Lewis Lapham discusses his smoking habit. (Photo by Beowulf Sheehan)

Lewis Lapham, the former longtime editor of Harper's Magazine, started smoking in 1952, and he's been going at it with zeal ever since.

"I developed an early passionate attachment," Mr. Lapham, 78, said last night in his deep, mentholated monotone, "which could be considered an addiction."

Mr. Lapham was discussing his smoking habit with the comedian Katie Halper on a small stage at Chez Andre at The Standard East Village. The talk was part of a conversation series on obsessions, which runs through Saturday, tied to the PEN World Voices Festival. (Tonight, Andrew Solomon will focus on the subject of sleep.)

But Mr. Lapham didn't necessarily agree with the theme of the series, at least as it related to him. "I don't know if you could call it an obsession," Mr. Lapham said with the air of an aristocrat. "I call it a pleasure."

He wore a natty pinstriped suit and big tortoise-shell glasses, occasionally pausing to puff on a black electronic cigarette, the tip of which illuminated bright blue every time he inhaled.

Mr. Lapham has always associated the act of smoking with writing. He started his career in journalism, in 1957, as a newspaper reporter for the San Francisco Examiner. "The idea of being a newspaper reporter was romantic to me," Mr. Lapham said. In other words, everybody smoked.

Smoking "carried a connotation of fellow feeling," Mr. Lapham elegantly explained. "It was a warm social rapprochement."

With that in mind, one can imagine that Mr. Lapham, who burns through three packs of Parliaments a day, might feel ostracized by the city's anti-smoking measures. He started using electronic cigarettes, he said, four days ago, worried that if he continues to smoke in the office of Lapham's Quarterly, the literary journal he founded in 2007 after retiring from Harper's, he will be evicted.

"I look at the anti-smoking law as a form of sumptuary law," Mr. Lapham told the crowd. "The tax and the oppression, for the most part, land on the poor."

Mr. Lapham expanded on that idea. "The freedoms in this country have been diminished over the course of my lifetime," he mused. "I don't like being told that I can't do something."

He acknowledged that the smell of tobacco might be offensive to those who don't smoke. "But on the other hand," Mr. Lapham reasoned, "there are a lot of offensive smells." The audience laughed.

All humor aside, though, what are we to make of Mr. Lapham's health? His teeth looked brown and mossy from a distance, and he occasionally let out a crackling cough, the sound of which could only be made by a smoker of 61 years.

Mr. Lapham casually conceded that he has "a chronic case of bronchitis," but it didn't seem that he was willing to admit that cigarettes are as bad for the health as everyone thinks.

"I'm 78, and the odds of my dying of tobacco poisoning are very slim," Mr. Lapham said. "There's very little proof, at least according to my physician, connecting smoking to death," he added, tongue slightly in cheek.

That doesn't mean, however, that he hasn't attempted to kick the habit. "I've tried to give it up once," Mr. Lapham said. He paused for a moment. "No, twice!"

About 10 years ago, on the Today show, Ralph Nader offered to buy 1,000 subscriptions to Harper's if Mr. Lapham would give up smoking for two years.

"I only made it five hours," Mr. Lapham said.

Lewis Lapham

Longtime editor and longtime chain-smoker Lewis Lapham, who ran Harper’s for three decades before founding Lapham’s Quarterly, loves tobacco and will be discussing his romance with nicotine at the PEN World Voices Festival, a salon-style conversation on “Obsessions.” Back when the editor in chief of The Observer was an intern at Harper’s (i.e., pre-nanny city), Mr. Lapham’s office on Broadway was filled with a permanent cloud of Parliament smoke, giving his stories about hanging with the Beatles in India an appropriate resin. Mr. Lapham, joined on stage by a psychoanalyst, will discuss the virtues of cigarettes and the act of lighting up. We do hope they let him grab a Parliament while discussing his habit. The series focuses on the obsessions that keep writers awake at night, and future talks include Naomi Wolf on “Truth” and Andrew Solomon on “Sleep,” or the lack thereof. And though we have spotted some hipsters sneaking a smoke at the venue, Chez Andre, we suggest audience members bring a pack of NJOY e-ciggies.

Chez Andre at The Standard East Village, 25 Cooper Square, (212) 475-5700, 9pm, $20.

“I’m not a billionaire,” Mr. Stein told Off the Record last week. “This job’s not going to make me a billionaire. Or a millionaire for that matter!”

Mr. Stein’s new boss at the arts and culture starter magazine, on the other hand, is definitely a billionaire. Last month, BlackBook Media Corp. was bought by grocery magnate Ron Burkle and his investment partner, Magic Johnson. Mr. Stein didn’t have much to say about the acquisition, except that it means more money and better resources for the magazine, side-by-side with Mr. Burkle’s current holdings, Vibe, Uptown and the reportedly lucrative Access Network media software company.

“I think the content is some of the best content out there,” Mr. Stein said of BlackBook. “I think we can present it in a more creative, sophisticated kind of way.”

“If you look at the front-of-book there’s a lot of capsule reviews. That’s not my style,” he went on. “There’s not gonna be capsule reviews. There will be a meaty, interesting, compelling front-of-book. I’ll also say I think we have a wonderful team in place, but obviously I’m looking to add people there.”

And aspiring BlackBook writers take note: Mr. Stein has a Zen boss attitude befitting a survivor of Gawker’s self-destructive heyday.

“I’m interested in being fair, kind and just to the readers and to the staff,” he said.

As for Mr. Stein’s own arts and culture bona fides, it’s hard to beat this: He has an album coming out next month of songs he’s been working on since he was an intern at Harper’s, eight years ago.

“When I was an intern at Harper’s, Lewis Lapham was there and he was great. He peed without touching his penis,” Mr. Stein explained. “I had never seen anything like that. So I wrote a song about him.”

Sample lyric: “Lewis chain smokes Parliaments/He called me ‘babe’ once/I don’t know what he meant/I feel like I gained a new grandparent.”

Since then, Mr. Stein has written many more songs, including a number of songs about women he’s dated, as well his wife, Ana Heeren, with whom he recently had a son, Achilles. As a 30th birthday gift, Mr. Stein’s friend Kyle Forester, the Crystal Stilts musician, recorded 15 of Mr. Stein’s original songs with a full band. In March, they’re releasing the album, called “KCF sings JDS,” in a limited run of 500.

“I asked Lewis to write the liner notes but I haven’t heard back from him,” Mr. Stein said.

A Colonial era easy chair. (image via chestofbooks.com)

Did anyone else notice the little Leftist fracas that broke out in The New York Times Book Review this weekend?

Bloomberg View columnist Michael Kinsley's review of Baffler editor and Harper's columnist Thomas Frank's conservative-debunking tract, Pity the Billionaire, elicited two spirited letters from Mr. Frank's corner.

Chris Lehmann, a fellow Baffler-er, wrote in to defend the book's focus on Ayn Rand. Mr. Kinsley had written that Mr. Frank's notion that Atlas Shrugged played a role in right wing ideology was "far-fetched."

"No, actually — what seems far-fetched is that any liberal commentator would airily dismiss the reactionary ideology of government-baiting as irrelevant to the business of government," Mr. Lehmann wrote.

Harper's publisher John R. MacArthur chimed in to wag a finger at the Times for allowing Mr. Kinsey to sneak a dig at Lewis Lapham into his review of Mr. Frank.

Mr. Kinsley had written:

Frank sometimes writes in an arch voice that seemed familiar when I first encountered it but that I couldn’t place. Then I read in his book-jacket bio that he writes for Harper’s Magazine, and I thought, “Zounds, Watson, the man may have Lapham’s Disease.” The symptoms of this malady, named after the longtime editor of Harper’s, Lewis H. Lapham (now of Lapham’s Quarterly), include an elevated, orotund, deeply ironic prose style that, in severe cases, reveals almost nothing about what the topic is or what the author wishes to say about it except for a general sense of superiority to everyone and everything around.

But, as Mr. MacArthur pointed out, Mr. Kinsley's account of discovering Mr. Frank's resume was itself pretty ironic. Mr. Kinsley briefly replaced Mr. Lapham as editor of Harper's, only to be dismissed and replaced by Mr. Lapham again. Mr. Frank later took over the "easy chair" column from Mr. Lapham.

"I’m not sure what standards of self-disclosure should apply to book reviewers, as opposed to ordinary journalists and column writers, but certainly editors of book reviews should be aware of potential conflicts of interest or grudges that might lead to irrelevant ax-grinding," Mr. MacArthur wrote.

Maybe Mr. Kinsley was mimicking a writer afflicted with Lapham's Disease? If so, he didn't mention it in his response to Mr. MacArthur's letter.

In 1981, I replaced Lewis Lapham as editor of Harper’s. In 1983, Lapham replaced me. I did not mention Round 2 of this ancient history in my review, and Mac­Arthur did not mention Round 1 in his letter. Maybe we both were wrong. At any rate, we’re even.

I am happy with the reputation of Harper’s during my brief tenure as editor, and am not embarrassed to have been canned.

The current issue is about medicine, and includes selections from Hippocrates, Plato, Rudyard Kipling, Virginia Woolf and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, all noteworthy for being - among other things - dead and therefore cheap. It is fronted by a long essay by Mr. Lapham that begins with a quotation from Montaigne and near the end quotes Socrates.

The key to economically plausible publishing: writers who are very old and already famous. Or, alternatively, writers who are very young, poor and not famous at all. What do interns have in common with Plato? They're cheap.

At 6:30 p.m., however, the fifth floor of the spacious Soho building was barely a quarter full, mostly with a young bunch of attractive, well-dressed guests.

Mr. Lapham, sipping a glass of that rationed red wine, looked delighted. Looking down through his round, tortoise-shell spectacles, he told the Daily Transom that he had never met Mr. Franco before, but was excited to do so this evening.

"I’ve seen him in minor things like City by the Sea, which is a movie I really liked but I don’t know why, and I still can’t remember what part Franco played but I’m sure it was good," Mr. Lapham said.

And even though his younger editors have told him about Freaks and Geeks, he had never seen that, either.

"That’s television, right?" he asked. "Television is out of my league."

Still, Mr. Lapham said he was quite impressed with the actor's literary ventures.

"Not only is he an actor, but he’s a writer," said Mr. Lapham. "He’s got a book of short stories coming in the spring called Palo Alto and he likes the Quarterly, Jeannie tells me. So I’m delighted to know him."

The Quarterly editor then confessed that there was a time when he had planned to become an actor, but after a few plays while at Cambridge in England—The School for Scandal, All The King's Men-—he realized that he wasn't any good at it.

"A lot of the kids at Cambridge were going to become professional actors. They were serious and they could do anything, any part, any character," he said. "And I was only capable of doing characters to whom I was sympathetic, which is a whole different thing."

As the room began to fill, there was talk of eager Franco-philes being rejected at the door downstairs so as to make sure all the RSVP'd guests would be able to get in later. But by 8 p.m., the room was still not at capacity and neither of the readers appeared to be present. Around the room, writer-lawyer Elizabeth Wurtzel began to check the time; Accompanied Literary Society's Brooke Geahan was glancing around, looking for a sign of the curly-haired actor; Mr. Lapham was shifting on his feet. Some people started to leave.

By 8:30 nothing had changed. Ms. Vanasco, who said she had confirmed everything just 12 hours prior, began to frantically work her phone and email. What if Mr. Franco were to ditch this like he did that UCLA graduation? guests had begun to whisper.

But at 8:45, Mr. Franco finally arrived, seeming a little confused and disheveled in slim, dark blue Levi's, a hunter's sweater, and black boots.

"Thank you for being so patient," is how Mr. Lapham introduced him. He then informed the audience about Mr. Franco's enrollment at the M.F.A. program at Columbia, his collection of short stories to be published by Scribner in the fall, and his outstanding role as "the leading pothead on the television series Freaks and Geeks," which he had never seen, but heard about. The audience whooped and cheered.

"This is an oldie, but it’s pretty good," said Mr. Franco as he began to read to some Herman Melville. "Call me Ishmael!"

The readers alternated. Mr. Bidart read Beryl Markham and Isak Dinesen. Mr. Franco concluded the program with a passage from Don Quixote. Leaning on one leg and holding a copy of the Quarterly with both hands, he had a theatrical inflection.

"Anyone tired of standing?" he asked at one point. "This is a little long. I don't have to read it."

But the audience objected: "No, read it, read it!"

"They initially suggested I read an Elizabeth Bishop poem," Mr. Franco told the Daily Transom after the reading was over. "But sometimes I find that I’ve been to readings before where they alternate poetry and sometimes it’s hard for poetry to land on an audience when fiction is being read because, it’s like, stories are being told and poetry demands something else from an audience."

How did he prepare?

"I do a fair amount of readings. So I usually don’t get that nervous anymore unless it’s my own stuff," he said. "It’s a different thing from acting because you’re the narrator, it’s not just playing one part. With the Don Quixote piece, I play the narrator and two characters."

Mr. Franco was repeatedly interrupted by guests, mostly women, coming over to say hello, even though it was now nearly 10 p.m.

"I listen to a lot of audio books and I feel like I like it best when it’s not a full, immersed performance, it’s more like a storyteller talking to you," continued Mr. Franco, who, as it turns out, is a close talker. "It’s not a full emergence but just a slight shift and a changing of the voice. So that’s my excuse for not full characterization!"

The actor looked a bit worn out, but politely submitted to each young woman that approached. At 10 p.m. there was still plenty of wine.

So which team does the editor of S.I. pull for in a game like this, the Daily Transom wondered?

"There are numerous considerations. One team will make you more money and one will break your heart," said Mr. McDonell.

Former Harper's editor Lewis Lapham was pulling for Pittsburgh. "I'd go for it," Mr. Lapham declared, when the Steelers faced a fourth down on their opening drive. The founder of the historical Lapham's Quarterly, Mr. Lapham took the long view when the Steelers' young coach settled for the field goal. "Only the old masters could go for it there," he sighed.

A few minutes later, when Arizona scored its first touchdown, concert promoter Ron Delsener leapt to his feet with an outstretched glass of red and nearly spilled it on Mr. Lapham.

At halftime, some in the crowd donned 3-D glasses while others ambled from the dining room to the bar. "I hate Bruce Springsteen," said Page Six editor Richard Johnson as the Boss took the stage. How can you hate the Boss, the Daily Transom asked? "He's like blue-collar New Jersey or something. I aspire to more than that," Mr. Johnson said. Then he complimented Mr. Springsteen's stage acrobatics.

Men's Health editor Dave Zinczenko said he was rooting for Pittsburgh, given his Pennsylvania roots, but seemed to spend most of the evening in conversation. He laughed after a young woman complimented his recent appearance on Oprah. "It was a childhood obesity special," he said.

Mr. Zinczenko, whose third volume of his Eat This, Not That! series—books about substituting healthier foods for fattier ones—came out recently, called the buffet's mix of seafood and sweets "a struggle between good and evil." "I'm not faring so well tonight," Mr. Zinczenko admitted.

By the second half, the crowd had thinned and the enthusiasm dampened. Mr. Zinczenko left in the third quarter, blaming an early Today appearance. "I'm going to the dog-and-pony show tomorrow," he said. Harry Smith of CBS's Early Show had departed at halftime. WNBC anchor Chuck Scarborough wasn't far behind; he had the late shift. Former MSNBC commentator Dan Abrams had been walking around with his coat since the first quarter, deflecting questions about his personal life. "I'm only answering questions about the game," Mr. Abrams said. (He expressed tepid support for the Steelers.)

With such an ambivalent crowd, the Daily Transom wondered what Mr. McDonell thought about the Giants' chances next year. "I don't know," he said. "Depends on who shoots themselves next."

Mr. Daldry's film is an adaptation of German writer Bernhard Schlink's bestselling novel starring Kate Winslet, Ralph Fiennes, and 18-year-old David Kross. The story focuses on an underage boy's brief affair with an older woman, who he re-encounters years later when she is tried for crimes committed while serving as an SS guard during WWII.

The Transom does not cry, but we noticed that a significant portion of the audience had, in fact, been moved to tears by the film's end. Post-catharsis, the small crowd moved upstairs to dinner, where Ms. Geahan encouraged attendees to "get literary with a little bit of glamour" (a new motto, perhaps?).

We quickly noticed Harvey Weinstein, who was making the rounds in between Blackberry dispatches. "Aren't there smart people you can talk to? I'm going to take you over to someone smarter," he said, leading us across the bar.

We suggested that he might also be smart.

"I'm not smart."

Rather than debate that point, we asked him how he had enjoyed the screening.

"It's my movie. I'm buying it. I love it," he said, depositing us next to Mr. Daldry, the director.

We asked Mr. Daldry how he felt the screening had gone.

"Good. We've only just finished the film, so it's a whole new experience... We're just showing it for the first time so, it's very interesting hearing peoples' reactions to it."

We wondered if he'd noticed all the crying, which seemed to indicate a pretty strong reaction.

"Well, good, I would say! I never know what to expect when people watch the stuff I make, so I'm always really interested to see whether it has an emotional relationship to other people or whether it's just me. Particularly a complicated, ambiguous story full of moral questioning that's hard to fathom. It's not a regular movie--it's a very strange story. It's just such a strange character."

We also asked him what he made of the potential Winslet vs. Winslet Oscar battle (she is also starring in the upcoming Sam Mendes-helmed Revolutionary Road).

"I hope that doesn't happen, but who knows. I mean, Kate's a wonderful actress. I think she's great in this, and she's great to work with. Awards are, you know...Awards are awards. You have to take them with a little pinch of salt."

Also present was the writer Francine Prose, who told us she had "enormous respect for them for doing this film at a point in history when Americans seem to want films about vampires, so it seemed courageous to be doing this now."

Later, Ms. Geahan thanked Mr. Weinstein (who eventually got up to take a call and never returned) for "making films I want to watch."

"He was the one who actually handed me The Reader," she explained. "He said, ‘You haven't read this?' and I read it and thought, ‘How have I not read this?' Literature, charity, morality, that's what we're all about, my nonprofit. But above that, I have to thank the beauty that we have in all of us today. We have so many great writers and authors and people who really believe in literature."

Included in that group were social people Fabiola Baracasa, who was proud she had called the film's final twist (we had not), and Emma Snowden-Jones, who, we learned, maintains a poetry collection on her Blackberry.

Mr. Lapham, his round tortoise-frame spectacles resting firmly on the bridge of his nose, was talking about his recent efforts to get more young people to attend readings and events hosted by the quarterly. "For the fun of it," he explained.

"My editors are young, they are all under 30, and I trust them," said Mr. Lapham. "When people get to be of the older demographic, when they get to be 50, they tend to read history and watch the History Channel. When I conceived the quarterly I thought that would be the audience, but I was surprised to find out how many young people liked it."

Scattered among the antique leather couches and grandfather armchairs in the room were indeed groups of 20-somethings--the boys with disheveled hair and the girls in vintage dresses. Except, that is, for the quarterly's 23-year-old assistant editor, Elias Altman, who was delighted when his well-fitting suit was complimented by The Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel. (Mr. Altman informed Ms. vanden Heuvel that his linen pocket square was lent to him by Mr. Lapham.)

Among the readers (who included Francine Prose and Calvin Trillin) that evening was Elizabeth Wurtzel, who published a memoir about depression, Prozac Nation, when she was 26; she's now 41 and an attorney at Boies, Schiller, & Flexner LLP. Originally Ms. Wurtzel was supposed to read Sylvia Plath. Then Mr. Lapham suggested Teddy Roosevelt, but the text failed to "move" Ms. Wurtzel and she selected a passage from Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, which she studied on the train ride over while listening to Guns N' Roses.

Ms. Wurtzel graduated Yale Law School last May and began practicing just this year. But earlier that day, Gawker had reported that Ms. Wurtzel had failed to pass the New York State bar exam.

"Wow, really? I had no idea. I didn't even see that. That's interesting," Ms. Wurtzel said of the report, with an awkward half-smile. "It's a weird test. I think when you go to a different school than Yale you are better prepared for it. It was definitely hard. I guess when I should have been studying, I was kind of having a good time."

Since taking up her new part-time job working for Mr. Boies, Ms. Wurtzel said she has not given up writing. In fact, she has been able to do more of it.

"The problem was that when I was just sitting in my room writing, I wasn't actually getting that much done. Now that I work, I'm getting more writing done," said Ms. Wurtzel. "And law is actually a little bit like literary criticism because when you look at cases, you're looking for the detail in the case that will help you prove your point."

The Transom wondered if the ubiquitous photo of Ms. Wurtzel in her 20s that still graces every article written about her-the one where she's crouching down and staring up into the camera, thick eye-liner around her eyes-is a haunting presence.

"I wish I still looked like that! I'm very conscious of the fact that I am 41 now. Age creeps up on you and suddenly you're 41. It's weird," replied Ms. Wurtzel. "Your looks suddenly change dramatically and you just don't look the same. I'm actually thinking of writing about it, though I don't want to write yet another miserable book that lots of people can relate to. But it's a worthwhile subject."

It's hard finding just one thing to quote from the long, admiring review, which takes into account a man with a long, admirable life, but here's one little nugget.

Per Mr. Carter:

If you're interested in seeing some of the roles Mr. Plimpton did have time for, Blake Wilson, writing for The Times' Paper Cuts Blog, presents The George Plimpton Film Festival.

Mr. Carter also manages to get meta while talking about the founding of The Paris Review, which sounds suspiciously like his own start-up a generation later, but now feels like a misdirected telegram from a lost world: