Amber Tamblyn and David Cross.

– Lindsay Lohan and her mom got into a limo fight on Long Island that was so bad the cops needed to be called. Which means it must have been really bad, because limo fights on Long Island is like traffic on the FDR: pretty routine on the weekdays.

– Amber Tamblyn and David Cross got married, and if that thought doesn't creep you out, you should check out their adorable Instagrammed wedding photos from the upstate ceremony.

– Samantha Geimer, the woman who at 13 was at the center of Polanski rape scandal, is now writing a tell-all book. That will not be making Lena Dunham money, even.

– Did you ever want to know what sex with Olivia Wilde and Jason Sudeikis was like? Okay, it's like having sex with Kenyan marathon runners. How delightful!

– Monica Lewinsky is just out and about these days, eating cake in the rain.

Ms. Lewinsky, the woman who will forever be the intern with a stained blue dress, has decided to capitalize on her long-lived fame and sullied name. The Post reports that she got a $12 million book deal, although the publisher has not been disclosed. That’s a lot of money (especially in these days of austerity and low book advances) but apparently Ms. Lewinsky has the goods.

The book will have details about the Clintons' (allegedly non-existent) sex life, Ms. Lewinsky’s previously, miraculously unpublished love letters to the President (she was apparently very much in love) and more details than anybody could ever want to know about Mr. Clinton’s sexual proclivities (where there’s a cigar….there is apparently worse).

It isn’t that Ms. Lewinsky is so eager to retell her story. She just needs some cash. Ms. Lewinsky, now 40, got a master’s degree, briefly worked as a television reporter in England and designed a line of handbags.

“No one will hire her and she can’t get a job because of Clinton,” a sympathetic friend told The Post. “She needs to make money somehow.”

We hope she still has an extra-large handbag lying around - $12 million is a lot of dough.

Afterward, he caught an overnight flight on the Hucka-plane to New Hampshire, where, around dawn, he filed a story for “Good Morning America.”

That evening, he was back in front of the cameras yet again, this time from Henniker, N.H., reporting on Mr. Huckabee for “ABC World News with Charles Gibson.”

“It was pretty nuts,” said Mr. Tapper.

But evidence suggests that Mr. Tapper’s recent flurry of productivity was no fluke. According to a new study, of all the hyper-driven personalities reporting on network nightly news, Mr. Tapper is quantitatively the least likely to lolligag.

The Tyndall Report—a web site which encyclopedically chronicles the weekday nightly newscasts of ABC, CBS, and NBC—recently published its annual year in review, including a study of “the Top Most Heavily-Used Reporters (anchors excluded)” of 2007. The results?

Mr. Tapper triumphed. Over the past year, the 38-year-old reporter scored more airtime (231 minutes) than any other network correspondent, including blue-chip regulars such as NBC’s Andrea Mitchell (220 minutes) and CBS’ David Martin (217 minutes). Most impressively, Mr. Tapper pulled out a narrow—upset!--victory over NBC’s robo-newsman, David Gregory, (230 minutes) who practically owns the Tyndall Top 20, having finished No. 1 in two of the last three years.

Mr. Tapper had never previously landed in the top 10. How did he do it?

On Friday evening, we caught up with Mr. Tapper, who was briefly back home in Washington D.C. He said he was enjoying time with his 5-month-old daughter Alice, and preparing to….

NYTV interrupted. Mr. Tapper had topped Mr. Gregory (and David Martin and Martha Raddatz and Pete Williams and Lara Logan and David Muir) during a year in which he became a first-time father? “My wife, Jennifer gets a lot of the credit,” said Mr. Tapper.

He downplayed his professional achievement. “I attribute Mr. Tyndall’s finding to the fact that it’s been such a huge political year,” he said. “The bottom line is that I am a political geek.”

But the ranks of network news chasers are well-populated with political news hounds. What sets Mr. Tapper apart?

In search of a Just-So story, we called David Carr of The New York Times. Roughly a decade ago, in the early days of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Mr. Carr, the then editor of the Washington City Paper, published a freelance cover story by Mr. Tapper under the infamous banner headline, “I Dated Monica Lewinsky.” Afterward, Mr. Carr gave Mr. Tapper his first full time job in journalism.

Regarding Mr. Tapper’s prolific output and rapid ascent to the upper echelon of the news gathering business, Mr. Carr offered a theory. “The dude is relentless,” said Mr. Carr.

According to Mr. Carr, as a staff writer for City Paper Mr. Tapper’s filing appetites quickly outstripped the paper’s ability to process his copy. “If he worked for Tony Soprano,” said Mr. Carr, “he’d be called an earner.”

“A lot of these people who are productivity machines are not collegial,” added Mr. Carr. “They’re just tyrants when it comes to the craft of journalism. He has none of that. He will always help you when you call. I don’t think ambition precisely describes what’s going on with him. He’s got whatever editors look for in terms of a combination of personal neediness and endless, bottomless curiosity that tends to result in a lot of stories, many of them good.”

Despite the Observer’s best efforts on Friday night, Mr. Tapper refused to gloat.

“There’s a line in Broadcast News—what do you do when all your dreams are realized? And Albert Brooks says, 'Keep it to yourself,'” said Mr. Tapper. “That’s kind of what I’m living right now.”

How does our panel of professionals rate her performance?

JOHN UPDIKE

Senator Clinton is an excellent and thoroughgoing politician and not a novelist; her description of “the most devastating, shocking and hurtful experience” of her life is nowhere as moving or human as the legalistic vignettes of furtive partial pleasures in the Starr Report. Her surprise at her husband’s belated confession is indeed surprising, as if they had never quite met before. But I loved the sentence, “I hadn’t decided whether to fight for my husband and my marriage, but I was resolved to fight for my President.” Her citizenship is ardent.

John Updike’s most recent novel is Seek My Face (Knopf).

ERICA JONG

In any campaign biography, the writer--or her ghost--solicits sympathy for the campaigner while pretending to be telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Living History is no different. Hillary Clinton’s moment of maximum public sympathy arrived when she became the woman scorned, and she has no intention of letting us forget it. “This was the most devastating, shocking and hurtful experience of my life,” she writes. “I was furious and getting more so by the second,” she writes. “[H]is eyes filled with tears. He had betrayed the trust in our marriage and we both knew it might be an irreparable breach.” With these soapy sentences, Hillary reminds us relentlessly of her instant of greatest P.R. glory, the moment she stopped being too brainy, too brilliant, too adamantine and became, in the tabloids, just another betrayed wife. How pathetic that she has to twang our heartstrings in this cheesy way. Hillary Clinton has changed the role of First Lady for all time. Like Eleanor Roosevelt, her mentor, she has proved that the First Lady can be more compelling and empathic than the President. The woman is stronger than Queen Elizabeth I of England, a greater strategist than Catherine the Great of Russia, braver than Boadicea or the Amazons of old. And yet the demands of fame in America are such that she has to grovel to the appalling level of reality TV to get our undivided attention. The fault, dear readers, is not in Hillary, but in our ghastly mass media, which only applauds brainy women when we are reduced to tears.

Erica Jong’s most recent novel is Sappho’s Leap (W.W. Norton & Company).

LAURA MOORE

Dear Senator Clinton,

In my line of fiction, we call it the “black moment”: the moment of crisis between the heroine and hero, when they discover that their love and trust are in jeopardy. You’ve done a great job, in Living History, of setting the scene for the key confession/confrontation, but if I may, I’d like to make a few suggestions to turn your story into a real “keeper” for your fans.

We need to feel your pain. The best romance novels wring every last drop of emotion as they expose the heartache of betrayal. Simply crying, yelling and saying you’re furious won’t make those pages turn and those readers’ eyes moisten with tears of understanding and connection. You have to make us identify with you as a wife and lover. Let’s see whether we can’t open up this scene in the bedroom (terrific choice of setting, by the way) and let the reader share more fully in your thoughts, emotions and reactions when Bill drops the bomb.

My mind reeled from the blow of his softly stammered words. Stunned, I stared uncomprehending. A wave of dizziness assailed me and I thought I might be sick. Fighting against the sudden nausea, my fingers clutched at the bed sheets. A distant region of my brain registered the fact that here I was in our bed, the one Bill and I had shared countless nights, his warm, wonderfully familiar body pressed against mine. It had been a place of joy and refuge where we had lain and whispered dreams in the dark. Now it was horribly transformed into an icy field of lies. As though of their own accord, my hands released their hold to wrap themselves protectively about me as I shivered from the tears coursing down my cheeks, from the awful chill invading my heart. A scream of pain rose up inside me, and yet all I managed was a broken whisper. “Why, Bill, why? Why did you lie to me?”

He just stood there, his head lowered, unable to meet my eye, his shoulders slumped, looking like a sullen, naughty child. Perhaps I should thank Bill for that, for at that moment as I stared at him, rage hot and pure began coursing through my veins, spreading until it consumed every atom of my being. Bill must have sensed it, for he raised his head, his red-rimmed eyes finally meeting mine. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I was trying to protect you and Chelsea.”

Now, obviously we can’t have Bill explaining too much here. That would take away from your story--and besides, your book can be a great marketing teaser so that next year we’ll all rush out and buy Bill’s take on the bedroom scene--but there’s one more thing I feel could really enrich the emotional impact of the scene: forgiveness. Even the merest hint of it allows your reader to hope that maybe there’s some way to get past this darkest moment of your marriage and your love. As you know, this is a challenging bit of writing, because you’ll have to convince us that you found something redeemable in Bill, something worth saving in your relationship. But let’s give it a shot. Let’s try and open the door of your heart a crack, because, after all, that’s what you did manage to do.

“I believed in you, Bill. We all believed in you.” My throat, raw from pain, closed tight and I was unable to continue. I shut my eyes in despair. I couldn’t bear to look at him. Not now, maybe never.

I heard the sound of his feet moving closer, the heavy muffled thud of his knees hitting the carpet as he dropped down next to the bed. “Hill …. ” His whisper was an agonized plea. “Please, please, I need you. Now more than ever.” I felt his head drop, its weight resting heavy against my thigh. I opened my eyes, and involuntarily my hand reached out, a feather brushing against his graying hair.

Unchecked tears flowed down his cheeks as he gazed at me. “You’ve always been strong where I was weak. Be strong for me now, Hillary …. If not for me, then for Chelsea …. ”

Chelsea. The one truly wonderful thing our marriage had given us. Chelsea, our pride and joy. How this sordid affair would hurt her, a pain a thousand times greater than my own. “I don’t know, Bill. I don’t know if I can be that strong …. ”

From outside the bedroom door, our dog, Buddy, gave a plaintive whine of distress.

I think we’ll leave the suggestions at that. I’m sure you’ve got the gist. In closing, please let me add that I hope we’ll have you and President Clinton back in the White House in 2008. The material W. is providing is far too scary to contemplate.

With warmest regards,

Laura Moore

Laura Moore’s latest contemporary romance novel, Night Swimming (Ballantine), was published in May.

DAVID GATES

This doesn’t feel to me like the time to be making sport of Hillary Clinton--not when the far right, having essentially engineered a coup d’état, is busily reinventing America as a theocratic cloud-cuckooland, with suicidal economic, social and environmental policies and a mean streak so wide it would take a B-52 hours to fly across it, and with the mouth-breathing millions cheering them on. I’m a lot less dainty than I used to be when I couldn’t bring myself to vote for a sellout like her husband. So I’m not the guy to give her book the ridicule it might deserve in better days.

Living History isn’t an X-ray self-portrait, but a belated--or a be-earlied--campaign autobiography, as well as a moneymaking product calculated to save her hours and hours of paid speechifying. Since one recurring theme is her tendency to put her supposedly innocent foot in her mouth---”tea and cookies,” “Tammy Wynette,” “vast right-wing conspiracy”--it’s understandable, maybe even commendable, that the book has been thoroughly gaffe-proofed, apparently with the help of the speechwriters, editors and friends whom she thanks in her copious acknowledgments. If her goal was to include nothing that might come back to bite her in the ass, she’s done just fine. For instance, she doesn’t come right out and say that if Ken Starr hadn’t distracted the White House and Congress with the Monica Lewinsky nonsense, the Sept. 11 attacks would never have happened. But she sure lets you know it, by constantly juxtaposing President Clinton’s prescient worries about Osama bin Laden with the Republican right’s jihad against Mr. Clinton. It sounds a little sketchy, but I’m not dead sure she’s wrong.

If I’d been her editor, I would have cut the sentence where she says: “My own approval rating was nearing an all-time high and would eventually peak somewhere around 70 percent, proving that the American people are fundamentally fair and sympathetic.” And I might have urged her to lose the namedroppy stuff, where Stevie Wonder comes and sings her a song he just wrote about forgiveness, and Walter Cronkite takes Bill and Hill for a sail, and the Dalai Lama puts in his two cents. At Davos, she runs into Elie Wiesel and the missus, and he asks her, “What is wrong with America? Why are they doing this?” She says, “I don’t know, Elie.” Icky as this is, though, she undoubtedly was on a first-name basis with Elie and Stevie and Walt and Dalai. And they undoubtedly were nice to her. So what’s she supposed to do, not say so?

About Mr. Clinton’s sexual betrayals--the plural is mine, not hers--she’s as forthcoming as you could reasonably expect. Her only comment on Gennifer Flowers’ allegation that she’d had a long affair with Mr. Clinton is: “He told me it wasn’t true.” (End of sentence. End of paragraph. No halfway intelligent reader could miss the implication.) Similarly, she says a couple of times that her husband will have to give us his own explanation for what the hell he was thinking when he got involved with Ms. Lewinsky. And while Bill and Hillary went into marriage counseling after the affair became public, Hillary never tells us specifically what the upshot was--if there was a specific upshot--or even if they started sleeping in the same room again. Well, it’s none of our business, really, and left to herself--to the extent any politician has a self--she might have told us so. But without at least dipping a toe into this swamp, she wouldn’t have had a promotable book or, perhaps, a political career beyond the Senate. Which, I have to say, I hope she’s got her beady eye on. Since she had to deal with the mess somehow, she’s done a reasonably deft job of giving away not much of anything we didn’t know. Did anybody, for instance, think she wasn’t angry with Mr. Clinton? Would anyone have respect for her if she hadn’t been? As rawly confessional as Living History is designed to seem, it’s an artifact crafted by a politician and her team, and she doesn’t give up a damn thing she didn’t have to. Would you?

David Gates is the author of two novels and, most recently, The Wonders of the Invisible World: Stories (Vintage Books).

VINCE PASSARO

It’s a decent bet that almost every day that Monica Lewinsky went down on Bill Clinton, bombs dropped somewhere in Iraq--and while he hardly ever got to climax, the bombs frequently did. Now that Hillary has spilled “all,” that’s one of many facts you won’t see discussed in the stupefying reporting about her book. Nor, it occurred to me today while looking over “August 1998,” the curiously affectless chapter on her “personal agony” that was much reported on after it was leaked to the Associated Press last week, are we going to be enlightened as to why Hillary voted in favor of our spectacularly mendacious little war in the Fertile Crescent, either.

All we get are her tears over the casual infidelities of a man who, by most credible accounts, hasn’t kept it in his pants since the diapers came off.

Here’s a news item for the media, for Simon & Schuster, and for whatever bizarre, salacious readership leads the publisher to believe this book needed a first print run of a million copies: It wasn’t the Clintons’ genitals that were so troubling, it was their brains.

But, of course, there’s a lot of political cover in pointing our attention groin-ward. Perhaps that’s why her book reads so much like the establishing scenes in a bad porn video.

August 1998 is when Bill Clinton testified to a grand jury via video what he then had to announce to the nation: He’d had a little action in the Oval Office. Hillary kindly reminds us that (just by coincidence, mind), “within hours of his statement about his personal transgression, the United States would launch a missile strike against one of Osama bin Laden’s training camps in Afghanistan, at a time when our intelligence indicated bin Laden and his top lieutenants would be there.”

This little arrangement, in which dire national-security requirements dovetail so perfectly with the political needs of a desperately underclad emperor, feels kind of familiar, doesn’t it? But then, that’s not an aspect of Hillary’s now-famous chapter--the “personal revelation” of her “agony” (as opposed to the agony of so many others)--that we care to discuss much.

Vince Passaro’s first novel was Violence, Nudity, Adult Content (Simon & Schuster).

JENNIFER EGAN

Reading Hillary Clinton reminds me of how hard it is to pull off climactic, emotionally charged scenes without lapsing into cliché. Of course, there is frisson in the very idea of being secreted past the bedroom door to witness the moment when her husband, the President, admitted to her that he had fooled around with Monica L. after months of denying it. But the language Senator Clinton uses to render this encounter veers between legalese (“there had been an inappropriate intimacy”) to familiar prose shorthand for heightened emotional states (“Gulping for air”; “I was furious and getting more so by the second”; “I was dumbfounded, heartbroken and outraged … ”).

Clichés are a kind of literary Esperanto, recognizable to everyone in a vague, general way. Take out the names, and just about anyone could have written this stuff about anyone. That’s why Ms. Clinton’s answer to another much-pondered question back in 1998--how does Hillary feel about Bill now?--is so weirdly disappointing: “As a wife, I wanted to wring Bill’s neck.” The cliché blocks the gritty specificity of what went on between these two particular people; it actually obscures it. Which may be the point. Does she really want millions of readers to know how she felt when her husband confessed to yet another infidelity--one that might cost him his Presidency? I wouldn’t.

As a writer, I try to look at clichés as a starting point. Early drafts of my work are lousy with them, in the same way that they creep into (cliché) so much spoken language without our even noticing. In the end, I try to isolate each one and ask myself: What exactly is this standing in for? The answers are usually interesting. I’d love to know Hillary Clinton’s.

Jennifer Egan is the author of two novels and a collection of short stories.

LOUIS BEGLEY

We live in a decadent era that grows uglier by the minute. The spectacle of the media salivating in gluttonous anticipation of Senator Clinton’s telling how she learnt from her husband the “truth” about Monica has been one more painful and shaming lesson in the abasement of the American public’s taste as the media and publishers perceive it. Is it true that Hillary Clinton needed to let the entire world into her bedroom to justify an $8 million book contract? She had, after all, other useful and interesting information to impart, and she is an engaging and sometimes deeply moving figure. I readily imagine Kenneth Starr, Orrin Hatch, Tom DeLay and the other stalwarts of the great Presidential peep show in their viewing booths, shifting eagerly from foot to foot, ready to climax as Hillary and Bill undress. But are the rest of us just as depraved? If we are, I wonder whether Hillary Clinton shouldn’t have settled for less money and written a book that did not delve into matters normally reserved for fiction and the transcripts of divorce proceedings. Peep shows are hardly ever worth the price of admission--a quarter? Fifty cents? I honestly don’t know; the last one I attended--other than the Clinton impeachment proceedings, which came free on CNN--was in the early 50’s, in smelly premises near Boston’s Scollay Square. The price of the current one--$28, minus such discounts as Barnes & Noble, Amazon and other chains will grant--will seem like highway robbery to the prurient reader the media have postulated: Senator Clinton has, in fact, written with commendable restraint and modesty.

Louis Begley’s seventh novel, Shipwreck (Knopf), will be published in September.

FRANCINE PROSE

Even those of us who have given up the losing battle against the misplaced modifier and the dangling participle still believe that certain rules of English grammar are not optional, and that their importance is not merely linguistic, but philosophical and moral. One of these is the rule that says that to put dialogue between quotation marks signifies (unless you’re writing fiction) that those words were spoken as written, and were transcribed directly from what we call real life. I’ve sometimes wondered if the increasingly common confusion about this simple relationship between truth and punctuation may be at the heart of some of the media’s current problems with journalistic ethics and accuracy.

It’s possible that, when Bill Clinton finally admitted to his affair with a White House intern, Hillary said, as she reports in Living History: “What do you mean? What are you saying? Why did you lie to me?” And it’s possible that Bill replied: “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I was trying to protect you and Chelsea.” It’s likely that they said something like that, but unlikely that they said that, exactly. For one thing, it’s very difficult to remember precisely what words we used in the past, unless we’ve uttered some fabulous bon mot. Which this is not. And it must be doubly hard to recreate the conversation that ensued when one’s husband, the President of the United States, suggested that Ken Starr might soon tell the world how Monica Lewinsky was encouraged to get acquainted with a cigar.

But someone felt that we needed to hear (not merely hear about) this historic exchange, and that to dramatize it--to borrow from the rhythms and speech patterns of the afternoon soaps--would help us to feel like a fly on the wall. Or, as Senator Clinton’s publishers must hope, one fly among millions on the wall. The result is that, reading the scene, you don’t have to be a writer to think that you could have written it yourself. Which can only add to the sense of déjà vu and anti-climax that (despite the advance publicity and the tantalizing promises of heartfelt, steamy, tell-all revelation) readers may wind up feeling about Living History.

Which is as it should be. Because now that we’re being routinely bombarded with so many big lies, it’s hard to get excited about the little lies and the little exposures. It’s just not as much fun as it used to be. Reading Living History feels like an exercise in a kind of bittersweet nostalgia that gets downright depressing as we try to imagine the equivalent we might get--but never will--from the current administration:

“I could hardly breathe. Gulping for air, I started crying and yelling at Donald and Dick and Condoleezza: ‘What are you saying? Why did you lie to me? What do you mean, there were no weapons of mass destruction?’”

There's no way left to swing it, so a troupe of eager musical theater folk have determined...to sing it. Monica! The Musical first appeared last spring. Now, a refined (errr, make that "updated") version, which premiered last night, has already sold out four of six shows at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater. As your devoted Politicker slave, I went to see for myself.

The cast tromps all over the beaten path, from the tasteless to the clever, with an emphasis on the former. There's lots of physical comedy: Hillary is an amusingly spastic dancer, frugging her heart out, while Bill has a languid, frat-boy lope that makes him look more Animal House than White House. During a press conference, a frenzied George Stephanopoulos tries to mow down Ken Starr with a presidential podium on wheels.

Set against the slapstick backdrop, Monica dreams of someday being "Monica Rodham Clinton." "Now don't cry," Bill tells her, off in a corner at the inaugural ball."You're breaking my heart. And you're being very loud."

What else? Hillary dreams of taking over and...Well, there's that cameo by Tom Jones. He sings away sexual scruples ("Forget it! Forget it! Forgetitforgetit!") while introducing Bill, the young Rhodes scholar, to British prostitutes with lousy teeth.

Leaving the theater, this is what I was thinking: A) There's a reason I'm not a theater critic; and B) In light of the present administration, it doesn't take a musical to create nostalgia for the mildness of Clinton's missteps.

"Sex: in America, an obsession. In other parts of the world, a fact," said Marlene Dietrich. And in that vein, The Washingtonienne arrives this month, to celebrate the beginning of the summer-intern season and the fact that we've only managed to regress further into the abyss of American prurience.

Jessica Cutler, the comely former envelope-stuffer, staffer to Senator Mike DeWine and Twilo aficionado now turned blogtastic authoress, delivers an account of her brief sojourn in Washington, D.C., as a professional mattress. Aided by her alter ego, Jacqueline Turner, Ms. Cutler explores the barely washed underbelly of our nation's capital-and finds a few hotel bars, many middle-aged lobbyists, lawyers, medium-weight bureaucrats, a bike messenger and a nightclub named after a Japanese wine.

There are about three girls living in Washington, D.C., as well-an insalubrious triumvirate composed of our protagonist and her two friends, April and Laura. They take friendship lightly, choosing instead to undermine one another as though their lives depended on it. As provincial 24-year-olds might, they consider nothing sacred, except perhaps their (post-)post-feminist right to have sex wherever, however and whenever they please. There is, after all, nothing better to do as they waft through their jobs and relationships with as much purpose as a tiger in a tofu factory. What these young bored things discover is that everyone in D.C.-which is, after all, "the Hollywood for the Ugly"-is horny as hell, unapologetically disloyal and driven by all sorts of unsurprising sexual urges: spanking, Astroglide, mirrors ….

Monica Lewinsky was clearly no anomaly.

The difference is that Ms. Lewinsky turned, post-cigar, to handbag design and insignificance, while Ms. Cutler cashed in-on a scandal that wasn't one. "She's not even that hot!" the blogosphere yammered after she'd shagged her way through the Men's Warehouse of Washington politicos; spread the news online; pocketed an estimated 300-grand advance on her "novel"; and sauntered into her very own Playboy shoot. (The props? Laptops and cardigans.) Ms. Cutler was hot, all right, mussing glossy sheets, spreading her legs, smiling lasciviously. She was a good concubine, and the capital was crowded with a surplus of entitled and willful men with just enough power and money to command her services.

A 300-page e-mail, The Washingtonienne is insufficiently hair-raising and occasionally entertaining, a plodding narrative of the " … and then … and then … " sort. It descends, predictably, into platitude: "Right now I was hardly the trash-talking bitch on wheels who wrote the blog. I was a frightened, lonely girl who was all dressed up with nowhere to go." For charm, Ms. Cutler throws in some flirty self-effacement-very plausible when you've made your career from turning other people's private lives into public fodder without ever having the courage to accept the implications: "Women! I don't know how men put up with us. Oh, that's right: sex, otherwise what good were we?" Or: "Girls like us would never be fat cats. In this town, we were nothing but pussy." She's right: Girls who engage passively in demeaning sex out of boredom are indeed good for little else. On the other hand, Ms. Cutler thinks she's the master puppeteer, destined for bigger and better things than her partners, co-workers and friends. It's easy to claim (as she did recently in Roll Call) that "it wasn't all that interesting"-especially when you've got your face on the cover of magazines and your book on display at Barnes & Noble.

Most of Ms. Cutler's observations reinforce the notion that the highest form of morality is amorality. Her alter ego is ostentatiously nonjudgmental: "Of course I had reservations about letting someone from work butt-fuck me, but if he was game, so was I." She thinks she's endowed with the freedom of choice, and it suits her well: "Obviously, I was being rewarded for my behavior, and while my life wasn't perfect, I was getting what I wanted. Maybe I wanted all the wrong things, but I was so busy chasing after all of this shit that I forgot what the difference between right and wrong was in the first place." Plagued by this convenient forgetfulness, she continues to accept money for sex, encourage flagrant infidelity, allow herself to be exploited by co-workers, parade her knickerless crotch in public and so on. She's perfectly aware of her wrongdoings, of the harm she inflicts on herself and others. Her excuse? "If you want to be rich you have to be bitch." And this: "We were … going to rot in hell anyway, right?"

Read as fiction, Jessica Cutler's book barely stands up to potboiler erotica; it's only interesting insofar as it resembles a memoir. Thanks to various blogs and some well-timed lawsuits, we now know the identities of some of her suitors (but not her clients), and even though none of them is a public figure, we find ourselves hooked by the details of these debauched lives. But are the details accurate and true? Perhaps not: "Wasn't everyone in politics a goddamn fucking liar anyway? Perhaps that was my niche. I told lies all the time. Hell I was good at it, a real bullshit artist." Well-at least she's some kind of artist.

Jessica Joffe is a reporter at The Observer.

How does our panel of professionals rate her performance?

JOHN UPDIKE

Senator Clinton is an excellent and thorough-going politician and not a novelist; her description of "the most devastating, shocking and hurtful experience" of her life is nowhere as moving or human as the legalistic vignettes of furtive partial pleasures in the Starr Report. Her surprise at her husband's belated confession is indeed surprising, as if they had never quite met before. But I loved the sentence, "I hadn't decided whether to fight for my husband and my marriage, but I was resolved to fight for my President." Her citizenship is ardent.

John Updike's most recent novel is Seek My Face (Knopf).

ERICA JONG

In any campaign biography, the writer-or her ghost-solicits sympathy for the campaigner while pretending to be telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Living History is no different. Hillary Clinton's moment of maximum public sympathy arrived when she became the woman scorned, and she has no intention of letting us forget it. "This was the most devastating, shocking and hurtful experience of my life," she writes. "I was furious and getting more so by the second," she writes. "[H]is eyes filled with tears. He had betrayed the trust in our marriage and we both knew it might be an irreparable breach." With these soapy sentences, Hillary reminds us relentlessly of her instant of greatest P.R. glory, the moment she stopped being too brainy, too brilliant, too adamantine and became, in the tabloids, just another betrayed wife. How pathetic that she has to twang our heartstrings in this cheesy way. Hillary Clinton has changed the role of First Lady for all time. Like Eleanor Roosevelt, her mentor, she has proved that the First Lady can be more compelling and empathic than the President. The woman is stronger than Queen Elizabeth I of England, a greater strategist than Catherine the Great of Russia, braver than Boadicea or the Amazons of old. And yet the demands of fame in America are such that she has to grovel to the appalling level of reality TV to get our undivided attention. The fault, dear readers, is not in Hillary, but in our ghastly mass media, which only applauds brainy women when we are reduced to tears.

Erica Jong 's most recent novel is Sappho's Leap (W.W. Norton & Company).

LAURA MOORE

Dear Senator Clinton,

In my line of fiction, we call it the "black moment": the moment of crisis between the heroine and hero, when they discover that their love and trust are in jeopardy. You've done a great job, in Living History , of setting the scene for the key confession/confrontation, but if I may, I'd like to make a few suggestions to turn your story into a real "keeper" for your fans.

We need to feel your pain. The best romance novels wring every last drop of emotion as they expose the heartache of betrayal. Simply crying, yelling and saying you're furious won't make those pages turn and those readers' eyes moisten with tears of understanding and connection. You have to make us identify with you as a wife and lover. Let's see whether we can't open up this scene in the bedroom (terrific choice of setting, by the way) and let the reader share more fully in your thoughts, emotions and reactions when Bill drops the bomb.

My mind reeled from the blow of his softly stammered words. Stunned, I stared uncomprehending. A wave of dizziness assailed me and I thought I might be sick. Fighting against the sudden nausea, my fingers clutched at the bed sheets. A distant region of my brain registered the fact that here I was in our bed, the one Bill and I had shared countless nights, his warm, wonderfully familiar body pressed against mine. It had been a place of joy and refuge where we had lain and whispered dreams in the dark. Now it was horribly transformed into an icy field of lies. As though of their own accord, my hands released their hold to wrap themselves protectively about me as I shivered from the tears coursing down my cheeks, from the awful chill invading my heart. A scream of pain rose up inside me, and yet all I managed was a broken whisper. "Why, Bill, why? Why did you lie to me?"

He just stood there, his head lowered, unable to meet my eye, his shoulders slumped, looking like a sullen, naughty child. Perhaps I should thank Bill for that, for at that moment as I stared at him, rage hot and pure began coursing through my veins, spreading until it consumed every atom of my being. Bill must have sensed it, for he raised his head, his red-rimmed eyes finally meeting mine. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I was trying to protect you and Chelsea."

Now, obviously we can't have Bill explaining too much here. That would take away from your story-and besides, your book can be a great marketing teaser so that next year we'll all rush out and buy Bill's take on the bedroom scene-but there's one more thing I feel could really enrich the emotional impact of the scene: forgiveness. Even the merest hint of it allows your reader to hope that maybe there's some way to get past this darkest moment of your marriage and your love. As you know, this is a challenging bit of writing, because you'll have to convince us that you found something redeemable in Bill, something worth saving in your relationship. But let's give it a shot. Let's try and open the door of your heart a crack, because, after all, that's what you did manage to do.

"I believed in you, Bill. We all believed in you." My throat, raw from pain, closed tight and I was unable to continue. I shut my eyes in despair. I couldn't bear to look at him. Not now, maybe never.

I heard the sound of his feet moving closer, the heavy muffled thud of his knees hitting the carpet as he dropped down next to the bed. "Hill …. " His whisper was an agonized plea. "Please, please, I need you. Now more than ever." I felt his head drop, its weight resting heavy against my thigh. I opened my eyes, and involuntarily my hand reached out, a feather brushing against his graying hair.

Unchecked tears flowed down his cheeks as he gazed at me. "You've always been strong where I was weak. Be strong for me now, Hillary …. If not for me, then for Chelsea…."

Chelsea. The one truly wonderful thing our marriage had given us. Chelsea, our pride and joy. How this sordid affair would hurt her, a pain a thousand times greater than my own. "I don't know, Bill. I don't know if I can be that strong …. "

From outside the bedroom door, our dog, Buddy, gave a plaintive whine of distress.

I think we'll leave the suggestions at that. I'm sure you've got the gist. In closing, please let me add that I hope we'll have you and President Clinton back in the White House in 2008. The material W. is providing is far too scary to contemplate.

With warmest regards,

Laura Moore

Laura Moore's latest contemporary romance novel, Night Swimming (Ballantine), was published in May.

DAVID GATES

This doesn't feel to me like the time to be making sport of Hillary Clinton-not when the far right, having essentially engineered a coup d'état, is busily reinventing America as a theocratic cloud-cuckooland, with suicidal economic, social and environmental policies and a mean streak so wide it would take a B-52 hours to fly across it, and with the mouth-breathing millions cheering them on. I'm a lot less dainty than I used to be when I couldn't bring myself to vote for a sellout like her husband. So I'm not the guy to give her book the ridicule it might deserve in better days.

Living History isn't an X-ray self-portrait, but a belated-or a be-earlied-campaign autobiography, as well as a money-making product calculated to save her hours and hours of paid speechifying. Since one recurring theme is her tendency to put her supposedly innocent foot in her mouth-"tea and cookies," "Tammy Wynette," "vast right-wing conspiracy"-it's understandable, maybe even commendable, that the book has been thoroughly gaffe-proofed, apparently with the help of the speechwriters, editors and friends whom she thanks in her copious acknowledgments. If her goal was to include nothing that might come back to bite her in the ass, she's done just fine. For instance, she doesn't come right out and say that if Ken Starr hadn't distracted the White House and Congress with the Monica Lewinsky nonsense, the Sept. 11 attacks would never have happened. But she sure lets you know it, by constantly juxtaposing President Clinton's prescient worries about Osama bin Laden with the Republican right's jihad against Mr. Clinton. It sounds a little sketchy, but I'm not dead sure she's wrong.

If I'd been her editor, I would have cut the sentence where she says: "My own approval rating was nearing an all-time high and would eventually peak somewhere around 70 percent, proving that the American people are fundamentally fair and sympathetic." And I might have urged her to lose the namedroppy stuff, where Stevie Wonder comes and sings her a song he just wrote about forgiveness, and Walter Cronkite takes Bill and Hill for a sail, and the Dalai Lama puts in his two cents. At Davos, she runs into Elie Wiesel and the missus, and he asks her, "What is wrong with America? Why are they doing this?" She says, "I don't know, Elie." Icky as this is, though, she undoubtedly was on a first-name basis with Elie and Stevie and Walt and Dalai. And they undoubtedly were nice to her. So what's she supposed to do, not say so?

About Mr. Clinton's sexual betrayals-the plural is mine, not hers-she's as forthcoming as you could reasonably expect. Her only comment on Gennifer Flowers' allegation that she'd had a long affair with Mr. Clinton is: "He told me it wasn't true." (End of sentence. End of paragraph. No halfway intelligent reader could miss the implication.) Similarly, she says a couple of times that her husband will have to give us his own explanation for what the hell he was thinking when he got involved with Ms. Lewinsky. And while Bill and Hillary went into marriage counseling after the affair became public, Hillary never tells us specifically what the upshot was-if there was a specific upshot-or even if they started sleeping in the same room again. Well, it's none of our business, really, and left to herself-to the extent any politician has a self-she might have told us so. But without at least dipping a toe into this swamp, she wouldn't have had a promotable book or, perhaps, a political career beyond the Senate. Which, I have to say, I hope she's got her beady eye on. Since she had to deal with the mess somehow, she's done a reasonably deft job of giving away not much of anything we didn't know. Did anybody, for instance, think she wasn't angry with Mr. Clinton? Would anyone have respect for her if she hadn't been? As rawly confessional as Living History is designed to seem, it's an artifact crafted by a politician and her team, and she doesn't give up a damn thing she didn't have to. Would you?

David Gates is the author of two novels and, most recently, The Wonders of the Invisible World: Stories (Vintage Books).

VINCE PASSARO

It's a decent bet that almost every day that Monica Lewinsky went down on Bill Clinton, bombs dropped somewhere in Iraq-and while he hardly ever got to climax, the bombs frequently did. Now that Hillary has spilled "all," that's one of many facts you won't see discussed in the stupefying reporting about her book. Nor, it occurred to me today while looking over "August 1998," the curiously affectless chapter on her "personal agony" that was much reported on after it was leaked to the Associated Press last week, are we going to be enlightened as to why Hillary voted in favor of our spectacularly mendacious little war in the Fertile Crescent, either.

All we get are her tears over the casual infidelities of a man who, by most credible accounts, hasn't kept it in his pants since the diapers came off.

Here's a news item for the media, for Simon & Schuster, and for whatever bizarre, salacious readership leads the publisher to believe this book needed a first print run of a million copies: It wasn't the Clintons' genitals that were so troubling, it was their brains.

But, of course, there's a lot of political cover in pointing our attention groin-ward. Perhaps that's why her book reads so much like the establishing scenes in a bad porn video.

August 1998 is when Bill Clinton testified to a grand jury via video what he then had to announce to the nation: He'd had a little action in the Oval Office. Hillary kindly reminds us that (just by coincidence, mind), "within hours of his statement about his personal transgression, the United States would launch a missile strike against one of Osama bin Laden's training camps in Afghanistan, at a time when our intelligence indicated bin Laden and his top lieutenants would be there."

This little arrangement, in which dire national-security requirements dovetail so perfectly with the political needs of a desperately underclad emperor, feels kind of familiar, doesn't it? But then, that's not an aspect of Hillary's now-famous chapter-the "personal revelation" of her "agony" (as opposed to the agony of so many others)-that we care to discuss much.

Vince Passaro's first novel was Violence, Nudity, Adult Content (Simon & Schuster).

JENNIFER EGAN

Reading Hillary Clinton reminds me of how hard it is to pull off climactic, emotionally charged scenes without lapsing into cliché. Of course, there is frisson in the very idea of being secreted past the bedroom door to witness the moment when her husband, the President, admitted to her that he had fooled around with Monica L. after months of denying it. But the language Senator Clinton uses to render this encounter veers between legalese ("there had been an inappropriate intimacy") to familiar prose shorthand for heightened emotional states ("Gulping for air"; "I was furious and getting more so by the second"; "I was dumbfounded, heartbroken and outraged … ").

Clichés are a kind of literary Esperanto, recognizable to everyone in a vague, general way. Take out the names, and just about anyone could have written this stuff about anyone. That's why Ms. Clinton's answer to another much-pondered question back in 1998-how does Hillary feel about Bill now?-is so weirdly disappointing: "As a wife, I wanted to wring Bill's neck." The cliché blocks the gritty specificity of what went on between these two particular people; it actually obscures it. Which may be the point. Does she really want millions of readers to know how she felt when her husband confessed to yet another infidelity-one that might cost him his Presidency? I wouldn't.

As a writer, I try to look at clichés as a starting point. Early drafts of my work are lousy with them, in the same way that they creep into (cliché) so much spoken language without our even noticing. In the end, I try to isolate each one and ask myself: What exactly is this standing in for? The answers are usually interesting. I'd love to know Hillary Clinton's.

Jennifer Egan is the author of two novels and a collection of short stories.

LOUIS BEGLEY

We live in a decadent era that grows uglier by the minute. The spectacle of the media salivating in gluttonous anticipation of Senator Clinton's telling how she learnt from her husband the "truth" about Monica has been one more painful and shaming lesson in the abasement of the American public's taste as the media and publishers perceive it. Is it true that Hillary Clinton needed to let the entire world into her bedroom to justify an $8 million book contract? She had, after all, other useful and interesting information to impart, and she is an engaging and sometimes deeply moving figure. I readily imagine Kenneth Starr, Orrin Hatch, Tom DeLay and the other stalwarts of the great Presidential peep show in their viewing booths, shifting eagerly from foot to foot, ready to climax as Hillary and Bill undress. But are the rest of us just as depraved? If we are, I wonder whether Hillary Clinton shouldn't have settled for less money and written a book that did not delve into matters normally reserved for fiction and the transcripts of divorce proceedings. Peep shows are hardly ever worth the price of admission-a quarter? Fifty cents? I honestly don't know; the last one I attended-other than the Clinton impeachment proceedings, which came free on CNN-was in the early 50's, in smelly premises near Boston's Scollay Square. The price of the current one-$28, minus such discounts as Barnes & Noble, Amazon and other chains will grant-will seem like highway robbery to the prurient reader the media have postulated: Sen. Clinton has, in fact, written with commendable restraint and modesty.

Louis Begley's seventh novel, Shipwreck (Knopf), will be published in September.

FRANCINE PROSE

Even those of us who have given up the losing battle against the misplaced modifier and the dangling participle still believe that certain rules of English grammar are not optional, and that their importance is not merely linguistic, but philosophical and moral. One of these is the rule that says that to put dialogue between quotation marks signifies (unless you're writing fiction) that those words were spoken as written, and were transcribed directly from what we call real life. I've sometimes wondered if the increasingly common confusion about this simple relationship between truth and punctuation may be at the heart of some of the media's current problems with journalistic ethics and accuracy.

It's possible that, when Bill Clinton finally admitted to his affair with a White House intern, Hillary said, as she reports in Living History : "What do you mean? What are you saying? Why did you lie to me?" And it's possible that Bill replied: "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I was trying to protect you and Chelsea." It's likely that they said something like that, but unlikely that they said that, exactly. For one thing, it's very difficult to remember precisely what words we used in the past, unless we've uttered some fabulous bon mot. Which this is not. And it must be doubly hard to recreate the conversation that ensued when one's husband, the President of the United States, suggested that Ken Starr might soon tell the world how Monica Lewinsky was encouraged to get acquainted with a cigar.

But someone felt that we needed to hear (not merely hear about) this historic exchange, and that to dramatize it-to borrow from the rhythms and speech patterns of the afternoon soaps-would help us to feel like a fly on the wall. Or, as Senator Clinton's publishers must hope, one fly among millions on the wall. The result is that, reading the scene, you don't have to be a writer to think that you could have written it yourself. Which can only add to the sense of déjà vu and anti-climax that (despite the advance publicity and the tantalizing promises of heartfelt, steamy, tell-all revelation) readers may wind up feeling about Living History .

Which is as it should be. Because now that we're being routinely bombarded with so many big lies, it's hard to get excited about the little lies and the little exposures. It's just not as much fun as it used to be. Reading Living History feels like an exercise in a kind of bittersweet nostalgia that gets downright depressing as we try to imagine the equivalent we might get-but never will-from the current administration:

"I could hardly breathe. Gulping for air, I started crying and yelling at Donald and Dick and Condoleezza: 'What are you saying? Why did you lie to me? What do you mean, there were no weapons of mass destruction?'"

It was the kind of night where Larry King, one of the celebrity presenters, told the crowd that so many thank-you's had been uttered that he felt compelled to deliver one of his own: "To my urologist." When The Transom asked the CNN personality what he meant by that, he looked shocked. "For sitting so long," he said. "I had to explain that?"

Meanwhile, Babbo chef Mario Batali, who won the American Express Best Chef: New York City award, delivered one of the evening's better unscripted lines. As Mr. Batali and Jamie Oliver, star of the Food Network series The Naked Chef , were walking to the podium to present a cookbook award, they were preceded onstage by an unannounced addition to the show: the Naked Cowboy, that muscular lunkhead who strums a guitar in his briefs in Times Square. As the scantily clad sight gag scurried off the stage, Mr. Batali-who's known for his way with head cheese-deemed the cowboy "classic New York offal." Or was it "awful"?

The Beard awards were also where restaurateur Drew Nieporent realized his lifelong dream of becoming the Bono Vox of the restaurant set.

Mr. Nieporent and Windows on the World chef Michael Lomonaco opened the ceremony at 5:30 by performing Bachman-Turner Overdrive's "Takin' Care of Business" with the Overtime Blues Band. But the crowds, which tend to arrive late to avoid the slew of regional radio and TV-show awards that lard the beginning of the program, missed the performance. So the black-clad, newly svelte Mr. Nieporent played twice more with the band at the awards after-party at Peter and Penny Glazier's Michael Jordan's Steakhouse.

The Transom missed Mr. Nieporent's first two performances but caught the final one, which took place shortly before 1 a.m. "Are you ready to rock 'n' roll?" Mr. Nieporent said to the crowd, which responded enthusiastically despite having stuffed themselves with cuisine like Annisa chef Anita Lo's dry-cured Magret duck liver mousse with Chinese cinnamon and black vinegar reduction.

"All those people at Cipriani"-by this he meant the café that the father-and-son restaurant team run at Grand Central Terminal-"look out for the $25 cover charge," Mr. Nieporent said, right before going into a crouch and launching a blood-and-guts version of the Doors' "Roadhouse Blues."

The owner of Montrachet and Nobu then coaxed the band into playing "Takin' Care of Business" for the third time that night. "James Beard was takin' care of business," Mr. Nieporent told the crowd during a mid-song interlude that included a shout-out to chef Daniel Boulud, among others. Beppe chef Caesare Casella and Gourmet magazine editor in chief Ruth Reichl were also in attendance. Later, Mr. Nieporent said that he and the band had rehearsed only five times together before their performance.

Meanwhile, downtown, a group of chefs that included Alain Ducasse and Kitchen Confidential author Anthony Bourdain, food writer Gael Greene and food journalist Nina Griscom joined Le Bernardin owner Maguy Le Coze and executive chef Eric Ripert, who was nominated for the All-Clad Cookware Outstanding Chef Award, for their annual post-ceremony dinner at Balthazar. At the dinner, Ms. Le Coze wore the Beard Foundation medallion that Mr. Ducasse won last year for Best New Restaurant. "See, I got something," she said.

"She is le king ," Mr. Ducasse said, referring to Ms. Le Coze .

-Frank DiGiacomo

Launch of the Year

On the evening of Monday, May 6, under a plastic canopy that covered the garden at the back of his 57th Street townhouse, bantam-like publisher Harold Evans welcomed some 70 guests to "the first birthday party of The Week ," a somewhat humorous newspaper digest of current events that was imported from his native Britain by the publishers of Maxim . Standing on a pedestal before a crowd that included Bianca Jagger, Salman Rushdie, Ralph Fiennes and Candace Bushnell, Mr. Evans-who consults for the publication-extolled its many virtues, which mainly had to do with his assertion that there was always something in The Week that he didn't previously know.

Then the editor of The Week , William Falk, took his turn on the small pedestal for a mercifully brief talk that nonetheless had Mr. Fiennes chit-chatting with his neighbor the whole way through. Finally the mistress of the house, Tina Brown, who was dressed in a light-blue getup, took her turn on the box.

"This newspaper was named 'Launch of the Year,'" she said excitedly. "By a publication that probably trashed Talk magazine, no doubt!" Suddenly Ms. Brown disappeared from sight. She had lost her balance and quite literally fallen off her pedestal. A chorus of choked laughter rose up and died quickly. For a moment there was silence, as necks craned and glances were exchanged. Mr. Fiennes stopped talking. Then the sound of Ms. Brown's voice could be heard again, though she still could not be seen. She had decided to resume her speech while keeping her feet planted on terra firma.

-Elisabeth Franck

Harlot's Ghost

They didn't know it, but both Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton were invited to a benefit for Back House Productions, the Drama Book Shop Inc.'s tiny theater company, the night of May 6. Unfortunately, a helluva media opportunity was lost when Mr. Clinton did not attend.

Ms. Lewinsky was front and center, though in a billowy low-cut number. She came with actor Alan Cumming.

After a little browsing, Ms. Lewinsky bought Mr. Cumming a book called The Dramatic Imagination by Robert Edmund Jones. "I'm ashamed to say I've never heard of Robert Edmund Jones," Ms. Lewinsky said. "I guess I'm not knowledged enough in theater. I bought it for Alan Cumming, who I'm with tonight, because I think he"-she pointed to the cover illustration-"looks just like Alan Cumming."

Mr. Cumming, in turn, bought Ms. Lewinsky a book of stickers.

Two of the party's organizers, however, said separately that Ms. Lewinsky had come less because of Mr. Cumming than because she was attracted by another of the night's guests: Norman Mailer's eldest son Michael. Mr. Mailer fils is no stranger to scandal-plagued women: He was once affianced to Donald Trump's ex-wife, Marla Maples.

Michael Mailer and Monica Lewinsky never crossed paths at the event, and Ms. Lewinsky would not cop to any crush. She said only that she was "friends" with several of Norman Mailer's nine children-one of whom helped organize the event-and that she was a fan of Mr. Mailer's writing.

" The Executioner's Song is my favorite," she said.

This came as a bit of a surprise to the elder Mr. Mailer, who was sitting on a stool flanked by two canes. He said he thought Monica Lewinsky's favorite book of his would have been The Deer Park , in which a movie director cooperates with a fictional version of the House Un-American Activities Committee. He would not say whether this was because Ms. Lewinsky herself cooperated with a Congressional committee to turn in Mr. Clinton. When asked to elaborate, he said only, "You're not going to get anywhere with this." Then he asked to be introduced to Ms. Lewinsky.

After an unexpectedly long and intense conversation with Mr. Mailer, Ms. Lewinsky stole away, and Mr. Mailer's son Michael finally arrived. "Monica's here," one of the organizers told him. Michael Mailer smiled. "She came for you , you know," the organizer went on.

"Great," he said diffidently. "That's just great."

-Ian Blecher

Trafficking in London

If you think it was tough driving into the city last weekend, what with all the parades and charity events, you haven't been to London lately.

Neither has New York City's transportation commissioner, Iris Weinshall, who happens to be married to our senior Senator, Chuck Schumer. So she's planning a trip to London the first week of June to check out a new system-geared to be up and running early next year-that automatically charges Londoners five pounds for driving into the central part of the city during certain times of the day.

Satellite technology already used in the trucking industry would be adapted to track cars, which would have individual ID's, like EasyPasses, hooked up to the satellite tracking system.

Satellites track each vehicle's movements on the busiest roads and at the busiest times of day, and drivers pay using pre-paid cards or by sending a check in the mail. It's called "congestion pricing."

"If a city like London can do innovative and creative things regarding transportation," said Ms. Weinshall, "it's incumbent on us to sort of check it out and see what works and what doesn't work, and what's controversial and what's not controversial."

If automatic tolls for driving into midtown or lower Manhattan during peak hours seem more likely to be controversial than not, consider the (relative) popularity of the city's ban on single-occupancy vehicles over East River crossings right after the terrorist attacks. Such measures are common in plenty of other cities-but the thinking at City Hall has always been that New Yorkers were too grumpy a lot to put up with it.

"I never thought that we could implement an S.O.V. ban," said Ms. Weinshall. "So anything is possible."

-Tom McGeveran

This week, Metro Channel's Full Frontal Fashion is providing 24-hour coverage of the shows, while an hour of their highlights will be shown nightly on WE, the Women's Entertainment Network. The Style Network will provide two hours of coverage daily, to be distilled into a prime-time clip of highlights on E! This instant and comprehensive coverage will enable housewives nationwide to realize to what extent their wardrobes are grotesquely dated…albeit half a year ahead. It will also give H&M and other fashion-follower factories plenty of time to churn out their "homages" to Marc, Calvin, Michael et al. Fashion obsolescence now travels at the speed of light, and it's quite possible for the knockers-off to beat the originators of a look into the stores. Meanwhile, the items most in demand by logomaniacal initiates of the Concorde-set cargo cult will be pre-ordered and sold out long before shipments reach the stores.

In other words, the shows are just there for show.

Blanket coverage means that the fashionably homebound need not miss a single runway look. Watching the shows on the tube while lying in bed will save me hours of traveling and waiting, as well as protect me from nervous exhaustion, dehydration and the possible injury or likely humiliation I'd experience in person. For fashion shows are like pro football: They're really a lot better on TV. If there's anything worse than joining the mead- and grog-swilling, face-painting proles of the N.F.L. in person, it's a full schedule of fashion shows teeming with the rudest, shallowest, most grating and upwardly thrusting egomaniacs extant. At least at Giants Stadium, you know where you're going to sit–and if you've paid enough, you'll be seated well in front of the brawling, bonfire-starting barbarians. (And if the humans aren't scary enough during Fashion Week, last season a crazed sheep ran amok on the runway, cowing the assembled fashion press. Yikes!)

The pre-seating crush of diehard fashionables can be every bit as brutal as a soccer riot. I remember the shocking spectacle of one of our most venerable and kooky fashion editors and one of our most glamorous, eligible-bachelorette fashion editors savagely elbowing a swath through the passively waiting "white trash" outside a show. It was brutal–especially when the younger fashion editor pushed an elderly, diminutive Japanese woman journalist to the ground. A fist fight ensued. The horror! But position is, in runway-show context, everything.

The attendees aren't there to see but to be seen; the front row is the ticket to major cable-TV and paparazzi visibility, offering an ego boost on a global scale. It's also the real fashion show. The major editors wear outfits that required their subordinates weeks of meetings to assemble, getting that unique dress, those crucial boots, that cult bag–and getting them exclusively. Runway-side seats are so important to second-tier "fashists" that they'll get there by any means necessary, because in their world, life is a perilous quest to move down to the front row, then a death struggle to stay there. The tents are the totem poles of this strange tribe, and front row is top man.

Of course, the front row isn't all editors and major buyers, especially at second- and third-tier shows. They'll hold seats for Anna, Glenda and Patrick and pray they show up. Good luck. Chances are many prime seats will be occupied by rabid interns and junior-assistant handbag editors who know the boss isn't showing and help themselves to major visibility and the freebie bag. The "muses"–the stars who depend on designers for free dresses for award shows–will be there applauding vigorously, and one may observe chairs marked, say, "Guest of Gwyneth Paltrow" or "Guest of Stephen Baldwin." Entourages must be served as well. But some stars don't seem to be there out of devotion to the designer. When you see Anthony Kiedis, Mickey Rourke, Steven Tyler or Jon Bon Jovi runway-side, you suspect it's not about the clothes. Everyone knows that if you rush backstage fast enough, the girls will be naked.

But you never know who's going to turn up. A few years ago, I arrived at Versace too late to take my seat. As the show started, I was poked in the back and wheeled around to hear a gentle lisp: "Thcuthe me." I looked down, and there was Mike Tyson. He passed without delay. I also remember a recent Anna Sui show, where strobes began flashing and there was a palpable buzz of the sort that accompanies the arrival of a major star. It was Ronald McDonald. You know, life can be a cabaret, chums, and nowhere more so than in the tents at Bryant Park during Fashion Week.

It is truly amazing to see such a vast, complex yet ephemeral undertaking. It's like a gay D-Day: dozens and dozens of designers, hundreds of models, hairdressers, makeup artists, dressers and stylists mounting extraordinarily detailed events all over town. And it all goes off like clockwork–well, maybe like sundial work. But it's a remarkable outburst of creative effort that has enormous global impact. What walks down the runways will soon be walking down our streets, changing the looks and attitudes of the civilian populace. Well, some of it will reach the streets, anyway, after the hemline has been lowered a foot and you put a bra underneath that gauze. But for months we'll be hearing about the aesthetic and social impact of the schmattas.

This week we'll be hearing plenty of human-interest stories, like the comeback of SuperLinda, and discovering fashion's newest enfants horribles and future gigamodels among the haute zombies. We'll see the willful wannabes. If they aren't showing, they'll be partying: Shoshanna Lonstein, designer for the bra-challenged, bag lady Monica Lewinsky, Denise Rich's loopy designing daughter and the precocious teen-designer daughter of Jerry Della Femina (not the same precocious daughter who wrote Jodi's Shortcuts 2000: The Hamptons and sent all those psychos in unarmed personnel carriers past my house).

In addition to showing us what's new, Fashion Week always promises us new geniuses! It was just two years ago that the designers who go by the name Imitation of Christ made their auspicious debut, sending out reconstructed thrift-store fashions on their muse, Chloë Sevigny. And this year we'll have our third eyes peeled for the latest breakthrough kids, designers like Imitation of Imitation of Christ, who might just change everything. Please! I'll be watching closely. And if I doze off, I'll just rewind.