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.

From freelancer to essayist to novelist, Meghan Daum seems to have inadvertently walked into the “writer that defines a generation” role. Despite her best efforts, she managed to chronicle Generation X’s quirky exploits to a T in her first essay collection, 2001’s My Misspent Youth. Writing truthfully and hilariously about the hills and valleys of Gen-X’s many cultural enclaves (online chatters, communal polyamorists, band geeks), Daum garnered the most attention for the book’s title essay, a tale about her broken love affair with New York city and her subsequent move to Lincoln, Nebraska.

Two years later, she re-emerges with The Quality of Life Report, a fictional account of a New York reporter who, dejected, takes refuge in a small town in the Midwest. Though it may at first seem like a thin construct for autobiography, it quickly becomes a stark and (no surprise) hilarious send-up of media perception and a new twist on the old fish-out-of-water paradigm. Amid the bustle of her book tour, Daum spoke to mediabistro.com from San Francisco about her new book, Joan Didion, and Always maxi pads.

Tell me about the new book.
It’s about a television reporter named Lucinda Trout at one of these really cheesy morning-news talk shows in New York called New York Up Early. She is the lifestyle correspondent—who reports on really hard-hitting issues like thong underwear—and she comes up with all these gimmicks for her reports, like: “has sushi replaced sandwiches?” and “is 37 the new 26?” and “what happened to yogurt? It just went away. Nobody eats it anymore.” She has this really tyrannical, bipolar, freakish boss, so basically Lucinda gets so run down that she’s goes to this town called Prairie City—that she discovered while on another journalism assignment—to create a series for New York Up Early called the “Quality of Life Report,” designed to tap into New Yorkers’ escape fantasies. She’s going to supposedly live this very simple, rural, idyllic life and report back to New Yorkers about how great it is. Inevitably, the more romantic she tries to make it seem the less romantic it becomes. In the meantime she meets an assortment of decidedly unsimple people in Prairie City. She ends up moving in with this guy named Mason, who’s an eccentric, woodsman type, and things really just start to unravel shortly after that. Thematically, for me, it’s a story about how she’s kind of looking for this “authentic life,” and being authentic, she finds, is really about messing up and making mistakes, in a way that she was unable to do in New York.

There are some themes that pop up in this novel that were also dealt with in My Misspent Youth. You mentioned in the preface to MMY that the undercurrent of the essays was a conflict of “what you thought would be” versus “what is.” You revisit that theme in the novel, and I’m curious what avenues you were able to take with the novel that you weren’t able to with the essays.
That’s a good question. I think most writers have at least one or two themes that they keep circling around throughout their careers, and for me it is the idea of how the trappings of existing in the world kind of overwhelm your actual existence, and how aesthetics become the main concern of our lives, the way things look against the way things really are. What I wanted to do here was keep a couple balls in the air, and I saw the novel as the best way to do that. I was really interested in this idea of the whole simplicity movement, which was big few years back. Personally, I moved to Nebraska, and the things in this book that I took from my own experience had to do with being asked over and over again by different magazines to write about “my newfound simple life.” I would write these things, and I was happy to do it, but I felt a little bit hypocritical because my life wasn’t very simple at all. It’s very complicated to change your life and try to uproot yourself and customize your life in that kind of way. I wanted to create a character who has a much more extreme and dramatic way of having that happen to her. So that was one thing I was working with. The second was a media critique, which I think this novel is.

Speaking of media critiques, you also seem to revisit that in both your essays and your fiction. As a media person yourself—you do a lot of freelancing—how does that impact your work?
I wanted to have a book that was set in the Midwest, to have a setting that would be rooted in a perception we see on television and in movies and certain books of the Midwestern, cowboy type. In the book, I don’t think the characters are stereotypes at all; I was really careful as a journalist. When I was in New York, one of the reasons I left was because I found myself becoming one of those New York provincials in a certain way. The irony of the media and people in big cities is that they’re charged with defining the entire culture, when in reality they don’t even live in that culture. They live in such a rarified, tiny world. I always thought that whatever myself and my five best friends were thinking about was what everybody in the world was thinking about. It’s a joke in the book, but I probably did think at one point that no one wore gold jewelry anymore. I was becoming one of those people. I certainly wasn’t as bad as Lucinda or anybody in the book, but I think it’s a real danger, and as a writer and as a person it was healthy for me to get out of that.

Your work also has this lament about the state of publishing and the media. What do you think of the current trend of these tell-all media books, How to Lose Friends and Alienate People and the like?
That’s a great title, and I did buy the book. I think whatever generation you’re in has a nostalgia for the generations past and the generations you weren’t in. I always lamented that I wasn’t a writer during the late ’60s and the early ’70s, with the New Journalism and Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson and all those people. But I’m sure that they had their complaints that things weren’t the way they were 30 years earlier, before them. So that’s just part of being alive, is a kind of nostalgia for a past that you never knew.

It seems like a very “in” thing now to publish a tell-all book about you time spent at a beauty magazine or a men’s magazine, or whatever. A lot of your writing has a similar sentiment, but it doesn’t come across as spiteful.
I hope not. There are three steps in the essays—and this is why I make a really clear distinction in my work between memoir and essay; I’m an essayist not a memoirist. In the context of the essays, I’m not confessing, and I’m really never moved to write anything unless I felt that it would transcend my own experience in the culture and have a certain idea behind it. In “My Misspent Youth,” that was of course my own experience, but I also think that a lot of people have similar feelings about New York. That might be why it resonated. But for me, in that essay I was just revisiting the same themes from The House of Mirth; it was an answer to Edith Wharton. It’s more fun and challenging for me to try and operate on a bunch of different levels rather than just writing something like, “I walked into the offices of so-and-so magazine, and, boy, did I have the wrong skirt on.”

It’s funny you say that essay was an answer to Edith Wharton; a lot of people have said it closely resembles Joan Didion’s “Goodbye to All That.” How do you feel about being compared to Didion?
It’s incredibly flattering. I think that a lot of young woman writers get compared to Joan Didion, almost in the same way that many young singer/songwriters get compared to Joni Mitchell. I think it’s unavoidable. Joan Didion had a really original and unique voice, and in my mind what I take from her is the sound of her work; the rhythm and tonality of the way she writes. As far as content, she wrote a lot about politics, and many people get compared to her whose subject matter bears no resemblance to hers. I really think it’s the tone. And I’m not the only one who gets compared to her. Joan Didion changed the sound of non-fiction, and that is a really important thing that’s had a pretty expansive influence.

In “My Misspent Youth,” you wrote that you had graduated in what was being called “the worst job market in 20 years.” That was in 1992. A decade later, the prospects for hopeful media professionals are not that different. Any tips?
I always tell writers that it’s good to have an area of expertise. Its’ a really practical answer, I know, but know about science, or about sports, or about medicine so you can work as a science writer or a sports writer. Don’t just know about yourself. And that’s a very “do as I say, not as I do” answer. I wish that I had a deeper knowledge about more things; then I could be a nature writer or something. Unfortunately, I’m just so bad at everything else that I had to fall back on writing. And I worked so many temp jobs. I had some of the most hilarious gigs as a freelancer.

Like what?
I wrote for the Always maxi pad website. I did that for almost two years, I think. It didn’t have anything to do with the product. They had a website, and they wanted it to be like a newsmagazine, so every month they had a feature like “getting in shape for the summer,” or “mothers and daughters bonding.” And one time they wanted an interview with a woman who was giving back to her community in a way that was related to the topic. So the best and most humiliating part of the job was that I would have to research somebody in some random city, like someone in Tampa who is doing free aerobics in the park or something, then call her and say, “Would you like to be featured on the Always maxi pad website?” And they always said yes. So I guess just hang in there is what I would tell people.

And the cheesy last question: What’s the quality of life report for Meghan Daum?
It’s good. It’s great. I can’t complain.

Mike Scalise is an editor and freelance writer living in Brooklyn. You can read an excerpt from The Quality of Life Report here.