Rebecca Mead on Middlemarch

On a recent Friday evening, we headed all the way west on 37th Street to hear New Yorker writers recount stories about being that most exciting of things—a New Yorker writer. The event was the opening night of the blitz of panels, conversations and chances to see what writers look like that is the annual New Yorker Festival.

The hangar-like space was converted into a lounge with the addition of cafe tables and chairs. A cash bar offered wine, beer and snacks in serving bowls fashioned  to look like martini glasses. Snippets of conversation—overheard while we looked for a seat—sounded like, dare we say it, the premise of many a New Yorker cartoon.

“Did you buy a place?” we heard a woman sipping red wine ask.

“In the process,” her tablemate responded.

“How was Monterey?” someone squealed.

A woman seated alone waited for the show to start, clutching, appropriately enough, this week’s issue.

Andy Borowitz, the magazine’s humor writer, hosted. “When David Remnick asked me if I wanted to write for The New Yorker, I was so excited I said I would do that for free,” he said.

The editor, Mr. Borowitz said, apparently had the same idea.

Thus, the tone was set. Lauren Collins, in black ankle boots and a patterned dress, reminisced about throwing up on Donatella Versace while on assignment in Lake Como. When she confessed to Mr. Remnick, he made her include it in the story “as penance.” Nicholas Schmidle told a story about interviewing Russian arms dealer Victor Bout, who demanded a subscription in exchange for talking to the magazine. Mr. Schmidle no longer speaks to the inmate, but he does renew his gift subscription.

“The New Yorker makes a lovely gift and the holidays are just around the corner,” Mr. Borowitz said after Mr. Schmidle’s 10 minutes were up. “David Remnick will be selling subscriptions at intermission.” Mr. Remnick, who sat in the audience, stage right, looked amused.

“Did you know, David Remnick hasn’t read the magazine in the 14 years he has been the editor?” joked Mr. Borowitz. “He has them all in a pile on his bedside table, but he can’t seem to get to them.”

Rebecca Mead told a heartwarming story about finding herself while writing about Middlemarch. Film critic Anthony Lane held the mic and paced like a seasoned stand-up.

“When it happens, it’s like a dog that can dance,” Mr. Remnick told The Observer later. “Anthony Lane is a natural comedian.”

Will Mr. Remnick ever tell his story onstage?

“No one has asked me, and if drafted I will not run,” he said. “I swear to God. It’s mortifying enough to hear your name in someone’s story.”

Larry Wright, who closed the show, had the folksy charm of a storyteller at a campfire (he lives in Austin, Texas) as he talked about his 25,000-word story about Scientology. He described the fact-checking process with the notoriously touchy (and litigious) church. “I’ve come to think of the fact-checkers as very erudite and polite agents with the KGB,” he said.

Like everything else about the magazine on this evening, even the fact-checkers became the stuff of legend

Did the Church of Scientology use a Vanity Fair contributing editor to infiltrate and gather intelligence on the cult's enemies in the media?

John Connolly is a well-known, and well-liked, character in New York media circles. He's a former NYPD detective and stock broker who landed a third career as an investigative reporter for Vanity Fair, where he is a contributing editor, Radar, the Daily Beast, Gawker, and other outlets. Connolly is an investigator of the old school, employed more for his ability to run a license plate number than his facility with prose. In 1990, while freelancing for Forbes, he was accused by a federal judge of using his old NYPD badge to obtain sealed court documents. According to USA Today, his stint as a stockbroker ended in the 1980s with a $100,000 civil penalty and lifetime ban from the Securities and Exchange Commission. He's a mischievous tipster, an inveterate gossip, and an information broker of the highest order. He speaks with a cartoonish New York accent and knows literally everybody. And according to the two highest ranking Scientology officials to ever leave the church, he's been a paid informant for the cult for two decades.

The accusation comes from Marty Rathbun, who ranked so high in the organization before he left that he served as Tom Cruise's "auditor," or confessor, and Mike Rinder, Scientology's former chief spokesman. Both men have defected from the church and accuse its current leader, David Miscavige, of ruling through violence and terror. On February 15, Rathbun posted to his blog a lengthy internal church memo, purportedly written by Linda Hamel, chief of the church's faux-CIA "Office of Special Affairs," revealing Connolly to have secretly supplied intelligence to the church on the preparation of Andrew Morton's 2008 biography of Tom Cruise. According to the memo, Connolly approached Morton in 2006 under the pretense of writing "an article for Vanity Fair about the books Morton has done on celebrities including the one he is writing on Tom Cruise." He proceeded, the memo says, to pump Morton for information about his book and report it back to the church:

Connolly was here in LA working on the Pellicano story ["Talk of the Town," Vanity Fair, June 2006] and contacted Morton and met with him on the basis of gaining his cooperation to be interviewed for an article for Vanity Fair about the books Morton has done on celebrities including the one he is writing on Tom Cruise. Connolly wanted to see what Morton was like and get any information about where Morton is currently at with regard to writing the book and to see if Morton would agree to be interviewed for an article. Based on the meeting, Connolly said that Morton seems to have finished his research already and is busy writing the book.

Connolly told Morton that it would not be a puff piece and would show both sides including what would be said about Morton. (Connolly will use the article to investigate Morton's past treatment of other celebrities, use of sleazy sources, etc. that would undermine Morton's credibility). Morton said he would check with St. Martin's Press to get their take on cooperating for the story. Morton seems to be interested in generating publicity for the book.

Connolly's impression of Morton is that he is a serious writer and is a focused person but enjoyable to talk to. He knows how to use his charm to get people to talk. Morton also told him that it only took him five weeks to write the Monica Lewinsky book - so he is capable of churning out a lot in a short period of time.

Morton said that he thought that Tom Cruise was a good story and that is why he wanted to write the book. The reporter got the impression from talking with Morton that Morton has collected a lot of information about the Church and that this will be well covered in the book. Morton also mentioned that he has an assistant who is working for him.

[snip]

Connolly's impression is that Morton is a formidable adversary who is not going to back down. He thinks that Morton has made up his mind already as to the angle of the book but did not specifically say what it was.

[snip]

In the US Connolly, wants to do an investigative story and put a piece together on Morton and his use of sleazy sources in the books he has done about celebrities such as Madonna, the Beckhams and Tom Cruise. This would attack Morton on his reputation questioning the credibility of his sources.

The memo proves, in Rathbun's words, that "Connolly has been a Church of Scientology Office of Special Affairs informant for nearly two decades." In a phone interview, Rathbun told me that Connolly's work for the church was extensive. He was an operative, Rathbun says, of a Los Angeles cop-turned-private-investigator named Gene Ingram who was well known as a hired spook for Scientology. "I hired Ingram," says Rathbun. "And I remember distinctly that he would talk about his pal John Connolly. For years I periodically saw his name in programs and reports as an active source of information and stories." Rathbun cited examples: Connolly was involved, he says, in gathering intelligence on a 1993 Premiere story on Tom Cruise that the church was particularly concerned about. The details are hazy, Rathbun says, "but I remember Connolly getting intel on that story." Rathbun also says Connolly was involved in "trying to influence" vocal ex-Scientologist Chuck Beatty in 2006.

Rinder, who was responsible for, in church parlance, "handling" the news media, corroborates Rathbun's account. "Connolly was a resource to deal with media problems," he told me. "Ingram used to tout Connolly's virtues pretty often--'Connolly can handle this; he'll find out what's going on and he's got lines into all media.' That was something I heard many, many times. Ingram even met with Connolly at the Celebrity Center in Los Angeles." Like Rathbun, Rinder recalled vaguely that Connolly was involved in reconnoitering the Premiere story. He also said Connolly "was used to gather information" on Wensley Clarkson, a British reporter who wrote an unauthorized biography of Tom Cruise in 1998.

Both Rinder and Rathbun say Connolly was paid for his services. "Absolutely," said Rinder. "No one ever does work like that for free. Not for the church." Likewise, Rathbun said, "I assume he was paid. That's the way Ingram operated." Neither man claimed to have direct knowledge of payments. Ingram didn't respond to repeated phone calls. Neither did the church.

SEEING RATHBUN'S POST, and the purported memo, came as a shock to me. I know John Connolly. He wrote an item for Gawker just a few weeks ago. We worked together for months at Radar, where I was a senior reporter and he was on contract as a tipster, fixer, and all around über-source. We worked closely together on a feature story about the Los Angeles paparazzi. And he'd helped me out on a lengthy 2008 feature about Anonymous' war on Scientology. Connolly had received an inquiry from a member of Anonymous, which he handed off to me, and gave me the names and numbers of two helpful former Scientologists.

While I was working on that story, Connolly told me casually that he was friendly with some private investigators who work for the church. There was nothing particularly nefarious about that--Connolly's friendships with various private eyes is one of the reasons he's useful to places like Radar and Vanity Fair. The fact that some of them counted the church as clients, and that he freely admitted that, struck me as innocuous enough. And when he told me that one of those friends actually called him to ask who I was and what I was reporting on, I was more happy to know that my reporting had struck a nerve than worried about what Connolly might tell him. I trusted him.

Then a strange thing happened. Connolly called me up, out of the blue, and asked, "You live in Brooklyn, right?" Yes, I replied. "What neighborhood? I was just there visiting family, and it's so great." I told him that I lived in Park Slope, which isn't strictly true: I live in Windsor Terrace, an adjacent neighborhood. It's often easier to say Park Slope, which people know. But I was also immediately suspicious of why Connolly would want to know, so I decided to shade my answer a little bit in case he was helping a Scientology operative figure out which of the 62 public listings for a "John Cook" in Brooklyn was mine. I never suffered any Scientology harassment at my home, and I never confronted Connolly about why he needed to know where I lived. We continued to stay in touch, and he would occasionally tip me to stories.

When I read Rathbun's accusations, that call suddenly loomed large in my mind.

I called Connolly. He told me that he wasn't feeling well, and that he'd been "shot up with so many drugs" after a recent surgical procedure to correct a heart arrhythmia. He'd already seen Rathbun's post. "I've gotta tell you, it's bullshit," he said. How would the church know about his meetings with Morton? "Maybe they were tapping my phones," he said. "Maybe it's a forgery." Connolly admitted that he knew Ingram, but said the information flowed the other way in their relationship: "Ingram drank too much one night and told me what they were doing to Rich Behar," he told me. "I'm the one who called Behar and told him what the church was up to." Behar was a reporter for Time who wrote a detailed expose on the church in 1991 and was rewarded with a $416 million lawsuit and exhaustive investigation into his personal life by the church that included obtaining his phone records and credit reports. (Behar corroborated Connolly's account, telling me that Connolly contacted Time's legal department in the early 1990s with a tip "that an agent for the church had told John over drinks that he [the agent] was proud of a particular thing he had done to gather information about a family member of mine," and that Behar was "highly appreciative of what he did in this effort to help us.")

Connolly did approach Morton in 2006, as the Hamel memo states. Patricia Greenway was Morton's assistant on the Cruise book. She told me that Connolly introduced himself as a writer for Vanity Fair who was working on a book about Anthony Pellicano, and was interested in trying to connect Pellicano to Scientology. "He was asking me to tell him what I knew about Scientology," Greenway says. "He was pumping me for information. I spoke to him because Andrew asked me to." Contrary to the memo, however, Greenway says Connolly never told her that he was working on a story about Morton--just that he was a Vanity Fair writer working on a Pellicano book.

As far as I can tell, Connolly has never written a word about Scientology. Vanity Fair has never devoted a feature to the cult, though it has turned up tangentially in several stories. Beth Kseniak, a spokeswoman for the magazine, says Connolly has never been assigned to write about Scientology aside from contributing reporting to a 2008 Nancy Jo Sales story about two people who believed, falsely, that they were being harassed by the church. Radar and Spy, two other publications he's been associated with, covered it extensively, but never under Connolly's byline. He has claimed in the past that he's helped out behind the scenes on coverage of the church. When Andrew Morton e-mailed him to ask for an explanation of the Hamel memo, Connolly replied, among other things, that "I have worked on a number of anti-Scientology stories without getting a byline-my choice." One of those "anti-Scientology" stories is my 2008 Radar piece. I've been told by two former Scientologists that Connolly has claimed credit for some or all of that story, despite the fact that his participation consisted simply of referring me to three sources. In 2005, Radar published a damning story about Tom Cruise's relationship to the church; its author Kim Master says Connolly didn't play a role in it.

Which makes it odd that Connolly has repeatedly, almost obsessively, called a variety of prominent ex-Scientologists for years to keep up with them, all under the pretense of developing stories for Vanity Fair. "He called me hundreds of times," says Chuck Beatty, a former Scientologist who frequently helps reporters covering the cult. "He'd say, 'If there's any new defectors, let me know.' He asked me lots about Cruise. He asked me lots and lots about Paul Haggis." Haggis and his angry departure from the church were the subjects of a recent devastating story by the New Yorker's Lawrence Wright. "He was real heavy to find out who Blown for Good was." Blown for Good was the screen name of an anonymous former highly placed Scientologist who was active in a number of anti-Scientology message boards. He was later revealed to be Marc Headley, a church volunteer who spent 15 years on its Southern California desert compound. "He was repeatedly asking who Blown for Good was," Beatty says.

Connolly also maintained extremely close contact with vocal defector named Larry Brennan. "He's probably called me over 50 or more times," Brennan told me. "Sometimes twice or more a week. He was definitely checking up on me. We'd talk about our daughters. Sometimes I'd wonder--you're calling me once or twice a week, week in and week out, but never writing a story? He told me he was trying to find an angle."

Another high-profile Scientology dissident Connolly kept in touch with is Jason Beghe, a film and television actor who publicized his defection from the church in a series of YouTube videos calling it "very dangerous for your spiritual health." Connolly began calling after his break in 2008, Beghe says, and kept coming back. "I've been talking to him for a couple years at least," Beghe says. "He was always just interested in what was going on, or he just wanted to shoot the shit. He would try to blow smoke up my ass--'I like the cut of your jib, Jason.'" Beghe says he always suspected that Connolly wasn't keeping in touch for journalistic purposes. "I was waiting for the church to try something on me," he says. "And when Connolly first came on my radar, I was suspicious. So I'd always give him foggy data, because I believed I was talking to the church. And then a couple years ago, Marty told me, 'Yeah, I think that guy did undercover work for the church.'"

Connolly's contacts with these anti-Scientology figures certainly don't prove anything. In fact, they're exactly what you'd expect from a reporter covering the church. Trouble is, there doesn't seem to be any evidence that Connolly actually ever covered the church. And there is evidence, in the form of Rathbun's memo, that he worked for it. "He would definitely ask me about the kind of stuff that a Scientology spy would ask you about," says Brennan. "But it's also the stuff a reporter and friend would ask you about."

It was a recent call from Connolly to Beghe that sparked Rathbun to publish the memo. Wright's New Yorker story had just come out, and Connolly called Beghe to pump him for information about it. And he started in on a line of questioning accusing Rathbun and Rinder of plotting to take over Scientology. "He said, 'Marty and Mike, they're trying to take over the church,'" Beghe told me. "Connolly was trying to plant internecine turmoil between people the church regards as enemies." If anti-Scientologist activists came to believe that Rinder and Rathbun wanted to depose Miscavige and take over leadership of the church rather than destroy it, a schism could be exploited. Beghe called Rathbun to tell him about the conversation, and Rathbun decided to expose Connolly. "He was not only a data collector," Rathbun says. "He was an agent provocateur, and he was running an operation on Jason."

Connolly freely admits that he accused Rathbun and Rinder of trying to take over the church. When I first called him to ask about the memo, he said, "They got spooked because I was asking about the schism. You and I should do a story on it together." He explained to Morton that "I have been poking around and trying to get a publication to do a story about the possible takeover/schism of Scientology which apparently has made some people nervous."

IF CONNOLLY WERE a paid agent of the church used to run interference on stories the church was worried about, one would expect to see his fingerprints on Wright's New Yorker piece, which was highly anticipated. He never contacted Wright or tried to gather intel on the story, but Wright says Connolly's name came up during his reporting. "I was alert to surveillance and that sort of thing," Wright said. "I didn't feel like it was happening. But I did hear the name. It was during one of many 'they're gonna get you' conversations I had with various ex-church people. The conversation had to do with, 'There will be an article about you, they'll try to smear you. And John Connolly's name came up. In the welter of names that had been thrown at me, his was one."

Rolling Stone contributing editor Janet Reitman spent the last five years working on her book Inside Scientology, which will be released later this year. It's based on a critical 2006 Rolling Stone article, and would likewise be a prime target for someone operating as a media informant. Reitman told me she's never met Connolly and that he never attempted to contact her. But she was surprised when Brennan, one of her sources for the book, called her a year or so ago to tell her that Connolly had been talking about her. "He certainly knew a lot about me and about my book, when it was coming out," she said. "And he told Brennan how much he liked my writing."

I could find no evidence that Connolly was involved in any of the specific operations that Rinder and Rathbun mentioned to me. Beatty said he spoke to Connolly all the time, but couldn't recall any specific instances of Connolly trying to influence him, as Rathbun claimed. John Richardson, the author of the 1993 Premiere story that Rinder and Rathbun recall Connolly gathering intelligence on, says Connolly never contacted him during his reporting. "We certainly did have a lot of trouble with the church during that story," he said. "I went to interview Rathbun and Rinder [who were at that time still in the church] with an editor of mine. They'd only known for two days that he'd be joining me, and in that time they learned that he was gay and had worked for Rolling Stone as an assistant, neither of which were public. So they definitely had someone working on us. Someone inside the media must have done it."

Richardson did have a run-in with Connolly not long after, though. He had been working on a subsequent story on Heidi Fleiss, the Hollywood Madam, that was killed for a variety of reasons. Richardson says that a year later, Connolly, writing either for Spy or New York, began reporting a story based on the premise that Richardson dropped the Fleiss story in exchange for a bribe. "We had to send a cease and desist order, and he stopped," Richardson says. "I don't know if that was a Scientology revenge plot or just an honest mistake."

Wensley Clarkson, the author of the unauthorized Cruise biography that Rinder says Connolly gathered information on, says he's never met him and is unfamiliar with the name.

When I called various former colleagues of Connolly's to run Rathbun's accusations by them, few were truly surprised. But rather than condemn him as a Scientology rat, they shrugged and said: "He's playing both sides. That's Connolly." Indeed, for someone who trades in gossip and information, being regarded by the church as an asset could be exceedingly useful. Who knows what valuable secrets Connolly could extract from Ingram, or other church members, in exchange for using his credentials to keep tabs on a few harmless critics of the church, or check up on a reporter now and again? Reporters trade information with sources all the time. Moreover, if Rathbun's accusations are true and his memo genuine, who's to say Connolly passed on accurate information? If he was meeting with Ingram at the church's Celebrity Center in Los Angeles--an invitation I wouldn't turn down--the potential upsides in terms of inside information about Hollywood could be huge. The downside, of course, would be lying to and spying on your colleagues and sources.

I spoke to Connolly briefly on the phone after I first read Rathbun's memo. After speaking to Rathbun, Rinder, and others mentioned in this post, I repeatedly tried to reach him again to seek further explanation and clarification. He declined to return my phone calls or e-mails. My inquiry to Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter was forwarded to spokeswoman Beth Kseniak, who told me that the memo's claim that Connolly used his Vanity Fair credentials to get close to Morton is false. "As far as we're concerned, the claim that he approached Andrew Morton as a Vanity Fair reporter is unfounded." When I asked her for Carter's response to the claim that Connolly had been feeding intel to the church for 20 years, she said, "You're going to have to go to Connolly on that."

editorial@observer.com

Based on journalist Lawrence Wright's one-man play of his best seller, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11—which you might remember as the one book Sarah Palin copped to reading when questioned by Katie Couric—My Trip to Al-Qaeda delves into the tangled web of politics and fanaticism behind not just the September 11 attacks, but how the West relates to Muslim culture in general. He even finds time to paint Osama bin Laden as the first great screenwriter of the 21st century, a monster crafting a narrative of America's coming ruin that began with the fall of the Twin Towers. It's all very Shakespearean in its tragedy.

Kudos to Gibney for taking what is ostensibly an audio book and livening things up a bit. Wright's stage play recounts his experiences researching The Looming Tower, and as thrilling as it all is, the author uses a tone and manner that's reminiscent of a Middle Eastern Studies professor: a riveting speaker and narrator he is not. But in his reporting and Gibney's meticulous editing, My Trip to Al-Qaeda comes to life. Toward the end, while Wright discusses the various atrocities that Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda has perpetrated on innocents around the world—including many Muslims—Gibney cuts together a montage of news footage that recalls the heart-stopping quality of Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men. Like that film—and despite some inherent limitations—My Trip to Al-Qaeda is unsettling, incisive and downright scary. Just don't expect to leave feeling good about the future.

On Monday, March 5, the Culture Project theater house reopened in Soho after a two-and-a-half-month-long hiatus with the premiere of New Yorker staff writer Lawrence Wright’s one-man show, My Trip to Al-Qaeda.

“The unique production,” a press release had trumpeted, “follows in Al Gore’s footsteps by using facts, figures and PowerPoint to weave the details of a complex global issue—in this case the rise of Al-Qaeda.”

“It was fascinating to get to understand their way of thinking,” said the avant-garde artist-musician Laurie Anderson after the show, which featured no PowerPoint whatsoever, while theatergoers filed out as if leaving a funeral. “That they have no plan, that they’re interested in death, not life. I found it shocking and, in a way, more devastating.”

“Devastating,” agreed her husband, singer Lou Reed. The diminutive couple, both in hooded parkas, resembled a pair of really hip Eskimos. “It’s an astonishing explanation. It makes terrible sense. We seem to be doing what they wanted us to do. I don’t know anyone who knows how to get out of this or why that guy’s still here--Bush.”

“You know when people say, ‘Can art change the world? Ehhh,’” Ms. Anderson said. “But then I think about Bob Dylan: He wrote songs about losers. So people went, ‘Hey, being a loser can be kind of cool.’ You know, it can be romantic. It expanded people’s idea of what a role model can be, and that’s really good in America, where your role models are very restrictive. You know: cowboy, salesman, movie star—that’s about it.”

The Transom tried to get Mr. Reed to expand on this, but he indicated with his hand that he was done.

Many of the promised luminaries—editor Tina Brown, TV host Phil Donahue, even, to The Transom’s disappointment, Vagina Monologuist Eve Ensler—didn’t make it to the after-party at the new Bowery Hotel. There was no dance floor, no disco ball, but the wine and conversation flowed freely.

“There was no greater party place than West Berlin, and they were always on the verge,” said Culture Project’s white-pinstripe-suit-clad founder, Allan Buchman, explaining why the festivities were a wise idea. “It’s a way to release the tension.”

Mr. Wright said he’d been mulling a venture into drama ever since David Hare asked if he could use a line from one of Mr. Wright’s articles for one of his plays. “When I finished my book [The Looming Tower, about the road to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks], I still had some things I wanted to say,” Mr. Wright said. “I’m not a character in my book, but I’d had some really interesting experiences and I had been changed myself. I want people to understand why they attacked America, what caused them to be the people they are, how are we seen in the rest of the world. Those are themes that I want people to understand.”

He added, “It’s a very odd thing for a reporter to do, write a play.” Not to mention act in it—move over, Joan Didion! “It takes a lot out of you,” Mr. Wright said. “I think next I’m going to write about learning how to play the piano.”

New Yorker editor David Remnick praised his employee’s experiment. “What I liked about his performance is that it was him,” wrote Mr. Remnick (who attended the performance but slipped away early to relieve a babysitter), in an e-mail the next morning. “There was no attempt to make himself into a broader character, thank God.”

Heyday! Heyday! Shiny Vanity Fair Crowd Fêtes Kurt Andersen’s Second Novel

Kurt Andersen’s second novel, Heyday is barreling towards bookstores, and on Wednesday, Feb. 28, his old buddies Graydon Carter, of Vanity Fair, and Jim Kelly, of Time, threw him a party at Mr. Carter’s restaurant, the Waverly Inn.

Researching the book, a piece of historical fiction, “was like the graduate school I never had,” Mr. Andersen said. “Taking the hard facts of history and then seeing how much you can try to voyeur and play around with it is part of the fun and the puzzle of doing it.”

In the crowd was Jonathan Franzen, author of the 2001 best-seller The Corrections and erstwhile Oprah antagonist. “I like him a lot,” he said of Mr. Andersen. “But I have problems with the genre.” Though he admitted to digging Deadwood.

“The two things I don’t like about historic fiction are when they try to backdate modern attitudes,” said Vanity Fair contributing editor, Walter Kirn. “Kurt doesn’t do that. And also, he sounds contemporary—even though he’s writing about a hundred years ago. And that’s the essential accomplishment.” Is that two things?

Never mind—it was onward to contributing writer David Margolick, who fondly recalled listening to the audio version of Michael Shaara’s Civil War novel The Killer Angels while driving home from covering the O.J. Simpson trial in 1994. His colleague Kevin Sessums, meanwhile, was bemoaning the forthcoming review in The New York Times of his new memoir, Mississippi Sissy. “They got a right-wing lesbian to review the book,” he said, referring to Norah Vincent, author of Self-Made Man: One Woman’s Year Disguised as a Man. “Believe me, I’ve done my research on that bitch.”

—Nicholas Boston

She-Bop in Reebok: These Bold Broads Miss the Crazy 80’s

The upsetting 1980’s fashion flashback just refuses to stop, as evinced by Reebok’s blindingly Day-Glo party celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Freestyle sneaker at Culture Club on Thursday, March 1.

“For me, it’s glory,” said Brooke Shields, comparatively subdued in a black Donna Karan pantsuit accented with giant diamond earrings. “It was my sort of era, when I arrived. It was responsible for me—I respected it then and I respect it now. And the fact that we’re still here”—she gestured at her mother, Teri, and an unidentified man—“is a testament to longevity.”

Ms. Shields, 41 (which is 61 in model-actress years), took a moment to recall what was perhaps the decade’s sartorial high point. “Jeans with the leg warmers—and you couldn’t leave without the leg warmer,” she said, adding poignantly: “I never really had friends in high school until I invited them to Wednesdays, when they had disco night at Xenon—and then all of my friends in high school decided they liked me, because I invited them to a party.”

Party girl turned master thespian Tara Reid, meanwhile, was wearing a sequined white dress picked up on Portobello Road in London. “I love the 80’s—the 80’s never came back because they never went away,” declared Ms. Reid, 31. “I mean, you have the Madonna videos and you have Boy George. I remember me and my friend growing up—we had a dance-off to ‘Karma Chameleon.’ I still know the dance moves.”

Before she could demonstrate them, The Transom ducked into a back stairwell, where relentlessly festive former MTV V.J. “Downtown” Julie Brown, 43, was stepping aside to allow a plate of mini-cheeseburgers to pass. “The world is in quite a messy little place,” she said, as the Fine Young Cannibals tune “She Drives Me Crazy” blasted in the background. “I think it’s fun to go back to something that’s … fun.”

—David Foxley

Please Sir, May I Have Seymour? Birthday Cake for Model Husband Brant

Wynton Marsalis was on the horn. Little wooden peace pipe making the rounds. A bunch of slick-looking millionaire art dealers noddin’ and bobbin’ and shakin’ their domes to that sweet, sweet music.

“It’s an honor to be here,” said Mr. Marsalis, coming off the stage. “Here” was the surprise 60th birthday party for Peter Brant, art-world publishing mogul, polo player and hubby of supermodel turned homemaker Stephanie Seymour—at the Gramercy Park Hotel’s not-yet-opened Asian-inspired restaurant Thursday, March 1. “I play like it was my own birthday,” said the jazz great, looking timeless in a three-piece tweed suit.

“It was perfect, especially in this smoky room,” said gallerist Larry Gagosian, who’d just returned from Oscar week in Los Angeles.

“I think Peter was very moved,” said the artist Jeff Koons. “There was definitely some moisture around his eyes. It was just really good people, good friends.”

These good friends included Robert De Niro and Baby Jane Holzer. But the surprise element of the illustrious gathering was almost ruined. “Peter had heard something about a party earlier in the day,” said gallerist Tony Shafrazi, who played M.C. for the evening. “We had to distract him for a couple hours, so we took him to the bar and told him we were going to a restaurant somewhere else.” Sneaky!

Nearby, Ms. Seymour was sizing up a Warhol print of a cow that everyone had signed for her husband. She was moved by the gesture, but said birthdays don’t really mean much to her. “It’s just an excuse to have a great party with great people and great music.”

A faraway look came over Ms. Seymour’s eyes. “Jazz is so sexy,” she intoned. “I think it has something to do with the lips.”

Flamed! Gay Prison in L.A. Bars Carrot-topped Comedienne

On Monday, Feb. 26, self-described D-list comedian and “honorary gay” Kathy Griffin met with Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca, in an attempt to convince him to let her bring her act and her cameras from the reality show My Life on the D-List to the openly gay division of his jail, known as cellblock K-11.

“He didn’t know me from Adam,” Ms. Griffin said. “He kept saying, ‘Now who are you again?’ I was like ‘Um, I sold out Carnegie Hall? Anybody?’”

It was a brief and somewhat desultory meeting. “I was like, ‘I speak gay fluently.’ He didn’t laugh at anything I said,” the carrot-topped comedian complained.

“Sheriff did not think it would fit into the core values of the jail,” said Mr. Baca’s spokesman, Steve Whitmore, of the proposed performance. Mr. Whitmore acknowledged that Mr. Baca didn’t know who Ms. Griffin was, but said that “she clearly did not know who he was, either”—as demonstrated by the fact that she had tried to bring an uninvited camera crew into the sheriff’s office.

“The sheriff wants to eliminate the locker-room mentality and to bring out a sense of integrity and dignity when it comes to language and conduct in the jail,” Mr. Whitmore said. “He didn’t think that her act would be appropriate at this time.”

Ms. Griffin had her own insights into the workings of Mr. Baca’s mind. “The sheriff is not gay. If he were gay, I would have been in for sure,” said the comic, who dates her homosexual bona fides back to high school, when she hung out with the “theater queen” set.

Undaunted, Ms. Griffin will perform at a prison in Perryville, Ariz., this week. “What’s weird is that the heterosexual prisons are like, ‘Come on down! Do whatever you want!’” she said. “I’m planning to open with: ‘What time is the gang rape? I’m here for the 6:30 gang rape!’ I’m hoping nobody makes a citizen’s arrest.”

The best thing about After Words, the book interview show, is that it pairs an author with someone who knows the subject and often comes at it from a different point of view. The best example of this was David Frum's superb interview of Victor Navasky a year ago, for Navasky's book, A Matter of Opinion. Frum was both respectful and sharp, and the polished Navasky humored him for a while before he grew impatient with Frum's description of the errors of the left, and defenestrated him. I forget the specific exchange, though I do recall that Frum tried to grill Navasky over the alleged anti-Semitism of Nation magazine writers. (Frum and I share a hobbyhorse; he just rides it backwards).

Anyway, last night, the interview went along on data points surrounding Al Qaeda before Wright climbed up to the high board: the despair in the Muslim world. "Islamic societies are in a crisis... All the statistics are so dismal... the absence of knowledge, the widespread illiteracy, all these things create depair..."

This is Bernard Lewis regurgitated by a new generation, and some of it is true. I have commented often on the lack of reading I observed in Syria. The problem is that it is purely materialistic. The statistics are economic ones, and they often seek to valorize Israel, because it is so modern. Those of us on the left who are concerned with Muslim hearts and minds are not talking strictly about their pocketbooks. Other things beside western progress puncture the spirit of Arabs. Like, injustice.

Zogby knows this, and could have educated a great number of us by expressing this point of view. The closest he got was "Doesn't the loss of control and policies we've perpetrated contribute as well?" He meant, I will bet, the Occupied Territories, and the charnel house that David Frum and John Podhoretz have made of Iraq. But he didn't say so out loud. And Wright then pushed the question aside with another serving of pablum. Zogby had something of a fawning smile throughout. This was a true misfortune, a lost opportunity to extend the dialogue between worldviews...

“For almost five years now,” it began, “we have carried around the legacy of Sept. 11. There is no sunny morning that does not revive its memory. The news of a terrorist plot against America-bound airliners yesterday called up feelings that are never all that far below the surface.”

There may still be some New Yorkers, some Washingtonians or Pennsylvanians for whom that’s true. And no doubt it’s true for the loved ones of everyone murdered that day. But the portrait of people still struggling bravely with the trauma of 9/11 is, largely, a flattering lie.

For many Americans, 9/11 now exists as something like a fictional event. The fact that there have been no further attacks on American soil is taken by the right as proof that President Bush’s war against terror is working (one of the G.O.P.’s talking points for the fall election, according to The Times); by the left, it’s taken as proof that the Islamic threat has been grossly exaggerated—if it exists at all.

Recently, I read a review of a book about the war on terror in which the reviewer castigated the author for not giving serious consideration to the claim that if the Bush administration hadn’t branded Al Qaeda an international threat, Osama’s crew would be properly regarded as an ineffectual ragtag cult. Let me get this straight: It wasn’t demonstrating the capacity to murder nearly 3,000 people simultaneously in three separate locations that made Al Qaeda dangerous, nor the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, nor the successful coordination of attacks on two American embassies in Africa thousands of miles apart—it was Bush propaganda.

Listen to those arguments and it’s as if 9/11 had become an urban legend. Denying that something is ever likely to happen again can be a way of denying that it ever happened in the first place—it’s denying that the line separating an unthinkable event from a reality has already been crossed. And so the attacks that followed 9/11 in Bali, Moscow, Madrid, Riyadh, London and Mumbai don’t matter. America hasn’t been attacked again and that, both right and left are telling us, should settle all doubts.

As its subtitle implies, Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 doesn’t deal with the place that 9/11 has come to occupy in our consciousness or in our politics. But Mr. Wright’s gripping, lucid narrative suggests at least one thing remains unchanged in American life: the belief that it can’t happen here.

It’s not the chapters about the formation of the murderous Islamist mind-set that inspire the most anger reading this book. They’re exactly what you would expect. Beginning with the Islamic writer and theorist Sayyid Qutb, executed by Nasser in 1966 for his part in a scheme to overthrow the government and thereafter an inspiration for Islamist fanatics, Mr. Wright traces a remarkably consistent line of thought—if “thought” can be used to describe a set of beliefs so insular and medieval—that culminates in the murderous ideology of Al Qaeda.

What enrages you about The Looming Tower is Mr. Wright’s cool-headed demonstration of how Osama bin Laden’s homicidal religious fanaticism was abetted at nearly every turn by the criminal negligence of American officials. Mr. Wright depicts the C.I.A. and F.B.I. as so intent on protecting their respective turfs that they refuse to share crucial information with each other. And he presents the agencies as so steeped in their past battles—the Cold War for the C.I.A., bringing down the Mafia for the F.B.I.—that the agents warning of the new threat from the Middle East are regarded as little more than obsessives.

Although the Bush administration doesn’t fully enter into the narrative of The Looming Tower until the last chapters, Mr. Wright adds to the picture of the administration that’s been painted elsewhere as hapless and not interested in hearing about the threat of Islamist terrorism. The indelible image of that incompetent arrogance remains Condoleezza Rice’s testimony before the 9/11 Commission, when she blithely dismissed a bulletin she’d been shown in August of 2001: “I believe the title was ‘Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States,’” she testified, as if she was saying, “I think I was wearing my blue dress.” Mr. Wright reports that when Richard Clarke, special advisor to the National Security Council, met with her earlier that year, he left the meeting believing she’d never heard of Al Qaeda. One of Mr. Wright’s most devastating passages lists the Middle Eastern intelligence sources who attempted, from April through August of 2001, to warn Washington that a serious attack was on the way: They included Ahmed Shah Massoud, commander of Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and even the Taliban’s foreign minister.

The most vivid portrait in The Looming Tower is that of John O’Neill, the F.B.I. agent in charge of the National Security Division in the bureau’s New York office. O’Neill, who found a sympathetic ear in Mr. Clarke, comes off as not just dogged and driven, but capable of seeing beyond the information that bureau investigations had uncovered. What distinguished O’Neill, says Mr. Wright, was his realization “that radical Islamists had a wider dramatic vision that included murder on a large scale.” O’Neill was able to grasp that Islamist terrorism was not driven by a political strategy, in the way that, say, the terror of the P.L.O. or the I.R.A. had been. What was being acted out was what the conservative political philosopher Lee Harris would call (in the title of an essay written after 9/11) “Al-Qaeda’s Fantasy Ideology.” One of those gifted people who makes enemies easily and does not suffer fools gladly—and who suffered them at every turn in his F.B.I. career—O’Neill was also beset by the turmoil in his compartmentalized personal life (different women in different cities; worsening debt to fund a lifestyle he couldn’t afford). He left the bureau in August of 2001 for a high-paying job as security chief of a company operating out of the World Trade Center. His body was recovered 10 days after the attack.

Mr. Wright is a deft guide to the divisions and infighting among the various Islamic sects. He makes a sober case that Islamist anger at the U.S. comes in part from our support of the governments that have kept their people in poverty (though he dispenses with the nonsense about Islamists caring for the Palestinian cause—except insofar as it’s useful propaganda).

At bottom, Lawrence Wright realizes, Islamic fundamentalism is neither protest nor politics but a retreat from the demands and compromises of the real world into a dream of bringing the Islamist paradise to earth. And he doesn’t shy away from the essential components of this fantasy: the adolescent male fear of humiliation and the sexual terror that makes radical Islamism a refuge for so many Muslim men. It’s not hard to conclude that misogyny occupies the ideological place in Islamism that anti-Semitism did in Nazism.

The Looming Tower takes the threat of radical Islam seriously, and yet it leaves you scarcely able to believe that an assault on the very idea of civilization has been launched by such an adolescent mind-set. It’s like awakening to find out that Dungeons & Dragons devotees have threatened to take over the world.

Charles Taylor has written for Salon, The New York Times, The New Yorker and other publications. He’s a frequent contributor to The Observer.

“For almost five years now,” it began, “we have carried around the legacy of Sept. 11. There is no sunny morning that does not revive its memory. The news of a terrorist plot against America-bound airliners yesterday called up feelings that are never all that far below the surface.”

There may still be some New Yorkers, some Washingtonians or Pennsylvanians for whom that’s true. And no doubt it’s true for the loved ones of everyone murdered that day. But the portrait of people still struggling bravely with the trauma of 9/11 is, largely, a flattering lie.

For many Americans, 9/11 now exists as something like a fictional event. The fact that there have been no further attacks on American soil is taken by the right as proof that President Bush’s war against terror is working (one of the G.O.P.’s talking points for the fall election, according to The Times); by the left, it’s taken as proof that the Islamic threat has been grossly exaggerated—if it exists at all.

Recently, I read a review of a book about the war on terror in which the reviewer castigated the author for not giving serious consideration to the claim that if the Bush administration hadn’t branded Al Qaeda an international threat, Osama’s crew would be properly regarded as an ineffectual ragtag cult. Let me get this straight: It wasn’t demonstrating the capacity to murder nearly 3,000 people simultaneously in three separate locations that made Al Qaeda dangerous, nor the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, nor the successful coordination of attacks on two American embassies in Africa thousands of miles apart—it was Bush propaganda.

Listen to those arguments and it’s as if 9/11 had become an urban legend. Denying that something is ever likely to happen again can be a way of denying that it ever happened in the first place—it’s denying that the line separating an unthinkable event from a reality has already been crossed. And so the attacks that followed 9/11 in Bali, Moscow, Madrid, Riyadh, London and Mumbai don’t matter. America hasn’t been attacked again and that, both right and left are telling us, should settle all doubts.

As its subtitle implies, Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 doesn’t deal with the place that 9/11 has come to occupy in our consciousness or in our politics. But Mr. Wright’s gripping, lucid narrative suggests at least one thing remains unchanged in American life: the belief that it can’t happen here.

It’s not the chapters about the formation of the murderous Islamist mind-set that inspire the most anger reading this book. They’re exactly what you would expect. Beginning with the Islamic writer and theorist Sayyid Qutb, executed by Nasser in 1966 for his part in a scheme to overthrow the government and thereafter an inspiration for Islamist fanatics, Mr. Wright traces a remarkably consistent line of thought—if “thought” can be used to describe a set of beliefs so insular and medieval—that culminates in the murderous ideology of Al Qaeda.

What enrages you about The Looming Tower is Mr. Wright’s cool-headed demonstration of how Osama bin Laden’s homicidal religious fanaticism was abetted at nearly every turn by the criminal negligence of American officials. Mr. Wright depicts the C.I.A. and F.B.I. as so intent on protecting their respective turfs that they refuse to share crucial information with each other. And he presents the agencies as so steeped in their past battles—the Cold War for the C.I.A., bringing down the Mafia for the F.B.I.—that the agents warning of the new threat from the Middle East are regarded as little more than obsessives.

Although the Bush administration doesn’t fully enter into the narrative of The Looming Tower until the last chapters, Mr. Wright adds to the picture of the administration that’s been painted elsewhere as hapless and not interested in hearing about the threat of Islamist terrorism. The indelible image of that incompetent arrogance remains Condoleezza Rice’s testimony before the 9/11 Commission, when she blithely dismissed a bulletin she’d been shown in August of 2001: “I believe the title was ‘Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States,’” she testified, as if she was saying, “I think I was wearing my blue dress.” Mr. Wright reports that when Richard Clarke, special advisor to the National Security Council, met with her earlier that year, he left the meeting believing she’d never heard of Al Qaeda. One of Mr. Wright’s most devastating passages lists the Middle Eastern intelligence sources who attempted, from April through August of 2001, to warn Washington that a serious attack was on the way: They included Ahmed Shah Massoud, commander of Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and even the Taliban’s foreign minister.

The most vivid portrait in The Looming Tower is that of John O’Neill, the F.B.I. agent in charge of the National Security Division in the bureau’s New York office. O’Neill, who found a sympathetic ear in Mr. Clarke, comes off as not just dogged and driven, but capable of seeing beyond the information that bureau investigations had uncovered. What distinguished O’Neill, says Mr. Wright, was his realization “that radical Islamists had a wider dramatic vision that included murder on a large scale.” O’Neill was able to grasp that Islamist terrorism was not driven by a political strategy, in the way that, say, the terror of the P.L.O. or the I.R.A. had been. What was being acted out was what the conservative political philosopher Lee Harris would call (in the title of an essay written after 9/11) “Al-Qaeda’s Fantasy Ideology.” One of those gifted people who makes enemies easily and does not suffer fools gladly—and who suffered them at every turn in his F.B.I. career—O’Neill was also beset by the turmoil in his compartmentalized personal life (different women in different cities; worsening debt to fund a lifestyle he couldn’t afford). He left the bureau in August of 2001 for a high-paying job as security chief of a company operating out of the World Trade Center. His body was recovered 10 days after the attack.

Mr. Wright is a deft guide to the divisions and infighting among the various Islamic sects. He makes a sober case that Islamist anger at the U.S. comes in part from our support of the governments that have kept their people in poverty (though he dispenses with the nonsense about Islamists caring for the Palestinian cause—except insofar as it’s useful propaganda).

At bottom, Lawrence Wright realizes, Islamic fundamentalism is neither protest nor politics but a retreat from the demands and compromises of the real world into a dream of bringing the Islamist paradise to earth. And he doesn’t shy away from the essential components of this fantasy: the adolescent male fear of humiliation and the sexual terror that makes radical Islamism a refuge for so many Muslim men. It’s not hard to conclude that misogyny occupies the ideological place in Islamism that anti-Semitism did in Nazism.

The Looming Tower takes the threat of radical Islam seriously, and yet it leaves you scarcely able to believe that an assault on the very idea of civilization has been launched by such an adolescent mind-set. It’s like awakening to find out that Dungeons & Dragons devotees have threatened to take over the world.

Charles Taylor has written for Salon, The New York Times, The New Yorker and other publications. He’s a frequent contributor to The Observer.

If you think anthrax-tainted mail is a nightmare, imagine the risks were terrorists to tinker with our currency. That's the fear that clutched one Fifth Avenue resident on Nov. 3 when she left her building and spotted a $1 bill in front of 925 Fifth Avenue. She reflexively reached down and pocketed it. However, the next morning she took another look at the bill and noticed that there was something scary written on it.

"Osama bin Laden is my hero," it said. The lady, fearing the bill might be tainted, called 911. The police responded to the scene and took the suspicious dollar into custody, placing it in an envelope and hauling it off to a Department of Health lab for testing.

Lousy Tipper

Many cab riders quickly develop issues with their drivers and the hair-raising way some of them navigate the city's canyons. But few take their displeasure to the lengths that one unknown passenger apparently did on Nov. 11, when he left a hand grenade in the back seat of a yellow cab.

The police first became aware of the situation when they got a call from the cabbie, a 67-year-old gentleman, on his cell phone from 68th Street and Park Avenue at around 12:30 p.m., informing them of the presence of the explosive device.

A lieutenant with the Manhattan North Task Force, whose patrol car happened to be a couple of blocks away, heard the call come over his police radio and responded to the scene. He confirmed that there was indeed something that looked very much like a grenade in the back of the cab and summoned the Emergency Service Unit.

Vehicle and pedestrian traffic in the area was stopped as a precaution. The E.S.U. arrived and secured the suspicious object, awaiting the arrival of the bomb squad. The bomb squad showed up and deemed the grenade to be inert, but a grenade nonetheless. They removed it without further incident.

The cabby's surname appeared not to be of Arabic or Middle Eastern origin, and the cops apparently never considered the incident to be bias-related.

W.T.C. Memorial Trophy

The police have been the recipients of much good will since Sept. 11, ranging from cards and letters to home-baked cookies-but the sports trophy that arrived at the 19th Precinct station house in recent days stands, quite literally, in a league of its own.

The monument, won by one Lawrence Wright for his first-place finish on Sept. 29 in the 11th Annual Twin Towers Classic International Karate Championships, soars six feet off the ground on prismatic silver columns, and is festooned at various plateaus and pinnacles with winged seraphim. The whole structure culminates with a bronze, black-belted figurine delivering a nonstop, brain-scrambling karate kick straight to the face of an opponent.

"I promised myself if I did well I'd donate it to the NYPD," explained Mr. Wright, an expert on building automation with Johnson Controls, who was working in the World Trade Center complex the morning of the attack. "I figured maybe that would get me back intact mentally. I went back not knowing how I'd perform at the tournament."

Even though the event is named after the World Trade Center, it takes place at a gymnasium at Queens College. Mr. Wright, who lives in Allentown, Pa., and commutes to work here, beat 10 other fighters to win first prize in the intermediate division.

"I was inspired by the whole thing," he said of the tragedy. "I just wanted to do well for those who couldn't be there."

He schlepped the trophy home to Pennsylvania, then back to Port Authority on the bus and over to the midtown office building where he was assigned one recent morning, and from there to the 19th Precinct on his lunch break.

"I wanted to donate it to one of the downtown precincts," he explained. "But being it was in honor of the whole police, fire and E.M.S., I figured this would be the closest."

The trophy currently resides in the community-affairs office of the station house while the police attempt to locate a suitably important place to display it. "It's a beautiful trophy," acknowledged Stephen Petrillo, the precinct's community-affairs officer. "We're going to make up a nice sign" to go with it.

Meanwhile, Mr. Wright had his picture taken with Captain Howard Lawrence, the 19th Precinct's commanding officer. In the photograph, Captain Lawrence stands beside Mr. Wright, who flashes both a victory smile and also a lethal, karate-chopping right hand poised to fight for freedom.