Jesse Eisenberg, yurt-dweller (90days90reasons.com)

As we have previously noted, The Social Network star Jesse Eisenberg is now a full-fledged member of McSweeney's disciples, worshiping at the feet of Dave Eggers at 826Valencia. So it's not that surprising to find the actor stumping for President Obama over at 90 Days, 90 Reasons, the McSweeney's offshoot nonprofit which serves to "re-inspire the grassroots army that got Obama elected in the first place."

So why does Mr. Eisenberg think you should vote? Because he's currently living in a yurt in Mongolia, that's why.

It's a short essay, but it reads like a college application, making it just shy of impossibly unbearable. Here is most of it:

I'm traveling through Mongolia and currently staying in a yurt. This was not by choice; I'm with persuasive friends. If it were up to me I'd never leave my apartment and, more specifically, the bedroom area. But my comforts have given me a nagging sense of discomfort. I think traveling and seeing how other people live, even if I’m not totally immersing myself, assuages some of my unease because it re-sensitizes me to the difficulties and existential inconveniences that most other people face. In this way, I think Barack Obama is a good leader for our diverse country because he's seen how the world lives.

This essay raises several questions, not the least being, "How did Jesse Eisenberg get to Mongolia so quickly when he was just spotted and identified as Mark Zuckerberg at the London Olympics on Sunday?"

Also: Who has wifi in a yurt?

Also: What qualifies as an "existential inconvenience" in Mongolia, as opposed to an actual inconvenience, like steep drops in fertility, a straining economy and lowered life expectancy?

Also: Who is going to vote for President Obama again just because a jet-setting actor is currently yurt-sitting?

The most recent arrest occurred on July 25, when Mr. Zeitoun allegedly struck Kathy Zeitoun with his fists and a tire iron and attempted to choke her outside of a lawyer’s office in Uptown New Orleans. At the time he was on probation for attacking Ms. Zeitoun in front of their children in March 2011, a charge to which he pleaded guilty last summer and was subsequently sentences to anger-management classes.

Magistrate Judge Gerard Hansen decided yesterday not to revoke Mr. Zeitoun’s probation in light of the new arrest. Mr. Zeitoun is currently being held on $150,000 bail. After the hearing, Ms. Zeitoun showed reporters photographs of bruises and scrapes, claiming that her ex-husband “tried to kill her,” and asserting that she believes he should be held without bail.

“I’m not going to be quiet about it anymore because being quiet puts him in a position to do it again,” Ms. Zeitoun told Greater New Orleans of her ex-husband’s violence. The couple was divorced earlier this year.

Mr. Eggers’s book chronicles Mr. Zeitoun’s wrongful arrest following Hurricane Katrina, when he was allegedly mistaken for a terrorist and detained at Elayn Hunt Correctional Center for over 20 days without ever standing trial.

We have reached out to McSweeney’s, the publisher of Zeitoun, for comment and as of writing this have not heard back.

Hard to swallow (Sony)

If the cliche for actors used to be "But what I really want to do is direct," then the updated version would be "But I really want to do is blog." It makes sense. These people are already rich and famous: they can afford not getting paid, plus, it makes them look intellectual and proves that they are more than dancing little monkeys who can memorize dialogue and cry on cue.

The latest literary star in the making is The Social Network's Jesse Eisenberg (who has actually been writing one-offs for the site since 2009), who started his own whimsy-column back in May, "Bream Gives Me Hiccups: Restaurant Reviews From a privileged Nine-Year-Old." Sounds adorable, right?

It's not.

Bream is an ongoing series in which the child protagonist, dragged around by his bitter, alcoholic, divorced mother (maybe a callback to The Squid and the Whale?) is revealed over the course of time to not just be a little lord Fauntleroy about food--from their experience at an Iraqi restaurant: "When Mom and I tasted how normal it was, we looked at each other in a relieved way, like we were Matt’s brother and we had just come back from Iraq"-- but possibly homosexual as well. And this is not done in a revelatory "A young child discovering his burgeoning sexuality" kind of way, but as a punchline to the icy mother's frequent jabs at her fey son.

The most recent piece about TCBY finally pulls out all the stops when the protagonist's off-mentioned friend Matthew comes along for the ride:

The woman behind the counter asked Matthew what he wanted for toppings and he said Blueberries and Cherries. And then the woman said, “You just want two fruits?” Then Mom said, “Yup! Two fruits for my two little fruits!” And then Mom laughed in a cackling way that made everyone uncomfortable. When Mom finally stopped laughing, she said, “Sorry, I just couldn’t help myself,” and then we felt uncomfortable again.

When the woman asked me what I wanted, I decided to get the same thing as Matthew because he thought about his order in such an interesting way.

And again:

After a few bites of the Mountain Blackberry Yogurt, I got a brain freeze and it hurt really bad. Mom said that brain freeze is not a real thing and that I should stop complaining but Matthew told me to relax and to put my tongue to the roof of my mouth and lick. He demonstrated by showing me his tongue licking the roof of his mouth and then he put my head back and told me to open my mouth. But when I opened my mouth with my head back, Mom got really frantic and said, “Jesus Christ you two, get a room!”

And again:

Matthew ordered a Mountain Blackberry Yogurt. He said that he got it because it’s the most interesting color, which is a kind of light purple, but which Matthew called “Mauve.” “Mauve” is a word I never heard before and hearing new words is one of the reasons I like Matthew. When I asked why he didn’t get the flavor he liked the most, he said he thought that all the flavors probably tasted the same and so it was best to get something that was “pretty to look at.” Mom rolled her eyes two times: when Matthew said “Mauve” and when Matthew said “pretty to look at.”

To be fair, the piece does try to explore some deeper themes in the context of how children relate to the world, and it might be considered more of a critique on the mother's homophobia than the writer's. But still, this is ranging into some pretty heavy terrain: Bream is at times uncomfortable and sad, like Roger Dodger. But the actor/writer does make an effort to identify with how this kid thinks, so he's not exactly Daniel Tosh or Dane Cook here. It's hard to know what to make of what Jesse Eisenberg is doing with his McSweeney's column; what the larger contexts for these pieces will be, except maybe we don't have to know and that's okay too? Like it is written:

"So I guess Matthew is like TCBY because they both said they were the best at something even before the other person agreed. I know it sounds like Matthew and TCBY are trying to have relationships in reverse, but I like to think of everything happening together at the same time.

The idea that a site can wildly succeed as a meme factory, a listicle aggregator, and as of recently, a serious news operation rubs some folks the wrong way.  The most recent source of attack was the web presence of McSweeney's, the San Francisco-based publishing house (and internet humor destination widely known for—but of course—their lists).

McSweeney's recently published a list by one Jory John entitled "Suggested Buzzfeed Articles." Among the titles were "15 Ways to Obliterate a Tree" and "3 Opera Singers Covered in Day-Old Newspapers," both of which made this braindead, heat-stroked writer chuckle (as a McSweeney's list will sometimes do), the joke being: Here is the extreme version lampooning the extent to which Buzzfeed will go to make a list for their website, for which sometimes they can be found reaching.

So Buzzfeed answered them, by actually creating the articles Mr. Jory jokingly suggested, explaining:

McSweeneys was kind enough to suggest some articles for us and here, we make those suggestions a reality! If you've got a suggestion for an article we should do, send it to suggestedarticles@buzzfeed.com, and we'll do our best to make it happen!

The "suggestions" they chose were:

• 11 Political Lessons We Learned From "Gilmore Girls"
• 29 Reasons to Hate Your Life
• Elvis Presley's 42 Sweatiest Moments
• 3 Raccoons That Will Kill You And Your Family
• 50 Photos of Bill Clinton's Forehead
• 18 Things To Scream At A Cow
• 10 Peaches That Resemble Pat Sajak
• 4 Inspiring Lance Bass Quotations
• The World's 13 Laziest Salmon
• 25 Numbers Bigger Than 2
• 16 Beautiful Photos From Underneath A Bed
• 8 Surprising Uses For An Orange
• 10 Grizzly Bears Doffing Newsboy Caps

Yes. They actually made all of those.

For the lists that seem unlikely to be even remotely possible—like the Pat Sajak one, for example—they simply photoshopped the meme into reality. Others, like the 50 Pictures of Bill Clinton's forehead, they aggregated into reality. It is as funny, canny, and absolutely as frightening a response they could muster. For all the wiseass moxie employed in making this a reality—which they appeared to start working on yesterday—there is an utterly odd and somewhat disconcerting boast at the heart of this: That anything can be turned into a meme or a list, no matter how absurd, uninteresting, or fictitious. Challenge this, and you're daring them to excavate heretofore unmolested depths of Internet Ephemera, and bring them to the surface of the collective consciousness in response. Let this be a lesson to us all.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek 

Nosowsky.

Ethan Nosowsky has left his role as editor-at-large for Graywolf Press to take a job as editorial director at McSweeney's, announcing the move today on Twitter. Mr. Nosowsky used to work as an editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux and is also the "consultant for innovative literature" at the Creative Capital Foundation. He has a more traditional book publishing background than some at McSweeney's, a sign that that its San Francisco-based books division will likely become more aggressive about acquiring work. He arrives in the wake of several departures from the editorial staff there. He has edited books by Geoff Dyer, Emily Barton, Stephen Elliott and others.

ESPN and Grantland have contracted McSweeney's to handle the production and distribution (which, in retrospect, explains why Dave Eggers is a Grantland contributing editor).

As such, the basketball leather-bound books will harbor twee custom moving parts, like posters, a pull-out section, "old-school baseball cards" and mini-booklets. The first volume is available through the McSweeney's store; individual issues cost $19.95 and a year-long subscription (four issues) is $48.

In addition to some of the more memorable Grantland features (Malcolm Gladwell on the NBA lockout and Colson Whitehead on the World Series of Poker, for example), the first volume includes an original column by Mr. Simmons and new fiction from Jess Walter, author of The Financial Lives of Poets.

Grantland Quarterly has always been a part of the ESPN-sponsored website's business plan, according to Mr. Fierman.

"If our site has a problem it's that we move so fast that readers miss stuff," he said. The print journal serves up the site's greatest hits in a medium better suited to long-form journalism. Plus, nostalgia runs rampant among Grantland's roster of magazine writers.

"I miss the feel of print," the former GQ editor told The Observer. "It’s good to be back in it."

The plot.

Ayelet Waldman and Michael Chabon are working on a musical about McSweeney's non-profit 826 Valencia's Superhero Supply Store in Park Slope. It's true, Ms. Waldman told us! It will be called The Brooklyn Superhero Supply Company. Michael Mayer, of American Idiot and Spring Awakening will direct; Peter Lerman, a young up-and-coming musical talent, will compose; Margo Lion and Amanda Lipitz will produce and the literary world's favorite (only?) happily married couple with four children will pen the book. Will Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark now have to compete with a gang of Brooklyn misfits in capes and nerd glasses? Oh no.

Ms. Waldman, author of Love and Other Possible Pursuits and Bad Mother, and Mr. Chabon, author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, are also working on a series for HBO called Hobgoblin, about a group of magicians who fight the Nazis in World War II.

"These things are not institutions," said founder and co-editor Thomas Beller. "They're always razor's edge things."

Ms. Yas and Mr. Beller decided to shut down the journal after multiple sources of funding pulled out. They hadn't expected issue 30 to be the swansong.

"The vibe of the last party," said Mr. Beller, "showed me that the magazine has had a lot of action around it. It's ending on a really good note."

"The Open City people were from an earlier time--the mid-'90s," said the novelist Sam Lipsyte, "the last time you really felt an understanding that the man was inherently bad. A distrust of the official discourse was what bound people together--and a distrust of hippies."

Mr. Lipsyte's first story in the magazine, "Shed," was an account of sodomy conducted with a hoe handle. It was commissioned by the late Robert Bingham, who joined Mr. Beller and Daniel Pinchbeck, Open City's co-founder, shortly after the journal's launch.

"I remember Bingham called me up and said, 'Don't sell out to the majors.'"

Mr. Lipsyte is one of a pair of writers most identified with the magazine. The other is the poet Dave Berman, leader of the indie rock band Silver Jews.

"We get two piles of imitators in slush," Ms. Yas said, "the Lipsytians and the Bermanites."

"I didn't expect that Open City would continue at all after Rob Bingham's death," said Mr. Berman. Bingham died in 1999 of a heroin overdose. Shortly thereafter, Mr. Pinchbeck decamped, and Ms. Yas, then the managing editor, joined Mr. Beller as co-editor.

"I feel a tremendous amount of admiration for Joanna for squeezing an extra decade out the magazine," Mr. Berman said.

For now, Ms. Yas is at work on an anthology of stories from the magazine. She and Mr. Beller will continue to publish Open City Books. (Their next title is The Smell of Pine, a novel by Lara Vapnyar.)

Novelist Jonathan Ames emailed to say that Open City was "the new Paris Review" for his generation of writers, "while also being McSweeney's before there was McSweeney's. It was and is a beautiful magazine."

"Open City has offered me shelter and encouragement, and I needed it!" Diane Williams, a contributor since the inaugural issue in 1991, wrote The Observer in an email. "They didn't let me down!

"Oh, this is very sad news!"

--Christian Lorentzen

Author: The editors of McSweeney's
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Page Count: 256
Pages Read: 50ish? We were skipping around.

Does It Work? It's clogged by tepid interviews with the people responsible, who never offer more insight than: "Working at McSweeney's is fun," and, "Dave Eggers is a genius." Of course, coffee-table books are for looking at, not reading, so more criminal is that there are simply too few pretty pictures to glance at. We expect wordiness from McSweeney's, of course, but we also expect meaningful words.

Best Moment So Far: David Byrne! "It was design that lured me into the McSweeney's world. I probably picked up an early issue at St. Mark's Bookshop and found it baffling (the letters section) and seductive.... [I] realized that the journal implied that somewhere possibly close by there existed a whole scene or world that either I didn't know about or that was completely imaginary."

Odds We'll Finish It: 500/1. The list of Coffee Table Books We've Read Straight Through is short. Right now, it stops after one, and this won't be number two.

Read Instead: How about something pretty?

Dave Eggers spoke recently at Berkeley's J-School about print journalism. He and fellow McSweeney's leaders took the opportunity to explain the economics of the quarterly's recent newspaper experiment, the Panorama. Reports SF Weekly:

Many people assumed Dave Eggers' business model for the next-generation newspaper was something like, "I'm so cool, people will write for my paper for free!" Not so--it wasn't for free....

[Panorama publisher Oscar Villalon] said writers typically made between $500 and $1,000 for their stories. Some writers made less, in the $200 to $250 range. Villalon, former book editor at the Chronicle, said this compared favorably with the Chronicle's freelancer rate, which he said could be as low as $50 or $100 per article.

And, yes, the cachet of taking part in a super-duper cool happening definitely helped. Stephen King, for instance, wrote an entire eight-page section on the 2009 World Series. What did they pay him? "Believe me, it was not over $1,000," Villalon said.

Eggers remains steadfast in his support of print, and said that almost none of Panorama's content would go online. He also declared it "impossible" that Gourmet magazine was not profitable, an idea that no one in the audience challenged. (Choire Sicha, however, has some thoughts on that.)

By way of a counterpoint to Eggers' vehemently old-school approach, there's the story of Vice-grows-up, which David Carr examines in this week's Media Equation column:

Last Tuesday night, there was a semiannual meeting for the Vice tribe. The company has grown to 560 employees in 30 countries, with 2,500 freelancers who are mostly paid in hipster cred. This success has created some dissonance for a crew of raconteurs who have spent much of their lives laughing at the stiffs who live pointless lives in dumb jobs defined by their next PowerPoint presentations.

Yet there they were, Shane Smith, one of the company's founders, and the creative director Eddy Moretti clicking on the next slide at their corporate event in a bar on 6th Street in the Williamsburg area of Brooklyn, the hippest street in the hottest neighborhood in the coolest borough ... well, you get the idea.

This much is certain: the media of the future will need to be extremely cool.