Maybe it's another David Plotz, we thought! Not so: on the day of publication of The End of Men by Hanna Rosin (pictured), as the pair were undergoing a jokey publicity tour, Mr. Plotz wrote another Amazon review. "I'm Hanna Rosin's husband, so I'm obviously biased," he wrote, "but I have also lived with this book and this subject for two years, and I can tell you confidently that Hanna has written an absolutely gripping and thought-provoking book about why the world has changed so fast." Six of fourteen Amazon readers found the review helpful.

Four out of Mr. Plotz's five Amazon user reviews grant the subject the perfect five stars (including a rave review for The Bush Tragedy, written by Jacob Weisberg, the editor-in-chief of Slate Group and a man Mr. Plotz calls "a colleague and friend"). The one negative review was for a Black & Decker toaster oven. "The timer did not function, causing me to nearly set fire to my kitchen when the first piece of toast I put in incinerated," Mr. Plotz wrote. "Also, it came without an instruction manual."

Hanna Rosin

“Last night we did a version of this where we walked down the aisle!” said Atlantic senior editor Hanna Rosin at the beginning of a debate last Wednesday at the Maritime Hotel, on occasion of the publication of her book, The End of Men. “It was like our wedding!”

She had just come onstage along with an unlikely interlocutor: her husband David Plotz, the editor of Slate. The couple were conducting a road show of sorts to debate whether or not the male gender was less nimble in the current economy, they appeared together in Washington the night before and were scheduled to appear on Today together on Thursday. The sell—woman declares male gender dead (or, at least, her book jacket does), and here’s her loving husband!—was irresistible, and the pair played it up at the Maritime reading. Mr. Plotz referred to himself, early in the evening, as “Mr. Rosin,” and instructed his debate partner, “You need to stay on mic, sweetie. Just hold it! It’s very simple.”

For her part, Ms. Rosin bristled good-naturedly at a tough question, saying “It’s weird! Because you’re my husband! And you’re Charlie Rose-ing me!”

Not every viewer was entranced, however. We noticed New York Times Magazine editor Hugo Lindgren, who excerpted The End of Men for a recent, characteristically splashy cover spread in his publication. The editor spent much of the speech whispering loudly to one male and one female friend.

“Do you like my boots?” Mr. Lindgren asked his male friend, pulling up the leg of his trousers to peacock.

“Yeah! Do you like mine?” asked his male friend, as Ms. Rosin spoke.

The debate was won by Ms. Rosin, but by then Mr. Lindgren was already gone.

Hanna Rosin

Hanna Rosin of the Atlantic has that slightly troll-y publication’s knack for provocation—she’s just published a book called The End of Men: And the Rise of Women. But that’s not the whole story—oh, no, Ms. Rosin has committed to her viewpoint, engaging her husband, Slate editor David Plotz, in a debate over whether or not men are in fact a dying breed. This Matalin-and-Carville act should provide some insight into the Rosin-Plotz marriage as well as offer a fitting end to a Fashion Week during which straight men were an invisible race.

North Cabanas, Maritime Hotel, 363 West 16th Street, 7pm, tickets and information can be found at endofmen.eventbrite.com.

As the two journalists tried to explain the persistent wage and power gap between men and women in America, their conversation returned again and again to our more progressive friends in California and Scandinavia.

Ms. Rosin asked Ms. Collins—whose feminist history America’s Women she called “her bible”—if there was an era in history when women held true political power.

“No,” Ms. Collins deadpanned, to laughter. Generally speaking, women had fared best in new societies, “where things are being started and everyone really has to chip in and work together to get stuff done.”

That might explain the better-than-average gender equality Ms. Rosin found in Silicon Valley, where she said companies have figured out the “domestic puzzle” of balancing child-rearing and work.

“They work really hard and they work really flexibly,” she said, “because the companies are fairly new and don’t have structures in place.” One female Google executive told Ms. Rosin she had gotten the company to agree to pay for her nanny and baby to accompany her on all business trips for the first two years.

But Ms. Collins was skeptical about how high Californian equality goes. Facebook's board of directors, she said, resembles the Backstreet Boys.

Ms. Rosin said that in Norway, a law had been passed requiring major corporations to have boards that were 40% women.

“It’s always Norway,” Ms. Collins replied.

“Or Sweden,” they said, in unison.

Sweden had, in fact, been the site of another experiment of interest to Ms. Rosin, which offered financial incentives for men to take paternity leave. Women stayed home during the child’s first year or so of life, and then men took over for the toddling years, congregating in big indoor playgrounds and generally behaving like the mommy mobs of Prospect Park.

“You expect the guys would be talking about football,” Ms. Rosin said, “but they’re like, ‘What kind of stroller you got?’”

But back to Norway.

One year after the board of directors law was enacted, it turned out that companies with gender-equal boards were—gasp—less profitable than the male-dominated ones.  They had been less reactive in the face of the recession, reducing salaries and hours across the board instead of laying off trained workers.

“Not the Bain Capital way of doing it,” said Ms. Collins, a noted Mitt Romney-watcher.

It remains to be seen whether the female-led companies will do better in the long run.

One audience member wondered if there was any hard data on “Swedenification” of gender roles. Were their children, the boys and the girls, doing better? Did it make anybody happier?

“I always get the impression Swedes are very unhappy,” Ms. Collins said. “It’s a very cold country.”

“There are saunas,” the audience member pointed out.

But according to Ms. Rosin, one nice thing about “The End of Men” is that men—well, Swedish ones, anyway—are learning that there are worse things than having to be the woman in the relationship.

“They forced it on them and now they’re into it,” she said. “It turns out to be not so bad.”

"What can you tell me about Y chromosome shrinkage?"

Next month, the live debate series Intelligence Squared will put forth a motion so controversial it has already divided two halves of a media bromance.

"In a modern, information-age economy that appears better suited for women, many wonder if men are now permanently trailing. Education and employment statistics point to a clear and increasing dominance in women’s status at home and in the workplace. "MEN ARE FINISHED" is the theory that’ll be put to the test: Are men still dominant in society or has the order shifted forever?" asked the Intelligence Squared release.

Intelligence Squared puts on Oxford-style debates between highly quotable journalists and academics. (One debate, between Michael Wolff and David Carr, among others, made a memorable scene in Times documentary Page One.)

The "Men are Finished" motion ties nicely into ABC legal analyst Dan Abrams's new book, Man Down, therefore he will make up half the team for it, alongside Hanna Rosin, Slate writer and author of The Atlantic story "The End of Men."

Men's Health editor and Eat This, Not That! author Dave Zinczenko will stand up for the health of mankind, against the motion, with feminist scholar and The War Against Boys author Christina Sommers.

The debate is set to take place September 20, but why even go through with it? The qualifications of the participants are proof enough that the order has shifted.

From the article:

Men in ancient Greece tied off their left testicle in an effort to produce male heirs; women have killed themselves (or been killed) for failing to bear sons. In her iconic 1949 book, TheSecond Sex, the French feminist Simone de Beauvoir suggested that women so detested their own "feminine condition" that they regarded their newborn daughters with irritation and disgust. Now the centuries-old preference for sons is eroding—or even reversing. "Women of our generation want daughters precisely because we like who we are," breezes one woman in Cookie magazine.

A contributing editor at The Atlantic and a founding editor of Slate's DoubleX, Rosin is also the author of God's Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission to Save America, published in 2007 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

By way of introduction, Mr. Weitz sent an open letter to Twilight's diehard fans—those adolescent girls and forever-adolescent young women drawn to, (per The Atlantic's Caitlan Flanagan), "the dangers and dramatic consequences of... forbidden love"—which he partially addressed to the books' characters.

From the letter:

It's true that Mr. Weitz has been involved with several adaptions. He was nominated for an Oscar in 2002 (along with his brother, Paul, and writer Peter Hedges) for the adaptation of Nick Hornby's About a Boy. At the time, some felt that the movie was nominated by mistake: Fox News' Roger Friedman speculated that, "Academy voters got confused between About Schmidt and About a Boy when they were picking Best Adapted Screenplay nominees?" While not an adaptation, Mr. Weitz's co-directorial debut, American Pie, was in its own way a cinematic tribute to Philip Roth, seeing as how co-star Jason Bigg's ode to the love that dare not bake its name was a lot closer to the spirit of Mr. Roth's Alexander Portnoy than Richard Benjamin's whiny portrayal of the character in Ernest Lehman's 1972 adaptation. 

Mr. Weitz's biggest—and most controversial—adaptation came last year when he directed a film based on another beloved fantasy book series, Philip Pullman's Golden Compass. For his efforts on that film, Mr. Weitz was criticized by fans and taken to task in a pointed Atlantic article from December 2007 by Hanna Rosin.

The article, headlined How Hollywood Saved God, detailed the challenges of adapting a book that has such an intense, protective group of fans and that's laced with the sort of anti-regilous sentiment Hollywood fears handling.

Ms. Rosin wrote:

"Weitz told me that after reading the Times story, he went into a cold sweat," Ms. Rosin continued. "'Why am I doing this?' he remembered thinking. 'I'll end up being hated by the fans and ripped into by the press. And this is a huge, huge endeavor. Maybe this isn’t for me.'"

One person who seemed not to like the finished product was Ms. Rosin, who in a Web-only follow up to her piece provocatively called Compass Without Direction (ouch!), wondered if the director had "lost his nerve."

In the next issue of The Atlantic, Mr. Weitz wrote an impassioned letter in response to Ms. Rosin's article, calling it a "hatchet job" and an "assemblage of carefully cut-and-pasted quotes and surmises pumped up with paraphrase." (The director even criticized a caption used in the layout.)

Fans of the Twilight series will have to wait for New Moon to see if Mr. Weitz's treatment of the book lives up their expectations or if he again lets down fans of his source materials. Meanwhile, Mr. Weitz is currently developing two other literary adaptations for the screen. The first is a movie based on Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man to be produced by Mr. Weitz and directed by the fashion designer Tom Ford. The other is The Game, based a book about picking up women by journalist-turned-love guru Neil "Style" Strauss.

Inspired by a recent New York Times 'House & Home' story about a Buddhist monk and his platonic partner who've spent the last decade eating off the same plate and attempting to breathe in unison ("We are always inhaling at the same moment and we are always exhaling at the same moment"), Mr. Plotz and Ms. Rosin did their best to do the same for 24 hours, cutting a length of string 15-feet long so that they could ensure their intimacy. Sure, it wasn't performance artists Linda Montano and Tehching Hsieh tying themselves together with eight feet of rope for a year, but it was something of a challenge.

Half the video takes place at Mr. Plotz's Slate office, where he has a small scale freakout over the lack of Fresca in the fridge in morning ("Who drinks Fresca at 10 o'clock in the morning?" his wife sensibly asks), and complains that Ms. Rosin's reporting is too loud. Ms. Rosin, who is pregnant, drags her husband to the women's room where he must stand outside the door waiting for her to finish up. Mr. Plotz seems to spend a lot of his day watching soccer.

Another portion of the video takes place at The Atlantic's office where she discusses a story with her editor. Mr. Plotz describes this encounter:

Read 'till the end to experience a bit of classic Mars/Venus disconnect wherein Mr. Plotz and Ms. Rosin each have very different thoughts the morning after.

"Could it be that he didn't want to hear criticism?" said Ms. Ashton.

She was referring to the alliance between Brill Media Holdings L.P. and CBS, NBC, Primedia Inc. and the Ingram Book Group in Mr. Brill's retail Web site, Contentville.com. Skeptics believe that Mr. Brill's magazine, Brill's Content , cannot continue to function as a media watchdog now that Brill Media Holdings is in business with so many big media companies.

According to Ms. Gioia, Mr. Brill agreed on Dec. 30 to show up at the event. She added that she sent him an e-mail noting the time, place and date. Later, he made his big deal with the other media companies. On the day of the event, March 1, his office called Ms. Gioia, claiming that he had not known the exact time of the event and that, alas, he would have to cancel, because of a scheduling conflict.

"I was flabbergasted," Ms. Gioia said.

Mr. Brill's spokesman, Cindy Rosenthal, was not amused. "This is a stupid story of incompetence," she said. She explained that Mr. Brill had been trying to find out the exact time he was needed for the panel so that he could duck out of the dinner portion of the evening because of his other plans. "I called 30,000 times between Tuesday and Wednesday," Ms. Rosenthal said, referring to Feb. 29 and March 1. "She didn't return my calls."

Ms. Ashton mentioned that Bill Moyers managed to make the same event, despite having endured three hours of dental surgery that afternoon. "He showed up with a mouth full of novacaine," Ms. Ashton said. "If anybody had an excuse not to show up, it was him."

Mark Crispin Miller, a journalism professor at New York University, was also on the panel that night. Asked about Mr. Brill's last-minute dodge, Mr. Miller alluded to the Brill's Content slogan: "As far as his excuse for not appearing," said the professor, "I'd say skepticism is a virtue."

A while back, Jason McCabe Calacanis, the founder of the Silicon Alley Reporter , heard that John Battelle, the chief executive of his competitor, The Industry Standard , was talking about him.

"John has been going around town saying he is going to buy Silicon Alley Reporter ," Mr. Calacanis said. "So when I heard that, I decided I would buy him–at least metaphorically."

So Mr. Calacanis registered Mr. Battelle's name, and those of two other Industry Standard heavies (editor in chief Jonathan Weber, New York bureau chief James Ledbetter) as Internet domain names. That makes Mr. Calacanis, who has been known to call himself the "Latrell Sprewell of publishing," the proud owner of Johnbattelle.com, Jonathanweber.com and Jamesledbetter.com.

(Mr. Battelle was not available for comment. Mr. Ledbetter said of the prank: "I'm glad he has a lot of free time.")

Recently, Mr. Calacanis finally met Mr. Battelle at a "billionaires dinner" (neither Mr. Calacanis nor Mr. Battelle are billionaires), where Mr. Calacanis said that Mr. Battelle denied the boast. "He told me, 'I would never say that. That is very presumptuous,'" Mr. Calacanis said.

Still, Mr. Calacanis owns his rivals' names. For now.

"In all seriousness, John and I have become friendly since we hung for about an hour at the dinner," he said. "In all likelihood, I'll be giving John and company their domain names back or putting them up on Ebay with the proceeds going to charity."

Still, with The Industry Standard expanding its coverage of the New York Internet scene in recent months, the business rivalry between Mr. Calacanis and Mr. Battelle is more intense than ever. Mr. Calacanis has hired Veronis Suhler & Associates Inc. to raise money for his company. A source close to Silicon Alley Reporter said Mr. Calacanis is looking to raise around $20 million.

Three days before Mr. Calacanis claimed ownership of the Standard honchos' domain names, on Jan. 19, The Industry Standar d closed a $30 million round of venture capital financing led by New York-based Flatiron Partners and Chase Capital Partners.

And now, a tabloid skirmish: On Sunday, March 5, the Daily News unveiled the first in its six-part series on the 15 most-sued doctors in New York. The same day, the New York Post ran a special investigation on how "Bad docs get off easy." Coincidence? Not quite.

According to Arthur Browne, senior managing editor at the Daily News and the editor on the malpractice series, the Post didn't get to work on the special report until March 3. The News series was originally set to go for March 12, but, hearing of the Post 's entry into the story from sources in the medical industry, the News ran with what it had a week earlier. Reporters Russ Buettner and William Sherman had been working on the News series for months.

"When we heard that, in their typical fashion, they were going to do something cheap, quick and dirty, we decided to get it in the paper," Mr. Browne said.

Post health reporter Susan Rubinowitz said she came up with her story before she learned of the upcoming Daily News series, as a tie-in to the recent rash of medical malpractice horror stories in the news (i.e., Dr. Zorro). "It was my idea, and I worked on it for about a week," Ms. Rubinowitz said. Making one of her final round of calls on March 3, she found out about the News series, she said. Told that the News bumped its malpractice series up, Ms. Rubinowitz said, "That's nice … That makes me feel good."

The Breakfast Table is a nice feature at Slate . The idea behind the column is that you take two interesting people, get them to write e-mail to each other throughout the day, and then publish the results all week long. At their best, the exchanges have the zip of e-mail dashed off in just a few minutes.

For the week beginning March 6, Slate readers are treated to an exchange between Hanna Rosin, a religion reporter for the Washington Post , and David Plotz, Slate 's Washington bureau chief, who is also Ms. Rosin's husband. And so the tone of the e-mail between the two has swung back and forth between pillow talk and wonk-speak.

On March 1, Ms. Rosin wrote: "Hi, Honey. Did you see the papers this morning? (Why of course I did, Sweetie, because I stole them out of your bag at the gym this morning.)

Well, in the few minutes I managed to steal them back (while you were treadmilling away, no doubt mesmerized by Katie Couric's on-air colonoscopy) …"

After that bit of "domestic cooing," as one Slate reader put it on the Web site's message board, the tone went suddenly New Republic : "Maybe the answer is less sociological than pheremonal," Ms. Rosin wrote to her husband. "The religious right's hatred of McCain is viscerally, inexplicably venomous. It goes way beyond his support for campaign finance reform."

Then it was right back to the billing and cooing: "P.S.: Do you think I can post a query to the general public about our 'bug problem' or would that embarrass you as regards the thoroughness of our housekeeping?"

Mr. Plotz responded a couple of hours later: "Hi Sweetie, (Note my use of 'Sweetie' rather than your bogus 'Honey.' 'Honey' is an endearment you've never directed toward me in real life. Please don't start now.)" And he, too, fell into wonk-speak as he described for his wife a photo of Al Gore in The New York Times : "This picture highlights one of my pet peeves about the phony populism of modern campaigns: American Presidential candidates prove their fitness for office by doing all the things they would never do in office. The campaign is an exercise in anti-governance."

Reading Ms. Rosin and Mr. Plotz was like switching from a Thirtysomething rerun to News Hour With Jim Lehrer , and back again. Off the Record called to ask if the Breakfast Table setup was making them feel awkward.

"I am perfectly happy to coo over my wife in public," Mr. Plotz said.

"It's embarrassing to have the conversations with your husband called awkward," she said.

Both Mr. Plotz and Ms. Rosin put their accounts of their conversations with Off the Record in their next Breakfast Table installments. You can read them–and, perhaps, sadly enough, their reactions to this item–at www.slate.com.