The prospect is real, and is simply intolerable. Or so you’d think. But some commentators are going wobbly, as Margaret Thatcher might say. Bill Keller of The New York Times spoke not just for himself but for other accommodationists the other day when he wrote a long piece that concluded, in essence, that Tehran is going to get nuclear weapons no matter what we do. So we need to figure out how to live with his unavoidable reality.

It’s hard to know where to start, except to say that no Israeli should expect to live very long if Iran gets nuclear weapons, since it is the express desire of Iran’s leaders to wipe the Jewish state and its inhabitants off the map.

Mr. Keller argues that nuclear weapons have proven to be a stabilizing force—India and Pakistan, for example, have not gone to war since obtaining nukes. And the Soviet Union and the United States kept their hostilities to a minimum even when tensions were high during the Cold War. Mr. Keller argues that these nations understood the consequences of mutually assured destruction.

Iran, however, is different, and those who fail to acknowledge that difference either are lying to themselves or are hopelessly naïve. The leaders in the Kremlin were, at the end of the day, rational beings. They had no desire to bring the world as they knew it to an end. The leaders of India and Pakistan similarly understand that nuclear conflict will have no good ending.

There is nothing—nothing—to indicate that the madmen who run Iran think along these lines. They would welcome the sacrifice of millions of Iranians if it meant the destruction of Israel. This is a nation that sponsors small-scale suicide attacks. Why would anybody ever think that they would not support a suicidal attack on Israel—or, for that matter, on the United States?

Iran has made its intentions clear—just as Hitler did in Mein Kampf. Have we learned so little from history? Is it possible that people like Mr. Keller think that the Iranians are just kidding when they issue their regularly scheduled threats to Israel’s existence?

Let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that the Iranian threats are just so much political rhetoric, designed merely to please Jew-hating terrorist groups throughout the Middle East. If Iran decided that trading Tehran for Tel Aviv wasn’t worth it, how hard would it be to slip a nuke to Hamas? Iran does not lack for admirers among the world’s Islamic terrorists. Surely the Iranians could find somebody to do their dirty work—although, again, there’s no reason to think that they would shy away from carrying out mass slaughter themselves.

Israel, the United States, Europe and even Iran’s enemies in the Arab world have every reason to believe that Iran’s leaders have every intention of using every weapon in their arsenal. That arsenal must not be allowed to contain a single nuclear weapon.

Ailes

Last week, Fox News chief Roger Ailes came under fire for characteristically incendiary remarks he made about The New York Times ("cesspool of bias," "a bunch lying scum")  and other media organizations during a lecture at Ohio University. 

The event was woefully underreported, but an unnamed "senior Fox executive" told Howard Kurtz that Mr. Ailes thought he had gone too far in the lecture. He respects Jill Abramson, the source said, and thinks the Times has been fair under her. At that lecture, he was speaking exclusively about Russ Buettner, who reported that Mr. Ailes had pressured Judith Regan to lie to federal investigators about her relationship with Bernie Kerik. 

The full transcript of Mr. Ailes's May 21 lecture at Ohio University is now online (via Romenesko), and it reveals plenty more original Times commentary. Mr. Ailes said former executive editor Bill Keller was fired for publishing biased news (it went down a little differently in the Ken Auletta version) and that Mr. Keller's stated opinion of Fox News amounts to sour grapes because the newspaper industry is dying and Fox is thriving. He also said that the two of them are getting a drink.

[UPDATE: That rendez-vous hasn't happened...yet. Mr. Keller told The Observer in an e-mail: "After my column identifying Fox as a satanist front, he sent me a light-hearted email. I offered to buy him a drink. He hasn't taken me up on it yet. Stay tuned."

Below, an excerpt of his conversation with moderator Andy Alexander.

AA ...Bill Keller who is a former executive editor of the New York Times had a piece recently which you obviously read. And basically, one of the things that Keller said was that partisan press in America is not new and we know that.

RA God knows he’s knows it. He got fired because he was putting the editorials on the front page as news, so ---

AA Actually I think he resigned.

RA That’s what we all say. More time with the family.

AA What do you ---

RA It usually means you got your butt fired; that’s what it means.

AA Okay. You’re not confusing him with his ---

RA I know Bill well. In fact, I e-mailed him afterward and I said, “Bill, your article…” what I find amazing if you read the article very carefully, he’s quite critical of the mainstream press for being too biased. And I said that commentary would never have been written if Fox News didn’t exist. We have made people aware that bias can work from a lot of different directions and God knows The New York Times is one of them. So the fact that he wrote that showed me the influence on Keller of Fox News. Now I wrote to him and I said, “You know, I actually think you’re more biased than you think I am, but I’ll buy you a drink.” He offered to buy me a drink and I’m going to call him next week and we’ll get together and talk.

AA For the benefit of the audience, can I just read one of the key things ---

RA Sure.

AA --- which I think is what you’re responding to. Keller wrote, “My complaint is that Fox pretends very hard to be something that it is not. And in the process contributes to the corrosive cynicism that has polarized our public discourse. I doubt that people at Fox News really believe their programming is fair and balanced. That’s just a slogan for suckers, but they probably are convinced that what they have created is the conservative counterweight to a media elite long marinated in liberal bias. They believe that they are doing exactly what other serious news organizations do; they just do it for an audience that has been left
out before Fox came along.” I wonder how much of that you really disagree with.

RA I disagree with it in the sense that we really believe when a Shep Smith does our hard news at night, you know, my suspicion is that Shep’s a Liberal, but he actually works at trying to put it over the plate and right down the center. So does Brett Baier. Does Sean Hannity? No. He announces—

AA Commentator.

RA --- he’s a commentator. So I disagree with that. What is amazing is that he’s finally admitting the New York is a cesspool of basically biased.

AA He—admitting that because my reading of that column was he was very clear in saying that we make our own mistakes and that we ---

RA But he’s writing his off as mistakes and we’re determined evil people. Let me tell you, let me give you an example. What if you got up on a Thursday morning and the front page of The New York Times said you were going to be indicted on Monday. How would you feel about that? Let’s assume you hadn’t done anything and don’t know anything about it. That happened to me. I got up on a Thursday morning and it said Roger will be indicted on Monday.

AA And what ---

RA And do you know what they used for their source? They said somebody was overheard in the waiting room of a Barbados airport saying it. That was their source for that story.

N.B.: As far as we can tell, the Times didn't say that Mr. Ailes would be indicted. That report came from blogger Barry Ritholtz.

AA Did you call them on it?

RA No.

AA Why not?

RA Because they’re a bunch of lying scum and they’re not going to do anything about it. They did it on purpose, they did it deliberately and they didn’t have anything. I’m sure they couldn’t produce the guy in the Barbados airport.

AA One of the things ---

RA So, do I take on The New York Times? Yes. Yes, I do, because somebody should.

AA Now speaking of the lying scum here, another line in Bill’s column was basically he says that Fox handles stories this way. Control it, spin it or his—meaning yours--segmented audience of believers and demonize anyone who sees things differently.

RA Fine. Give me an example. Let me hear what you’ve got as an example. That’s his opinion as a far-left wing editor, writer, reporter, journalist so called, and he has a right to that position. Don’t get me wrong. I mean, I think Bill’s a very talented guy; I’m told he’s a pretty nice guy, I intend to find out because I’ll sit with him and have a drink. I don’t have any problem with him having it, but you have to understand that is his view of Fox News, primarily because we’re winning. One of the things that is really, you know, we’ve moved into a society that thinks everybody ought to get a trophy. That’s not the way it works. Somebody’s going to win. And let me tell you when they win, when you win they don’t like you. Newspapers are dying, their profits are down, they had to go to a guy in Mexico to cough up enough cash to keep them running. They’re a far-left wing newspaper. They have an absolute right to be. And I don’t have any problem with that other than the fact that I have a right to present what I view to be an alternative point of view to The New York Times. So I don’t have a fight with Keller. I don’t even have a fight with left-wingers. But I do have a fight with people on the left who have a problem with Fox.

During the cocktail hour preceding the screening, the premise of the show gave us an excuse to ask everyone : Who is your favorite vice president? Fortunately, guests were in a festive and charitable mood. No doubt they were already anticipating the post-screening filet mignon awaiting them at Porter House.

“You know what? I’ve never been asked that before,” Fran Lebowitz replied when we tracked her down in a corner of the 10th-floor reception area. "That’s a great question.” She thought a little. “Well, there was Johnson, and he became the president. Which is why you can’t nominate someone like Sarah Palin.”

Still, he wasn’t exactly her favorite. “I believe it’s possible that I do not have a favorite vice president. And if you asked a president he might say the same thing.”

Ms. Lebowitz was asked whether she’d been following the Republican primaries. “I feel more like they've been following me,” she said. “I see Santorum suspended his campaign today, so he doesn’t have to lose in his home state.” The Observer pointed out that Mr. Santorum was even unpopular in his home town. “Well, that isn’t such a bad thing,” she replied. "That’s why many of us came to New York!”

We put the question to her pal, Frank Rich, who is executive producing. “That is a great question!” he said. “Favorite? Not the greatest, right? I guess Lyndon Johnson. Lotta drama, Macbeth-like conniving...”

Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly went with John Adams. “He was the first one, he had to figure out the job. And he had a son who became president,” he said. “So if I had to pick one...”—yes, you can only pick one, that’s the challenge—“Adams. There was an HBO series about him!” Asked whether he’d consider the role himself, he replied, “I have the best job in the world.” He always says that.

Bill Keller thought it was a great question. (We were beginning to think this was a stalling tactic.) “It’s gotta be gotta be Spiro Agnew. As a journalist, how could there be anything better than that? I mean the wristwatch in the safe? Come on!” (Did he actually say this? We think so. But when we Googled "wristwatch safe Agnew," we got nothing, so maybe that particular nugget never made it into the paper of record.)

“The rest of them are all pretty much a bucket of warm spit,” he added. (This, he definitely said—quoting FDR veep John Nance Garner.)

What did Mr. Keller think were the most important traits of a successful veep, we wondered. “A masochistic tendency for subservience,” he replied. Not to say they aren't strivers. “Ambition is the ambient quality for anyone seeking a top job in politics—heart-attack-making ambition,” he elaborated. “But in order to be vice president you have to be willing to supress that ambition so totally that you’re willing to be somebody’s bitch for four years.”

“Or eight,” we noted, before remembering he was no longer in any position to give us a job, so why try so hard?

“Yes, or eight.”

Prompted by Mr. Keller’s surprising use of the B-word in a non-canine context, we asked how he was adjusting to life after giving up the reigns of the Times (translation: was he maybe kind of losing it?). “I’m very happy,” he said. “I’ve got a lot more control of my life. I don’t have to be in a lot of meetings. I don’t have to be in any meetings, as a matter of fact. Life is good.”

We grabbed art-world scourge Morley Safer and hit him with the evening's query. He was quiet for a moment. “Trick question,” we said.

“Even worse for him—he’s Canadian,” offered his wife, Jane.

“I’d say Lyndon Johnson,” Mr. Safer said. “He became a great President. Though he didn’t like me very much.” Mr. Safer didn’t elaborate, but we suspected he was referring to his report on the burning of Cam Ne, which helped turn American public opinion against the Vietnam war.

Johnson hated the piece, of course. No doubt the nabobs of the art world know just how he felt. We asked Mr. Safer how they’d reacted to his latest 60 Minutes salvo, in which he visted Art Basel Miami Beach and wondered pointedly whether contemporary art wasn’t perhaps “the biggest scam since Hans Christian Andersen trotted out the Emperor’s new clothes.”

“The Gray Lady of The New York Times didn’t like it very much,” he said. “But she’s clueless.” In case you weren’t sure just which gray lady he meant, he added, “Ms. Smith,” i.e., Roberta Smith, who had pronounced the segment “tired and formulaic.” Mr. Safer added, “Critics like Ms. Smith are part of what’s wrong with contemporary art. She writes in this impenetrable prose that makes it all seem important. But that’s why what she says is meaningless.”

We moved on to the subject of his own art. Mr. Safer is himself a painter, who described his work as “mostly" figurative "but not necessarily.” Years ago, he even had a few shows. Is he still at it? “I’m desperate to do it but my day job keeps me pretty busy,” he said.

Later, we ran into Ms. Lebowitz again (yes, her day job is still writing a book—two, in fact). She had a question for us. “Did anyone name Al Gore?” she wondered. They hadn’t. “Aw, that's too bad,” she said.

(It might have helped that The Puppy Diaries was published by Times Books.)

To avoid an editor-has-no-clothes scenario, the Arts and Book Review sections assigned their reviews to two writers whose job security does not depend on Ms. Abramson’s esteem, John Grogan and Alexandra Styron, respectively.

Outside reviewers aren’t always kind to Times writers. Earlier this year, pinch hitter Michael Kinsley was asked to review the documentary Page One. “See His Girl Friday” again, he told readers.

Mr. Grogan, author of the dog owner’s tear-jerker–turned–major motion picture Marley & Me, seemed a safer bet, and he raved about Ms. Abramson’s book. His only complaint was that it was a little too serious.

“Ms. Abramson writes with intelligence and grace and never descends into the saccharine,” he wrote, adding that part of him “wishes she had forgotten about her serious-journalist credentials and had more fun.”

On Sunday, Ms. Styron (son of William Styron and a celebrated “dadoirist”) wrote appreciatively of Ms. Abramson’s ability to “vanquish the writer’s self-regarding pose” and to emerge with an “unaffected, unironic, and lovingly goofy [...] golden retriever of a memoir.”

But The Puppy Diaries is not merely a poorly timed,  half-endearing and half-embarrassing assemblage of personal anecdotes from the executive editor’s less high-profile past. The book is based on a Times blog of the same name, which taught Ms. Abramson a lot about digital journalism, she told Sam Tanenhaus on the Times’s Arts Beat books podcast. The blog was her first experience with interactive journalism, and helped shape her thinking about the ongoing transformation of the Times’s newsroom.

“Readers want it all, and they want it as soon as you can give it to them,” she said. “They want to combine pictures and video, they want to comment, they want to talk to other dog owners.” Recalling that her invitation to readers to send in pictures of their own pets had crashed the website, she pointed out, “Journalism is no longer simply the authority of a reporter or editor telling an audience what the facts are and what to think of them. It’s more of a vigorous back and forth.”

The best part of The Puppy Diaries, Mr. Grogan noted in his review, is the “insight into the private sensibilities of the Times’s top editor, the final arbiter of what ends up on the page.”

Unless it has to do with puppies, that is. In the book, she writes that Mr. Keller noticed an increase in dog stories being pitched for page one after her blog debuted. “To curb the trend,” she added, “he urged me to recuse myself from any discussion about a proposed dog story.”

The book also offers a glimpse of her managerial style.

“In one’s relationship with dogs and with a newsroom, a generous amount of praise and encouragement goes much better than criticism,” she told The New Yorker.

By the time she got to the web newsroom, then housed a few blocks from the paper’s historic home on West 43rd Street, it was evident that news was breaking. But the overnight editor and the business editor, the only others in the office, were in a state of confusion. They were seeing things on television, but the reports were unconfirmed, and they conflicted.

“At one point, we thought two planes had collided with each other,” she remembered.

As more editors and producers trickled into the newsroom, Ms. Spruill exchanged calls with the continuous news editor, Terence Neilan, who rushed to confirm the reports and get a story back to her.

The rest of the world wondered what was happening too. The morning papers said nothing of the World Trade Center, so from their cubicles people checked nytimes.com, causing an unprecedented surge in traffic—190 percent more visitors than the average Tuesday in 2001—that the site could not support.

Once Ms. Spruill received the story from the 43rd Street newsroom, she hit publish, but it took excruciating minutes for the clogged site to update. By the time the story went live, the story had changed. A career’s worth of news happened between 8:46 and 10:28.

On a day of uncertainty, 1.9 million people looked to paper of record for answers. The digital staff performed technological triage, stripping any content unrelated to the attacks of its multimedia components to lighten the site’s load and keep it nimble enough to accommodate the breaking news and incoming images. Though many news websites crashed, nytimes.com stayed “live” all day.

“It made it abundantly clear that people don’t think of us as a newspaper that publishes once a day,” Ms. Spruill said. “September 11 was just the start. It became a new kind of normal.”

The Times created an emergency plan for simple web publishing during catastrophic events, and put plans in motion to eliminate the physical and psychological gap between the traditional newsroom and the digital one.

“It quashed any thought that the Internet was a threat to The New York Times,” said CNN.com managing editor Meredith Artley, who was associate editor of nytimes.com at the time. “It was a tool they could use to get the story out. Sept. 11 brought the organization together.”

After her performance on Sept. 11, Ms. Spruill helped lead the digital newsroom to the integration while quickly ascending its ranks. By 2006, she was its top web editor and is now the editor for emerging platforms.

“It was another three-plus years before we committed to fully integrating the print and digital newsrooms, but I expect Fiona got there ahead of us,” former executive editor Bill Keller said.

Sept.11 also made it clear that breaking news events had enormous business potential for the Times’s digital operations. If the paper could capture the attention of casual online news readers on important news days, it had an opportunity to make regular readers out of them. The Sept. 11 traffic quickly dropped, but it never went below pre-9/11 levels. Anxiety was heightened, two wars were on the horizon, and the global appetite for constant news did not recede. Monthly traffic to The New York Times increased 60 percent nationally. The pattern recurred on subsequent major news events, most recently the death of Osama bin Laden.

kstoeffel@observer.com

Waldman. (Photo: Pieter M. van Hattem)

Amy Waldman did not read most of the 9/11 novels before she started writing her own. DeLillo, Amis, Updike, Foer—she didn’t need to read them. Ms. Waldman was in New York on the day itself, in Afghanistan in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion and in South Asia as the United States dug in to combat in Iraq. Having watched the new world order evolve both here and abroad, the book that she eventually decided to write is more a synthesis of her firsthand experience as a reporter than an examination of collective memory. But what’s remarkable about her new counterfactual novel about the World Trade Center, The Submission, is that it will likely be remembered as one of the first satires of post-9/11 New York City: a place where tragedy is exploited by the ambitious and powerful to self-interested ends. Ms. Waldman’s New York, in other words, is one where sacred cows are routinely slaughtered—starting with the gingerbread reconstruction of “the vanished towers” (never to be named in the book) baked by the chef at Gracie Mansion. “The shapes were unmistakable,” Ms. Waldman writes. “It’s not meant to be eaten,” says her chef.

The Submission begins with a simple premise: the winner of a blind contest to design the 9/11 memorial (though the date itself is never mentioned) turns out to be a Muslim. Political cacophony ensues as reporters inflame hysteria, politicians exploit prejudice, surviving family members affect grief in the service of self-promotion and community activists manipulate identity politics. At issue is the memorial itself: is it a space for sober meditation or is it an “Islamic garden” that “memorializes Jihadis”? The problem is exacerbated when the garden’s designer, Mohammad Khan, refuses to declare his design one or the other.

“I didn’t really think of it as a 9/11 novel as I was writing it,” said Ms. Waldman recently during an interview at a coffee shop near her home in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. “It was just this particular scenario was interesting to me. I wasn’t particularly interested in trying to capture that day in fiction because I felt like we all had lived through it so many times, on the day itself and then in endless replays.”

If Ms. Waldman is acting in a literary tradition, it is not that of the 9/11 novel but rather the striated New York society of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, where characters glide seamlessly forward in their individual trajectories until an upset forces them to collide.

Ms. Waldman said she tried to avoid mixing up her characters with real-life players. She contemplated meeting with Michael Arad, the memorial’s real-life designer (he’s a London-born Israeli-American) but decided against it, saying that she would feel a reportorial responsibility to stick to the facts (a spokesman for Mr. Arad said the architect had not read the novel). Some characters are impossible to disguise, however (The “flamboyant real estate mogul with a toupee and an inestimable fortune”? The “president who once owned a baseball team”?) And the city’s newspapers, of course, are characters by name. The New York Post, the Daily News and even The Observer, which illustrates an article about Mo Khan with “a color drawing showing an ominous-looking Mo looming over a shrunken Manhattan.”

Ms. Waldman grew up in Los Angeles and studied at Yale. After graduating from college in 1992 she went to work as a volunteer teacher in South Africa, first in Cape Town and later in Johannesburg, picking up freelance reporting jobs along the way. Taking advantage of the momentous political shifts in the waning days of apartheid, Ms. Waldman got her first bylines in The Times, working for Bill Keller, who was then stationed there as a reporter.

“Amy was stringing, mostly for alt-weeklies, when I met her in South Africa,” Mr. Keller recalled via email. “She always seemed to be in the right place—the protest, the campaign rally—arriving in a bright yellow V.W. bug that resembled an engorged bumble bee. I hired her to help out so that I could be in more places at once, but she also wrote several pieces under her own byline.”

He remembered in particular a “smart piece” Ms. Waldman wrote about death row inmates who could not vote but were anxiously monitoring the rise of the African National Congress, which had promised to abolish the death penalty. “I like to claim that I discovered her, but the truth is I just got lucky,” he wrote.

Ms. Waldman returned to the United States in 1994 and went to work as an editor at The Washington Monthly, a famous training ground for young reporters. Joseph Lelyveld, then executive editor of The New York Times, hired Ms. Waldman in 1997. She started out on the metro beat, first in Brooklyn doing night rewrites and later in the Bronx and Harlem.

On Sept. 11, 2001 Ms. Waldman was in the office early to cover the mayoral primary election scheduled for that day. She had just arrived in the lobby when she heard people discussing that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. By the time she arrived upstairs, the second plane had hit. She spent that first day making phone calls to companies that had offices in the towers and within a few days had begun reporting from the site itself. Her stories from that time are echoed in the pages of her novel: she wrote about law firms and banks trying to account for the employees who worked in the World Trade Center; about homemade memorials placed around the site; about letters written to cleanup crews by schoolchildren; about the families of deceased firemen in Staten Island and about an American imam in Brooklyn.

Six weeks after Sept. 11, The Times dispatched her abroad, first to Russia and then to Iran. She had only just arrived in Iran when word came in that the Taliban had fled western Afghanistan. Ms. Waldman crossed the border on foot with the Times’s Persian translator and their wheely suitcases, while the Afghan guards stared. She spent the better part of that year reporting on post-Taliban Afghanistan, initially from Herat and later from Kandahar. A year later, she was transplanted to the Times’s South Asia bureau in New Delhi, reporting from across the region, and making more trips to Afghanistan, as the United States began the war in Iraq.

Given Ms. Waldman’s journalistic background, it’s notable that in The Submission it is the journalist character, Alyssa Spier, an amoral reporter from the New York Post, who plays perhaps the least forgivable role in the controversy over the memorial in the novel. “The only part that veered a bit into satire was the portrayal of the Post,” wrote Mr. Keller in his email to The Observer. “I mean, the idea that the Post would twist the truth, invade people’s privacy, sensationalize, even make things up, all in service of a grotesque hate campaign … I found that a little much.” Alyssa, for her part, is uninterested in the “stodgy, mincing version of news” in the “blue-blood papers.”

When asked if Alyssa was a projection of some of her own fears about the strategies of her sometime profession, Ms. Waldman mentioned Janet Malcolm’s theories of journalistic manipulation, then added: “There’s a lot of self-justification or rationalization when you are calling people up and saying, ‘What is it like to lose your husband?’ I know there’s all kinds of reasons for doing that but there was something that I was not suited for.” After covering the 2005 tsunami in Indonesia, Ms. Waldman returned to the States, leaving The Times for the more liberal word counts of The Atlantic.

“I think after the tsunami, where it was the exact same thing of going to village after village and asking what it’s like to lose your husband and four children … I just felt like it wasn’t for me anymore,” she said. “I think I also had some burnout—I came back after almost four years book-ended by 9/11 on one side and the tsunami in 2005 on the other. After that I kind of thought, ‘I don’t think I want to do this anymore.’”

She also had the seeds of the novel already germinating in her mind.

She’d first thought of the idea in 2003 after the contest to design the memorial was announced and she encouraged an artist friend to apply.

“I was saying to her, ‘Why don’t you enter the 9/11 memorial competition?’” she remembered. “We were talking and sort of got into Maya Lin and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the backlash against her because she was Asian-American.”

Ms. Waldman began writing the novel while on a Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard (during which she had proposed to write “a nonfiction work on the social and intellectual history of Muslims in modern Great Britain”). Her early forays were tentative, but when she had an initial mash-up of scenes she began shopping for agents. Bill Clegg, whom Ms. Waldman eventually chose, suggested she consolidate the work into a full chapter with an outline.

“Amy tortured me for at least three or four breakfasts—giving me a little chunk of new material every month or so and I gladly kept auditioning to play the part of her agent,” wrote Mr. Clegg in an email.

Ms. Waldman sold the book based on 80 pages and the outline, a small excerpt for a first-time author, but, according to Mr. Clegg, “nearly all editors were interested.”

“Rarely are pages as strong as Amy’s were when we sent them to publishers,” he added. Ms. Waldman eventually went with Courtney Hodell at FSG. By the time she turned in the first draft of the manuscript, in February 2010, the book was 800 pages (Ms. Hodell called it “Thomas Mann-ish”). It was while in the process of revising her manuscript down to its current 299 pages (and expecting twins with her husband, Alex Star, senior editor of the Times’s Sunday Book Review) that the controversy erupted over the project now known as the “Ground Zero mosque.” Ms. Waldman had read a story in The Times about the project in late 2009 but said that it initially “barely registered.” In May 2010, however, when the story suddenly flared up on cable news, Ms. Waldman went to a community board meeting and left taken aback by the vitriol she had witnessed (and its eerie similarity to her book).

“It just came out of nowhere and it was packed,” she remembered. “People were so angry and I kind of couldn’t believe it. There were people who were genuinely opposed, who were very sympathetic, and then there was some real ugliness there that was pretty shocking to me.” Not to mention the similarities to her book. “It was very surreal,” she said—so much so that she ultimately changed some parts of the book that were too similar to the rhetoric around the mosque. “I didn’t want it to just read exactly like it read in the newspaper,” she said.

Some of the sharpest barbs in the book, however, are reserved not for conservative bigotry but liberal hypocrisy. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are for the most part referenced only obliquely, and the position of her former employer in supporting them is glossed over. But it is one character’s helpless explanation of her decision to come out against the Muslim designer of the mosque that stings: “The New Yorker didn’t trust him!” cries the character in her own defense. “What was I supposed to do?”

In the interview, Ms. Waldman treads carefully on the subject of the war. “I think even something like in the run-up to the Iraq war, for example,” she ventured, “where there were so many liberals who have now said ‘I really regret that’ but were somehow shaped by this climate of fear and this sense that anything is justified … I think the book is definitely something of an exploration of some of those emotions but just through how people feel about Mo Khan: they don’t know how to read him and how to read the garden—what do we do when we don’t know?”

Ms. Waldman is adamant that the world she created in her book—where grief is exploited to gain rhetorical advantage and reason is sacrificed for political ambition—exists separately from the world she once reported on at The Times. In her determination to place the book in a purely fictional realm (and assert again that it was not her intention to write a 9/11 novel), Ms. Waldman initially even resisted the release date of the book being as close as it is to the 10-year anniversary of the attacks (FSG furnished her with an office to make sure she finished in time). She also wanted to strike any reference to Sept. 11 on the book jacket.

None of the characters are based on anybody real, she insists, any resemblance is purely coincidental.

ewitt@observer.com

Food is a great prop, right? Hand-held fair food is basically the opposite of national enemy arugula, and shoving it in one's mouth buys some time before answering a question. It's so charming it got us to blog about Mitt Romney!

So, what did the very hungry GOPillar eat his way through?

A pork chop on a stick.

A corn dog.

A hot dog.

He was, sadly, not seen eating deep fried butter. Not that he shouldn't! Debating burns calories. Speaking of which, we're going to go tune in. We're third-wheeling Bill and Emma Keller's date night.

If you two have a debate drinking game, tweet it!

Breivick.

Two things tend to be givens in the modern-day 24-hour news cycle: One, that something sad and tragic will invariably happen; and two, that when something sad and tragic happens, someone with a large social media following will not hesitate to immediately crack an inappropriate joke about it. (Too soon? Never on Twitter!)

When Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s accuser, Sofitel maid Nafissatou Diallo, revealed her identity for the first time in Newsweek’s cover story, Esquire—ever the gentleman—took the opportunity to use the alleged rape as a jumping-off point for a service-y web post about oral sex. “As we’ve learned over the years ... a blow job need not be degrading or hurtful, for either party,” the magazine wrote in the article, which has since been deleted but which was teased on Twitter as “How to get a better blowjob than #DSK.”

Of course, that tactlessness pales in comparison to Glenn Beck’s reaction to the massacre in Norway last Friday, in which anti-Muslim right wing nationalist Anders Breivik set off a large bomb in Oslo and then went on a shooting spree at a Labor Party youth summer camp on a nearby island, killing in total at least 76 people (at last count). One would think that the guilty party in this scenario was obvious. And yet Mr. Beck, who regrettably still has time to pontificate on the radio between penning bestselling children’s books about itchy Christmas gifts, took to the airwaves Monday to compare the camp victims to Hitler youth. “I mean, who does a camp for kids that’s all about politics?” Mr. Beck asked. “Disturbing.” In related news, the Tampa Liberty School, a weeklong Tea Party day camp modeled after Mr. Beck’s very own 9/12 Project, recently finished its inaugural session.

Yet even more tragic than small children in Florida using hard candies to learn about the gold standard was the untimely death of Amy Winehouse at age 27, presumably from drug and alcohol abuse. Some fans cried; some—in a well-meaning but probably inappropriate vigil—left bottles of vodka and beer bearing hand-written messages outside of Ms. Winehouse’s north London home. Missouri congressman Bill Long, on the other hand, chose to use the singer’s death as a plea to resolve debt ceiling talks. “No one could reach #AmyWinehouse before it was too late. Can anyone reach Washington before it’s too late? Both addicted—same fate???” he tweeted on Monday, prompting international vitriol. (Esquire couldn’t resist an opportunity here, either. On Monday it published an appreciation of Ms. Winehouse’s ex, Blake Fielder-Civil, and his remarkable ability to remain stylish in the face of tragedy.)

Speaker John Boehner neglected to comment on the capitol’s sobriety, but did seem to drown his own sorrows in platitudes over the weekend, announcing to whoever would listen that President Barack Obama “wants a blank check” and “moved the goalpost.”

And speaking of goalposts, the NFL lockout is over, which means that football is back! Not that it ever really left, because we’re in the off-season. But still! It’s kind of like Bill Keller at The Times—even though he keeps on quitting, he never goes anywhere. Just four months after debuting as Hugo Lindgren’s controversial magazine columnist, Mr. Keller has announced that he will leapfrog over to the op-ed page in September, around the time that he cedes his executive editor desk to Jill Abramson. The difference between his old gig and his new one, presumably, will be that the op-ed rate of correction is somewhat more forgiving (Mr. Keller is currently averaging just over 41 percent, which WWD helpfully points out is about eight times worse than Jayson Blair).

Of course, even when good news seeps across the transom—just as raw sewage has been inconspicuously seeping out into the Hudson—someone tries to ruin it for everybody else. Case in point: one day after New York’s first legal gay marriages were performed at City Hall, a conservative group filed a suit against the New York state legislature, alleging that standard voting procedures were broken in order to pass the Marriage Equality Act. It’s unlikely to make an impact, but it’s distracting and destructive, serving as yet another reminder that sometimes, despite what the M.T.A. tells us, when we see something, we probably shouldn’t say anything at all.

Keller: "Hilarious."

After Bill Keller, the lame duck executive editor of The New York Times, wrote a column lamenting all the books written by Times writers, we thought some of these writers might be annoyed. We thought wrong.

“I laughed out loud,” wrote the business columnist Joe Nocera, author, with Bethany Maclean, of All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis. “It was a great, hilarious column.”

“I thought it was hilarious,” agreed David Carr, the media columnist who wrote a memoir about being a crack addict, The Night of the Gun. “There's a good naturedness to it, a kind of wise-cracker familiarity, that makes it sing instead of sting.”

Mr. Carr did take issue with the contention that letting reporters write a book was all about building a brand. "It's about giving them the means to both live in or near New York and put their kids through college," he wrote in an e-mail. But overall, Mr. Carr found it to be the "perfect mid-summer column if you ask me, and pretty funny to boot."

Really? Did everybody feel this way? Some New York Times authors who have produced New York Times bestsellers did not return our phone calls. Nicholas Kristof was hiking in Oregon. Frank Bruni was on deadline. Sarah Lyall was up to her ears in covering developments in the News of the World scandal.

We tried Brian Stelter, whose recent book deal provoked Mr. Keller to ask, “The obvious question: What’s up with that?” Reached by phone, Mr. Stelter disappointed us.

“I’m on vacation – I literally haven’t read the piece,” he said. He paused. “I read the beginning, which seemed complimentary…” If he had a comment, he concluded, he would Tweet it. But he indicated there would be no comment: “It’s the opinion of my boss; why would I comment?”

A few minutes later, the following comment appeared on Twitter.

“So I went ahead and read it all,” he wrote. “He's right: ‘Sigh. It will never end.’"

Which Dan Abrams is this? (Getty Images)

“Dan Abrams and I emailed a bit about possibly trading our Twitter handles,” said Dan Abrams, a writer/producer in New York, of an exchange with the ABC News analyst three years ago. “I probably would have—he was like, I’ll take you out to dinner. I wasn’t at a point where my name was a brand.” The more famous Mr. Abrams, whose Twitter account is @danielabrams, let the matter drop, which the less famous Mr. Abrams estimates he regrets. He wouldn’t make the switch now, though: “I’m making that transition from being behind the scenes to being, like, a person.”

In the age of personal branding, sharing a name with a famous person can be a boon. (Witness the upcoming summer reality show Same Name, in which civilians meet their celebrity namesakes.) Mr. Abrams takes pride in his un-Google-ability: “People can’t come across some stupid show I did. If my name was Rizzo Gulati, they might see something I’d done and not want to hire me.” Mr. Abrams hasn’t reaped the social benefits of sharing an identity, but the New York film critic David Edelstein gets invitations directed to the real-estate developer David Edelstein: “Recently, I received at my home an embossed patron invitation to some BAM gathering at a fancy Upper East Side residence,” Mr. Edelstein said via email. “I called BAM and they were horrified that the likes of me could almost have shown up at some hedge fund manager’s townhouse.”

Of course, the truly powerful need not be aware of their shared-name cohort. Bill Keller of The New York Times shares an identity with an evangelist—the second result on a Google of “Bill Keller” is for “Bill Keller Ministries” at LivePrayer.com. “Amazingly, given my evangelical charisma and general piety, I’ve never gotten one of his messages,” said the Times Magazine columnist via email. Perhaps the best coping mechanism is to come up with a canny, repeatable line. Could the high-society DJ David Chang be the same guy who makes our ramen? No, he told The Observer: “I mix beats, not meats!”

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_