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Alternate Titles for NYT Mag’s ‘Here Is What Happens When You Cast Lindsay Lohan in Your Movie’

Drew Grant — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 16:27:01 -0400

Lindsay Lohan and James Deen in The Canyons. (Facebook)

If there ever was a week for longreads, this would be it. After Elizabeth Wurtzel's 5,500-word essay published in New York about crazy landlords/Not Compromising on Life, The New York Times Magazine proved that it hadn't cornered the market on histrionics. Thus, an 11-page exposé about Lindsay Lohan and The Canyons, the Kickstarter-funded film written by Bret Easton Ellis and directed by Paul Schrader, co-starring porn heartthrob James Deen.

As you can imagine, the piece chronicles what a nice time everyone had on the short shoot—which took place over three weeks last July--with a lot of fond, funny anecdotes. Like the time Ms. Lohan took too many sleeping pills, locked herself in a closet, and refused to come out until Paul Schrader took off all his clothes? That one is great. The pitch-perfect tone was immediately reflected in its blog-snark title, "Here Is What Happens When You Cast Lindsay Lohan in Your Movie."

A fine choice, but a little unsubtle. We offer these 10 other titles that would have equally reflected the appeal of such a long, labor-intensive piece of journalism.

1. "Here Is What Happens When You Take All Your Meetings at Chateau Marmont"

2. "'Julia Roberts Is Late!': The Lindsay Lohan Story"

3. "Paul Schrader Takes It All Off"

4. "How Not to Make a Film"

5. "That Time Lindsay Lohan Called Everyone Else Unprofessional"

6. "I’ve got one assistant passed out at my house and the other one in the Palisades saying he wants to hang himself. Life’s great.”

7. "Do you know that iPhone app that makes explosions?”

8. "Grownups Crying"

9. "When Porn Is the Least Interesting Part of Your Film"

10. "American Psycho 3"

Andrew Goldman Returns to The New York Times Magazine

Kara Bloomgarden-Smoke — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 18:57:27 -0400

Andrew Goldman made his triumphant return to the pages of The New York Times Magazine on Sunday. Mr. Goldman, you may recall, was suspended from the magazine after he got into a Twitter kerfuffle with novelist Jennifer Weiner over a Q&A in the magazine’s “Talk” column that raised Ms. Weiner’s ire—and provoked Mr. Goldman’s own sharp tongue. The suspension lasted a little more than a month.

For his first “Talk” column since returning, Mr. Goldman played it safe with Lemony Snicket creator Daniel Handler. But that wasn’t the only piece Mr. Goldman had in Sunday’s Magazine. He also wrote a six-page story about Oliver Stone, who is busy promoting Untold History, his new mini-series. In the piece, Mr. Goldman spends a lot of ink describing the director-cum-liberal historian’s propensity for putting his loafers in his mouth.And to illustrate this tendency, Mr. Goldman seemingly randomly inserts himself into the story.

“The day we met, I mentioned that my family would be leaving Brooklyn for Connecticut, where we don’t know a soul. ‘But, really, what’s the worst thing that could happen?’ I said, offering the kind of throwaway phrase used to move from one topic to the next,” Mr. Goldman wrote. But Mr. Stone didn’t seem to understand that some questions are rhetorical.

“Well, Stone postulated, quite earnestly, you could end up going through an acrimonious divorce and then be forced to wage an expensive battle over custody of your children.”

So, Mr. Goldman is moving to Connecticut, huh? It’s a long way from Brooklyn. While we are not quite sure how this exactly shows Mr. Stone’s social awkwardness, the director, to his credit, felt bad enough to (at least) pretend to like Connecticut when Mr. Goldman returned to the jab later in the piece. Although we are not totally clear on why this jab was worth returning to.

“A few weeks later, he looked genuinely pained when I needled him about the Connecticut divorce comment he made,” Mr. Goldman recounted, pages later. “When he met my wife, he took her hands in his and told her, apologetically, ‘I love Connecticut.’”

Sure he does. And JFK was killed by a lone gunman.

The New York Times Magazine’s Hugo Lindgren Tells Reddit What Girls Character He Is

Drew Grant — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 16:40:42 -0400

This guy is adorkable! (NYTMag.com)

Hugo Lindgren, ethical feminist, entered Reddit's Ask Me Anything forum an hour ago to appeal to Reddit readers who have been on the fence about subscribing to The New York Times Magazine.

Of course, the questions soon turn to the important topics of the day: What Girls character did Mr. Lindgren most identify with?

23967230985723986: Are you a Hannah, Jessa, Marnie, or Shoshanna?
Also, this is more of a Times question, but do you have any good stories about David Brooks, Maureen Dowd, Douthat, Friedman, et al. that you'd be willing to dish on? David Carr?

Hugolindgren: I am consulting with my Girls experts, and they say: "Zero percent Shoshanna, zero percent Jessa. 60 percent Hanna because she is the archetypal writer & self reflective, but the rest Marnie because you don't let your self reflection paralyze you." I have no idea what any of that means because I am the designated non-Girls watcher on staff. Not for any good reason, except, you know, the Rangers.

Mr. Lindgren did not consult with his New York Times experts in order to answer the second half of that query. But yeah, Mr. Lindgren is is totes a Hannah!

Arianna Huffington Hung Up on New York Times Writer Andrew Goldman

Kat Stoeffel — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 11:30:28 -0400

New York Times Magazine writer Andrew Goldman kicked off his "Talk" with AOL CEO Tim Armstrong by revealing that Arianna Huffington, editor in chief of the AOL-owned Huffington Post, was not very pleased with her own turn in the Q&A column.

AG: After AOL purchased The Huffington Post last year, I interviewed Arianna Huffington. She hung up on me and complained to my editors. So I was pleasantly surprised that you agreed to this interview.

TA: I read the interview when it came out, and it looked like it was rough. We don’t hold grudges around here.

Back in April, Mr. Goldman and Ms. Huffington got into it over the alleged red shift that had struck the news site, once known as the liberal's Drudge Report, since its merger with AOL.

AG: You’ve been saying recently that The Huffington Post is not a lefty publication?
AH: Actually I’ve been saying that for three years. The tag line that we’ve used a lot is “Beyond left and right.”

Three years ago was 2008. I looked at The Huffington Post a great deal during the election. It felt like the Internet version of Keith Olbermann’s show, and if that’s not lefty. . . .
Why don’t you be more specific? What were the messages that you considered lefty?

It’s as if you’re trying to tell me that Smurfs aren’t blue.
I’m just telling you that it is very clear that we have progressive views, but to call everything we’re doing lefty — it misses the whole point that American policy needs to be redefined beyond left and right. It’s a completely obsolete view of politics.

Still, I’m amazed you’re trying to tell me that The Huffington Post wasn’t started as a lefty blog?
I’m not trying to tell you anything. I’m telling you things. I’m not trying, O.K.?

Despite this attack on his so-called work wife, Mr. Armstrong is able to carry on a lighthearted but substantive conversation about the company. He denies that AOL's revenue is entirely made up of little old ladies who don't know they're still subscribed to it, promises he is not challenging Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and says, actually, under-30s have very positive brand associations with AOL because of our wasted youths on AOL Instant Messenger (AIM).

It all appears to be very civilized but, considering the recent revelation about Ms. Huffington's interview, we would be naive to think we know what goes down between Mr. Goldman and his subjects. Who knows what curse words, personal insults and threats of physical violence wound up on the cutting room floor after this interview was, as they say, condensed and edited?

New York Times Magazine Hires Thought Catalog Writer

Kat Stoeffel — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 16:46:46 -0400

More than a year after Hugo Lindgren took over as editor in chief, The New York Times Magazine is still evolving. Last month it debuted a new column: “They’re Famous! (On the Internet),” by Gaby Dunn, a 23-year-old stand up comedian who has written for Thought Catalog and GOOD.

Unlike the short-lived “Last Month on the Internet” column, a sort of collage of found Internet gems, “They’re Famous!” takes Internet personae for its subject matter but otherwise sticks to the conventions of traditional journalism.

As far as Internet correspondents go, Ms. Dunn is practically embedded.

In October, an American Express business blog published an article called “How Gaby Dunn Self-Promoted Her Way to Internet Fame.”

Short answer? By writing a quality blog and having a funny Twitter.

Post-journalism school, flitting between the media gulags and stints on her brother’s couch, Ms. Dunn started a Tumblr called 100 Interviews. It had the self-imposed rules that she must interview 100 different kinds of people in person over the course of one year. Her subjects included a child prodigy, a present or former Guinness Book of World Records record holder, someone who was left at the alter and Stephen Colbert. Number 100, appropriately, was an Internet celebrity.

Some people noticed the blog, including The Village Voice, which named it the Tumblr of 2010, and Times Magazine culture editor Adam Sternbergh.

He wrote to say he was a reader, and Ms. Dunn remembered thinking, “What? Why? You’re a real person, though. You’re a real guy. What are you doing? You have much better things to do.”

Evidently not.

“And he asked if I wanted to get a drink, and we talked, and he said, ‘I want you to write stuff for us’ and I was like, ‘O.K., wow, yes.’”

“They're Famous!” will be edited by front-of-book editor Jon Kelly, she said.

In the first installment, Ms. Dunn profiled Mike O’Brien, host of a web talk show called “7 Minutes in Heaven.” His interviews with celebrities like Patricia Clarkson, Andy Samberg, Hoda Kotb and Elijah Wood take place in a closet and end with a kiss.

Ms. Dunn said that the biggest challenge so far is explaining the magnitude of her subject’s fame to people for whom YouTube hits do not unequivocally confer household name status.

“It’s an alternate universe,” Ms. Dunn said of the Internet. “There are people that are legitimately super famous.”

Like two of her favorite YouTubers: Charlie McDonell, a red-headed Brit who incites “Bieber-level” insanity, and Kingsley Russell, a skinny black college student who critiques pop culture while wearing a fur-lined hunter’s cap.

“His word is gold online,” Ms. Dunn said, “I don’t understand why he doesn’t have a TV show.”

It’s probably only a matter of time.

The 10 Best Responses to New York Times Magazine’s Yoga Article

Drew Grant — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 16:59:19 -0400

This is what anger looks like on people who do yoga

We're calling it now: 2012's best Non-Controversy (Nontroversy?) of the Year is going to New York Times Magazine's excerpt of "How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body." The item in question ran over the weekend; part of a book by yogi William J. Broad, who claimed that people can get seriously hurt or injured or dead from practicing yoga. Notice the word "can" in the title. Yoga can wreck your body. Not "Yoga Will Wreck Your Body." It's a subtle distinction that most of the article's readers seemed to have missed.

Instead of saying "Namaste" and moving on with their lives, yoga disciples are coming out of the woodwork to decry Mr. Broad as a traitor and fear-monger. Some of the yogis used in the article have been interviewed by other publications to say Mr. Broad misquoted them. Other places are jumping on the brand new thought-train that holding positions for long periods of time can do your body damage in the long run.

In the end, this whole debate is a non-starter because, as Sarah Miller from The Awl points out, "Yes, you can get injured doing yoga; you can also get injured walking across the street."

We found the 10 best articles that capture the absurdity of this Times health scandal du jour. Enjoy, and remember: take deep breaths.

1. Six Reasons To Ignore The 'New York Times' Yoga Article - The Awl (Clearly the top winner, as it's given the highly-cited award on Google, and is mentioned almost as the article itself.)

2. Yoga Need Not Wreck Your Body - Salon

3. Response from Iyengar yoga teacher Roger Cole, misquoted in The New York Times piece -Facebook

4. Yogi Glenn Black Responds to New York Times Article on Yoga - The Huffington Post (Black was also quoted extensively in the Times Magazine article)

5. Yoga Won't Wreck Your Body But May Make You More Hindu- The Huffington Post, again (HuffPo had approximately five "responses" in total to the item. Two of them were about how not to get hurt in yoga class, while two others claimed that yoga cannot "wreck" one's body.)

6. Should You Give Up Yoga? Experts Respond to the New York Times' "Yoga-Can-Wreck-You" Controversy - AlterNet (The answer is, of course, no. To be fair, Mr. Broad only cited a few extreme cases in which someone would have to stop practicing yoga entirely for medical reasons.)

7. The Dangers of Yoga - Men's Fitness (Finally, someone sticking up for the little guy by agreeing with The New York Times!)

8. The New York Times Magazine Doesn’t Like Yoga - Philadelphia Magazine

9. Any article with a question mark at the end, to show you that the author of the piece is not taking sides but wants to get in on the coverage: Is Yoga Bad for You? A Debate‎ - The Atlantic; Is yoga ruining your body?‎ - Globe and Mail; Strokes, retina damage and trapped nerves: Is yoga doing us more harm than good? - Daily Mail

10. NBC Nightly News' segment on yoga dangers, including a doctor that says "I see a ton of yoga injuries." Also, "There are no definitive numbers, but a Columbia University survey reveals injuries..." Fear-mongering is so hot right now.

New York Times Magazine Orders Illustration of 1,027 Tiny Palestinian Prisoners

Kat Stoeffel — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 15:42:29 -0400

New York Times Magazine editor in chief Hugo Lindgren made waves with this week’s cover story, an 8,000-word foreign policy report about Gilad Shalit, the young Israeli soldier held captive in Palestine, for whom Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu traded 1,027 Palestinian prisoners.

But even more memorable was the cover.

“Hugo Lindgren comes in my office and says he wants 1,028 little illustrated people on our cover,” design director Arem Duplessis tweeted. “Here’s the end result.”

The 1,027 tiny Palestinians and sole tiny Israeli—hand drawn by Tim Enthoven—made quite an impression, earning the Society of Publication Designer’s biweekly best cover award.

“This labor-intensive approach not only looks cool, it conveys an important point,” Mr. Lindgren wrote on the Times Magazine blog, “That each prisoner is an individual with his or her own identity.” Indeed, many of the Palestinians returned in prisoner swaps end up as high ranking Hamas members who kill more Israelis, author Ronen Bergman pointed out.

The memorable cover isn’t the only sign of evolution at the Sunday crossword vehicle. Mr. Lindgren has added two new recurring pages. The first, “Who Made That?” is a weekly column of material histories (last week it treated spray paint; this week, the rubber duck), by Dana Rubinstein and Times designer Hillary Greenbaum.

More innovative is “The One Page Magazine,” a new front-of-book assemblage of paragraph-long “features” apparently intended to skewer typical magazine forms. Eric Spitznagel’s “What the Kids Are Doing These Days” gives trumped-up youth trends (beards, “vandwelling”) the three-sentence treatments they merit; Dave Itzkoff distills “The Big Profile” into a celebrity sound byte, and, in “That Should Be a Word,” Lizzie Skurnick offers tech-inflected neologisms, like “clogin: One who blocks an entrance or exit while checking a smartphone.” (Rest in peace, “On Language.”)

With its mini info-graphics, Twitter-length reviews and blogger bylines, “The One Page Magazine” is not unlike peering into one’s recently refreshed Google reader, and quite a bit like Edith Zimmerman’s experimental Times Magazine column, “This Month on the Internet.” That got put on indefinite hiatus, but Ms. Zimmerman still contributes to the magazine, this week in the “Riff” space (that’s the one printed on blue), with an astute piece about the Internet, and how it confronts its users with their waning cultural relevancy at younger and younger ages. (Ms. Zimmerman is 28.)

That piece too might have yielded a splashy cover, according to the 6th Floor blog.

“Now if we thought like the legendary magazine designer George Lois did, we might have asked Edith to pose in a very dramatic and uncomfortable way,” Mr. Lindgren wrote, referring to the famous Esquire cover “The New American Woman: Done at 21,” in which a nude pin-up is folded into a trash can.

Alas, readers had to settle for a thousand tiny Middle Eastern soldiers and, as a consolation prize, one of the sillier corrections in recent Times history.

“The Riff column on Page 54 this weekend, about age and cultural relevance, misstates the author’s age in 1998, when a toy with a McDonald’s meal made sounds her grandmother could not hear. It was 15, not 8 or 9.”

Write it off as premature memory loss, induced by the Internet.

Meet the Mollys! Social Network Sweeties Tumbl Upwards

Daniel D'Addario — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 16:13:26 -0400

Molly McAleer

What makes a Molly?

Three well-known Internet writers--Molly Young, Molly Lambert, and Molly McAleer--share more than a name. The three have long attracted attention for their similar methods of self-promotion on the blogging platforms Tumblr and Twitter.

Ms. Young, an n+1 contributor, had a (now-deleted) Tumblr showcasing slightly goofy glamour shots and offering chapbooks for sale. Ms. Lambert used the photo-heavy format of the website This Recording as a jumping-off point for a sort of post-writing writing career as curator of several Tumblrs, including one comprised entirely of GIF files. Molly McAleer was the former Gawker Media videographer whose personal blog featured videotaped confessions and thoughts about Yogurtland and other elements of life in Los Angeles.They were three exemplars of the value of a well-constructed personal brand, and each is now more than merely Internet-famous. Ms. Young contributes regularly to New York after leaving a job at the Daily; Ms. Lambert works for Grantland, where she now sticks images of celebrities between her paragraphs on ESPN’s dime; Ms. McAleer launched a women’s-interest site, HelloGiggles, with the actress Zooey Deschanel, and is a writer for the new CBS sitcom 2 Broke Girls.Despite their different endpoints, the three writers are frequently lumped together, having risen to e-inescapability around the same time and using the same means. A typical Molly blog post is aggressively quirky and a bit manic in its desire to make you laugh; it represents the triumph of the voice, a voice at once coquettish, self-promotional and knowing.

While that name brings to mind certain female protagonists of canonical works (the archetypal confessional blogger Molly Bloom, the cutie-pie Molly Ringwald), you don’t have to be a Molly to write like one. Remember those photos of former Gawker writer Emily Gould sprawled upside down in bed, tattoos on glorious display? Sure you do! It was for her Times Magazine cover story, “Exposed” (the jumping-off point for her memoir, And the Heart Says Whatever), in which she detailed her experiences in blogging and in love. The piece appears to have set the tone for a generation of female writers, and the self-presentation even influenced striver-y men.

I Gchatted a friend who works in finance to tell her I’d been assigned to write a piece on “the Mollys.” She replied “write it in the p.o.v. of edith z.” The Hairpin blogger Edith Zimmerman may be the Molliest of Mollys. She wrote bizarre and fantastical fake letters from women’s magazines for The Awl and ghost stories on her personal blog. She brought that brand of flustered, wacky pixieishness first to The Hairpin, the women’s interest site she edits, then to a GQ cover profile of Chris Evans. The piece, which was controversial even among the magazine’s editors, was more revelatory of Ms. Zimmerman’s half-self-deprecating exultation of her L.A. exploits than of anything Captain America had to say, in the same way that Molly Young’s New York articles sneak in turns of phrase like “weenie-tuggers” and “girl crush," and Molly Lambert smuggles fan-fic footnotes about how Kate Moss is like “the cool best friend who knows all the good shows and parties to go to and brings you” onto Grantland. Another freelance writer, Marisa Meltzer, posted a photo of herself doing the “hand-heart” gesture on her Tumblr after publishing a piece on the phenomenon in the New York Times Styles section; she also posted a picture of her bedroom, suggesting that she considered submitting it to a blog of teenage bedrooms though she is “aged way the fuck out” now. Mollyish writing hinges on a cute mashup of ingratiating cuteness (hand-heart! Weenie-tuggers!) and hard ambition (the Times! New York!), starring a narrator in on the joke.

Such is the appeal of Mollyism—especially to straight, male dude-itors—that the literary eye-lash batting generally manages to survive the delicate transition from personal blog to print. (Whether Ms. McAleer’s voice will make the trickier leap to TV remains to be seen, but examples like that of Ms. Zimmerman and Ms. Meltzer indicates that the blog voice can thrive in print.)

According to Wired editor Bill Wasik, the Mollys are doing what writers have always done. “It's pretty common and always been common that you start with voicier writing in less established organs,” said “and you move to better- established organs that pay better and you bring the writing, but you show that you can report out and structure and bulletproof a magazine feature.”

But voicey is one thing. The Mollys have taken it to a whole other level. The intimacies of Tumblr have vastly amplified the confessional mode. As Maud Newton noted in a recent essay in the Times Magazine (which briefly employed Ms. Zimmerman as a web columnist), there’s a frantically conversational tone on social media: “‘Oh, hi,’ people say at the start of sentences on blogs, Twitter and Tumblr these days, both acknowledging and jokily feigning surprise at the presence of the readers who have turned up there.” Ms. Newton phrased this as a universal concern--perhaps we're all a little bit Molly.

Tumblr happens to be a nearly perfect platform for showcasing a writer’s wry take or sharp attitude while requiring minimal effort. “Sometimes, you see a blogger where they’ve only written two sentences, but they’re really witty,” said Jezebel editor Jessica Coen. “Tumblr’s really easy to read and you can go through 100 entries in ten minutes.”

The coquettish particularities of Tumblr as a platform—which encourages a sort of literary fan dance, in which a writer’s identity remains largely hidden even as she’s laying bare her interior monologue—invite a certain amount of projection from readers. Choire Sicha, proprietor of The Awl and a keen observer of the Molly phenomenon, noted over Gchat that “my problem is that digital presence is weirdly so obscuring? it's like, you look at someone's tumblr and you're like, what the fuck is your name? what's your email? where DO YOU WORK, HOW OLD ARE YOU?”

Near instant reader feedback also encourages a certain style of writing. “I remember the days of Tumblarity,” said Maura Johnston, music editor of the Village Voice, recalling an early feature of the platform that ranked users based on their readers’ devotion. “If I write something, I do hit the reload button to see if people have responded to it… it’s the blogger’s dilemma: you can work really hard on something that’s thought out and reasoned or you can post about ‘I fell in love today and this is why’—and that greeting card-ready stuff will triumph.”

“One of the things that’s been lost in this new, fast publishing age,” Ms. Johnston added, “is this grooming period for a lot of young writers thrown into the deep end after school. You see things like Thought Catalog”—the website full of glum young boys and girls curating confessions about themselves in a super-breezy tone—“and you don’t have people thinking about things. There are a lot of lazy constructions or lazy ideas.”

Which is not to say that there’s not considerable drive behind the cozy bed-head tics—just that the ambition is tempered by an appealingly easygoing quality. “Mollys just want to have fun,” Mr. Sicha pointed out. “That’s why they’re so endearing, even when they’re glum or emo or sincere… But they’re full of kicks.”

Mr. Wasik said that the kicks are hardly going to damage the writers’ credibility: “We're entering an era where it's not as if, if you want to write an essay for The New Yorker, they’re going to be freaked out by the fact that you have this Tumblr devoted to being funny or being silly. People get that writers have different sides to their personality.”

That presumes people can tell the Mollys apart. Ms. McAleer, the 2 Broke Girls writer, said: “It happens to me all the time—people say, ‘I read your stuff on Grantland every day.’” Molly is a memorable name, so people will assume that it’s all the same person.” She and Ms. Lambert, both of whom live in Los Angeles, are friends.

“We’ve all gotten emails for the other Mollys,” said Ms. Lambert. “It’ll go back and forth a few times before you realize it’s meant for someone else.”

Ms. Young, who lives in New York, stands apart, and declined an interview request. She told The Observer via email: “I just don't think that anyone gives a shit about me, even if I share a name with these cool people.” Super Mollyish thing to say.

And there’s always an up-and-comer. “No molly list now is complete with[out] molly oswaks,” Mr. Sicha told us via Gchat, of a writer whose work (“Mad Men’s Betty Draper Is A Real Bummer,” “The Melodrama of Miley Cyrus”) has been featured on Thought Catalog and in The Believer. “THERE’S A NEW MOLLY,” he told us. “MOVE OVER MOLLIES.”

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

Wyclef Jean's Ascent–From Rapper to Serious Political Figure to Rapper

Daniel D'Addario — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 17:11:16 -0400

(L-R) Hugh Jackman's wife, Hugh Jackman, and Wyclef Jean, rapping on Governors Island (PMc)

The Times Magazine this weekend, in addition to an interview revealing Paz de la Huerta's bath troubles, features a profile of Wyclef Jean--the would-be savior of Haiti who may be better known for his years with the band the Fugees. The article's author seems to suffer some cognitive dissonance as he tries to reconcile Mr. Jean's music career and his current political profile: "surrounded by his boys, looking very much like a rapper en route to a bottle-service-only club" is actually a way Mr. Jean's travels through Haiti are really described.

While we are inclined to avoid describing a potential world leader as "surrounded by his boys," we do know that he loves bottle service. Or at least bottles. At a Veuve Cliquot-sponsored polo event, our Michael H. Miller reported that Mr. Jean broke out in a freestyle rap: “Veuve Cliquot/Wyclef Jean, I play a little polo/June 5th 2011/my father was a reverend/Wyclef, I take the course/I come from Haiti and I know how to ride a horse.”

Very presidential!

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

Hugo Lindgren Loves Bright Lights, Big City

Daniel D'Addario — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 14:07:58 -0400

Youth!

The New York Times Magazine's Sixth Floor blog posts, for reasons obscure, an aggregate list of each staffers' five favorite novels, with names redacted (perhaps the one instance in Times Magazine recent history of editors not wanting to attach their names to something). Who can it be who likes both The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, and the latest Jennifer Egan (besides "a Middle American Reader"?)

Hugo Lindgren, though, lets the cat out of the bag that he is the one contributor whose favorite novels include The Godfather by Mario Puzo, and his four other favorites thus are revealed as:

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chabon
The Thin Man, by Dashiell Hammett
The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., by Robert Coover
Bright Lights, Big City, by Jay McInerney

Did American Psycho feel too cliché?

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_