and fifteenth editions.
The grammar and usage section is new. We did a lot of market research indicating that that was something that would be welcomed, so that the manual could be one-stop shopping. As luck would have it, we had a Press author who was an expert in the field and agreed to write the chapters for us. We were extremely fortunate that he was willing and able to do that.

As far as dates go, we are now preferring month, day, year to day, month year—although the latter is an acceptable alternative, because frankly the rest of the world likes month, day, year, and we don’t want to have editors trying to conform to Chicago to jump through all kinds of hoops, making all kinds of changes to things that are intelligible the way they are.

We no longer prefer small caps for a.m. and p.m and for B.C., A.D., and BCE. We’re now allowing lowercase for a.m. and p.m., and full caps for B.C., A.D., and B.C.E. Some of these changes come out of working so much on disks. When you’re working with a pencil manuscript and you want small caps you do the two lines. On screen, however, there are a few more hoops you need to jump through and it doesn’t aid comprehension.

Ordinal numbers, we’re now going with 2nd and 3rd instead of 2d and 3d, except in legal citations. Again, it never caught on among authors, and it just seems unnecessary to require people to do it that way when it doesn’t aid comprehension.

Letters as shapes—e.g., L-shaped room and U-turn—are no longer required to be set in sans-serif type. Onscreen editing has caused that change. If you like the way it looks, and I do like the way it looks, it’s not wrong to make them serif.

The thing that caused everyone to gasp was the renumbering of the chapters from chapter 4 on when we added the chapter 5 on grammar. We knew that would cause a stir.

Why is that? Because people are so accustomed to looking in specific places for certain things?
Yes, I think it is. But we felt is was absolutely necessary. Sometimes you know something is wrong and you know how to fix it but you can’t necessarily, when questioned by an author, explain exactly why one way is wrong in grammar terms. So that grammar chapter is handy because we came up with a succinct and cogent and grammatically correct way of explaining it.

Oh, also, there was a table in the old chapter 6 that dealt with hyphenation and that’s now a list.

I’ll miss that table. I used it a lot.
I have to confess that I loved that table, but the consensus was that the list was clearer and easier. It’s a good list, it just looks so different and is indeed so different.

The whole look of the book is different. There’s some color, a new type face (Scala and Scala Sans), a new index.
We wanted to make it look like a book that was published in 2003 but was still readable. And I think our designer was very successful. I love having a second color. The other change that is so nice is that after every number for the number paragraphs is a run-in subheading that tells what’s in that particular section. I can flip it open at random and know what I am looking at immediately.

Of course, people will still decorate them with Post-Its flying out of the top and dog-eared corners.
I have a twelfth edition that was in our library that the owner went so far as to tab her book with very formal index cards she meticulously placed and taped into place. There were so many differences of opinion on what we should do about adding markers. For a while I was thinking of the L.L. Bean catalog, which comes with translucent post-its you can put on pages, and we thought we could do them in manual orange. Then that turned out to be not really feasible, and we figured people have their own systems and it was best to let them devise their own.

The fourteenth edition says, “The use of the comma is mainly a matter of good judgment, with ease of reading the end in view.” Then it goes on to explain the use of the comma for 15 pages.
Authors have very fixed ideas about commas, and some people don’t really care for the serial comma at all, but we’re really not flexible about it. Our example, which is probably apocryphal, is a book dedication: “To my parents, the Pope and Mother Teresa.” It does help explain to people why you want the series comma in there.

Do you or any of the others at the Press receive fan mail from enthusiastic manual users or grammar enthusiasts?
The person who wrote the answers for the FAQ on the previous Chicago website, whose name is a deep dark secret, had someone who was a “frequent-flier” who asked interesting questions. And, through our marketing department, this author began sending fan letters and inscribed copies of his books to the FAQ writer.

Earlier, when we took phone calls, people could just phone in and the reception desk rotated it among the managing editors, and some of us gave out our direct phone numbers to people who phoned in a lot. We had to stop because we were getting so many calls we couldn’t really get our work done. People would want to fax us things, have us edit them, and then fax them back.

Are those, or did they used to be before you stopped, examples of how you knew what information needed to be updated or added?
What it does, and what it did for us, is remind us of what a broad readership we have, It’s not just scholarly publishing or nonfiction publishing. We have people out in the real world, in the business world, and at advertising agencies. The phone-in questions were incredibly esoteric. I remember a woman’s daughter was getting married, and she was doing the program and wanted to know how to style the musical pieces that would be played. I thought it was wonderful that she knew there was a right way and a wrong way, but it was incredibly time consuming. I took a call after we had stopped answering phone-ins. It had somehow gotten through to me and it was a woman in the medical field who was working on a grant proposal. I told her I am sorry we don’t take calls anymore, but I’ll answer it this time. And she said, “So you mean, my grant is just supposed to be done wrong?” I told her those weren’t the only two options.

Chris Gage is a production editor for John Wiley & Sons, and he’s probably troubled that mb.com doesn’t follow a pure Chicago style. You can buy the new Chicago Manual of Style at Amazon.com.

When Diane Ravitch was chosen in 1998 to serve on a federal committee that designed a national educational test, she was shocked to learn that the testing industry’s standard procedure was to run all test passages and questions through a bias-and-sensitivity review. Even more shocking was what she learned these reviews rejected: A passage about Mary McLeod Bethune, for example, who opened the Daytona Educational and Industrial training School for Negro Girls, was struck because the reviewers didn’t like the word Negro. Similarly, a reference to the National Association of Colored Women was axed. A passage about owls was rejected because the owl is taboo to the Navajo, and a passage about a blind mountain climber was rejected as discriminatory to “children from the flatlands” and to “those without sight.”

What Ravitch learned was that the protocol for all major test developers and textbook publishers involved an elaborate and insidious process of textbook and test censorship. In her recent book, The Language Police, she argues that for 30 years schoolbooks and tests have been routinely stripped of any words, images, and content that could be deemed offensive by literally anyone. A professor of education at NYU and a leading expert on the history of education, Ravitch spoke to mediabistro.com recently about her book, educational censorship, and why America is obscuring historical facts in a misguided effort to make kids feel good about themselves.

Did you get any backlash from test or textbook publishers after writing this book?
The most significant response was a letter to the editor of The Wall Street Journal from Patricia Schroeder, the former congresswoman who is the executive director of the Association of American Publishers. She said that I was confusing censorship with the marketplace, that the publishers do what they do in response to what the states, which buy the textbooks, want. I interpreted her letter to mean that she acknowledged the widespread deletion of words and topics according to what the states wanted—which is exactly what my book said. In effect she was saying, “Sure, we make all these changes, because that’s what the marketplace demands.” Now what my book said, I don’t know if she read it, but it said that this is not a marketplace, this is a government procurement system. And when the publishers self-censor they’re responding to the demands of states, to be sure, which is what makes it censorship. But they should be complaining loudly about it, they shouldn’t just go along and acquiesce quietly, which is what they do.

In a Wall Street Journal review, Gary Rosen argued that although you place blame for this situation at both ends of the political spectrum, the “real villain” is “the multicultural left.” Do you agree with that?
I think that I was very balanced; there’s a chapter on the censorship by the right and there’s a chapter on the censorship by the left. Gary Rosen is an editor of Commentary, and his preference is to pin the blame on the left. I pin it on both sides. What I concluded was that the right has a greater interest in topics and the left has a greater interest in words and images. And I think the evidence is pretty strong that if you look at the topics that are banned from tests and that publishers yank before they ever get to publication, this is pressure coming from the right. So I think there’s enough blame to include not just both extremes but a lot of groups that are not really at either extreme. I mean you wouldn’t say that the people who say, “I represent the elderly,” are coming from the left or the right. The thing that is remarkable to me is that there really is very little popular support for this censorship. If you ask people who are older how they feel about that kind of censorship, they think it’s ridiculous.

In your book you point out where the right-wing and left-wing groups converge: that both believe “children’s minds would be shaped, perhaps forever, by the content and images in their textbooks.” Why is that philosophy a danger to the education of children?
Because it removes everything that is imaginative, for one thing, and it also removes any sort of literature—or, even, in many cases, history—that somebody somewhere thinks might be a bad example. So much of literature and history and even the Bible contains behavior that is not exemplary. Once you accept this philosophy of removing all bad behavior, you’re left with very little that’s worth reading.

Your chapter on history textbooks reminded me of 1984. Winston Smith’s job in the Records Department was “to rectify the original figures by making them agree with the later ones.” You point out that figures and facts are rewritten, and they are being rewritten not even to suit our present political and social climate but rather for some ideal future. What are some of the consequences for the generations growing up with this hashed history?
There’s a strange convergence between what the universities call postmodernism and this kind of editing, because it suggests that the text is really of no consequence, that it all depends on how the reader receives it. In some peculiar way, it’s related to this notion of “it’s about self-esteem, it’s about role models, it’s about feeling good.” And I think there’s been a fairly dangerous trend over the past 15 years, or maybe even longer, to suggest that history is a way of building self-esteem in different groups and finding some very essential identity, usually ethnic or racial or gender, that children have. And they were going to use the history books to make kids feel good about themselves. Well, that’s a terrible invitation to purging and censorship, because it means that you will leave out the bad parts and only emphasize the good and uplifting stories. You also get all of these groups rewriting history and literature to suit their needs. It’s dangerous in terms of telling lies about the past and using history in ways to obscure any effort to get at an accurate version of what happened in the past.

Do you see its effects in children today?
The bottom line is that kids don’t have any sense of history. The one thing that has come out of all of the national studies that have been done by the National Assessment of Educational Progress is that the one field of study American students do absolutely the worst in is history. They don’t know American history, and I’m willing to wager that when world history is assessed, which will be in a few years, we’ll see that American kids aren’t getting that either. There are many reasons for this. Part of it is just that the material is so superficial—and having sat down and read all the textbooks I can tell you that it’s difficult to retain anything because everything is reduced to a simplistic skim through facts of very little consequence or interest. And kids just aren’t getting it. And part of this is because the stuff that would engage kids and motivate them to learn more, isn’t there.

Has there been an instance of a historical photograph being edited?
One historical photograph I was given that was rejected from a textbook was a woodcut from the Civil War which showed a battle scene. Men were fighting on horseback, and some men and some horses were on the ground dead. And the reason that woodcut was rejected was because of the dead horses. Animal-rights activists thought that was unacceptable.

At the start of your book you say that this trend grew from an initial desire to remove racist and sexist statements from tests and textbooks, an impulse you call “entirely reasonable and justified.” What’s a justified act of censorship versus an unjustifiable one?
I wouldn’t call it censorship. I would say what was justified was to try to make the reading books better. I’m talking about those Dick and Jane-type readers for the early grades. And what they showed in these readers was that the boys in the readers always had the active role and the girls had a passive role. The boy would always be doing something, and the girl would always be watching. That’s not an accurate representation of life. There was also an overwhelming predominance of boys being the lead character. So there was a reasonable demand for a change, saying that this wasn’t fair, this doesn’t reflect life. Also anything that would be racist or prejudicial against a specific group didn’t belong in the book. I don’t think that at that time there was a list of words and topics to be taken out of every story. But as the groups saw how easy it was to intimidate publishers, they just kept going further—to the point at which publishers then instituted an internal review that grew into bias-and-sensitivity review. And what I tried to show in my book is that bias-and-sensitivity reviewers persisted long after there was no more bias in the textbooks and in the tests. And they began to find more and more exquisite forms of insensitivity. A rule of thumb that I use, is that if you can read it in The New York Times, there’s no reason to take it out of the textbooks. If kids can read this in their daily newspaper, why can’t they read it in their books?

Leslie Synn is an editorial intern at mediabistro.com. Photo courtesy of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. You can buy The Language Police at Amazon.com.

Since its launch in August 2000, Dwell magazine—with its accessible, inclusive take on modern architecture and design—has carved out a unique niche in the crowded shelter-book category. The magazine has quadrupled its circulation over the past three years, building a loyal readership that is as passionate about affordable prefab housing as it is about Eames chairs and Noguchi tables. At Dwell‘s San Francisco office, tucked on an alley at the edge of North Beach, editor-in-chief Allison Arieff spoke to mediabistro.com recently about Bay Area publishing, the definition of modern, and why buildings need people.

Born: October 29, 1966
Hometown: Fort Hood, Texas
First section of the Sunday Times: The magazine

How long have you been Dwell‘s editor-in-chief, and how did you get started at the magazine?
I’ve been editor-in-chief almost a year. I started at senior editor in January 2000. I had left my job at Chronicle Books and was doing a little dotcom freelance. But then I heard about Dwell, thank God. We started in January, and the first issue came out in August. It was this really kind of crazy experience because there was no magazine, no guidelines. It was hard at first, when you’d call people and they’d say, “Why would I want to be in this magazine? I’ve never seen it before.” And I’d say, “Yeah, I know. But it’s going to be good.” My first couple of weeks here it was me, Karrie Jacobs, the founding EIC, and Lara Hedberg Deam, the owner and founder. I remember I had a Rolodex and my laptop from home, and I was like, “All right, what am I going to do today?” It was a blank slate. But then we got more employees, we had this giant launch party, and we gained this momentum. And it’s all been very positive—not that there hasn’t been grumbling, but the whole creative team has been here since the beginning, which is pretty unique.

When Karrie decided to go back to New York, I was promoted to editor-in-chief. Since I’ve been in the job, there have definitely been some changes in the magazine, but not radical things. I did some interviews last year with people asking me what all the radical changes would be, and I said, “Look, I worked really closely with Karrie, and I’m not going to alter it just for the sake of altering it.” There have been a lot significant changes, and I’ve gotten really great feedback, about readability and how things flow, and about some of the projects that have been chosen. I don’t think that we were doing anything wrong before. But as we’ve had to expand our circulation and our audience, the changes that I’ve made have been with an eye toward our continued growth.

Most architecture magazines are really high-end, with houses that only rich people could afford. It seems there’s an emphasis in Dwell on projects an average person could realistically aspire to. What’s the philosophy of the magazine?
We do lots of super-expensive homes, and lots of not-super-expensive homes, but I think because no one else does the more affordable things, they just stick out. So it seems like that’s all we do. It’s great to find a house that was built for $125,000. But, of course, it’s really exciting to publish really well-designed high-end stuff, showing that range. It’s so unusual to see a magazine showing more reasonable options, or showing something slightly messy or not totally styled. I always look at other magazines and wonder, why are there always, like, two filled wineglasses but there’s no one there? It’s like everyone was forced to leave. So that’s part of the magazine’s philosophy—having real people in the pictures. I really believe that architecture is activated by the people who live in it. And to excise them from the process seems a little odd. So I love that we’re reinforcing the notion that buildings exist because we need to be in them. Some of these architecture magazines are like women’s magazines—they show this unattainable ideal that kind of screws with people’s heads. I think people are really comforted by looking at Dwell. Like, “Wow, they’re not perfect, either. They left something out on the counter.” Of course, in our October issue we do have a house that’s so minimalist it looks like the people own about two T-shirts each, but the house is super-interesting, so we’re not averse to showing it.

Do you consider Dwell primarily an architecture magazine, or is it something else?
First and foremost, it’s an architecture and design magazine. But we go beyond that and cover travel, art, food, film. It’s not a general-interest magazine, but I think if you’re interested in modern architecture and design you’ll also be interested in x, y, or z, too. We have an article in the October issue about four contemporary painters who are working with architectural subjects in their work—not typically what you’d find in a shelter magazine like this but a natural extension of the subject matter. When a designer is designing your toothbrush and your salt and pepper shakers, I’m interested in getting that all in.

To those of us in New York it sometimes seems like it’s the only place magazines are published. What’s it like putting out a magazine in the Bay Area?
It’s great. There’s Zoetrope across the street, and there’s ReadyMade, The Believer—I think all that stuff is terrific. I go to New York a lot, and we have contributing editors there. But I think the only people who are mad we’re not in New York are the PR people, because we can’t get to enough of their events. We’re able to be a little more flexible here, because we’re more independent. Not everyone came from a magazine background, so there’s less resistance to doing things differently. It’s better, I think, that people here are figuring out different ways of doing things and we’re not following all these established criteria.

There have been a bunch of new magazine launched in the Bay Area in the last few years. Do you think that has anything to do with the end of the whole dotcom thing, that there’s talent out there to work on something else now?
I think a lot of people who were around the dotcom thing but didn’t really get into it—myself included—felt like, Am I an idiot? Why am I not working for a dotcom? Ann Wilson, the managing editor, and I used to talk about this a lot, and, well, neither of wanted to be the editor of some store. I think people like tactile things, literary things. They like holding things, spending time with them. After all this nebulous, no-product stuff, people are reinvigorated by the fact of craft or something as old-fashioned as a book—or a magazine. When we started Dwell, people asked, “Well, what’s your web component?” We’ve always had a website, but there was never the idea of the magazine trying to support itself by selling furniture on the website. I’m not sure that would work. And I’m so glad we stuck to our guns. We are a magazine, and I didn’t want to read Dwell or any other visual magazine on a website—I didn’t think that was a good strategy.

Do you think being on the West Coast affects the sensibility of the magazine? It seems very different from other shelter titles.
I lived in New York, and I know New York tends to get kind of New York-centric, thinking there’s nothing going on outside of New York. People in San Francisco are very sensitive to being not provincial, so you make sure not to always focus on San Francisco. But also I think we’ve just found out there’s so much going on elsewhere—whether it’s in Sweden or Milwaukee or wherever—and it’s far more interesting to find that stuff. Other magazines just think they don’t need to. But people are excited if they live in Oklahoma and they open up the magazine and see there’s something about Oklahoma. So then they’ll send you stuff from there, and it goes back and forth. Nothing against New York—I know how important it is—but it’s not the only thing.

It’s great to see these houses in the Midwest and other places that you don’t usually see in design and architecture magazines.
When we were first talking about the current issue, the “Modern Across America” issue, we thought, we’re never going to find anything; this is going to be a joke. But we found that actually there is a lot of cool stuff. I’ve been to places I never would have discovered—like Fayetteville, Arkansas—and I love visiting those places. It totally breaks down stereotypes you might have.

Tell me about the Dwell prefab home competition.
The Dwell Home Design Invitational has been great for the magazine; the amount of interest that it’s generated has been great and totally unexpected. I got this job and my book, Prefab [cowritten with Bryan Burkhart], came out in the same two-week period. Because of the book, I heard from a lot of people interested in prefabricated buildings, so we decided to create this competition to design an affordable modern prefab house for a real client in North Carolina. Now that we’ve selected a winner, we have people writing in daily, wanting the Dwell home, others wanting to invest in Dwell home developments, design future Dwell homes, et cetera. I’m lecturing all over the place. The architect and I have a weekly date to talk about where things are at and to discuss the schedule. We’re signing off on a manufacturer, and the house should be completed by the end of the year. Then maybe I can get a little rest.

Yeah, you seem to do a lot with a small staff.
I try not to think about it that much. We write a lot in-house. Everyone’s multitasking. Sam Grawe, our associate editor, will write something and shoot the pictures for it. Our senior designer, Shawn Hazen, designed our website. And everyone can do many, many different things. I’m so glad that everyone here can rise to that challenge. Shawn designed a whole separate website for the Dwell home—and a logo for it—in about three days. It’s a very close-knit, good group. We definitely have our shouting matches with each other, but at the same time we’ve spent enough time together that there are people eating off each other’s plates at lunch and everyone knows everyone else’s business. In a good way.

The magazine’s tagline is “At Home in the Modern World.” How do you define modern?
Defining modern is tricky—we’re constantly trying to broaden the scope of what it means to be modern. It is not a midcentury style or a particular type of furniture or house but something much more culturally and emotionally broad. It goes beyond style to encompass a system of beliefs, a way of looking at and thinking about the world. For me, a modern house is one that is of its own time. It expresses individuality, truth to materials. No turrets, dormers, or arbitrary columns, for example. Being modern is about living in your own time, taking full advantage of all the latest technology, creativity, and innovation available in the creation of your own home. It’s about being curious about the world around you.

So what’s your own place like?
I live in an Edwardian apartment with amazing views of the Golden Gate Bridge to the north and downtown San Francisco to the east. While the exterior is very traditional, the interior is a mix of contemporary, midcentury modern—Eames, Thonet, Russel Wright—and a lot of aluminum and wood and lots of books. I’d love to say I live in an architect-designed masterpiece of modernism, but hey, there’s still time for that someday.

Adam Bluestein is an associate editor at Real Simple.

Imagine being the one guy who still lives in a town that’s been engulfed by lava—by yourself in a small, lush pocket amid a volcanic landscape that’s riddled with deadly lava tubes. Think about inhabiting an abandoned military compound in a remote Alaskan outpost, where winds rage, there’s always a threat of an avalanche, the only access to the rest of the world is through a long tunnel, and nearly all the residents inhabit one government-built apartment building. Consider hanging on as an 81-year-old hillbilly in the mountains of Malibu, refusing to budge when regular wildfires come charging through the valley. Living in these so-called “extreme locales” would seem unpleasant, if not forbidding, to most of us, but to certain people who actually live there, they’re proud homes that can’t be abandoned. In his new book, Braving Home, 28-year-old Jake Halpern, a bit of a nomad himself, examined these sorts of places, and he sought to explain why some people get so attached to their residences they’re willing to stay there through anything. He sought out five such communities—places too risky for most of us to live in, but with at least one very devoted local—and visited each one, getting a feel for the place and its residents (or, sometimes, resident). Safe back home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Halpern spoke to mediabistro.com recently about working at The New Republic, writing this book, and the various colorful characters he’s encountered while reporting, from Volcano resident Jack to Alaskan Babs to Malibu’s Millie—to even New York’s infamous Bernie Goetz.

Your first—and only, really—job in journalism was as a fact-checker at The New Republic. How did that come about?
When I was in college, I worked on a documentary about my great uncle, a Holocaust survivor. He grew up in a Slovakian small town, and he survived because his best friend from childhood, who was a Catholic kid, hid him underneath his bed for almost a year and then built a secret room for him in his basement, where he hid for another two years. When the film was done, someone mentioned to me that this guy Marty Peretz, who is the editor-in-chief of The New Republic, had an interest in Holocaust stories and might like this. So I invited him to come to the screening, and that launched a friendship with him. I then went overseas and worked as a freelance journalist and taught at an embassy school in Israel for a year, but I stayed in touch with him, and eventually Marty said to me, “If you’re ever interested in working at The New Republic, just let me know.” And when I came back I had this growing interest in journalism and contacted him.

What was it like working there, and how did it lead you to this book?
I came to The New Republic right after the Stephen Glass incident. They were extremely, and rightly so, concerned about accuracy. So I really had the fear of God in me about getting facts right. Which is something that I’m extremely grateful for, because in writing the book and doing other things, I was really disciplined in how to go over something and really make sure and knowing where it’s possible to make unintentional errors.

Also I made the contacts for the book. I had written a story about this coal-mining town that’s on fire, and that led to people saying, “Hey, if you’re interested in that story, you should really check out this place.” One thing led to another, and I kind of became the bad-homes correspondent; that became my little niche. So one day I’m sitting on the switchboard, which is part of the rite of passage for all the interns, and the publicist for the magazine calls to talk to the editor, Peter Beinart. Peter was on the phone, and she wanted to hold, so we started chatting and I told her about this crazy idea I had for a book. And she says, “That sounds like an awesome idea—you should write something up, and I’ll get it in the hands of an agent.” So I spent the next few weeks seriously putting together a proposal, and, with the help Jen Bluestein, the publicist, and a few other people, I ended up getting an agent.

Was it hard, visiting these places and writing the book?
I think the biggest challenge was that the natural expectation was that people living in these crazy places are crazy people, kind of cockeyed maniacs who are get-away-from-my-land kind of people. And what I wanted to do was try to bring out some of the color and eccentricities of these people, make them really engaging and, yeah, the characters that they were, but not to make them caricatures—tto lend them a sense of dignity that I thought that they deserved.

Most of the people I wrote about, I lived with them and they kind of brought me into their homes. Normally, when you interview someone for a story there are natural confines to the interview: you meet them at a restaurant, you meet them in their office, maybe you even meet them in their home and, for two or three hours, they can kind of watch what they say to you and you can have a proper interview. But I was living with these people and befriending them, and so they would tell me everything. I was aware that I was really trespassing through their lives and hearing much more than I might otherwise hear, and I didn’t want to betray them. I didn’t want to air all their dirty laundry; I wanted to not leave their lives total messes. Not that everyone in the world will be reading my book, but assuming they and their neighbors and a bunch of other people might be reading this book, I wanted them to feel that they had not been steamrolled by me. So what I ended up doing was, all of their quotes I read back to them at least twice. I did this for fact-checking purposes mainly, but I also wanted them to kind of have a sense of what was going to be in there and give them a chance to object if they felt that what I had said was unfair.

I was often amazed that things I thought would upset them and bother them didn’t. For example, in Whittier, Alaska, I have these sisters talking about one another, complaining about one another saying, “Oh, she’s in my hair, we didn’t talk for years, she’s kind of a nuisance,” and I really wanted to include that kind of sisterly tension because I thought it added a lot to their portrait, but I wasn’t sure how they were going to react. So I read it back to them and they were pretty much like, “Yup, that’s true, she is a pain in the ass. Yeah, she is an emotional vampire, that’s right, uh-huh.” And I’m like, “You’re comfortable with me putting that in there?” “Sure, why not?” The same thing happened with Thad Knight, in North Carolina, whose son committed suicide. I didn’t know if I wanted to drag that out. Eventually I just said, “Thad, you know, I would like to include this bit about Carlton committing suicide, and would that be all right with you?” And he said, “Yeah, that’s no problem.” And so sometimes the things that I was thinking would be sensitive were not.

But what about the physical challenges?
Those were much more immediate. The one that comes to mind the most is the volcano. Essentially we had to walk in, a chopper was not an option, it was just too expensive, and we couldn’t take Jack’s motorcycle in because there had been too much volcanic activity. Leading up to me going there, the volcanic activity was more intense in that area than it had been in like a decade. So we get a lift out there, and we’re passing all of these road signs that are like, “Don’t go beyond this point.” “Absolutely don’t go beyond this point.” “Sulfuric acid-laden steam from lava mixing with seawater will blow inward and scald.” These signs continued to progress with more intense warnings and dangers, and I was just sitting in the back of the pickup truck. I couldn’t talk to Jack because he was riding in the front with someone else, and we finally got out and Jack just said come on, let’s go, and it was a leap of faith. I figured that this guy has been making this trip for 20-odd years; he’s not going to die on this time across. And we started walking across the flow and the ground was hot, you could feel the heat radiating up through your shoes, and it was kind of cracking and the biggest fear is that you would fall into a lava tube, which are these giant underground tunnels that convey the lava, and if the surface is thin above one of these tubes, you could fall and that would be the end of you. We did come to a point where there was red gushing out of the earth, and Jack very nonchalantly popped out a penny and flipped it in. The penny just melted immediately, and we kind of marveled at it.

And then in the other places, the place that was hit by hurricanes in Louisiana, and then Malibu with wild fires, it was more that we thought we might have a hurricane when I was there, and it was just kind of me debating whether or not, if the hurricane came, or if the wildfire came, would I stay around to get the story of it passing through. It never came to that so I didn’t have to make that hard decision.

How did you find working on books rather than magazine articles?
One of my strongest motivations for writing this book was that the pieces that I wrote for The New Republic were only about a page long, and I found myself very frustrated with that length. I gathered all this great research and did so much reporting and then had to condense it. So I think that the advantage of doing a book is that you just have tons of time, and you have lots of space, and you can really go off on tangents. Just to have that room is a great luxury. The tough side is that sometimes you can just gather too much information, or you can go overboard, or you can be a little bit freaked out about just how much space you have. Whereas there’s something great about doing a piece that’s just really short.

For example, I wrote a New Yorker “Talk of the Town” piece in October. I caught up with Bernhard Goetz, who was the famous subway shooter from the ’80s, and he’s trying to reinvent himself as a vegetarian. He marches in the Halloween Day Parade now as this giant peapod. I wanted to march with him, and he told me that I could come and supply him with flyers if I dressed up as a tomato. So I flew into New York, rented a tomato outfit, marched in the Halloween Day Parade as a tomato with Bernie Goetz. Then woke up the next morning, wrote the piece, sent it to The New Yorker, and it was in print the next week. And it was like, “Wow, this is so cool.” It just all happens so quickly, and there was something fun about just having a crazy idea and jumping on it and then all of a sudden seeing it in print. So that’s, I think, the advantage to being able to do a piece a magazine piece, you can kind of just have a zany idea and go with it.

Jacqueline Schneider is an editorial intern at mediabistro.com. Braving Home was published earlier this month by Houghton Mifflin. You can buy Braving Home at Amazon.com. Photo by Neil Giordano.

Emma Taylor and Lorelei Sharkey started out as such nice girls. Taylor, a British Princeton grad, was an editor at Tripod.com, where she created an online women’s magazine. Sharkey, a New York native, was managing editor of Stuff, an arts and entertainment monthly published by The Boston Phoenix—not, she emphasizes, the men’s magazine. Then they ended up at Nerve, the so-called literary-smut website. One thing led to another, as they say, and now they’ve literally written the book on sex—The Big Bang: Nerve’s Guide to the New Sexual Universe, which was published earlier this month. Which all raises the question, how’d they end up doing this?

When the two started at Nerve, they were charged with creating an online community. They built “Nerve Center,” which included chat rooms, message boards, and the now-ubiquitous personals, which, spun off as Spring Street Networks, have since taken over the world. As part of “Nerve Center,” they began an advice column, “The Em & Lo Down.” Billing themselves as “near experts,” they answered readers’ questions on everything from marital infidelity to pubic-hair grooming. The column became hugely popular, and Taylor and Sharkey dispensed sex advice for Men’s Journal and Britain’s Guardian newspaper. The Big Bang, meanwhile, with its arty, pansexual, semi-nude photos (many shot at Coney Island) and abundance of pop-culture references, is sure to become the hipster’s Joy of Sex.

Taylor and Sharkey, who finish each other’s sentences and say they spend far too much time together, spoke to mediabistro.com last week about collaboration, living up to their image, and what their parents think.

Being sex experts, or even near experts, is a lot of responsibility. How do you do your research? Do you ever worry about being wrong?

Sharkey: In terms of questions to the advice column, if we’re worried about being wrong or we’re not sure of the answer to a question, we just won’t answer it. We pick ones that we feel really strongly about and where we know the information is good.

Taylor: And where we’ve got an expert that we trust completely. We have good relationships with the women at Toys in Babeland and Good Vibrations. And for The Big Bang, we worked with a group of doctors who vetted the whole book to make sure that everything was medically accurate. The great thing about researching safer sex and sexual health is that the people who disseminate that information are so excited to get that information out there. The Centers for Disease Control has an STD hotline, and they’re so helpful and kind. Planned Parenthood, the American Social Health Association. They’re so psyched for anyone to take their information and put it out there that they’re always willing to help.

Your column and the book aren’t written in the style of traditional service journalism, where you quote various expert sources. It seems as though all the information is coming from you.

Sharkey: For the book, Nerve wanted it to be Nerve‘s guide and Nerve‘s voice. If we quoted doctors, it wouldn’t be authoritative and it wouldn’t be in the voice that we wanted. So even though we did make sure the information was accurate, we wanted it to be in the Nerve voice and to appeal to Nerve readers—people who wouldn’t normally buy a sex manual, who don’t really have a problem to fix, but who, like all of us, could learn a little bit.

Taylor: We’ve tried to set up the idea that we’re a credible source. We’ve done some journalism for magazines where it’s like, you have to have a doctor quote here, but that was because their readers don’t feel comfortable taking suggestions from us, especially about something racy like sex. The editors feel that more conservative readers might feel more comfortable accepting advice that comes from someone who’s been to med school. We’re sort of trying to change that assumption, which was another reason for doing the book.

Sharkey: But a lot of the suggestions we make don’t have to be medically accurate—they’re more opinions about relationships. You don’t need a degree in psychology to believe that you should treat your partner with respect and not lie to them or cheat on them. The stuff in the advice column is much more geared to our own opinions about the way people should treat each other sexually.

I’m really interested in your collaboration. How did you meet? How did you end up in this relationship?

Taylor: Lorelei’s been at Nerve for five and a half years, and I’ve been there for four and a half. We didn’t meet until the day I started, when we were sitting literally this close, sharing a dictionary, sharing a phone. It was completely serendipitous that we hit it off. The first thing we did together was create “Nerve Center.” It was important for “Nerve Center” to have a voice, to feel personal.

Sharkey: We were the hosts, who people could talk to.

Taylor: That was how we started developing this voice that was a collaboration between the two of us. There would be little intros here and there, a newsletter…

Sharkey: …descriptions of message boards, intros to the chats, all of the text for the personals, from “Help” to the actual questions in the personals.

Taylor: And when we were doing that we were working 12-hour days and pretty much living and breathing each other. About six months after the personals started, we decided that an advice column would be great in the personals section.

Sharkey: And we volunteered ourselves. We started doing it before anybody could think, “Maybe we should get somebody else who has some experience.”

Taylor: And we knew how to upload stuff to the server.

What’s your writing process like? Do you write together or take turns?

Taylor: It depends on what we’re working on, but mostly we have a keyboard that we pass between us.

Sharkey: When we did the book, we wrote side by side for the first three months, but during the last month, when we needed to work faster, we split up the chapters. I would edit hers, she would edit mine, and we’d go back and forth a couple of times. But we’d take notes and brainstorm and come up with an outline together first—we’d go over the points we wanted to make, and make sure we agreed.

Have you ever disagreed?

Taylor: Rarely. Before we even start writing notes, we’ll discuss a question for like half an hour to get to our answer.

Sharkey: We feel pretty similarly. The only things we disagree on are baby talk—Emma thinks that baby talk is a sign of mental infirmity. I think in the privacy of your own bedroom, it’s OK, as long as you don’t do it in front of other people. The only other thing is that Emma used to think that when you start dating someone, exclusivity is assumed. I said no way. And now she’s seen the light.

You two are the euphemism queens. How do you come up with all your terms for body parts and sexual acts? I can imagine you sitting around cracking each other up.

Sharkey: Sometimes we high five. [They high five.] That’s the good thing about writing with someone you trust: They’ll tell you if something is crap. You don’t have to sit there and think, Is this genius or is it totally stupid? I really hope the fact that we don’t take ourselves too seriously shows through. I’m always afraid people will read us and think, “They think they’re so funny.” And when people do write in and ream us out, it really hurts.

Do you see yourselves collaborating for the rest of your careers, or do you expect to eventually do things individually, or even break up?

Both: Oh, no!

Taylor: We feel like we’ve got a really good brand, and we’d like to take it as far as we can go. We’ve been talking to a bunch of people about TV shows. We’re going to be Em & Lo for a long time. We work much more efficiently together.

Sharkey: When you work with a partner, you’ve got someone there to be your sounding board and your support, but also to keep you disciplined. If I was on my own, I’d never get anything done, because I’d always turn on the TV or something. But I know I have Emma to answer to.

Did you ever think that you would end up being sex experts?

Both: No.

How has the job affected your personal lives? Is dating weird? Are you like doctors—do people always come up to you at parties looking for advice on their most intimate problems?

Taylor: Two nights ago, I was at a bar having drinks with my friend. I started chatting with the guy sitting next to me, and we went downstairs where there’s this little area by the bathrooms. We kissed a few times, and then I was like, “OK, I’m gonna get going.” And he said, “I just wanted to ask you something. I’ve always thought I was a little bit small. Since you’re a professional, I was wondering if you thought I was average size.” I was like, “Oh no!” I started going up the stairs, and he starts running behind me, still unzipping, like, “You’re a professional! You’re a professional!” I think he thought that was a way to turn up the heat.

Sharkey: I’ve been dating the same guy for years, and he’s our biggest fan. But I feel like if I had to go out there in the dating world, guys would expect so much from me. Like, I wrote the book, I know every move, I have no hang-ups or insecurities, and that’s definitely not true.

What do your parents think about your jobs?

Sharkey: Mine are fine. My dad and my stepmom are very supportive. I don’t think they read it that much, but they’re very excited for me. My mom might have a little more of a problem with it, but she’s never said anything like, “When are you going to get a real job?”

Taylor: My parents are religious, but they’re fairly open-minded. For a long time I just didn’t really talk to them about what I did. My mom would tell her friends, “My daughter works at a magazine for young people.” And then when the Guardian column started in England, which is where they live, I was like, “Okay, you can be really proud of me, just don’t read it.” They were like, “Of course we’re going to read it!” But it was good, because it was the first time I could be really honest with them about what I did. They’re actually really cool about it. I just sent them a copy of The Big Bang, and I signed it, “Thanks so much for all your support! Now please turn to page 258,” which is the bio in the back. My dad went to his Oxford reunion and he and his friends were talking about what their kids do. He was like, “My daughter’s a writer—she actually has a column in the Guardian.” And his friend said, “Oh, that’s right! I just read that one about anal sex this morning!”

Emily Fromm is a freelance writer living in New York City. The Big Bang: Nerve’s Guide to the New Sexual Universe was published earlier this month by Plume, a member of the Penguin Group (USA) Inc. You can buy The Big Bang at Amazon.com.

We generally think of a literary agent as kind of behind-the-scenes power broker, someone aggressively guarding his unlisted phone number while toiling to bring unrecognized talent to the shelves of the local Barnes & Noble. But John Hodgman, a former literary agent at Writers House and author of the popular McSweeney’s column “Ask a Former Professional Literary Agent,” has devised a way to “revive the corpse that is the literary reading” and, along the way, bring him to the agent’s rightful place behind the podium. In New York’s “Little Gray Book Lectures,” Hodgman—whose own fiction has been published in The Paris Review, One Story magazine, and the website Open Letters—invites authors to sing, use PowerPoint, and occasionally smash items in a shamelessly successful bid for the audience’s rapt, drunken attention. A frequent contributor to The New York Times Magazine, This American Life, and Men’s Journal (for which, as a contributing editor, he writes a column about “food, drink, and cheese, which is a kind of food”), Hodgman spoke recently to mediabistro.com about Dave Eggers, karmic career advancement, and being a professional blowhard.

How did the idea for the “Little Gray Book Lectures” come to you?
Much like one becomes a food writer, one begins a lecture series by accident. At one of McSweeney’s readings at Galapagos, I saw Arthur Bradford [author of The Dogwalker] smash an acoustic guitar that he had been playing while reading his story. To me, that moved the goalposts forever. It was an explosive moment of understanding that something had changed forever, that this was exactly what literary readings required: more things being smashed and/or set on fire.

And the name “Little Gray Books” comes from…?
In the 1920s, a man named Emmanual Haldeman-Julius had the idea to publish a little library of inexpensive, shirt-pocket-sized, pamphlet editions of great works of literature, particularly those that were in the public domain. He started releasing this series of Little Blue Books in numbered sequential order, beginning with reprints, but rather swiftly, as they gained in popularity, moving on to original commissioned works with a kind of improving, instructive bent, like How to Tie All Kinds of Knots or How to Make All Kinds of Candy. There were more than 1,900 published, one of which was How to Prepare a Manuscript, a very interesting, timeless, and archaic book of instructions on how to submit you novel to literary agents, which my mother had given to me when I became an agent. And I realized two things: one, that this would be a great rubric under which we could introduce a theme for every lecture, and two, that someday we might even present Little Gray Books, either reprinting the lectures or as stand-alone items.

And were the lectures immediately successful?
They were immediately successful. But that’s not terribly difficult if you have, as we did in the first one, perhaps 10 readers who each has some friends who like to drink in bars; you fill a room rather quickly. Galapagos is a wonderful space; it can accommodate a couple of hundred people; and we usually have about 120 in there now. But I would say only within the past year has a substantial portion of that been complete strangers, to whom I am very grateful—as opposed to my friends, whom I hate.

And are they profitable?
Well, in December we made the suggested donation $5 at the door, and this allows us to mount increasingly elaborate displays of literary brio. PowerPoint presentations have become extremely important. And this allows us to pay Jon Langford of the Mekons to come sing songs about Chicago, or for the great freelance writer Brett Martin to ring up a pulley system so that he could have a miniature blimp descend while on fire.

He’s on fire, or the blimp is on fire?
The blimp is on fire. Well, it had some sparklers attached.

Now, you’ve become involved with arguably the two most powerful men of our literary generation—Dave Eggers and Ira Glass. Would you tell our readers how that came about, and how they too could meet powerful men?
Well, in terms of my professional writing career, I will be the first person to say that McSweeney’s was the best thing that had ever happened to me, and it happened by accident. In 1997, I was in San Francisco, and I read a cartoon of Dave’s in a local paper and thought, “Boy, this guy is really smart, and cool, and I wonder if he has a literary agent. When I get back to New York, I’ll have to look him up.” Of course, I never did. Maybe a year later, an email that he had sent out saying that he was starting this journal called McSweeney’s was forwarded to me by someone, and I thought, this is fate at work. I emailed him and he emailed me back, like, “How did you get this email?”

The work I did at McSweeney’s led to me getting to know certain editors like Paul Tough, who was doing a web site called Open Letters, and I wrote something for Open Letters, and that reminded Alex Bloomberg at This American Life that we had met at his friend’s wedding in 1998, and he called me up and said, “Would you like to read this letter on the air some time?” So, for my entire writing career I am grateful for gifts of circumstance.

Was it strange to watch someone around you become stratospherically famous?
No. No. No. I said no three different times for three different reasons. One, because Dave wasn’t really around me; we weren’t particularly close friends, so it wasn’t like watching your best friend from high school become a huge movie star. And the second reason is, it was not strange because I absolutely felt that he deserved it. Maybe because the McSweeney’s sensibility had touched such a nerve with me, I was pleased and not surprised when a lot of other people felt the same way. And third, because, no offense to Dave, but he’s not stratospherically famous. He’s, you know, a major, bestselling book author, but in the global scheme of things, I think Dame Edna gets more press than he does. And that transvestite is old! You know, he ain’t J.Lo.

Which leads me to a different question—where does one get stories?
My feeling is that storytelling, historically, has served three purposes, and this goes for fiction and nonfiction. One is to record history; two is to entertain or divert the listener or reader from everyday woes of starvation or warfare or beasts in the wilderness or whatever; and the third is to instruct. Typically, morally instruct, although now, this is an amoral age, so that instruction component is now sort of expressed in the service aspect.

Unfortunately, I think in most general, everyday storytelling, people aren’t going to tell you how to tie all kinds of knots as much as they used to. We had Jamie Kitman, who’s a rock band manager and attorney and, of course, an automotive correspondent for many magazines, talk about how to buy a car in “How to Negotiate All Kinds of Deals and Contracts.” At the same time, we had Bobby Hager, who used to sell musical organs at a mall, explain the principles for hooking in poor rural farmers to buying $20,000 organs, which could come in handy. Maybe not tomorrow, but someday.

In magazine work, the key is finding the story that you want to tell. Which is to say, in the week following and preceding the release of the motion picture The Hulk, saying that Jennifer Connelly or Eric Bana is alive is a story. Believe me, your reader will be much happier if you figure out the story you want to tell about Eric Bana or Jennifer Connelly.

Did you tell one of those stories?
No. I don’t have an Eric Bana story to tell. But Jennifer Connelly went to Yale [as did Hodgman—and, full disclosure, this reporter]. She’s very pretty, also. That’s the beginning of a story. If you’re pitching a story to a magazine or if you’re pitching a book or if you’re just figuring out what you want to write that day, presuming you’re independently wealthy and can just write short stories all day long, attune yourself to figuring out the stories that you have to tell about anything—whether it’s the guy you see on the street or a relationship that went wrong in your life or this year’s summer blockbuster or how to make the perfect hamburger.

What about fried chicken? Because that’s actually an important topic people don’t address enough.
No, I haven’t written anything about fried chicken. I think the definitive work on fried chicken has been done by Alton Brown on his show Good Eats on the Food Network. I don’t think there can be any improvement on that work at all. But food writing is a good example, because everything has already been written about. There are three basic macro-nutrients: proteins, carbs, and fats. And they’re going to combine in certain ways to make certain foods. Food writing is really a test to find the new story, and the way to find it is to make it your own.

That is good advice, John.
There’ll be more on my seminar tour.

I’ve always known you’ve had a talent for general pronouncements and ordering people around.
Some people are talented at doing things, writing things. Others are talented at being blowhards—bossy blowhards. I also like the term aphorist.

But why did you give up fiction writing?
Well, I still do a lot of fiction writing in that much of what I write is not reported and is largely made-up. Rather than telling the story in a traditional short-story form, it finds its way into phony advice columns, phony lectures, phony introductions to real lectures, and other various formats that have effectively become a certain professional blowhard-ism. And that fulfills that creative need for me very well. Writing short stories is very hard, and I don’t like to do things that are very hard. I would hope that some of the introductions and lectures that I’ve given achieve that sort of three-part purpose of a good story.

And why did you cease to be a literary agent?
By the early summer of 2000, when I left the agency I was working for, Writers House, I felt that by that time I had been enjoying writing for McSweeney’s, and even some venues that paid money on the side, and I wanted to pursue that. In a lot of ways, the lectures allow me to continue to be the kind of literary agent without having to be responsible for people’s careers—you know, having to work.

What would you like to happen next?
To become independently wealthy. Maybe by someone giving me money—it doesn’t really matter. I would prefer to not have to kill someone. I would like the “Little Gray Book Lectures” to become a radio show—ideally, a public radio show, because, as you know, that’s where the money is.

Lizzie Skurnick is a writer living in Baltimore and a frequent contributor to mediabistro.com. Illustration by Elizabeth Connor.