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.

If you know anything about Joe Bob Briggs, you know him as the trailer-park movie critic and avowed B-movie fan who began his career at the now-defunct Dallas Times Herald, had a messy run-in with most of that city’s black community, and has since performed one-man shows around the country and hosted two very successful cable shows. You may or may not also know that Joe Bob Briggs is actually the alter ego of John Bloom, who in 1981 was the earnest and thoughtful young movie critic who created this alternative, trash-loving persona. Bloom introduced Briggs as a 19-year old Texan redneck who drove a baby blue 1968 Dodge Dart to the drive-in and appreciated “nekkid” women in his movies. In his own way, Briggs is a connoisseur: He takes his B-flicks seriously, and a rating system—a criteria—all his own. Here’s a typical tally, from his review of Big Bad Mama II:”Six breasts. Two stunt breasts. 56 dead bodies. Five motor vehicle chases. Double aardvarking. Five shootouts. One brawl. One cat fight. Exploding gubernatorial candidate. Gratuitous belly dancer. Dynamite Fu. Angie Fu.””Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In” became the Times Herald‘s most popular feature, and Briggs’s reviews were less reviews of the exploitation film in question than of American culture. He took on feminists and communists and MADD and Baptists. In 1985, he took on the star-studded African famine relief single “We Are the World,” with a version called “We Are the Weird,” supposedly sung by drive-in stars. The black community in Dallas was outraged, a huge demonstration was organized, and Joe Bob’s Times Herald editor apologized and declared the character dead. Bloom quit in protest, and Joe Bob lived on. First there was Joe Bob’s Drive-In Theater, which ran on The Movie Channel for ten years, where it was the highest-rated show. Later came Monstervision, on TNT, which ran for four years. Bloom, meanwhile, has written for magazines from National Lampoon and Rolling Stone to the National Review. And Joe Bob has been writing, too: a UPI column and five books of satire. This month Joe Bob returns to his film-critic roots with the release of Profoundly Disturbing: Shocking Movies that Changed History. John Bloom—not, for the purposes of this interview, Joe Bob—recently spoke to mediabistro.com about his alter ego, his book, and what exactly aardvarking is.

Birthdate: January 27, but he won’t reveal the year
Hometown: Little Rock, Arkansas
First section of the Sunday Times: “I’m so anal about it that I read it in order, from the first page to the last.”

So tell me about the book.
It’s just movies that I’ve always wanted to write about, that in one way or other changed society or changed filmmaking or changed counter-culture—you know, made us all different. They’re not always the best movies, but they’re movies that had an impact on America.

We know it when we see it, but what is it that puts a movie on the B-list?
They’re movies that your mother doesn’t want you to see. And increasingly, the B-movies are ultra-low budget because we have video technology now that makes it possible for virtually anyone anywhere able to make a movie. And that’s never happened in the whole history of filmmaking. This is the first time that this has ever been true. And that results in a lot of awful movies, but it also results in, occasionally, movies that just come out of nowhere and don’t necessarily get noticed by the public right away but can establish someone’s career. I recently saw a movie called Infested, basically The Big Chill, except that all the people in The Big Chill get attacked by these huge swarms of genetically engineered killer flies. And they turn into zombies. And it’s a very humorous and scary film. That’s first-time filmmaker Josh Olsen, and he’ll probably have a career based on that.

Do you personally admire the monster and exploitation flicks that you’ve showcased on your shows, or are they just enjoyable kitsch that you have to screen with a sense of irony?
Well, it depends on the movie. Sometimes it’s just so bad—I mean, we had a movie on Monstervision called Super Beast that was just incomprehensible. I offered everyone a six-pack if they could tell me what the plot of it was, and nobody ever claimed the prize. It depends on the movie, there are good B-movies and bad movies, just like any old movie.

What came first, your writing about drive-in movies or your love for them?
I invented this whole scheme with Joe Bob Briggs as this movie critic and sneaked it into the newspaper when nobody was looking. And by the time they realized that it was in there, it had become too well-known to kill.

The book is credited to Joe Bob Briggs. What’s the story behind that persona?
When I first started reviewing these movies, nobody else was reviewing them. The big newspaper film critics were contemptuous of them and just ignored them. And so I wanted to be a film critic who was a populist, because they always made money. It was always written from the point of view of a guy who could forgive a movie anything except for being boring, and didn’t have any traditional critical standards.

You weren’t making fun of his kind of character, who would watch these movies or say those kinds of things.
Right. One thing that always distinguished me from the other people who review B-movies, is that most people make fun of these movies. They just use them as comedy material. I always try to celebrate the movies themselves but have comedy with it. If you ever watch the Elvira show, she would always put down the movie. And I always found the good and the bad.

You wrote Profoundly Disturbing as Joe Bob, but it doesn’t really read like that. Instead of breast and body counts, there’s a lot of film history, esoteric anecdotes, and careful movie analysis. It’s very smart.
Well, I wanted to go further in depth for the movies that I really liked. A lot of the movies that I review every week, that’s pretty much all I have to say on it. Most of the movies you review are bad, so I just have fun with them. But with these particular movies, I wanted to describe why they were so important. If you gave this list of movies to people, most would say, “these are not important movies.” Maybe they would say The Wild Bunch is important, but that’s a recent thing. And they would say The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is important, because that’s used in film schools and such. Everything else, they would say that these movies are lightweights that no one cares about. So I wanted to explain to the world at large why these movies are important. Even if they’re not important as movies, or not good movies, they’re important because of the way people reacted to them.

So could Profoundly Disturbing very well have been authored by John Bloom instead?
Yeah, it could have been. I don’t think it would have been so lively. And Joe Bob is more famous than John Bloom, so I’ve got to write about movies as Joe Bob.

What is it that makes Joe Bob Briggs a whole fictional character and not merely a pseudonym?
At the time I was doing it, I was also the regular film critic for the paper, so I had to distinguish the two. I had a conversation with Roger Corman, and asked him what elements he put in all of his movies, and I’ve refined that into my formula for movies—it has to have the three Bs: Blood, Breasts, and Beasts. And that became the rating system, you had to have all those elements to get four stars. I tried to put in martial arts, but I couldn’t think of a B word.

Has writing under the guise of Joe Bob affected your writing as John Bloom? I mean, it must get hard to slip into and out of character once they’ve become so familiarized and often used.
Not really, because even before I was doing Joe Bob, I was always the irreverent guy. There was always satirical edge to what I wrote. There are certain things that I can’t write about as Joe Bob, because nobody would publish it if I wrote it as Joe Bob.

Such as…
Well, I covered the terrorist attacks in New York, and you couldn’t put Joe Bob’s name on those—too solemn.

Was there a particular message that you were trying to send as Joe Bob Briggs?
No, I just tore stuff down. That’s what satire is, you just destroy things. People would say, “But you destroy things in order to be able to build new things up, right?” And I would say, “No, I wasn’t thinking about that. I was just destroying things.” It’s just what I love, myself. That’s the kind of comedian I watch, and those tend to be the smartest guys, because they’re the ones with something to say. You can’t just go up there and say, “Bush sucks.” You gotta have something to say about it.

You’ve been in almost every form of media—newspapers, magazine, books, stage, TV, movies—is there still a dream job out there that you haven’t done already?
There’s really nothing that I haven’t done. There are things that I would like to do better.

What’s coming up for you now?
I have a show in development that is a parody political talk show, that I would like to do for somebody. And I’d like to eventually go back to the stage, I just haven’t had time to do it. I don’t have a time to do it. But I think if I did an act now, it would be a lot more mature. You’ve got to spend a lot of time just learning how to walk across a stage. And I think that I could do a much more solid show now. I wouldn’t have to do dick jokes.

The parody political talk show that you’re working on—is that going to be Joe Bob as well?
Yeah, it’ll be Joe Bob. Joe Bob’s version of The O’Reilly Factor.

Last question: I read on your website one of your fans writing, “if you’d mind defining the oft-used expression on your site ‘aardvarking’.” And you replied, “Oh my God, honey, if your mama didn’t tell you what aardvarking is, I would be afraid to.” Could you define it for us?
I have been using “aardvarking” since 1984, and I’ve never said what it is, but if you read my columns, you get what it is. I had to invent these words because of working for newspapers, where they have a lot of rules about that kind of thing.

Leslie Synn is an editorial intern at mediabistro.com. You can buy Profoundly Disturbing a Amazon.com.

Since 1996, Ben Brantley has been the chief theater critic at The New York Times, a job that makes him undoubtedly among the most powerful men on the Great White Way. Of course, anyone in that gig is powerful, but Brantley’s reviews have sometimes seemed to actively court controversy. At a time when producers are terrified too few people are interested in highbrow live theater, Brantley (whom they’ve unkindly dubbed “Big Ben”) is often dismissive of the more commercial fare that’s designed to attract an audience from beyond the Upper West Side and West Village. But Brantley acknowledges he likes being controversial, that the important part of reading a review is not necessarily to agree with it but rather to find its argument interesting and entertaining. Brantley spoke to mediabistro.com recently about being controversial, why it’s fun, and how indulgent it feels to sometimes not be a critic.

Born: October 26, 1954
Hometown: Winston-Salem, North Carolina
First section of the Sunday Times: The front section or Metro

Right now you’re arguably the most powerful theater journalist in the country. What was the career path that led to you being chief critic for the Times?
I joined the Times in 1993 as the second-string theater critic. Before that, I was a staff writer for The New Yorker and I was doing film reviews for Elle magazine, which is what ultimately captured the attention of editors at the Times. They had been looking for someone for a while, and Alex Witchell, who is married to Frank Rich and who had been my editor at Elle when we briefly overlapped, was familiar with my work. She pointed me out to her husband, and he threw my name into the hat, so to speak. I didn’t expect anything to come of it.

And then at the Times?
Frank was still chief theater critic when I came on, but he moved to op-ed shortly after I arrived. David Richards—who had been the Sunday critic—became the chief critic, but not for very long. I think he stayed for about a year. Then there was Vincent Canby, who was the chief film critic and then was the Sunday theater critic. Next, he was the chief theater critic for a couple of years and, then, finally when he left in 1996, I stepped in.

What was the switch like, from writing about film to writing about theater?
I prefer theater because I think I have more of a natural affinity for it. It’s something I grew up loving, which is something that is also true of film, but theater was a greater passion for me. I think everyone to some extent is a movie critic. There is a sense of privilege in being allowed to write about theater. It’s not as much of a common dialogue, so you hope you’re kind of opening a window for some people to look in on. There’s never a time when I am not engaged by theater, even when it’s bad or boring, but I can’t say the same is true of films. I have found it is much easier to shut off during films, and leave that “reacting” mode, even when I have to review them.

Speaking of the different attention required: Theater is supposed to be an elite art, so how do you approach reviewing a show that doesn’t really seem designed for an elite audience?
I think it’s true that theater isn’t always elite, but you have to remember it has always been a popular art form. In fact, it was the popular art of rather dubious reputation in the 18th and 19th centuries in this country. Broadway of late has certainly pandered out of a sense of desperation more than it used to, but if you look back to the theater reviews of the turn of the 20th century, you’ll find a lot of the complaints made about Broadway then that are also being made today—that the shows we see are basically circuses or mere displays of technology. The so-called golden era of Broadway was actually pretty short-lived. We are always lamenting its decline and saying it is no good now, but I don’t necessarily think that is anything new. Theater in general is certainly less glamorous than when I first came to New York as a kid, but I am also looking at it through adult eyes. I sit through some bad stuff, but when I get to sit through some of the good stuff, it is still rewarding like nothing else.

Are there certain critics that you look to as role models in your own criticism?
I more or less teethed on Pauline Kael growing up, because we subscribed to The New Yorker, so it was always around. She is not someone I necessarily agreed with about films, but that was when I first realized that agreement with readers should almost be irrelevant. What you really want is to enjoy the argument. I still read her before I go to bed sometimes. Another writer I certainly enjoyed was Kenneth Tynan. I liked his passion and the way he expressed his opinions. Moreover, I liked his wit, which rarely descended into preciousness.

You recently edited a collection of Times theater reviews from the past century. How was that?
It was great fun to go through that and sort of see how the critical voice had changed over the years. I developed a great respect for Brooks Atkinson, if for nothing else than for having held the job for as long as he did. I mean, he started off in the age of Show Boat and ended in the age of West Side Story and Waiting for Godot, and he kept his mind open. It was sort of a wonderful lesson to see that evolution. Frank Rich I enjoyed greatly long before I was at the Times, again for his passion and his polemical streak. He was able to generate excitement about the theater, which is something I think you ask of a critic of any discipline.

So what do you think of the “Butcher of Broadway” business?
I don’t really understand that. If you go back and look at it, he wasn’t really that harsh. I suppose there are a couple reviews that are much quoted that have assumed a kind of notorious afterlife, but I basically found that he was pretty measured. Anyone in our position, however, is going to get that epithet to some extent. The Times does have disproportionate power, which is a very different situation than in London. There, they not only have a much more active theater but also a far more active and wider pool of theater critics, making it impossible to respond to just one. But as far as Frank, I don’t really think that the epithet sticks. I think, by and large, that he was a great booster for the theater.

You acknowledge the power the Times critic has. Does that influence the way you look at a show? Is it in the back of your mind that you could influence ticket sales or the longevity of the show?
You can’t think in those terms. I realized that early on. You do have to be respectful, of course. That’s just the sort of style of the Times. You can’t just hurl abuse or gush unconditionally over something. As a critic, I do try to catch my most base instincts before they emerge. On the other hand, I don’t want to muzzle myself all together, because, if I do, who is going to read what I have to say? So I sort of try to strike a balance. I think I have a certain mindset going in that I am going to write within a certain tone, but beyond that, I can’t think of it.

Part of what’s fun about keeping up with different critics is this sort of incessant back-and-forth between certain ones. Why do you think theater critics, more than other critics, have this sort of interplay?
While you wouldn’t necessarily have this conversation about books, I think you might also see it with film. That’s because I think you have some of the same obsessions with film as with theater. Of course, with movie criticism, there is just so much more to be considered that I don’t think there is one particular work that captures the imagination to the same extent. With theater, I think that it does tend to attract fanatics for some reason. There are people who approach it as a religion. So when you have that level of engagement you are going to have pretty passionate discourse, which is not necessarily a bad thing. I am all for anything that generates interest.

Do you still find time to follow film?
Sure. I go to the movies. There hasn’t been a whole lot I have felt I had to see recently, but it is a pleasure now to watch films. It has become an indulgence. I can just turn off my internal assessment machine—although I imagine you don’t ever turn it off all together—but just to the point where I can enjoy something that is truly bad and not even think about it. I think that is one of the greatest luxuries there is.

Jennifer Baker is an editorial intern at mediabistro.com.

“Martha Stewart Admits to Crafting Own Scandal: ‘Whatever Helps Borowitz Sell Books,’ Says Embattled Battle Ax”

That faux-headline is an Andy Borowitzish joke. The humor writer and performer is just the sort to notice the actually-not-so-freaky-if-you-think-about-it coincidence of Stewart’s indictment and his brand-new book, Who Moved My Soap? The CEO’s Guide to Surviving in Prison, which went into a second printing only days after its June 6 publication. The villains in Who Moved My Soap? are only a subset of the usual suspects skewered on Borowitz’s news-satire website, The Borowitz Report, which he updates every weekday and emails to more than 50,000 subscribers. The other targets of his faux-newswire “Shockers:” politicians, entertainers, and sometimes—again, not so freaky if you think about it—both at once. (An April 28, 2003, headline: “BUSH: WAR, MADONNA OFFICIALLY OVER.”) You might also call Borowitz the CFO—chief funny officer, that is—of The New Yorker‘s “Shouts and Murmurs” column and The New York Times‘s op-ed page, which both frequently feature his higher-concept, freer-ranging satire. He’s also a frequent host of The Moth storytelling series in New York and a frequent guest in mb’s Humor Writing for Journalists classroom. On the phone with mediabistro.com from his Westchester home office recently, Borowitz discussed his craft and career, the word “gulag,” and his stint writing for The Facts of Life—and discovered, interestingly, that the last two are not unrelated.

When you e-mailed to confirm this interview, you said you were on a movie set with Julianne Moore. What?
Yeah—it’s a movie called Marie and Bruce, starring Matthew Broderick and Julianne Moore. I’ve never been in a movie before, so I really started at the top. I got a call from this legendary casting agent, Juliet Taylor, who happened to know of me, and I read for a number of roles and got the part of a boring guy named Jim at a party. So I hope it wasn’t typecasting. You know, I actually feel uncomfortable talking about it, because it’s so far afield from promoting my book.

Okay, your book. How’s it doing?
Well, it just came out, and it is already the No. 1 best-selling “penology” book on Amazon.com. “Penology,” as in the prison system—not what all that spam is about. I’m taking the penology world by storm—this is a hotly contested race, you know. And as we all know, as goes penology, so goes the New York Times bestseller list. Let’s see what the other titles are… coming in at No. 2, The Little Book of Restorative Justice—see, only a little book—No. 3 is Couldn’t Keep it To Myself, Testimonies of Our Imprisoned Sisters, and No. 4 is The Gulag Archipelago: 1918-1956. Solzhenitsyn is down at fucking fourth place! So it’s safe to say that my book is four times as popular as Solzhenitsyn. I’m trouncing the gulag. [At press time, things had shifted somewhat: Borowitz held the No. 2 spot on the “Crime and Criminals” list, behind Noam Chomsky.]

Why CEOs, and why now?
As a satirist, I am always looking for fair game. And CEOs have had so much fun at our expense, now it’s time for us to have fun at theirs. When writing my column, I found that whenever I wrote about Tyco or Enron I got a tremendous response from readers who’d say, “Go get ’em!” When you have millions of people who have lost their jobs or their life savings because of these guys, well, it’s not a natural topic for comedy; still, we can’t get our money back, but we can get our sense of humor back. Also, the reason the book is priced at a low $9.95 is because if you were a shareholder that may be all you have left.

How did you get to be, let’s call it, CFO—chief funny officer—of The New Yorker and the Times?
It’s an un-useful story, much along the lines of how I became a film star. I got a call about five years ago from Susan Morrison at The New Yorker, when she was starting to edit “Shouts and Murmurs.” She knew of my work as a tv producer—and she knew me from college, where I was president of The Harvard Lampoon—and thought I could possibly still write funny prose. She asked me to submit something, the very week that President Clinton was giving his deposition on the Monica Lewinsky case. I wrote a set of talking points for him—explanations about how the sperm got on her dress—that got more and more contrived as they went along. That piece kind of got the ball rolling. In general, The New Yorker is a wonderful place for a humorist to write—it’s a place that gets the references that others don’t. For example, last summer I did an advice column as if written by Catherine Millet, author of The Sexual Life of Catherine M. Most magazines don’t have a readership that will get that joke.

Speaking of references that everyone gets, didn’t you use to work for The Facts of Life?
Yes. After leaving the Lampoon—that is, college—in 1980, I went to Hollywood to work for a producer named Bud Yorkin, who was Norman Lear’s partner. So my first job was actually working for All in the Family. I have to say, Carroll O’Connor wielded power on that show equivalent to Saddam in Baghdad: He was a despot on that set. I lived in fear, but it was an interesting hazing into that world. In fact, I wound up writing for television for 15 years. I may be best remembered, as they say, for creating The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, which ran from 1990 to 1996. Safe to say I’m the only person who has both written for The New Yorker and created a sitcom for a rapper.

Right. Now, about The Facts of Life.
That was the worst year of my professional life. I was so not the CFO. I may have been the worst writer in the history of that show. I went there after writing for a pretty funny show about teen girls called Square Pegs, starring Sarah Jessica Parker. The same company said, “Come apply your hip, edgy sensibility to The Facts of Life.” I mean, I was 24 and I listened to The Clash and they thought I could spice up the girls at Langley with my “sensibility.” But it turned out I was a dismal failure. I was such a disappointment to everyone. They never wanted to use my jokes. We once did a dream sequence where in the future, Jo is a high-powered business woman. I did a scene where she’s on the phone negotiating a deal with Mr. Spacely of Spacely Sprockets, insisting that she would only deal directly with George Jetson. After that I was confined to projects like proofreading, where I couldn’t do much harm—the show’s equivalent of Outer Siberia. A gulag, really. That said, there could still be some payoff. I’m talking to Comedy Central about doing a monologue about my stint at The Facts of Life. And, honestly, every woman your age wants me to talk about it. You all watched it religiously, and I don’t know why; it was like crack. If I were single I’d go to bars and try to work Tootie and Natalie into the conversation.

A real fact of life: What do you think it takes for someone to be truly funny?
A funny person sees patterns in the world around us that other people might not see but will recognize once pointed out to them. It’s like that scene in A Beautiful Mind where Russell Crowe tells Jennifer Connelly that if she names an object he can look up into the night sky and connect the stars to find that shape. Likewise, the best comedy comes not from rearranging the stars—it comes from simply pointing out patterns that are already there. That’s why the best compliment a humorist can get is when someone says, “I should have thought of that.”

Still, it must be hard to get up and make yourself see those patterns every day. How do you do it?
First of all, if you really are just looking for what’s already there, that’s much easier than laboring to manipulate the truth. I just try to look at the reality and put a different light on it, even just exaggerate it—by 1.3 percent, as Jim Bouton, the former Yankees pitcher, once said. In other words, describing Rumsfeld as cackling manically over a spinning globe really isn’t that much of a stretch. Also, yes, people do wonder, what do you do when you can’t feel funny every day? The answer is that there are days when I don’t feel happy, but there’s a big distinction. You can feel unhappy or lonely or depressed—just from reading the news—and still manage to write something funny.

How can you—how can one, that is—make fun of such terrible situations?
Some things that some people find funny—suicide bombings, innocent people killed—I guess it’s an issue of taste, but I just don’t feel in my gut there can possibly be anything funny there. The Israeli-Palestinian situation, for example, has been such a sad story for everyone that the only thing I can make fun of is when the politicians get involved and do silly things. For me, just the term “road map” is so overused. That becomes funny divorced from the situation, as in, let’s say, the notion of Bush having a difficult time refolding the road map. Of course, what jokes like that are really pointing to is how incredibly complicated and intractable all these people and situations are—which is what makes the “road map” fairly meaningless, and fair game, in the first place.

Honestly, when we were at war, it was easier for me to write. Something surreal was happening every day, like the fall of the statue. And let’s not forget the gift to comedy known as the Iraqi foreign minister. Whenever the politicians get involved and start using terms like “regime change” and “interim authority,” that’s when satire really wakes up. I mean, the Clinton years were so ludicrous in themselves that they actually became hard to satirize. The economy was good, we were relatively at peace—you had to dig more. When things seem their darkest satire can really flower. Not that I’m thrilled by bad news, but I did notice the difference in the response I was getting from readers. They’d say, “I’m so depressed, and this thing cheers me up!” I’m a little taken aback, but grateful. It makes me feel like I’m not wrecking their day with spam, but putting a smile on their faces.

Writer and comedian Lynn Harris teaches mediabistro.com’s Humor Writing for Journalists and is co-creator of Breakup Girl. Her comic novel, She-Business, is coming soon. You can buy Who Moved My Soap? The CEO’s Guide to Surviving in Prison at Amazon.com.

Since becoming editor-in-chief of the venerable Cosmopolitan in 1998, she has ramped up Hearst’s flagship to become the best-selling women’s magazine in the world. Before taking the reins at Cosmo, she was editor-in-chief of the more staid Redbook, and she’s worked at Glamour, Child, and Working Woman. But Kate White, a lifelong fan of Nancy Drew and all other things mysterious, has always had other things in mind. Her second mystery novel, A Body to Die For, was published last week, following quickly on the stiletto heels of her debut effort, If Looks Could Kill, a critical success that was the first pick of Kelly Ripa’s Book Club. Proving the genre has moved beyond dense fogs on cobblestone streets, White’s latest—which brings back her heroine, the true-crime reporter Bailey Weggins—is set in Berkshire spa, and it features not only a murder but even greater scares, like New Age music and essential oils. White spoke to mediabistro.com just the other day from her midtown Manhattan office, discussing pregnant pauses, killer titles, and mud wraps.

I’ve heard of mysteries set in camping grounds and old abbeys, but a spa?
To get an idea for the second one, sort of as I was winding down the first, I booked a facial and a massage. I thought, Maybe if I’m just really mellow, it will help open my mind to something. And literally as I was lying there waiting for the facial, I looked over on the tray where there were all these instruments, and I realized, God, you could kill somebody with one of those.

What’s your method for plotting these? Do you work them out beforehand?
I knew for years I wanted to write mysteries, so one day I went over to The Mysterious Bookshop and bought eleven books on how to write a mystery. As I was leaving, I knew they were probably thinking, That poor loser wearing a business suit, she’s not going to be able to pull this off. But one of the things that I’ve read in a couple of places is that you don’t want to box yourself in by not knowing who the killer is. I do think there are probably people who don’t know, but for the most part, I think it’s better if you really plot it out. That also allows you to disguise the killer. You want to trick your reader into thinking someone else might have done it, maybe someone Bailey isn’t even considering.

I know this will be a spoiler for people reading this interview, but I really had a moment when Danny [Bailey’s mother figure] had that mud on her arms.
A friend of mine called me last night and said, “I’m nervous—I don’t want Danny to be it, but there’s just something about her smelling of sandalwood, I think that’s going to come back.” You try to do little suggestive things like that that make your reader say, OK, that’s important, that right there. If you don’t know where you’re going, it’s hard to lay those little seeds.

What I do for each book—I’m on the third one now—is just buy a little notebook that I keep in my tote bag. Not only do I have pages for each chapter as I plot them out, but I also ask myself a question each day, like, how would Bailey know that wasn’t the right thing to choose at that moment? Then, during the course of the day, you’ll see something and say, I’m going to work that in. Having it with me is also good, so if I’m sitting on an airplane—

Just like Bailey has her reporter’s notebook.
Yes. You know, I hate composition books, but I didn’t want to make her exactly like me. It’s kind of an interesting exercise to make the person not like you and give her things you’d never do. And a friend of mine loves composition books, and I don’t.

Did you have the titles for these banging around in your head before you’d written the actual books?
I got the titles fairly early, and I think that helped, I really do. Probably there’s millions of books written that have a title that they got at the last minute, but I got If Looks Could Kill very early, then A Body to Die For, and the next one, which is at a wedding, is called, Here Comes The Corpse.

Speaking of that, can you tell us the setting of the next one? Does it take place at the wedding?
Well, the wedding has already happened, and Bailey was a bridesmaid. Two of the bridesmaids have died accidentally. She’s just concerned—was it just a weird cluster, or is there something going on? So part of it is to go back over that ground again. There’s lots of wedding stuff in there because she’s going back to the place and dealing with the bride.

Does it feel different, writing fiction versus editing the magazine? Do you feel they come from the same part of yourself, or totally different places?
I would say two different places, although sometimes I’ll hear something funny at Cosmo—there’s a couple of funny things I put in the third book that people here said. And because Bailey’s in her 30s and we talk to women in their 20s and 30s, I might use the same words that I might even put in a cover line. But I think Bailey’s definitely got a different attitude: It is a different voice than Cosmo, much more wisecracking and sarcastic. I could have made an attempt to write some romance or something, but for me, I think I enjoy the edgier thing myself. It was a nice way to do it when it’s not something I would do on the job.

There’s a lot of back-and-forth in the book with officers taking notes and then Bailey taking notes. Do you feel there is a natural affinity between the detective and the reporter?
There’s that line in All The King’s Men, this updated version, where Jack opens that envelope because “the end of man is to know.” But it’s the idea of trying to figure out the truth and solve the mystery. Part of me always wanted to be a writer and reporter, but as you know, if you’re writing and you’re at a magazine, you hit a point where you can’t go higher on the masthead. I actually did some reporting pieces when I was at Glamour, and one of the stories that I loved doing was where I went undercover to a modeling agency. It was one of those moments where you realize, Wow, I’m finding out some information about how they do business here, and it’s not kosher. Maybe, in the end, the piece I did kept certain girls from going to modeling schools and getting ripped off—not that all modeling schools are bad, but the ones that tell you when you’re 5’1″ that you’re going to be the next Giselle.

Bailey is sometimes a little unscrupulous—I shouldn’t say that—creative in her methods of getting information. Have you ever used “creative” methods to get info for your own stories?
I just tried to put myself in Bailey’s shoes and say, What if I needed to get this, and there was no way to get it by being totally straight. What little white lie would I tell?

I particularly loved the creation of the Connecticut Teacher’s Association magazine, because it sounds so real.
I think Bailey also often realizes that just being straightforward is going to do it, too. One of the things you discover working in magazines is that people want to talk about themselves. One of the reporters I asked about eliciting information also pointed out that people are not as hard to get to open up as you would think.

It’s funny you say that, because I’ve heard detectives saying the problem with confessions usually isn’t getting them, it’s having enough tape to record the whole thing.
A very famous reporter I interviewed the other day said the trick is mostly just to seem somewhat empathetic. Ron Rosenbaum told me a great thing, too—he said he’d actually learned this from Helen Gurley Brown [founding editor of Cosmo]—the “pregnant pause.” You just wait, and all of a sudden they rush to fill it.

There’ve been a lot of thinly veiled tell-alls by magazine staffers lately. What do you think of the trend?
Since I didn’t know it was going to be a trend, I was glad I got in there early in the game so it didn’t seem like, Oh, one more book like that. I read The Devil Wears Prada—or, I skimmed it—and there was that Kate Hudson movie that was totally based on Cosmo. They even used a bunch of our cover lines.

How do you feel when you find yourself lifted into a fictional atmosphere by someone other than yourself?
For Cosmo, it’s great: We’re going to be in Legally Blonde II and Charlie’s Angels this year. We’re losing our icon status if that’s not happening all the time, so I’m glad that it is happening all the time.

What are you reading right now?
Well, I just read Shutter Island—I liked it, though it’s not a classic mystery. I’m reading Atonement—I’m a little behind reading that; I lost my hardcover the day I started. I’m also reading a new mystery by a woman, called The Bleak Midwinter. A lot of times, I’m so addicted, I’m just shoveling then down. I’ll probably start the new Michael Connelly this weekend.

Last question. In your research, did you find any favorite spas or favorite treatments to recommend?
Well, first of all, I love the hot stone. There’s something really so intriguing and almost erotic about it. As for favorite spas, I have to say, the one that opened up near my home on Third Avenue, Ajune. I stop in sometimes on my way home, and the beauty is that it’s not going out of my way. I used to think my family didn’t know, but my hair’s real greasy when I come home, so they’re like, “Busted!”

Lizzie Skurnick, a frequent contributor to mediabistro.com, is a writer living in Baltimore. A Body to Die For is published by Warner Books and available at Amazon.com.

In October 2001, when a key financial backer pulled out, Lingua Franca, the venerated—and mercifully jargon-free—magazine of academia, closed its doors forever. Helming the fallen mag for its last seven years was Alex Star, who had brought succor to grad-school dropouts everywhere with his incisive and cogent dispatches from the Ivory Tower. The fall of this celebrated magazine of intellectual life occasioned an enormous hue and cry, particularly from The New York Observer‘s Ron Rosenbaum, whose long and tormented paean declared, “Lingua Franca had been an absolutely invaluable and highly influential resource, searching out the genuinely important controversies over ideas emerging from the academic world.”

Star, who grew up in Cambridge and went to Harvard, got his start as an editor after teaching history for a year at his alma mater, Boston’s Commonwealth High School. He worked first at The New Republic, as an assistant literary editor under Leon Wieseltier, and he soon carved out a niche for himself as a journalist and editor who could make news of the world of ideas. Since the fall of 2002, Star’s weekly “Ideas” section at The Boston Globe has emerged to fill the hole LF left, featuring both controversial and recondite news and analyses, including the work of powerhouses such as geneticist Steven Pinker, essayist Michael Berube, and the excellent staff writer Laura Secor. Almost a year into his tenure, Star talked to mediabistro.com recently about mags versus newspapers, African vistas, and not going to grad school.

For readers who have never seen the “Ideas” section, how do you describe it?
On the one hand, the section is trying to provide depth and perspective on important issues by trying to get the insights of academics and people who think on a conceptual level, not just the level of, “What happened?”—as important as that is. You know: Does the fall of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad remind us of the revolutions of 1989, or doesn’t it? But the second goal, which is a little bit different, is to assume that what goes on in academia and in the intellectual world is itself news, even if it’s not always seen that way. And to find ways to dip in there and tell stories and present things from that world people might otherwise miss.

I feel like you bring academia to the people who are interested but don’t necessarily want to read 300 books a year. To what do you attribute your profound interest in academia?
I think a lot of it has to do with how my generation was sort of tempted by graduate school, but was also somewhat disenchanted by both the horror of the academic job market and some of the dominant trends in certain departments. I think that I probably would never have pursued this kind of life if it hadn’t been for the existence of institutions as different as the books section of The New Republic and Lingua Franca itself. They both set different but stimulating models for how one can take academic evidence, argumentation, obsession, and turn it into kinds of writing that are not strictly what we once used in an academic journal, and reach a small but really highly receptive audience.

Did you consider going to grad school yourself?
Eventually, yeah. But I didn’t have it very clear. I actually filled out applications to American history programs. But I held back in part because I really liked working at The New Republic and I had the opportunity to stay there a couple years, and in part because, when I actually sat down to think about how to write an application essay on what I would really want to study and write a dissertation on, I had a hard time finding the thing that I thought was fulfilling.

Can you describe the fallout from that final period at Lingua Franca—both what you were thinking and what you did? Try to be as emotionally distraught as possible.
Well, after 12 years, it was a sad thing for the magazine and for all of us who worked there. Hopefully it was a sad thing for the readers, though I can’t say for sure. I’d been working every day of my life in a magazine office for 12 years, so having a little time to do something else was not horrible, and I can’t say it was a period of utter despair. But I called a friend of mine who lost her job and said, “What do you when you’re not on a job? I suppose you spend a third of your time anxiously figuring out what you might do next, a third of your time working on some project of your own that you’re not quite finishing, and a third of your time just doing nothing.” And she said, “Yeah, that’s about right.”

The main thing that occupied my time in that period was editing the anthology of Lingua Franca, called Quick Studies. I really got to spend several months looking back over the history of the magazine, writing an introduction, giving my own sort of history of what the magazine was about, and what was going on in academia in the ’90s. Getting to sort of re-experience the whole history of the magazine rather than just forgetting about it—as a form of mourning, it was highly effective.

The bankruptcy proceedings eventually resulted in The Chronicle of Higher Education purchasing one of the properties that Lingua Franca owned, the Arts & Letters Daily website. It’s a great site, and actually I think they’re doing a superb job of continuing it and managing it, so I’m really happy about that.

It’s like a living shrine, now, that you have. Now, let’s talk about the “Ideas” section. First of all, how did it come into being?
It was something that the people at the Globe had been conceptualizing for a couple of years. They’d even put together a task force and done a prototype. The head of that task force was a guy named Peter Canellos, and he’s sort of the instrumental person of the narrative. But first, in January, I went with my family to Africa for about three weeks, to South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Botswana. We were doing various tourist-y things, but between Cape Town and game parks, and just traveling through cities and talking to people, it was certainly the most interesting trip I’ve ever had. It probably helped bring some closure to the Lingua Franca experience.

How did game parks and striking vistas provide the closure?
You really feel you’re about as far from New York City as you could possibly get. Inevitably, that makes you think about things that are more timeless than even the most profound academic disputes. And the place is just so fascinating on its own terms that it’s hard not to want to go back. It drives you out of the things you’re thinking about when you’re wandering around Brooklyn.

Now, coming back to the “Ideas” section. How did this job come about?
I got back, and there was a voicemail on my machine in Brooklyn from Peter. He was looking around for candidates for the “Ideas” editorship, and I’m sure my name had come up through various people. We probably had lunch a little while after that when he was down in New York, and that was the beginning of a process that led me to eventually taking the job, moving to Boston, and starting the section.

Now, I know there’s obviously you, and you’ve got a full-time writer, Laura Secor. Is that the only staff?
Oh, no, the staff size is really quite good. There’s a deputy editor named Jennie Schuessler—she came from The New York Review of Books, where she had been for quite a while. And then there’s Josh Glenn, who is also extremely involved. He writes a column and works half-time editing as well. He’s from Boston, and he’s the founder of a ‘zine called Hermenaut. It’s a very excellent philosophy ‘zine, for lack of a better phrase. So it’s really Josh, Jennie, Laura, and me who run the section week in and week out.

You have a lot of people from the academy writing for you. Do you find they are able to shift their style to write for a magazine or to write for a daily?
At Lingua Franca, I think, we had relatively few academic contributors. It’s sort of ironic—the closer what you’re doing is to your academic work, the harder it is to translate it into something for a different audience. But when academics set out to write for the “Ideas” section, they know they’re trying to think in a completely different way than if they were addressing their colleagues. And very often, you have people who can actually find a new voice and do something different that works.

You’ve been in the magazine business since before cell phones were everywhere and before everything was online. How would you say that’s changed what you’re doing?
I will emphasize that I do not own a cell phone. Whether other people’s cell phones have changed my life I would hazard to speculate. When I first moved to New York to work at Lingua Franca in December of ’94, I’d written a little bit about technology, but I had never actually been, for instance, on the World Wide Web. A friend of mine called and said, “Alex, you’ve got to come visit my office, I’m doing this book.” I went down to this cubicle in the back of an advertising company in the Flatiron district and he had two computers, a dictionary, all the back issues of Details magazine, and nothing else. And I said, “How are you managing to write your book here?” And he went on the web and said, “What’s the last record you were listening to?” I said Liz Phair or something, and he immediately went to this web page and found some student at Oberlin who had written down all of her lyrics and guitar chords and put them up. And I thought, This is incredible. But the impact of the web and email became much greater when I went to the Globe, because we’re on such fast deadlines. Rather than having a fact-checker sort of painstakingly go to the New York Public Library, you really end up just doing the fact-checking on the web as best you can.

I know you’re a weekly section, but how is it different working at the newspaper than at the magazine?
I refer you to a piece written about the differences between working at The Washington Post and The New Yorker, in which the writer said that at a magazine, people don’t always have a huge amount to do—obviously, sometimes they do—but the psychology of the place is to feel like you’re very busy, and if you try to talk to someone, they say, I’m too busy, go away. Whereas at newspapers, everyone has a lot to do, and is incredibly busy and always trying to meet the next deadline, but the culture of the place is to affect a certain easygoing repartee and joviality. The fact of the matter is that at newspapers, deadlines are so crushing that no one has any time to get upset or disturbed or fazed by the deadlines, so the result is, paradoxically, it’s much calmer.

Lizzie Skurnick is a writer living in Baltimore.