Louis Menand, writing in The New Yorker about yet another memoir by Dick Cavett, recalls the time that Norman Mailer showed up drunk.

As any sort of intellectual exchange, the show was a disaster. But it was great television. It gave viewers what they want from a talk show: the sense that anything might happen.

Elsewhere in the current issue, David Denby complains that Becky Fuller, the news producer played by Rachel McAdams in Morning Glory, “doesn’t do anything worth doing,” and, indeed, as we recall, Becky makes strenuous efforts to prevent her new co-anchor from showing up drunk.

Good luck with that, says David Carr, writing about “Beastweek” and proffering a list of people (all men) who made it possible for Tina Brown to take on a great new business challenge. (NYT)

The list of people who turned down the job of reviving Newsweek reads like the reservation list of Michael’s restaurant in Midtown on a very busy day.

The people who said no before Ms. Brown said yes are said by at least two people involved in the process to include (in no particular order): Peter Kaplan, former editor of The New York Observer and now at Women’s Wear Daily; Josh Tyrangiel, formerly of Time Inc. and now at Bloomberg Businessweek; Kurt Andersen, the founder of Spy and the former editor of New York magazine; Adam Moss, the current editor of New York; Jim Kelly, the former editor of Time magazine; Jacob Weisberg, chairman and editor in chief of the Slate Group; Fareed Zakaria, a former Newsweek luminary now at Time and CNN; and Andrew Sullivan, the blogger and former editor of The New Republic.

Dwight Garner, on Sam Irvin’s biography of Eloïse creator Kay Thompson:

The tra-la-la is woven into the voice that Mr. Irvin, a veteran film and television director and producer, has concocted for his book, a voice that seems to have been stolen from the trade magazine Daily Variety about 1947. In “Kay Thompson” people don’t leave jobs, they’re seen “ankling” them. They’re not fired, they’re “eighty-sixed.” They’re not tricked but “bamboozled.”

A lover is a “boudoir companion”; the record industry is the “platter biz”; piano playing is “tinkling ivories”; clubs are “niteries”; executives are either “grand poo-bahs” or “muckety-mucks.” Oh, mama. As the gossip columnist J. J. Hunsecker is told in “The Sweet Smell of Success,” “You’ve got more twists than a barrel of pretzels.” Reading “Kay Thompson” is like running a cheese grater across your central nervous system.

The jobless recovery at a glance. (Nick Bunkley in the Times)

Three years ago, G.M. needed to sell nearly four million vehicles a year in the United States to break even, but today, it can be profitable at roughly half that sales volume, Mr. Liddell said in the video. Hourly labor costs have been cut by more than two-thirds, to $5 billion, from $16 billion in 2005, he said.

The Kaplan College imbroglio reminds us that the management of a for-profit corporation that sets out to turn a buck on human enrichment will inevitably discover that there is more profit to be made in turning their back on it. (NYT)

But many current and former Kaplan employees and students — including those, like Mr. Wratten, not involved in the lawsuits — said in interviews that they believed the company was concerned most with getting students’ financial aid, and that Kaplan’s fast-growing revenues were based on recruiting students whose chances of succeeding were low.

They cite, for example, a training manual used by recruiters in Pittsburgh whose “profile” of Kaplan students listed markers like low self-esteem, reliance on public assistance, being fired, laid off, incarcerated, or physically or mentally abused.

Melissa Mack, a Kaplan spokeswoman, said the manual had not been used since 2006.

Barry Obama’s childhood pals remember when. (NYT)

One time, recalled the elder son, Slamet Januadi, now 52, Mr. Obama asked a group of boys whether they wanted to grow up to be president, a soldier or a businessman. A president would own nothing while a soldier would possess weapons and a businessmen would have money, the young Obama explained.

Mr. Januadi and his younger brother, both of whom later joined the Indonesian military, said they wanted to become soldiers. Another boy, a future banker, said he would become a businessman.

“Then Barry said he would become president and order the soldier to guard him and the businessman to use his money to build him something,” Mr. Januadi said. “We told him, ‘You cheated. You didn’t give us those details.’ ”

Congressman-elect Nan Hayworth, a graduate of Princeton and Cornell Medical College, demonstrates the bankruptcy of higher education in America.

Are we perfect? No. But we are the greatest nation ever to exist. I do believe in American exceptionalism with all my heart, and that’s why I ran, because American exceptionalism comes from free enterprise.

Why we worship and adore Jenny Diski:

Somewhere in their teens or early twenties just about everyone discovers the inter-connectedness of things material and metaphysical, and tells anyone who’ll listen about the rose window at Chartres and the orbits of Venus and how they’re almost exactly the same, and about homeostasis and the amazing balance between the alpha rhythms of the brain and the tides, and how prehistoric peoples conserved and limited their eco-footprint while drawing rose-like patterns in stone, and that everything is everything, and everything is in that oceanic mystic moment when, just before the curtain closes again, you can see precisely how it all fits together. I know about all that and it’s lovely. But then, for those of us who don’t have our toothpaste squeezed onto our toothbrush each night, there’s the business of regular life, of time and consequence, and of how actually to live in and deal with our own particular sector of the oneness.

The context of these remarks (most amusing) really doesn’t matter.

Carl Paladino conceded the New York gubernatorial election with characteristic aplomb. (via Joe.My.God)

Eventually, he addressed Cuomo, saying he had called his Democratic opponent to concede. “I offer Mr. Cuomo my best wishes for him in his work as New York State’s next governor,” he said.

Then Paladino brought out a baseball bat, reminding the audience of the one he said he’d bring to Albany if elected governor. He offered it to Cuomo, saying the governor-elect could use it or leave it untouched — and “run the risk of having it wielded against you.”

In The New Yorker, Steve Coll assesses the murkiness that has been stirred up by Julian Assange’s Wild-West, anarchic brand of journalism.

If the organization continues to attract sources and vast caches of unfiltered secret documents, it will have to steer through the foggy borderlands between dissent and vandalism, and it will have to defend its investigative journalism against those who perceive it as a crime. Assange is animated by the idea of radical transparency, but WikiLeaks as yet lacks a fixed address. Nor does it offer its audiences any mechanism for its own accountability. If the organization were an insurgency, these characteristics might be in its nature. Assange declares that he is pioneering an improved, daring form of journalism. That profession, however, despite its flaws, has constructed its legitimacy by serving as a check on governmental and corporate power within constitutional arrangements that assume the viability of the rule of law. The Times and the Washington Post, in successfully defending their decision to publish the Pentagon Papers before the Supreme Court, extended considerably the political impact of their revelations.

Ross Douthat in the Times.

Nor have Obama’s political instincts helped him through these difficulties. Presidents always take more blame than they deserve for political misfortune, but Obama’s style has invited disillusionment. His messianic campaign raised impossible hopes (particularly among Comedy Central viewers, apparently), and he has made a habit of baldly overpromising, whether the subject is the unemployment rate or the health care bill. Obama seems as if he would have been a wonderful chief executive in an era of prosperity and consensus, when he could have given soaring speeches every week and made us all feel tingly about America. But he’s miscast as a partisan scrapper, and unpersuasive when he tries to feel the country’s economic pain.

Reviewing the new AMC Series, The Walking Dead, Alessandra Stanley nails a cultural distinction of vital importance.

 

Guest-posting at Felix Salmon, Justin Fox complains about Times financial columnist Gretchen Morgenson’s slapdash ways (she “gets basic facts wrong, seemingly misunderstands the businesses she covers, offers assertions that she fails to back up with evidence…”), but then he pronounces her indispensable.

How does she accomplish this? I think it’s partly that the same bullheadedness and simplistic approach that drives readers like me and Felix crazy actually enables Morgenson to zero in on targets that those more interested in nuance totally miss. It’s also that Morgenson suffuses her work with a sort of high moral dudgeon—and disgust for the evil ways of Wall Street—that more “sophisticated” journalists won’t allow themselves. The results speak for themselves: Sometimes battering rams work better than X-Acto knives. And I say that as someone who vastly prefers X-Acto knives (stylistically speaking).

Steps that we’d like to see being taken: the concoction of fruit juice, caffeine, and malt liquor known as Four Loko has been targeted — unfairly, says its manufacturer — by officials concerned about a recent rash of student hospitalizations.

Chris Hunter, a co-founder and managing partner of Phusion Projects, the five-year-old Chicago company that owns Four Loko, said Tuesday that the drink, introduced in August 2008, was being unfairly singled out. The company takes steps to prevent its products from getting into the hands of minors, he said.

“Alcohol misuse and abuse and under-age drinking are issues the industry faces and all of us would like to address,” Mr. Hunter said. “The singling out or banning of one product or category is not going to solve that. Consumer education is what’s going to do it.”

The best part? “[P]arents who were shocked because the can was in their refrigerator and they didn’t realize it was an alcoholic beverage.”

Historians of American foreign policy in the Cold War and after will scratch their heads bald trying to understand this country’s special gift for backing blustery bozos in precarious sovereignties, but trying to figure out the appeal of Hamid Karsai may break the skin on a few scalps. The Afghan wiseguy’s latest stunt is to accuse the Times of defaming him — by reporting what he concedes to be the truth (about Iranian moneybags).

In his news conference, Mr. Karzai also attacked The Times for publishing the report about Iranian payments, even as he confirmed receiving such payments. He urged the Afghan news media to “defame The New York Times as they defame us.”

You have to love the echo of the Lord’s Prayer.

One of our most favorite Web sites, The Awl, is making money. According to the Times, no less. Isn’t that nice? “The owners don’t have to get rich … they just have to eat.”

Because there is no office — staff members work out of their homes — there is no office manager, no toner cartridge to replace, no lease to be negotiated, no pencils to steal. The company exists in a string of e-mails, instant messages and phone calls.

“My friends keep talking to me about how they want to start a Web site, but they need to get some backing, and I look at them and ask them what they are waiting for,” Mr. Sicha said. “All it takes is some WordPress and a lot of typing. Sure, I went broke trying to start it, it trashed my life and I work all the time, but other than that, it wasn’t that hard to figure out.”

Fired by NPR for expressing a personal fear, in the wake of 9/11, of fellow passengers wearing “Muslim attire,” news analyst Juan Williams fulminated thusly. Right or wrong?

“Now that I no longer work for NPR let me give you my opinion. This is an outrageous violation of journalistic standards and ethics by management that has no use for a diversity of opinion, ideas or a diversity of staff (I was the only black male on the air). This is evidence of one-party rule and one-sided thinking at NPR that leads to enforced ideology, speech and writing. It leads to people, especially journalists, being sent to the gulag for raising the wrong questions and displaying independence of thought.”

Would having said “Arab” instead of “Muslim” have made a difference?

Times columnist Christine Haughney asked readers about their real-estate regrets. The solicitation was interpreted very widely. Among the choices that responders would reverse, the following stood out for us as a sign of changing times.

Simple: I would never go to law school. What a complete waste of time and money. I’d have been MUCH better off learning an actual skill/trade that is actually in demand. Welding. Solar panel installation. Diesel mechanic. Whatever. Andrew M.

We’d kind of like to know what Andrew is doing these days.

New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn deplores gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino’s incendiary homophobic rhetoric. (via Joe.My.God)

When there is focused political rhetoric against the LGBT community, anti-LGBT hate crimes go up. It is a fact, documented by decades of data at AVP [the Anti-Violence Project] and the FBI and in the police department. So why would it be any different this time?”

Felix Rohatyn, a statesman of finance if ever there was one, looks back with no small discontent on the evolution of finance during his fifty years of notability. He is still haunted by the RJR Nabisco deal.

Still, almost 25 years later, he is grappling with how to fix a system built upon selling to the highest bidder.

“The trouble with this is that it is very difficult to quantify,” he said of valuing the impact on all the other constituents. “I am very troubled by my difficulty in trying to determine which was the better of the two deals.”