Category: Blog Post

One of the wonderful things about TiVo is that you actually watch less TV. If you eliminate channel surfing from your routine, and you just check the queue of what the machine has recorded for you—based on your explicit instructions to record, say, the beautiful and brilliant and frightening Mary Lahammer every time she tosses those golden locks on TPT—well, then, you watch only what you intend to watch, and you waste less time. You get to watch Mary when it’s convenient for you, and you don’t have to waste your time on commercials (or pledge drives, or Eric Eskola). This gives you more time to read the New York Times, for example.

Then you read Frank Rich, who informs you that the new season of “24” has begun, with two back-to-back nights of double episodes. You check, and discover that your standing orders to TiVo to keep up with “24” whenever and wherever it might air, well, TiVo remembers. So, you have four hours of TV in two days—practically a new personal record! This, of course, is the perfect circuit between high-brow and low-brow: Reading Frank Rich in order to watch Kiefer Sutherland. (This doesn’t hold much water with your wife, by the way.)

We have mixed feelings about the series. It’s emotionally and physically violent, and there are elements of it that are a little like explicit suicide instructions for a depressed nation. (Torture is always justified by noble ends; the most heinous behavior is acceptable because of the urgency of getting the show over in twenty-four hours, through seventeen relentless episodes.) It’s state-of-the-art, cliffhanger TV, and we often find ourselves watching through our fingers.

But there was a very funny moment in the first episode that we wanted to dwell on for just a moment. After the first crisis, there is an emergency debriefing involving a bunch of senior counter-terrorism officers. They are gathered around a conference table. There is a newbie—a funny, fat guy with a lisp—who is clearly just learning the ropes. He is the only one at the table who does not have an open lap-top in front of him. A supervisor scolds him. “Where is your lap-top, Edgar?” He says, “I don’t need it. I’ve memorized everything.” The supervisor scowls, incredulous. “How will you crunch data?” she says. If it weren’t so sad it would be funny, and if it’s not already a cliche, it will be.

For example: Over the holidays, we were comfortably installed at the cabin in northern Wisconsin. We brought the laptop along in case there was an emergency, and in case we were suddenly gripped by an irrational desire to finish some longterm projects gathering virtual dust on the hard drive. We were sitting around the dinner table trying to remember the names of all the James Bond films. We cheated. We plugged in the modem, dialed up AOL, and quickly had all the answers at our fingertips. The conversation continued, and suddenly we were the most informed, interesting, entertaining person in the room.

We realized a long time ago that email and the internet have more or less replaced all of our biological memory banks. In a very short time now, we will not remember our own name or telephone number— it will be on a keychain somewhere. We’re afraid TiVo and Outlook are a lot more reliable than we are.

What were we saying? Begob, where’s my bus? What bus?

First, let’s get the pronunciation right. It’s Read (pronounced “red”), not Read (pronounced “reed”). Get it? Good.

Second, what’s going on here is usually a comment on something I’ve read lately. It could be a book, but more likely, it’s going to be a newspaper or magazine. There are a lot of good ones out there, that don’t have as wide a circulation around here as I’d like. Often, they write news or opinion that’s getting missed by the news sources that have the widest circulation.

But when you consider that the news sources with the biggest numbers are the ones that most closely imitate reality TV instead of reality, you see why a lot of good stories are under-noticed. That said, I’m going to make an exception to my own rule here and start with a story that was widely circulated but that almost nobody cares about.

I finally got around to reading the Newsweek piece from this week on Kerry’s explanation of why he lost.

Kerry says he was proud of himself for almost defeating a “a popular incumbent who had enjoyed a three-year head start on organizing and fund-raising.” From where we sit, Kerry should be ashamed of himself for letting an unpopular president who had started an unpopular war, tortured captives, gave tax cuts only to the wealthiest Americans, dodged military service himself, and executed mentally handicapped prisoners, off the mat.

The article goes on to say “Kerry tacitly acknowledged that he failed to connect with enough voters on a personal level,” saying that he was perhaps too “political.”

That’s sure the truth.

Depending on what you mean by “political.” If one means “saying whatever is most expedient at the time” by political, that was Kerry all the way. The way he should have beat Bush would have been to call him a liar every day, much as the Swift Boaters for Bush did for him.

It wouldn’t have been political in the sense that Kerry understands it, but it would have been the refreshing truth. And, it couldn’t have been any less effective that what he did do, which was nothing that anyone will ever remember.

And, what if he was charged with “going negative?” As a very smart man once told me, “It doesn’t do much good to quote the Marquis de Queensbury rules to someone who is kicking you in the balls.”

I’m looking forward to 2008, when the likely Democratic nominee will actually have a pair. I can hear Hillary now: “I kicked Ken Starr’s ass, and I’m coming for you next, Rove.”

–Oliver Tuanis

In an essay in the Times Book Review yesterday, William Deresiewicz discusses language—English, in particular, and the persistent tension generated by people who are inflexible prigs about “Correct English.” He compares this with “Standard English”—the modern effort to standardize usage to help stabilize the language for the long haul, but allowing for creativity and innovation. His main point is that “the genius of English is an oral one.” Thus, written language that deviates from spoken language is, he says, a sign of something rotten. (Stuffy, disingenuous writing he identifies as a symptom of class anxiety. We’re rather inclined just to call it bad writing.)

We couldn’t help applying his idea to what’s on our pillow at the moment. Melville’s Moby-Dick is dense with antique language, neologisms, solecisms, alternate spellings, and just plain overwritten sections that threaten to send a modern reader to the nearest harbor with a Barnes & Noble and a Starbucks. (Extra credit: How would Ahab have felt about Starbucks? No cheating.)

There are no “problems” in Moby-Dick. There are lots of “problematical and paradoxical predicaments ,” if you follow us. (For example, throughout the novel, Melville uses the construction “ye” as a Quaker affectation meaning “you.” As an article, “ye” is a pseudo-archaic misreading of the word “the.” In old and middle English, “the” was sometimes spelled with the letter thorn, a rune that looks a little like a “y” in handwritten texts, but is still pronounced “th.” Not to confuse the matter too much, but a Quaker would morelikely have said “thee” and “thou” for “you.” A construction like “Ye Olde Candy Shoppe” is just wrong. Oops, now we’re being priggish about it.)

Personally, we think this gassiness gives the book some character. It was written before the standardizers came along, and even if its main point is not to twist the language itself, like, say, James Joyce fifty years later, it certainly feels breezy and free and would, if published today, be considered experimental—not unlike Thomas Pynchon’s last novel.

But we didn’t wish to drag you, dear reader, into an academic discussion about whether language is animal or mineral. We had two small issues with Deresiewicz’s essay. First, the idea that our best novelists have been great by virtue of their ability to write like people speak. He says our “literature is greatest when hueing closest to speech (Chaucer, Wordsworth, Dickens, Joyce). It is no accident that our greatest author was a playwright.” Now there is much to disagree with here, not least of which is that we’re pretty sure people didn’t speak like Dickens wrote—other than in Dickens’ dialogue. And even that conceit is problematic(al). Any writer who has tried to transcribe an interview tape knows that if you wrote exactly the way people speak, it would be unreadable.

More important, we can think of dozens of writers of the finest vintage who don’t write the way people speak. Take two American extremes—Faulkner and Hemingway, the poles of exposition. Faulkner hardly wrote a sentence that can be read in one breath, while Hemingway had the opposite approach, atomizing the language, almost as if one sentence were unaware of the next. Today, Cormac McCarthy is a sort of post-modern incarnation of both. His dialogue is Hemingway, his narrative description is Faulkner, and he is probably the finest living writer of the langage. None of these dudes write the way people speak. (Instead, they write the way people hear, and there is a huge difference.)

And that’s our point, really. The spoken language and the written language are two very different things, with their own assets and liabilities. If that were not the case, poetry would cease to exist, and we’d be working in radio.

Why are editors jerks? We have a lot of theories, but first let’s just say that there are some notable exceptions. Mean editors outnumber nice editors about two to one, in our experience. (Men’s and Women’s magazines: five to one. Literary magazines: one to one.)

Editors tend to believe they are overworked. They also tend to feel underappreciated. Generally, they have a highly developed martyr complex—they are both the ingenuity and the industry of their magazine, though very few people seem to notice. They feel beseiged by writers who are desperate to be published, but who turn out to be unreliable helpmeets. No one ever seems able to execute what the editor has in his mind, but he is too harried or too important to go ahead and do it himself. The result is frequently lots of light and heat and exhaust, and a high rate of turnover on the lower levels of the masthead.

This week, James Truman was put to pasture from Conde Nast. The young, British super-editor had a meteoric rise through the ranks of the world’s greatest magazine company to become its editorial director—a mostly ceremonial, no-receipts expense account, executive position that is the wet-dream of magazine professionals everywhere. (The only perch that is higher and requires even less work: Time’s “editors at large.”)

There is no one we can think of who better fits the stereotype of the editor as frivolous, glacial egotist. Truman became famous for his month-long sabbaticals in the Far East, his month-long sabbaticals in upstate New York, his month-long sabbaticals at Conde Nast Europe. (We exaggerate, slghtly.) He was paid a handsome sum to do not much else besides read magazines and read trends, and try to put the two together in order to help the company make more money. He is most notable, probably, for proposing “Lucky” and “Cargo,” Lucky’s male counterpart. He also got to choose the carpet for Conde Nast’s prestigious new office tower in Times Square. It is not clear whether he ever actually contributed anything to journalism—although he took his leave proposing a never-to-be fine arts magazine, so presumably he still has his pride.

Full disclosure: We have had a lot of wonderful professional colleagues and pen-pals over the years. The exceptions to the rule have been so friendly and forthcoming and supportive that we hesitate to say the following. James Truman was an ass. Not a lot of people were willing to say it, because he was one of the most powerful editors in magazines south of Rockefeller Center.

The problem with a meritocracy like ours is that many people achieve a professional peak (Truman’s was editing Details when Details was so good that it caught the attention and investment of S.I. Newhouse), and then they pretty much coast forever afterward, taking up valuable space. This wouldn’t in itself be a problem, except that these folks tend to be jealous of their expense accounts and private drivers and two-hour martini lunches. They earned this! They stick around long after their expiration dates, and suppress the whole organization, up and down the masthead.

Yes, it is true that Truman once dissed us—privately. Our own fatal flaw is a long memory and an unforgiving nature, along with an occasional, tourettic impulse to sabotage our own advancement. That probably puts us among the mean editors, rather than the nice ones. Sorry about that. We believe we can evolve, and one day use our powers for good.

Last night, we convened the monthly round table at Kieran’s. Owing to the lazy holiday period when we had nothing better to do, the deputy editor had reserved the Titanic Room, which was—of course—an unintentional indulgence of present distractions. Much the usual crowd, lively banter, pints of Finnegan (charitable, but not deductible). For calorie counters, the Big Boss had a walleye sandwich, which won the traditional plaudits. To our right was a “buffalo salad”—a plate of greens piled with chicken that was roughly the color of orange Ne-Hi. (We thieved a piece from starving speech-writer DG. Yummy!) Down at the end of the table, we took note of columnist CC, who can normally be counted on to hoarde the french fries and nurse the beer.

We find the main thing to come out of these little to-dos is a persistent hankering for Tullamore Dew, another recently acquired vice (affordable! benign!). The question arose as to which was smoother—Canadian or Irish Whiskey. No one cared to speculate. The wise words of Sandberg, not present, were recited: “You know, I don’t drink that much bourbon anymore.”

Although we have other favorite haunts within stumbling range of the office, Kieran’s is our social headquarters. It is a comfortable and gracious place to take the family out in public. The homage to one of The Rake’s patron saints, the generally inspiring nature of all things Irish, above all the noble art of blarney—Kieran’s fits us like a mitten.

Readers sometimes say they’d like to visit us at the office. Sometimes they just pop in. We recognize them from a mile away, and the party instantly grinds to a halt. Our man at the front desk radios up. “Incoming!” Everyone looks very busy indeed. Boomboxes are shut behind closet doors, open liters of Mountain Dew and Jolt Cola are stowed behind book cases, cigars are extinguished, the dog, cat, and shetland pony are led into the back hall and vigorously shushed, the hang-glider is folded away, the pom-poms and shredded paper are kicked into the corners, shirts are buttoned, the small kiddie pool is shoved into the conference room, the Incredible Hulk boxing mits are returned to the Ad Directors empty filing cabinet, the disco ball is turned off, the mini-trampoline goes into the wine cellar, the throwing knives go back into their velvet lined case, the can-can dancers are shuttled into the copy room, garters are pulled up, skirts smoothed, hair patted, cowlicks flattened, flasks hidden in potted plants, whoopie cushions deflated. The reader is ushered in. Nothing going on here. Just a bunch of mouse-jockeys staring at screens. A scent of Lysol hanging on the air.

No, actually here is a little flash tour of The Rake World Headquarters.

It’s true that the office is maybe not as exciting as it could be, but we’re comfortable and we do have our own brand of fun. But if you want to see us at our razor-witted best, try to sneak into our monthly round table at the pub. Flattery often pays the tab, you know.

Begob, there’s our bus. Good-bye.

Inexplicably, I’ve been obsessed with sailing—right here in the heart of winter in Minnesota. Well, there is a reason, but it’s not what you think… just a new personal obsession, originating here and here. In my ongoing effort to reverse a previous decision never to reread a good book (so many other classics I’ll never get to, for shame!), I picked up Moby-Dick again. For years now, I’ve called it the all-time best American novel. But looking back—and attempting a re-reading— I realize now why it took a graduate course in theology to force me to finish the book on a schedule. All those victorian flourishes and bygone references, they become goads, not impediments, when you are reading a book for an elective credit. It may no longer be the best American novel—probably Twain deserves that honor, I guess.

So, anyway, I’ve just finished reading the chapter on mastheads on the Pequod. Apparently, the word did not come into regular usage until the 1740s—when whaling was beginning to become one of the world’s most vigorous commercial enterprises. There have been masts, and the heads of masts, since boats were first equipped with sails (Jonah was thrown from a sailing ship, you know). But no one thought to stand at the top of one until it became a useful perch from which to spot whales spouting far off in the distance. (Pirates, seeing other merchant mariners as plunderable whales, no doubt manned the masthead too.)

So how did newspapers and other publications come to use the term as it is used today—to let you know who all the fine folks are that are responsible for creating your favorite magazine or journal? Some etymological sources say that the masthead on a ship is where you fly the flag—thus the “flag” (in a newspaper sense) is flown from its masthead. But that is a tautology. Why is the flag in a newspaper called a flag? (We’ve stopped using that word in the magazine world. We call the flag the “logo.” Stubborn newspapermen persist, as ever.) I don’t really have an answer, other than the rough guess that it originated with some broadsheet of shipping news. The first newspaper in America was Publick Occurrences, Both Foreign and Domestick in Boston, in 1690. There could not have been a newspaper in the American colonies that did not concern itself with shipping and mariners and the like, and most likely on the front page, over the fold.

I like the association, actually. It’s neat to think of every little publication as its own ship, on its own journey, with captain and crew steadfast and loyal at the helm. We may not really compete with the Titanics and Lusitanias and Disney Cruise Ships of the world, but we have our own white whales to chase. Personally, I am not afraid of heights, and I don’t mind being on the lookout for ice bergs and pirates and friendly trade winds. Avast!—The Editor in Cheese

We noticed in the Sunday Times magazine a twenty-five-page advertising supplement promoting the Times’ “Arts & Leisure Weekend.” That would be this coming weekend, and it would encompass hundreds of events across the country (even spreading to Europe). What type of thing are we talking about here? Mostly it is theater and art shows, but also includes—somewhat oddly, we thought—restaurants, spas, health clubs, and “attractions.” It’s fun to browse through the supplement to learn what is going on in your own neck of the woods—but also to learn what other necks of other woods the New York Times seems to occupy throughout this bitterly divided land. The supplement constitutes fully a third of the issue, so it must be a big deal. (Paid for, apparently, by four full-page ads in the pagination by “Weekend” presenters Volkswagen, Mastercard, UBS, and Microsoft.)

Lots of publishing companies are trying this sort of thing, including our own little enterprise here at The Rake. Surely the Times is trying to fight the same weight as the New Yorker, which has quietly cultivated the New Yorker Festival into the gold standard in this particular area of the publishing biz. And the NYer Festival has merely been the locomotive at the front of a spiffy train of similar events and services that complement the book, and no doubt account for the magazine’s celebrated return to profitability last year. The New Yorker’s events and marketing department today is a wide-ranging juggernaut of brand-extension. (We noticed, for example, an advertisement in last week’s issue for a new service at Cartoonbank.com, the New Yorker’s online store, that resells New Yorker comics. The ad was promoting a new feature: Licensing cartoons for corporate reports and presentations. Go, Bob Mankoff, go! When will you return our call?)

So what is the story with every little festival accosting the good readers of America? You kind of have to make allowances for a huge diversity of offerings–from the shite “home tours” to the cerebral book signings to full-blown parties—but basically they are of a piece. The “branded editorial event” is the sort of marketing and “brand-extension” operation that can do two things. One, it “leverages relationships” with potential advertisers. Two, it offers interesting real-life opportunities to readers. Without offering both of these things, though, we feel like these things are a tremendous waste of effort—not to mention a possible distraction from a magazine that might improve its position in the world by merely being a better magazine.

Now, the New Yorker has a delicate and valuable brand that automatically lends any event a certain class and panache, a certain attractive world view. We suppose the New York Times does too, but it is interesting that they brand this event as a particular section of the newspaper. Each section of the paper surely has its own identity and voice, and this is probably a good thing—for the paper, but not necessarily for a festival. We wonder what the “Week in Review Weekend” would look like. Lots of events celebrating short-term memory? A movie marathon of “Memento”?

There’s a lot of cork in this particular wine, but if you’re lucky enough to live in New York, you may drink long and deep. From our point of view, the real value of the “Arts & Leisure Weekend” will be the limited number of Manhattan events that really flex the muscle of the brand. The “Times Talks” series, tacked on as the last page of the supplement, is where New York readers really luck out. We here in the Twin Cities can go to Gold’s Gym any day out of the year, with or without the imprimatur of the New York Times. But if you’re in Manhattan this weekend, you could see Times reporters interviewing Kiefer Sutherland, Billy Joe Armstrong, Chuck Close, Bill Murray, and Amy Tan—and that’s just in the first twenty-four hours. Blue-chip advertisers like Microsoft, Mastercard, and VW probably don’t care about these tiny little first-come-first-seated events at the City University of New York. But without them, they’d be underwriting a whole lot of events that would go off just fine without them or the Times.

And that is ultimately what the print-media festival is about. Coincidentally, it is precisely what print advertising is about: You are an advertiser, and you want good customers. So you associate yourself with a brand that already has them. All that’s left to be sorted out is who pays whom for the privilege. And whether readers actually get something they didn’t already have.—The Editor in Cheese

Well, I never did find Jim Romenesko ice fishing, but I found the flu. So last night abed, I had two friendly companions—the DVD player and a magazine. I’ve had a copy of the movie “American Splendor” gathering dust on top of the TV for months, and I grabbed the latest issue of the New Yorker. It was an interesting coincidence.

To refresh your memory and mine, “American Splendor” is about Harvey Pekar, the Ohio working stiff who authored a famous comic book series of the same title. During one of those times when comics and graphic novels become fashionable, Random House published an anthology of the first numbers in 1986—ten years after American Splendor No.1 was pulped. In the normal course of publicity glad-handing and ass-grabbing, and glad-handed ass-grabbing, Pekar was invited to be a guest on David Letterman’s popular television show. Letterman found Pekar a raw, entertaining, and combative guest, and kept inviting him back.

Pekar never had much patience for anyone, and it didn’t take long for him to rebel against “the American Dream” which Letterman believed he was offering Pekar—in other words, anomic midwestern working stiff gets rare opportunity to become world-famous TV star, not unlike the Ball State graduate himself. It ended badly between the two of them, in part because Pekar just doesn’t like people that much, and because a few TV appearances with the cynical, mocking David Letterman shows just how devalued the Warholian “fifteen minutes” of fame has become. Also, Pekar seems to prefer his life of relative obscurity and subterranean credibility. It’s both his muse and his material. He couldn’t stop being himself just to be a celebrity.

Here in my sickbed, I say it was a coincidence, because now I am looking at last week’s New Yorker, and in it there is a nice little comic feature by R. Crumb and his wife Aline. Pekar and Crumb were old friends from Cleveland, and it was Crumb who originally encouraged Pekar to write comics, though Pekar had (and has) no facility as an artist.

As “American Splendor” makes clear, Crumb was an underground sensation as early as the mid sixties, making a decent living, hanging out with bohemians, moving to San Francisco, and generally being himself a substantial, life-supporting satellite of that whole Merry Prankster, Summer of Love, hippy-dippy cultural moment.

And now, forty years later, he makes the pages of the world’s greatest magazine.

Am I the only one who finds that a little depressing? I realize Crumb has been in previous issues, and I realize that the New Yorker has hardly been sitting on its thumbs–having within the past twelve months published full spreads by, for example, Chris Ware. (Credit Bob Mankoff with being a true hero of the revolution, though we’re not sure anyone has noticed, even when it is a National Book Award winner. I mean, you know, like who really cares about the “graphic novel” category anyway?) So it certainly is not the New Yorker’s fault–nor even David Letterman’s fault. But there is a persistent, aggravated tension between mainstream media and comic artists, and I wonder if it can ever be fully overcome.

Is there something inherently anti-social about serious, adult-oriented comics, something that causes an inevitable backlash and fall-out and back-slide into obscurity? That prevents the final big breakthrough into mass culture that seems to be the forever just-out-of-reach apotheosis? (And what would that look like, anyway? A Dan Clowes page in every newspaper and magazine in the land?) It’s a wonderful and unique art form, but can it be a billion-dollar industry like film or video games? We’re tempted to say that its greatest naturalist pioneers—Crumb and Pekar—were too steeped in hippy paranoia and politics to ever allow themselves to be embraced by “Big Media.” Or maybe they just have not translated to other mechanical requirements as gracefully as others.

Well, the fact that I am watching a major motion picture about a filing clerk from Cleveland should tell you something. That I am reading a three-page feature drawn by R. Crumb in the world’s most prestigious magazine is also another clue. We call it the First Corollary to the Thermodynamic Law of Pastry Acquisition and Consumption (alternate, informal name: Letterman’s Razor): In rare cases, it is possible to have your cake and eat it too—but you may have to do it without anyone else noticing or caring.

On the other hand, y’know, comics are still basically for kids, right?—The Editor in Cheese

Sitting around the office yesterday, we had noticed the proliferation of little pamphlet-sized magazines in our fair city—in fact, in cities all over the country. These are neat little publications, not because of anything that is in them, necessarily, but just because of the way they are. The format is fun, easy to pick up, maybe tuck into your back pocket—if your back pocket isn’t already occupied by a wallet full of ATM receipts which represent cash that very briefly occupied that same space.

There are a couple of competing titles here in the Twin Cities. One is the clunky, unfortunately named “The Cites,” which has some kind of pronunciation bar over the “e.” (Note to self: simple puns rely on simple recognition. The sights? The citations?) For about six months, we read this as a typographic error in their very logo, rather than a device of surpassing cleverness. We hear through the grapevine that “Industry” is a knockoff started by a band of disgruntled “Cites” mutineers. (We hope this revolution was started by a righteous copy editor, but we have our doubts.)

Neither of these magazines has an editor, per se, which is fine because neither really has much editorial content to speak of. This is alright by us. The pictures are certainly pretty, the paper is heavy and white, and there is a certain sassiness to the design that must appeal to the twenty-something audience that palms these little magazines in the lobbies of strib clubs and martini bars.

As it turns out, a lot of serious Big League magazines are now toying with this sort of format, particularly in Europe. A couple years ago, Conde Nast-Europe began publishing pocket-sized versions of GQ and one or two other titles. In fact, the paractice goes way back, at least to World War II. One of the secrets of the New Yorker’s massive success was their “pony edition” which they published during the war, without advertisements, for the leisure of American soldiers abroad. When those GIs came home, they were easily converted into a massive inflow of subscribers to the full-sized, ad-enhanced version of the magazine.

One can never think too literally about media, especially about the way people actually use the TV, or a CD, a book, or a magazine. What does it feel like in your hands? What is the actual, concrete experience of using this form of entertainment? In the magazine world, we frequently talk about “heft” value. How heavy is it in your hands? (Warning to all self-respecting editors: this, sadly, bears no relationship at all to the “substance” therein. Those perfume inserts are great scale-tippers though!) Part of this is down to nothing more than advertising. More advertising equals more pages. More pages equals more respect. Advertisers are pack animals, and they tend to gather where other advertisers have gathered. As our friend Dave Pirner once said, nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd.

And yet, we think it is more than professional jealously that compells us to say what we must now say: It is possible to have TOO much of a good thing—whether it is ad pages or edit pages. There is nothing as easy to ignore as a 400-page issue of Vanity Fair, as great as that magazine is. And we very nearly missed Dave Eggers’ disarmingly restrained story on Monty Python in the “Winter Fiction” issue of The New Yorker, just because we find these fat theme issues off-putting.

We look at our so-called competitors here in Minneapolis/St.Paul, and we are exercised. We strain our back picking these door-stoppers up off the floor beneath the mail slot, and we are just overwhelmed by hundreds of pages of… well, nothing much at all. (The size itself is annoying. But what is infuriating is how little they do with how much they have. There is a special circle in hell reserved for the idle rich.)

To be perfectly fair, the January issue of Vanity Fair—traditionally one of the thinnest of the year, advertisers having blown their wads in December—always sets records for uninterrupted edit pages, this year something like 80 straight full-pages of feature stories and jump pages. We find this nearly unreadable too. It’s just too much. We prefer to invest that much time into a good book with a sustained subject and voice. Or a video game.—The Editor in Cheese

Michael Miner can be forgiven for his rather unimaginative wish for the New Year—that more people will start reading newspapers. Why should they? We’re tired of this perennial kvetch, especially coming from Chicago, where just about every trick has been tried other than improving the quality of the actual newspaper.

We were reminded the other day of the fact that Chicago, during the Gilded Age, used to have more than thirty daily newspapers. (We’re also reminded: That’s a helluva lot of tinder set at the feet of old Mrs. O’ Leary’s cow. A purifying fire, to be sure.) Even up until 1960, the windy city had eight major dailies.

In almost every other field of publishing, the drift has been clear: toward specialization and away from generalization. You find enthusiasts and you service them. You stop worrying about quantity in your demographics and start worrying about quality. This, it seems to us, is where advertising departments have been light-years ahead of editorial departments. THEY’LL be glad to tell you the unique selling proposition of their publications, while the editors sit on their thumbs and send around instant messages carping about this afternoon’s “business seminar.” But newspapers are the last great holdouts of the Bigger is Always Better school.

In a curious way, editors and advertisers are the idiots in this equation. It is the advertisers—well, more often their knucklehead media-buyers—who distrust the smoke-and-mirrors of the media kit. They like to see raw, audited circulation numbers, and hang the rest of it. Editors, too, distrust “reader profiles” and the endless smorgasboard of pie-charts and bar-graphs that purport to isolate every minor buying habit of their beloved reader, from a vague intention in the next fiscal quarter to buy a refrigerator from Southest Asia, to which direction they put the toilet paper on the roll. This skepticism is understandable, especially if you are an editor who has no clear picture in your own mind of who your reader might be. One does not create a reader from a collection of purchasing habits. One creates a reader with the imagination. (This is the real failure of the Chicago “reds.”)

We have no real quarrel with our own advertising people. We love them. They dress beautifully, they’re smart, they’re quick with a dirty joke, their pinkies are in the air almost as often as our own, and so on. Most important, they understand that the editors’ committment to a ~certain kind of reader~ is inviolable. And that this a bankable asset.

Newspapers should not wish to be widely read. They should wish to be more thoroughly and passionately read. Consider it a matter of public safety.—The Editor in Cheese