Wired Blog Network
from Opinionistas.com & Freakonomics.com/blog
We promised you news, and now we've got it: ETP's own Melissa Lafsky is the new Freakonomics site editor. Yes. She's supa-freaky!
Lafsky was recently hired by Freaknomics authors Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, hereinafter to be collectively known as "The Steves," to run the website, which will be ramping up sort of the way violent crime decreases in relation to the abortion rate. Lafsky will be writing and editing content, assisting with upcoming plans for video, recruiting and managing guest-posters (look for more smarty-pants contributions from economists, authors and assorted eggheads in the near future) and managing all user-generated content, plus dealing with "any and all other Freakonomic duties that arise." That is sort of awesome as an adjective.
Said Dubner: "We're pleased to welcome Melissa Lafsky as our new website editor. The site is is slowly but surely expanding, and we've brought Melissa on in anticipation of even bigger changes to follow." I guess that means that she's all right, she's all right, she's all right, by Steves. Yeaaaaaaaah.
We couldn't be more excited for our dear friend and colleague — she's a very special girl, and we look forward to seeing what fun things she cooks up over there with her new freaky friends!
Freakonomics Blog [Freakonomics]
Related:
Rick James: Superfreak [YouTube]
The New York Times
Happy Thursday, everyone! There's no better time than now to dig into some Thursday Styles! And, really, people...drink deeply. Savor each morsel. Because you never know when Rupert Murdoch will set his sights on devouring your favorite mid-mid-week Times features as well. MURDOCH HUNGERS! This week, Tom Ford confounds, '80s retreads frighten, James Bond inspires, and we're all apparently getting more and more alienated from our children with every passing hour.
by Glynnis MacNicol
ETP was thrilled to attend this week's Ellies, the magazine world's annual awards ceremony honoring their very best, depending on who you ask and how bitter they're feeling. By now, you have been under a rock if you don't know that New York magazine positively dominated — an accomplishment that seems, sort of unfairly, to have been taken as an aspersion cast on the New Yorker, which led the field with an impressive nine nominations but was roundly shut out ("round" as in "zero"). New York beat out the New Yorker in only one category — they were only pitted against each other in two — so, hey, it seems a tad churlish to beat up on poor David Remnick. Call us Polyannish, but we think the New Yorker should still feel pretty good about the work that was honored, as should all of the other pubs. Hell, we do - we got a great night of dress-up and free champagne out of it! (Which may go towards explaining why this is a day late, but hey, if we learned nothing else from the Ellies we learned that excellence matters.) Either way, below you'll find our takeaway — the various collected observations, meanderings, and scary Anna Wintour run-ins, straight from our spectacular, panoramic, best-seat-in-the-house vantage point, with a perfect view of the top of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists people's heads. Enjoy!
We admit it: We were excited for the Ellies. EX-CI-TED! Awards shows are FUN and it's even more fun to see normally be-jeaned editors/publishers/groupies dressed up in tuxes and gowns, mixing and mingling across genres and functions from Glamour to Salt Water Sportsman to editors, writers, designers and the "business people" who are so sweetly tolerated. Indeed, we may even have been a bit intimidated but we shouldn't have been; this was, after all, the Ellies of the Underdog, where Departures beat Newsweek and The Paris Review won for Photojournalism of all things, and yes, the New Yorker won nothing and New York won everything and "Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists" was on everybody's lips, even if they couldn't say it ten times fast.
For us, that theme started at the top of the night when our dallying before the show paid of unexpectedly in a rare Anna Wintour sighting (yep, she was there). Looking positively emaciated (hot!), bobbed to knife-edge perfection, and with a touch of fur about her shoulders, she stood alone, left briefly by someone in a dark suit — no doubt hoping we'd bust on up to her and ask for a photo, to which she said "Great" in a way that could only mean "Please go away."
We got out of her way, and began the long trek up to the very top-est, very back-est, very nose-bleed-est seats in the house: Right Balcony, Row E. Clearly the Magazine Powers That Be wanted us to be able to catch ALL of the action. And catch it we did, especially after realizing that the seating chart put various winners from - hmm, how to say this? - lesser-known publications up near us (btw "lesser known" apparently includes The Paris Review, as somewhere, George Plimpton slowly spins). One could almost judge the ASME's respect for the pub relative to how long it took the editor in chief to get to the stage: Graydon Carter was up there before they even finished reading the name of his mag. They'd get to "Vanity" and he was at the podium, just hanging out, waiting, while the guy from Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists might as well have taken a cab to the stage, then tried to expense it, but felt too guilty and just paid out of his own pocket. Come on, ASME — tell us what you really think!
Examiner
The Examiner is reporting today that tomorrow's 20/20 special report on "DC Madam" Deborah Jeane Palfrey will fall short of living up to the hype that has preceded it, stating: "...the show is likely to disappoint viewers eager to see a roster of VIPs who patronized Palfrey's escort service." Viewers are expected to get a pair of new names in a slim seven-minute report "at the end of the hour-long broadcast." Reporter Brian Ross is said to be "none too happy with the final results."
Is it surprising, though? When Palfrey stood before the cameras this week (looking reminiscent of Battlestar Galactica's Laura Roslin, except, you know..."dirrty"), she laid out a defense strategy that seemed to rely heavily on her clients being willing to step forward and provide exculpatory evidence that hers was not, in fact, a prostitution ring. She tsk-tsked former Deputy Secretary of State Randall Tobias, as if it constituted an assault on her delicate sensibilities, for his failure to come forward on his own and offer evidence that her escorts simply made appointments to, like, hang out and play mahjongg.
And yet, by hanging Tobias out as an example and making weighty references to the enormous expense of her defense, one couldn't help but wonder that something specifically subtextual was happening between the lines. Is it too radical to suggest that, in putting cameras on her, the media unwittingly abetted a quiet shakedown of her client roster? As in: Pony up some scratch or get dragged through the muck? It would go a long way in explaining why the promise of salacious details will presumably be deferred.
RELATED:
Yeas and Nays: ABC to tread lightly with D.C. madam [Examiner]
D.C. Madam Report Won't Live Up To Hype? [TV Newser]
Fox News personality Bill O'Reilly, for whom the mere existence of pre-eclampsia and ectopic pregnancies constitutes "spin", is many things--mainly an idle millionaire teevee celebrity who won't stop complaining ever. Nevertheless, O'Reilly can take pride in the fact that he has apparently set a new standard. And we're using the loosest possible definition of "standard."
An Indiana University study has found that O'Reilly uses derogatory language once every 6.8 seconds. That's nine instances each minute! And that does not include the moments where he sighs disdainfully or merely affects a pained expression. No, no: those are value adds, and, taken as a whole, make the average phone message from Alec Baldwin look like a gauzy Hallmark card by comparison. As Mike Conway, assistant professor of journalism at IU states: O'Reilly is "...very big into calling people names, and he's very big into glittering generalities."
Wha-huh? They glitter? Uhm...o-kay. It should be noted that these findings are related only to the "Talking Points Memo" of the show, but even still, his frequency of disparagement is a full-tilt fusillade of effete scorn. And IU has got, like, CHARTS AND GRAPHS to prove it. And if you need to find a "downfall of Western civilization" angle, here it is: "A 2005 Annenberg Public Policy Center survey found that while 30 percent of Americans viewed Washington Post and Watergate reporter Bob Woodward as a journalist, 40 percent of respondents considered O'Reilly to be a journalist."
"He's not very subtle," added Conway, angling to get his research cross-published in the Quarterly Journal of the Totally Freaking Obvious.
RELATED:
Commentator uses name-calling more than once every seven seconds in 'Talking Points Memo' [Indiana University Media Relations]
Courtesy of Time
Lists! Magazines love 'em, and The Time 100 is a biggie. Today it is released, as the mag runs down its unabashedly arbitrary list of the Most Influential People in the World, including people like Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Condoleeza Rice, Elizabeth Edwards (but not John - eep!), Rosie O'Donnell, Angelina Jolie, Leo DiCaprio, abortive LAT culture editor Brian Grazer, non-abortive SC Chief Justice John Roberts, the Big O's (Oprah and Obama), Justin Timberlake, Tina Fey, Brian Williams, Michael J. Fox, General David Petraeus, Steve Jobs and Georges Clooney and Soros.
One George did not make the cut: George Bush. No, this was the year the nation's president was edged out by Sacha Baron Cohen, Simon Fuller, Tyra Banks, the guy who created "Lonelygirl 15," the YouTube guys (but not the Google guys!) and, it should be said, Osama bin Laden. (And, it should also be said, Al Gore.) It makes sense: The nation has been abuzz with Tyra Banks' veto of the recent Congressional bill to withdraw troops from Iraq. Damn you and your careless abuse of power, Tyra!
The mag is on sale tomorrow, and online now. Full list of winners after the jump!
nytimes.com
