With New York Observer alum Jim Windolf at the helm and featuring contributions from George Gurley and Mark Ames, Punch! put out three issues before announcing that it was going on hiatus on August 14. 

Jim Windolf (Right) at a Rufus Wainwright Performance at Rose Bar in 2010. (photo courtesy of Patrickmcmullan.com)

Now Punch! will be focusing entirely on its new app-developing platform, described by its company CEO as a "Blogger" for app makers, while putting its editorial plans on ice for the foreseeable future.

"Somewhere down the road, it became clear we had two businesses in our hands," David Bennahum, CEO of Punch! Media, told The Observer earlier this evening.  "We had potentially a media-business producing the Punch!  products, which you know, then we had the technology business giving other companies this very powerful tool that we developed ourselves."

The initial plan was to have the custom-app division fund the editorial content. After raising $2.25 million in seed funding from venture capital funds like Betaworks and Techstars, Punch! seemed poised to publish a year's worth of issues.

But after just three editions, the magazine is on "hiatus" and its editorial team, which included Brooke Siegel (formerly of Daily Candy), is no longer with the company. 

"We had to wind it all down," said Mr. Bennahum. "We couldn't do two things at the same time."

"As we kind of look at our options, knowing we really couldn't do both, it became clear that the technology business was just a very large and exciting opportunity relative to the original business," said Mr. Bennahum. "Doing the Punch! the magazine app well requires complete focus."

With the magazine scrapped (for now), Mr. Windolf said he is no longer with Punch! 

"If he [Mr. Bennahum] restarts the magazine, I'd like to do it, which might happen," he added. (Disclosure: Daniel Edward Rosen was commissioned by Mr. Windolf in June to write a story for Punch!).

The news came as a sudden and sad twist to a publication that just months ago was poised to reinvigorate the magazine medium with new interactive content. Videos like "32 and Pregnant" and "Tiny Pundits" (featuring The National Memo Editor-in-Chief Joe Conason and three precocious and pugnacious kids) were picked up by The Daily Mail, The Atlantic Wire and Politico and lauded as spot-on spoofs.

"We did some good things, got a lot of attention for the few issues I put out as editor," said Mr. Windolf. "I was especially happy with the videos made for Punch! by young director Chioke Nassor, a huge talent and great guy."

"Also nice magazine-style pieces by Mark Ames (on Romney's Mormon history) and George Gurley (on sad-sack character actor Fred Stoller) and a good essay on viral culture before the internet by Kliph Nesteroff ([who] writes for WFMU's Beware the Blog). So it was starting to come together, I think."

Mr. Windolf has spent the past month working on Fairchild Fashion Media's revival of M Magazine, edited by former Observer editor in chief (and Windolf muse) Peter Kaplan. M will be hitting newsstands on September 24.

"It looks incredible," said Mr. Windolf. "Kaplan put a lot of his tricks in there. It's beautiful; I hope it's a hit."

Speaking from the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., Mr. Bennahum would not rule out a return of future issues of Punch! the magazine.

Despite rumors that Punch! had run out of money, Mr. Bennahum insisted that the company's financing is "secure."

"We don't have plans to announce another round of financing at this stage," he added.

drosen@observer.com 

The Accusers

Yasha Levine and Mark Ames, writing for their own site, The S.H.A.M.E. Media Transparency Project, which opened shop on in March. As Russian expats, both helped co-found the satirical Russian alt-biweekly The eXile (another co-founder: Rolling Stone political columnist Matt Taibbi), which still lives on, online. More recently, the duo were widely credited with having connected the Koch Brothers to the Tea Party (after Playboy all but erased from existence the original piece in which they initially made the connection for the magazine).

The Accused

Adam Davidson, the co-host and co-founder of NPR's Planet Money. Prior to Planet Money, Davidson worked for NPR as an international business and economics correspondent for NPR, and was a Middle Eastern correspondent for Public Radio International. Aside from co-hosting Planet Money, Davidson also has a gig as a regular columnist for The New York Times Magazine and, according to Levine and Ames, makes decent coin on the side with speaking engagements too. Here's his NPR biography. Here's Levine and Ames's biography of him.

The Charge(s)

First, that a notoriously hostile 2009 Planet Money interview between Davidson and Elizabeth Warren—the special adviser to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—was ethically tainted by Planet Money's financial arrangements with "the sole sponsor underwriting Davidson's Planet Money show and his salary." Levine and Ames argue that the sponsor in question—a financial services conglomerate—lobbied against the creation of the CFPB before it was created (and around the time of the interview), which is evidence of an insidious conflict of interest. Furthermore, they allege that Davidson is accepting speaking fees from the industry he covers for both NPR and The New York Times Magazine, something largely viewed as an unsavory, questionable practice by most journalists (and journalism institutions, which usually have guidelines against that sort of thing).

The Evidence

A Sponsorship Problem: Ames and Levine published a 2009 lobbying report signed by the financial conglomerate in question, GMAC (now Ally Financial), in which the company discloses lobbying against the Consumer Financial Protection Agency Act of 2009, which created the CFPB that Elizabeth Warren now acts as a special adviser to. To them, this disclosure speaks great volumes about Davidson's coverage, particularly a 2009 interview between Davidson and Warren. At the time, Warren was lobbying for the act (as she was its architect), which set out to create an agency that would protect consumers from predatory practices by companies like GMAC/Ally Financial. During the interview, Davidson was so surprisingly hostile towards Warren that it famously warranted an apology from NPR's ombudsman.

[Ally (formerly GMAC), the consumer-lending arm of General Motors, is 74 percent owned by the government after receiving a $17.2 billion bailout. Even as other financial firms have emerged from the darkest days of the financial crisis, Ally has remained in the government’s debt, due to the struggles of Residential Capital, the Ally-owned mortgage lender that recently entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy.]

Meanwhile, Ally had sponsored the show since shortly after it had launched, in an arrangement that raised eyebrows when it was initially revealed. Ames and Levine note that at that time, Planet Money was the only NPR show with a single sponsor.

The Speaking Gigs: They've compiled some of Adam Davidson's "lucrative" speaking gigs, hosted and funded by some of the largest financial institutions in the world (JPMorgan, Wells Fargo, Bank of America and Goldman Sachs). While a widespread practice, it's one that in their eyes—and the eyes of many others—compromises journalistic integrity.

The Rules

We could not find the issues of sponsorship directly addressed in NPR's handbook, other than a section on the necessity of disclosures. But the issue has come up even after that section was added in. However: NPR's current ethics guide does mention avoiding speaking to groups where the appearance itself might put into question one's impartiality, along with participation in forums where "sponsoring groups or other participants are identified with a particular perspective." The policy of Chicago Public Media (which owns This American Life, from which Planet Money was spun off): "Journalists may not accept any form of compensation from the individuals, institutions or organizations they cover." Finally, the New York Times' standards and ethics guide urges staffers to be wary of speaking gigs "especially if the setting might suggest a close relationship" to the sponsor, and notes that gigs must be approved by newsroom management. The example they give: "An editor who deals with political campaigns might comfortably address a library gathering but not appear before a civic group that endorses issues or candidates. An environmental reporter can appropriately speak to a horticultural society but not to conservation groups known for their efforts to influence public policy."

Precedent

We couldn't find any examples of NPR ending a sponsorship relationship because of a radio segement or program's purview. That said, Planet Money's sponsorship agreement with Ally has come under question both internally and externally prior to this.

An NPR ombudsman concluded in December 2009:

[NPR senior vice president for news, Eileen] Weiss is correct that NPR has a large pool of credibility with most of its audience. But that pool is not infinite, and it can be diminished when listeners perceive a conflict of interest, even if one does not exist.

No action was taken then. This was nine months after Davidson's interview with Warren, which prompted an on-air apology from Davidson and an NPR ombudsman's column reprimanding Davidson. That column ran five days before Planet Money's deal with Ally was written up on AdAge.

Over at the Times, writers have indeed been punished or even fired for taking speaking fees. Thomas Friedman once had to return $75,000 in unapproved speaking fees. Times technology columnist David Pogue has come under fire multiple times for speaking fees and a trip to Disney World; he still writes there (other, less popular writers have been fired for taking free trips). Mary Tripsas, an associate professor at Harvard Business School, had a monthly column until she was fired for taking a speaking engagement. And Joe Nocera once came under fire for speaking fees, and he was given a pass as well.

What do other Times writers think of the policy? Ask Paul Krugman:

I do very little paid speaking now, and no consulting, because the New York Times has quite strict rules: basically I can only get paid for speaking to nonprofits that have no possible interest in influencing the content of the column. It’s a good rule — read Eric Alterman’s book “Sound and Fury” to see how speaking fees can corrupt pundits — though it meant that I took a substantial income cut to work for the Times.

In Davidson's Defense

Planet Money has indeed covered Ally once before, in a segment derided by an Ally publicist as "false" and "inflammatory." There is no empirical evidence that Davidson—who, in his words, has "nothing to do with the underwriting stuff"—has explicitly interacted with his sponsors in a way that would undoubtedly compromise his show's integrity. Levine and Ames have no proof of Davidson's pay for his speaking gigs (though there's been no denial that he was paid).

The Official Word

An NPR spokesperson refused comment to Ames and Levine. They also contacted Ira Glass of This American Life, who also did not respond to their request for comment.

The Observer contacted an NPR spokesperson for comment through their communications department on Wednesday evening. We asked why they didn't comment to Ames and Levine, if Davidson's speaking engagements are of concern to NPR, and if—in light of the lobbying disclosure form vis-à-vis Davidson's (as noted by their own ombudsman) surprisingly hostile interview with Elizabeth Warren—Planet Money's sponsorship by Ally Bank was a concern to them. At the time, a spokeswoman answered:

I expect we'll give you comment on why we didn't comment before, and perhaps on some of these issues you raise.

This afternoon, the same NPR head of communications Dana Davis Rehm responded:

Adam reviews all his speaking engagements with his editors and we’re confident that none of them run counter to our ethical guidelines.

Beyond that, we don’t have any further comment.

When contacted Wednesday evening, a spokeswoman for the New York Times indicated that our call was the first she had heard of it; as of this afternoon, the Times was reviewing the issue, but had no official comment. UPDATE: On Friday afternoon, a spokeswoman from the New York Times emailed us with official comment:

We have discussed this situation with Adam and we’re confident that there has been no violation of our policies around speaking engagements and no conflict of interest.

When contacted by email Wednesday evening, Ames and Levine had this to say over email:

Until NPR answers these questions and fully discloses the nature of their relationship with Ally Bank, and their conflict-of-interest policy, everything else is a PR distraction. We have provided strong evidence of several very serious conflicts of interest. Evasions and distractions that avoid answering these allegations and questions, like the ones provided by their ombudsman back in 2009, will only reinforce our point about corruption at Planet Money.

They also pointed us to a March 2009 Columbia Journalism Review profile of NPR, which they provided as speaking to proof that "Davidson was in the very least intimately involved in the process of creating the show," which it certainly does. Again, that doesn't explicitly tie Davidson to Ally Bank's interests.

That said, Ames and Levine's takeaway isn't so forgiving:

This says pretty much everything you need to know about the gangrenous state of America's media, when two of the most respected media institutions adopt a mob strategy to protect their little racket.

At the very least, they have indeed made a compelling case that Davidson is—if not complicitly, then inherently—conflicted. Either way, it's a conflict that’s clearly uncomfortable to more than two people, regardless, and a few who'd rather not discuss it as well.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Ames published an "In Brief" item that began: "The former lover of tennis star Maria Sharapova, Maroon 5's frontman Adam Levine, revealed yesterday why he broke off their brief romance," and continued to explain that the returning U.S. Open star disoriented him by making no noise during sex.

The offending item, which Mr. Ames has since told The Transom that the piece had been written in five minutes from a hotel room in California, and was intended as “throwaway satire” to fill space.

“Americans are the most gullible fucking morons on Planet Earth,” he said.

Apparently not just Americans.

Here's what Mr. Levine's lawyer, Jeffrey Worob of Serling Rooks & Ferrara, said in an email to Mr. Ames:

The legal letter--and a draft of the response Mr. Ames plans to publish in his newspaper--follow.

Letter from Maroon 5 attorney Jeffrey Worob to Mark Ames:

Gentlemen,

I am the attorney for Adam Levine and the members of Maroon 5.

It has come to our attention that your newspaper and website recently (Issue #269, August 10, 2007) posted a story regarding my client and his purported relationship with tennis star, Maria Sharapova. In that story, you claimed that Mr. Levine made certain statements regarding Ms. Sharapova (http://www.exile.ru/2007-August-10/in_brief.html). On behalf of Mr. Levine, we hereby deny that such statements were ever
made by him. Should you have any information to the contrary, I would appreciate if you provide me with your sources. Since the time of
your posting, several other news outlets around the world have picked up your "story" and reported it as true in their publications. As
such, Mr. Levine has been forced to address the statements and defend his character.

At this time, my client has asked me to investigate the available remedies he may have against your publication. I am reaching out to you now to insist that you immediately retract the article and acknowledge that the statement was made without any basis in fact.

Unless I receive, within three (3) days of your receipt of this email, your written confirmation of your intention to take the action set forth in the preceding sentence, Mr. Levine will consider retaining local counsel to protect his name, image and character through all available legal and equitable means.

Please note that this letter is not intended to be a complete statement of the facts or law relevant to this matter and is written without prejudice to the legal or equitable rights and/or remedies of our client, all of which rights and remedies are hereby expressly reserved. Our client and I look forward to your immediate response.

Sincerely,

Jeffrey Worob, Esq.
Serling Rooks & Ferrara, LLP

Mark Ames' response:

Dear Mr. Worob, Esq.,

You're not shitting us with this letter, right? Did you say that you're representing Adam Levine, or the state of Kazakhstan vs. Sacha Baron Cohen? Please don't tell us that America's decline has taken us to the point of imitating vain Central Asian dictators…O please, say it isn't true! Say it's something different, like meta-satire of some kind you're pulling on us. Because if you're really who you say you are, a lawyer-type guy, and Adam Levine seriously wants us to issue a formal retraction of satire, then how can we run around believing in a God? It's like, first Jerry Falwell died, which we never thought possible, and now your lawsuit threat is just so retro-People-vs.-Larry-Flynt, it almost feels like the spirit of
Falwell never left us. Hey, wait a minute, that could be a good thing. After all, Flynt is our hero: the guy's a big fat fuck in a wheelchair, and yet he gets more snapper in a day than we smell in a lifetime.

Okay, let's assume the letter's real. Fine. In your "letter" you refer to the piece as a "story" with "quotation marks" around the word "story." Um, "Jeff," if that's really your name, we've got some news that may shock you: there's a reason you put quotation marks around "story": IT'S NOT A "STORY," IT'S FUCKING SATIRE! That's satire without quotation marks. Doyee!

But maybe we're missing something here. Maybe your letter is itself a salvo of sheer comic genius. If so, then baby, you've got a future in comedy. No seriously, with this finger-wagging letter, you've just managed to transform Adam Levine from pop heartthrob into a combination of Dean Wormer and Elmer Fudd, by way of Mrs. Crabtree. What's behind the career change? Are Moron 5's record sales dying so hard that Adam's agent is moving him towards a future playing comic villain foils? Has it got so bad that he's trying to salvage his career by piggybacking on The eXile's minor fame?

Damn, if that's what this is about, then we feels kinda bad-like.

Okay, here, let's make this deal: we'll figure out some way to retract the bit of In Brief satire without snickering, if you promise to have
Adam Levine send us a videotape of him singing a new Moron 5 song with the lyrics: "Oh you waskawy exiwe waskaws! I'we get you, if it's the
wast thing I do! Ooo! [chorus] You're on doubow secwet pwobation/Yeah baby you're on doubow secwet pwobation!"

Actually, truth be told we wouldn't be able to hold up our end of the bargain, cuz, um, well, could someone please explain to us how in fuck's name do you retract satire? We've consulted our brain trust, and for the life of us, as much as your super-scary letter made our
knees a-wobble and a-weeble, and as much as we too would like to bear witness to the most retractiony-retraction in the history of
media-stomping, a retraction that would make Mendelstam's blubbering retraction of "The Stalin Epigram" look wooden by comparison…it's
like, who wouldn't like to see something that groundbreaking? We'd witnessing history! (By the way, you should have seen the parts of the
In Brief we left out—like the line about how Adam Levine "has a great sense of humor, and isn't at all an egomaniacal asshole, nope, not at
all..." That part was REALLY funny, but we were really afraid it would be actionable, and that it might lead to some lawyer-guy who
represents Lollapolooza and indy-rock bands to sue an alternative newspaper, so we thought, best to leave that joke for another time).

Wait, where were we? What's this long response all about? Oh yeah, now we remember. Boyband stud Adam Levine is threatening to ruin us. Sorry, lost our train-of-scared-thought for a moment. We're scared, believe us you. No really, we are. There is serious business to attend to, and that is the business of "retracting" a piece of satire in the next 3 days, or else Adam Levine's lawyers will unleash a doomsday nuclear device that will render The eXile's offices uninhabitable for decades to come (although to be honest, a little nuking might not be a bad thing, would irradiate all the nasty smells and germs in our office). The task is urgent. Readers, we need you're help. Yes, you. It's time for you to stand up and heed the call of duty.

So here goes: WE HEREBY ISSUE AN OPEN CALL TO OUR READERS TO DO THE IMPOSSIBLE: TO SEND US YOUR SUGGESTIONS ON HOW A RETRACTION OF AN IN BRIEF SATIRE MIGHT LOOK. Whoever sends us the best retraction will earn $300 worth of credit at the "gentlemen's club" "Violete," and the three runnerups will win [sic] t-shirts and a big pat on the back. Yes, that's right: save us from Adam Levine's boyband wrath, and we'll get you laid! We'll even throw in another $50 to make sure that your whore screams the entire paid hour.

Hurry, everyone. The fate of the world hangs in the balance.

Mr. Ames, 34, and Mr. Taibbi, 30, are Americans who for the past several years have been living in Moscow, where, since 1997, they have edited and published a raucous biweekly tabloid called eXile and have been doing their best to introduce Hunter S. Thompson's "gonzo" style of journalism to 25,000 Moscow readers.

They were in the U.S. on a book tour; their first book, The eXile: Sex Drugs and Libel in the New Russia , had just been published by Grove Press. New York was the last stop. They'd driven a Lincoln Continental 10,000 miles around America, appearing at bookstores, classrooms and think tanks. Average turnout: 25 people. They'd borrowed the Lincoln from Mr. Taibbi's father, Mike Taibbi, the Emmy-winning NBC-TV reporter. The low point was a talk they gave at Columbia University's School of Journalism.

"We realized that all these people were future careerists, " said Mr. Taibbi. "They just stared mute at us the whole time. When they realized we weren't going to help them get a job, it was all over."

"This place is death," said Mr. Ames, referring to America.

"Mark and I both left America for pretty similar reasons," said Mr. Taibbi. "Being here makes us have panic attacks. It's hard to explain, I guess. There's just no sex and no nothing, you know?"

"When I'm here, it's like I'm taking a very cold bath," said Mr. Ames. "I don't think I've had a hard-on since I've been here. You don't even think about jacking off anymore here, it's just so vile. What's nice about Russian girls is you don't have to talk too much, you can pretend that you don't understand Russian. And they're usually so drunk. They like to have fun, they like adventure and they like doing things that are reckless."

"They like to live while they're still young and attractive," said Mr. Taibbi. "They look at their mothers, who turn into nose tackles at age 30."

Mr. Ames and Mr. Taibbi are fairly typical men of their generation: raised in upper-middle-class America (Mr. Ames in San Jose, Mr. Taibbi in Boston) in the ideal-light Reagan and Bush years, they are well-educated but defeated by regular work and frustrated by American women, whom they find smug and ambitious. Mr. Ames and Mr. Taibbi say that in Moscow they finally found a home; a city as chaotic and as brutish as they are, a place where a man can still make a beast of himself and write about it with impunity. America was telling them to grow up; Russia let their ids run rampant. And Russia's volatile political and economic situation gave them what all writers desperately need: a theme. In Mr. Taibbi's words, Russia is filled with "thieves and villains of a type that the world previously had seen only in James Bond movies." And Russian women, "the most physically attractive women on earth," according to Mr. Ames, were more available than their American counterparts.

"I began to notice a sexual pulse that I'd never experienced," Mr. Ames writes in their book. "The girls were stunning in their cheap, imitation Italian-style clothes, their lace see-through blouses and garish pink or purple coats, and the overdone makeup on their faces. They looked at you– actually looked at you –invitingly. No one looked at you in the Bay Area."

Mr. Ames said he couldn't wait to get back to Russia.

"It's kind of a Schopenhauerian thing," he said. "It's the absence of the amount of pain you would feel here. You come here to remind yourself how much more painful and horrible it could be. Then you go back and like kiss the tarmac."

There are drawbacks: They say the Moscow authorities have tapped their phone lines.

"They don't really understand us too well, and I think that's what saves us the most," Mr. Ames said. "If you're an old Soviet functionary, you can read our paper and it just doesn't make sense."

"We wrote a whole bunch of editorials about the size of Putin's penis," said Mr. Taibbi.

The cab stopped at 14th Street and Ninth Avenue. The Red Light Bistro. Mr. Ames looked disgusted. "This scene here," he said. "No coke, when you think there's going to be. It's all part of the new New York, the new America. This is what it comes down to. Sitting in this totally affected, run-down place. Is irony big here in America?"

"That's the thing about Russia," Mr. Taibbi said. "It's a totally unironic place. When I first was a student over there I had this girlfriend who had this mobster boyfriend, so she only saw me between 3 and 6 in the afternoon, but as a going-away present when I left my exchange program, she gave me this picture of herself naked in a bathtub. It was totally serious, like, 'Here, for you to remember me by.' An American woman would never do that except as a joke or to be sexy."

"And it would be so un sexy," Mr. Ames said. "You'd burn it the minute you got home. You get Russian girls giving you studio pictures where they're trying to look like stars from the 40's, and it's very touching. If you've been a loser most of your life, it's kind of nice."

Mr. Ames grew up outside San Jose, Calif. He was a weird, smart kid who started smoking pot at age 8 and got into fights. He spent five years at the University of California at Berkeley. After college, he tried writing screenplays. He grew more miserable. "I didn't even think of women anymore because they could just smell failure on me," he said. Then in 1991, he vacationed in Leningrad right after the failed coup against Mikhail Gorbachev.

"It was the first two weeks of my life that I'd lived really," he said. "It was pretty much just fuck whoever you wanted to. It was just very epic."

"I had no idea it was going to be like that, because of all the propaganda about how repressed Russians were," he said. "I didn't know that basically your average Russian tried to get the maximum amount out of every minute in the day, whereas here everyone is trying to work as hard as possible to get a stock option bonus."

He hung out with street musicians, shacked up with a prostitute and a gay guy, got gnawed by bedbugs. He went back to Moscow for good in 1993, which he found to be "the anti-California. True exile."

"The 90's in Moscow were a great time," he said, "like what they say about the 20's in Paris or the early 30's in Berlin. It was completely hedonistic and nihilistic and full of crime."

Mr. Taibbi, who grew up in Boston, was also alienated, as well as manic-depressive. He attended New York University, where he was miserable, and immersed himself in the work of Nikolai Gogol. In 1990, he went to study in Leningrad.

"The instant I set foot on the plane, my life changed," Mr. Taibbi writes. "I was charged with adrenaline, alert, positive, full of plans, inner demons palliated by a need to cope with new and unpredictable logistical problems. It was a high I would have to keep coming back to, and after a while, I knew where to find the vein."

He worked as a sports editor for the Moscow Times for five months, then went back to Boston, where he tried landscaping, only to keep returning to Moscow. During that time, he writes, he had a "howling-on-the-bathroom-floor ten-alarm" nervous breakdown and had an affair with a married woman. By 1996, he was playing basketball for a team in Mongolia. Then he came down with pneumonia, which caused some other problems. He was airlifted back to Boston and almost died.

"My first thought in the hospital was I was going to change and live a straighter life, be more careful in the future," he said. "Then as soon as I got a little better I thought, 'You know, God, this can all disappear in a second. The last thing I want to do is plan for the future.'"

In 1997, he went to Moscow to edit Living Here , a rival publication of the fledgling eXile, which Mr. Ames was editing. Mr. Taibbi knew of Mr. Ames. "I admired the fact that he was universally loathed in the Moscow foreign community," he said. Mr. Ames convinced him to come over to eXile .

They say their publisher is a shady guy who pays them each $1,200 a month. He finds them cramped offices with low ceilings and flickering lights. Thanks to depressed real estate prices, Mr. Ames and Mr. Taibbi live in apartments in a legendary, neo-Gothic-style building. They get comped for meals at restaurants.

"People are afraid of what our paper will write about them, so they give us free shit," Mr. Taibbi said.

They say they also take advantage of what they like to call the "white god factor" and make trips to the provinces. "Tens of millions of people live in dire circumstances, stranded in the center of the world's largest continent, with little hope of going anywhere," said Mr. Ames. "Which means–sexual opportunity for me."

We walked to the Village Idiot. Beer, pool, darts. Two college girls were dancing together to Elvis, provocatively.

Mr. Ames said he didn't like the trend toward lesbianism among American women. "Nothing coils my dick up faster," he said. "When I was in school in Berkeley, there were dykes all over the place who hated my guts for being a tall male. They don't like tall men, really."

He spoke about his sex life in Moscow. "Russian women, especially on the first date, expect you to rape them," said Mr. Ames. "They'll go back home with you and say, 'No, no, no,' and if you're an American, you've been trained to respect the 'No,' because you're afraid of sexual harassment or date rape, and so you fail over and over. But it took me a while to learn you really have to force Russian girls, and that's what they want, it's like a mock rape. And then you come back here and you're really freaked out–because you don't know if that actually exists deep in all women's psyches, that that's what they all want. All relations between guys and girls is basically violent, I think. It's all war."

Mr. Ames looked around the bar. "This is so depressing, I can't tell you," he said. "I feel like I'm back home in San Jose. It's basically like Tom Cruise in Cocktail except that it's a little bit fringier . I never thought San Jose would take over the country like some disease, but it's happened."

I asked Mr. Ames and Mr. Taibbi if maybe it wasn't America that was screwed up; maybe it was them.

"Yes, there's no question that a lot of our problems with America have to do with our own personal problems," said Mr. Taibbi. "Obviously we went to Russia for the very simple reason that in Russia it's O.K. to be a loser and a failure. Everybody is. If you're not a failure in Russia, you killed somebody, you're driving around in a Mercedes, everyone knows how you got it. In this country, everybody is so desperate to not fall through the cracks, everyone's so afraid of failing, of not getting ahead, of ending up living in a shitty place, of not making money. In the United States, especially in New York, if you are not doing well professionally, it's this albatross you carry around everywhere. The first thing people ask you is, 'What do you do? Where are you?' Everybody in this town has a book deal. In Russia, nobody thinks about that shit! You get together, everybody gets shitfaced, and everyone assumes nobody has anything going on because who does? Nobody. "

Mr. Ames said that Russia freed their American souls. "Being a fuckup there is your right , every Russian is a total fuckup, and that's even valued in that culture, it makes you human ," he said.

Pastis. Hottest restaurant on the planet. The last time I was there I saw Calvin Klein, Rupert Everett, Christy Turlington and Salman Rushdie.

"Oh, yeah, I think I read about this in Delta's Sky magazine," Mr. Ames said, walking in. He froze. "I don't know, man. I don't know how long I can hang out here. I mean, speed's a pretty powerful drug. It can bring you up in the worst situations. But this is like kryptonite , this place. This defeats speed! If this is like rock, paper, scissors, Pastis defeats speed!"

We went to Marylou's on West Ninth Street. Inside, Mr. Taibbi said, "This is fine, the atmosphere here is totally mellow."

The two men don't hang out much with the traditional press in Moscow. In eXile, they voted The Washington Post' s David Hoffman this year's winner of a "Worst Western Journalist in Moscow" contest.

"The most insidious, " said Mr. Taibbi, adding that he believes numerous western journalists in Moscow are on secret payrolls. "Virtually to the last man, they almost all make us sick to our stomachs," he said.

Mr. Taibbi said that Mr. Hoffman might even be "a C.I.A. type." "It's so overt, the stuff that he does," he said. "It couldn't possibly come from his own mind, it's just so uncanny how his coverage of things tends to follow the Clinton administration."

" The New York Times has just been disgraceful all the way through," he added. Especially "around the time that Clinton came out and said Putin is a man with whom we can do business. There's a very obvious reason why the American government would say that, because Putin is going to be the classic Pinochet-style, banana-republic dictator who's going to protect American business interests. So it's an investment thing, even though he's horrible for the country."

Mr. Ames was chatting up a woman named Debra, a 46-year-old busty blonde in a white dress. He stood up, vodka shot in hand, and said in Russian, "To the beautiful woman who is bringing light to our table."

I asked them if they had ever fought with each other.

"There was a period when Matt was more smacked out all the time, and I was more speeded out all the time," said Mr. Ames. "There's just different rhythms. But I think we're so close ideologically on things."

Mr. Taibbi said he had a bad period with heroin two years ago. "I'd just never done it before and went way overboard," he said. "Actually I wrote most of the book on it."

"A lot of his prose was written on smack and a lot of mine was written on speed," said Mr. Ames.

"Heroin is a horrible thing, there's no question about it," said Mr. Taibbi. "It can ruin your life in so many different ways and so fast before you even know it, but it has the one redeeming feature: being a whole lot of fun."

I asked them if what they were doing in Moscow was just another form of hollow escapism.

"Americans are so obsessed with what is authentic and what isn't, because they're so insecure about whether or not anything they're doing is authentic," said Mr. Ames. "It's a moot question. It's not even the right question to ask. The fact is, we are running a paper that is dangerous, that does expound a lot of dangerous ideas, we do have death threats, whatever, and at the same time we're actually really enjoying it. We're not doing it specifically because of that. We can't really do anything else."

Later we were walking through the East Village. Mr. Ames stopped in front of a Gap store on St. Mark's Place. But he decided against being photographed there. "I don't know, the Gap is too ironic at so many fucking levels," he said.