Certainly not The New Republic, who tweeted "With today's news, our Facebook page is starting to resemble a Condie (sic) Rice photo shoot" earlier this afternoon.

At the time, The New Republic's Facebook page featured a large photo and portrait of Susan Rice, President Obama's new National Security Advisor. There were no photos of Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's National Security Advisor and later Secretary of State.

But despite the mix-up, TNR was not trying to reference the fact that both Condoleezza Rice and Susan Rice are black women (and so resemble one another), they just made a mistake. After The Observer brought the tweet to the attention of Hillary Kelly, the New Republic social media/iPad editor who is in charge of the @TNR twitter feed, the account tweeted a clarification. Ms. Kelly also DM'd The Observer to say that it was an accident.

https://twitter.com/tnr/status/342349982923378688

Phew. It's good to know The New Republic isn't racist. After all, we all make mistakes on Twitter (like misspelling the former Secretary of State's nickname).

Martin Amis (Wikimedia Commons)

Martin Amis has become another soldier in a war against the sub-species known as “Brooklyn Hipsters.”

The London Evening Standard has a new piece about the British author and his apparent attitude toward the young and disaffected.

According to their mysterious source, the writer finds Brooklyn “terribly transactional."

"He views the Brooklyn hipster scene as populated by conventional posers,” the source said. He then points out a bit of a contradiction, going on to say that Mr. Amis himself "was viewed as a literary hipster."

Mr. Amis, author of internationally acclaimed novels like The Rachel Papers, and London Fields, relocated to Cobble Hill because his wife, a native New Yorker, was homesick. In an essay for The New Republic, he said the move was “exclusively personal and familial.”

"He doesn’t go out as much as he did and has developed a reputation as a curmudgeon," the source added.

We are unconvinced, however, that Mr. Amis has been properly exposed to the most vile of the hipster species. After all, Jonathan Safran Foer and Paula Fox are his neighbors.

Chris Hughes addresses his guests.

For much of its history, a party for The New Republic might not have brought to mind lobster hors d’oeuvres, custom-printed napkins and tray liners, and a grand Soho apartment just a couple floors below the penthouse that Lenny Kravitz sold to Alicia Keys.

But Chris Hughes has invigorated the venerable old brand, not just with a cash infusion befitting a Facebook co-founder, but with youth, buzz and a vision that he articulated to the hundred or so guests who had landed hard-to-come-by invites to the magazine’s relaunch party Monday night at Mr. Hughes’s home.

As revelers mingled and the well-read crowd approvingly assessed the young publisher’s ample library, Mr. Hughes stood on a ledge in front of his fireplace to tell the crowd that the answer to “why in the world are you doing this” is simple. The relaunched TNR would use great writing, reporting and criticism to “shape how we view the world.”

The new-look cover features an interview with the newly relaunched President Obama (because what is a second term if not that?) by Mr. Hughes and editor Franklin Foer. The rest of the table of contents reads like a who’s who: Sam Lipsyte on sex writing, Judith Shulevitz on grandmothers, Michael Lewis on Goldman Sachs.

Old-media types like Times media reporter David Carr (who left early for a guest appearance in an Upright Citizens Brigade show), Politico’s Mike Allen, New York mag editor in chief Adam Moss, the Post’s Keith Kelly and Time’s Fareed Zakaria mingled with the new, including Kickstarter founders Perry Chen and Yancey Strickler, BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith and Quartz’s Kevin Delaney.

If the excitement of the party and the reboot continue to surround the biweekly, Mr. Hughes’s motives for buying TNR may become ever less mysterious.

Additional reporting contributed by Ken Kurson. 

Nick Lachey enjoys life during wartime (Getty Images)

Onetime Presidential candidate Wesley Clark, the former NATO Commander, has a new TV gig--ushering demi-celebrities like notional pop singer Nick Lachey and Alaskan husband Todd Palin through intensive military training on the reality show Stars Earn Stripes. And despite the protests from Nobel Peace laureates against the gamification of war, Gen. Clark is unconcerned.

He tells The New Republic that young viewers may young people might “see the military through the eyes of Nick Lachey, and think, look what these people are doing. Pretty interesting, pretty tough, pretty awesome."

Gen. Clark compared Stars Earn Stripes, an NBC series featuring mentors from various branches of the armed forces, to reality shows like Wipeout: "So I’d wanted to make sure that what we were going to do was serious and authentic and purposeful. And didn’t involve a bunch of people making fun of themselves."

If it's anything like this year's Naval recruitment film Act of Valor (like Stars Earn Stripes, made with the full cooperation of the U.S. Armed Forces), this series will be a big hit and show wartime as fun and adventurous. To quote a decorated U.S. general, sounds pretty awesome!

Monster (Semantics) Squad: A freelance photographer sees a "monster" on the beach, photographs it. Gothamist writes a piece labeling it a "bloated rat monster," which, what? Bucky Turco at ANIMAL NEW YORK, which is the only news source worth trusting any more, about anything, talks to a Parks Department Representative, who tells him it's a pig left over from a weekend cookout. The photographer tells New York's Daily Intel blog that she doesn't think it's "pig-like" at all. Daily Intel does a photo investigation of it, and names it "Wilbur." Takeaway? Tuesdays. That's the takeaway.  [ANIMAL NY / Daily Intel / Gothamist]

Un-G.Q. Conduct? We missed this from the other day, but: Walter Kirn's widely-read and widely-acclaimed New Republic story about leaving the Mormon faith? It was a G.Q. story, but G.Q. pushed it back for space (because Kirn nor his editor Mark Lotto wanted to move on word count) into an issue yet-to-be-published. Kirn didn't want his piece to die in publishing limbo, so he took it to The New Republic. What'd G.Q. editor Jim Nelson make of all this? "Frankly, it didn’t seem right to me," he told WWD's Erik Maza. If that was what they call in the rap game a "subliminal" against TNR editor Franklin Foer, genius. Either which way, takeaway: Walter Kirn probably won't be writing for G.Q. anytime soon. [WWD]

Moments with Myler: New York Daily News editor Colin Myler had a "Town Hall" meeting today. The former News of the World spoke for about thirty minutes, speaking about the Daily News' national web presence and a third-party business initiative that will "consult and provide services for third-party digital products." More importantly: Myler said they would be hiring to ramp up the national presence, that they wouldn't be cutting back on their print product a la Times-Picayune, does not intend to raise the newsstand price, and won't let celebrity coverage and (external) gossip run the paper. [Capital New York]

Murdoch Mates Busted: Speaking of Colin Myler, two other former employees of Murdoch's British tabloid empire are now formally charged with accusations relating to the British tabloid hacking scandals: Rebekah Brooks and former British Prime Minister David Cameron's spin doctor, Andy Coulson. And now that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are involved, this thing is serious. [Guardian UK /Guardian UK]

Bad GOOD Idea: Want to make a bad publicity move? Take a word like "curate," which people—especially people who work in media—hate. If you're a magazine that just canned much of a very beloved staff, like GOOD, go forth, and seek out "brand apostles" who are "content-curators and change makers." Done. [Poynter]

Dow-n In? Dow Jones is going to sell its newswires through WSJ.com, Dow Jones CEO Lex Fenwick explains. Skeptics are skeptical. [Reuters]

Buzzfeed Is The Best, Says Buzzfeed Investor: VC guy Chris Dixon published an internal Buzzfeed memo written by Jonah Peretti, with his permission, wherein Jonah Peretti extols the greatness of the venture he oversees. [Chris Dixon]

So, we forgot to let anyone know we were even doing this yesterday—a depressing, necessary component of this job, such as it is—so we'll just copy what we wrote on yesterday's Media Briefs and hope you read it. Here:

Finally: The lovely albatross of the Observer‘s media desk for the last year and a half has been liberated from abdicated the position, and this writer will be filling in the interim. Please send your tips, gossip, rhetoric, legal threats, inspirational quotes, and freshman year poetry—along with, while we’re at it, your nominations for Media Power Couples, Bachelors, and Bachelorettes (which, due to unpopular demand, we’ll be doling out again soon)—right this way.

Happy Tuesday.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

But it appears the inspiration may actually have been one of Ms. Brown's chief gadflies, the late Spy magazine. Gawker's Adrian Chen pointed us to a very similar Spy cover from December 1993. Like TNR, Spy advertised a cover package about the end of the British empire ("U.K. Decay" vs. "Something's Rotten") by giving the country's most photogenic leader a patriotic dental makeover. (Also, note the coincidental cover line touting a piece on Ms. Brown's New Yorker.)

It's an uncharacteristically cheeky treatment from TNR, but it may be a sign of a new era at the magazine. With the online paywall torn down, is the magazine angling for more newsstand sales? Can we look forward to more visual hijinks from the buttoned-up beltway thought leader?

New Republic art director Joe Heroun declined to comment.

Lionel Shriver.

Harper, $26.99.

Lionel Shriver wrote her latest novel, The New Republic, before the events of Sept. 11, 2001, and, according to the book’s foreword, held it back until both her sales record and the public appetite for a terrorism-themed satire increased. Her first stroke of good fortune came swiftly when her 2003 novel We Need to Talk About Kevin, a school-massacre thriller that arrived a tasteful distance after the 1999 killings at Columbine High School, became a mega-hit and, eventually, a film starring Tilda Swinton. As for a public willingness to chuckle at anything terrorism-related, a decade would seem to suffice for the old mantra about tragedy plus time yielding comedy. The problem for Ms. Shriver is that the first wave of terrorism black comedy must necessarily have a sharpness, and a sense of gravity and for the facts on the ground that The New Republic utterly lacks.

The novel takes its title both from the real-life magazine for which its bumping-up-on-middle-aged protagonist, Edgar Kellogg, has freelanced and from Barba, a fictional peninsula dangling off the bottom of the Iberian peninsula, seeking independence from the government in Lisbon. Kellogg has thrown aside his legal career to write professionally and, having been swiftly hired by a USA Today-ish daily, is yet more swiftly dispatched to the would-be independent nation of Barba, where a terroristic nationalist front is centered and where his predecessor has gone missing.

More so than We Need to Talk About Kevin, The New Republic deeply indulges Ms. Shriver’s worst quality as a prose stylist—a tendency toward didactic, inhuman dialogue. Her tin ear for the patterns of human speech borders on the Randian; her political philosophy is, simply, that life is nasty, brutish and far too long. “Saddler’s appetite for poontang was suspicious,” says one character. “The nightmares were fabulous, lush with fantastic fears, hilarious with misadventure,” says another. The nadir: “Nicola, you’re the only one in town who’s ever noticed that the emperor might not be dressed to the nines. Your journo friends here operate like Visa card outfits.”

The jags of dialogue in this novel are neither colloquial enough to be honest nor outlandishly posh enough to approach the best of Evelyn Waugh (though Scoop is a clear influence here)—they indicate an author seemingly unsure of just how grounded in reality she wants her novel to be. Ms. Shriver’s ineptitude with human speech served We Need to Talk About Kevin well; it was told in the first person, through letters written by a haughty woman brought low who clearly labored over each word. The tormented prose could be read as the product of a tormented mind. So Much for That, Ms. Shriver’s most recent novel, had a similar problem with its dialogue. A political tract centered upon in the American health-care debate, its characters (who, to be fair, felt far more real and recognizable emotions than the characters in The New Republic) recited hastily rewritten policy papers.

What does tend to save The New Republic’s dialogue from the worst kind of didacticism is how apolitical it is. The foreign correspondents with whom Kellogg works spout off constantly but rarely express coherent political philosophies. Instead, they end up repeating the same tautologies about getting the story and the same gripes about how hellish Barba is.

The book’s politics occur mainly in Kellogg’s mind and his relationship with his editor back in America. He discovers that his predecessor, a beloved foreign correspondent, had been fabricating stories and claiming that terrorist attacks by the Barban liberation front were the work of others. Satire is only effective when it’s believable, and The New Republic beggars belief when Kellogg begins calling American papers, impersonating a Barban terrorist and claiming that various terrorist attacks on European and American soil are the work of his comrades.

Ms. Shriver never bothers to show quite how this maneuver actually helps his journalistic career. He generally calls papers he isn’t working for; how this results in scoops for his own paper is never made clear. And a setting that features a steady stream of terrorist attacks for which no one claims responsibility is itself a stretch for anyone who even occasionally follows the news cycle.

Bret Easton Ellis set his 2005 novel, Lunar Park, in what was clearly an alternate reality, wherein terror was visited upon families by an unknown and unknowable entity. The only significant differences between the world Ms. Shriver has created and our own are wildly unrealistic dialogue and a picaresque focus on incident. The author legitimately seems to believe that a series of terrorist attacks could be claimed by some fellow using a kazoo to disguise his voice, because no one else would come forward.

Ultimately, The New Republic drips with condescension for its reader, nowhere more so than in its closing two pages, where it’s implied that Kellogg took credit for the events of Sept. 11, 2001, on behalf of the Barban terrorists for whose cause he cares little but whose existence nebulously boosts his writing career.

The concept of a writer conflating real events into ludicrous fantasies to boost his or her career cannot be a foreign one to Ms. Shriver. Indeed, The New Republic seems less ghoulish and more clever when it’s read as a comment on its own existence and Ms. Shriver’s career as a magpie of human misery. Despite or perhaps because of its flaws, The New Republic is compulsively readable—just like the news coverage of global tragedy that Ms. Shriver implies exists merely for the pleasure viewers find in catharsis.

In this novel, deaths that occur offstage are treated so lightly that the reader comes to care little for those that happen onstage—those of central characters. The theme here is charisma—why some men’s lies are easily swallowed and help bolster their myths, while others’ merely make them appear pathetic—and yet Ms. Shriver makes little effort to fully investigate this phenomenon. Things are interesting because Kellogg thinks they are, and he thinks they are simply because he is insecure about having been fat as a child.

This is programmatic writing that is as devoted to simple cause-and-effect as a briefing in a big USA Today-style paper. It bears no resemblance to the complexities of the truth—either about world events or, more pertinently, human nature—and in that it is similar to the prose of a harried writer on deadline, working toward the end-of-night pint. If Ms. Shriver, herself a journalist who has written for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, set out to summarize through her style the manner in which journalism fails its subjects, she has succeeded brilliantly.

The sad irony of The New Republic, ultimately, is that it violates the journalistic dictum an editor articulates in its first 20 pages: “The hack who fancies himself a mover-and-shaker gets slipshod—thinks he’s covering his own story.” Ms. Shriver strives to shake up her readers’ sensibilities regarding both terrorism and human nature by overstepping the bounds of what she is able to convey, and ends up covering a story that is irresistible only to her.

In July 2007, The New Republic published "Shock Troops," the first of three "diary" entries from a pseudonymous soldier then serving in Iraq, which contained explosive allegations about the conduct of military personnel. Conservative enemies of the magazine, led by the Weekly Standard's Michael Goldfarb, led a vigorous campaign to discredit the author, Scott Beauchamp, a 24-year-old army private.

Mr. Foer initially stood by the pieces, as Mr. Goldfarb and others sought to prove that the magazine had another fabulist on its hands—this time, one that proved the lefty publication's secret troops-hating agenda. The ugly fight dragged on for months, with The New Republic taking a beating as it labored to verify Mr. Beauchamp's pieces—an effort compounded by an awkward weeks-long period of radio silence from Mr. Beauchamp. (I wrote a short piece about it here.) The soldier, though, had a pretty good excuse: unlike the other participants in the media dust-up, he was risking his life every day by fighting a war on behalf of the United States. His main point of contact at the magazine was his wife, Elle Reeve, a fact-checker with whom he had eloped in May 2007.

An embattled Mr. Foer eventually retracted the pieces in the coda to a bizarre 6,828-word first-person article. Mr. Beauchamp had by then returned to safety in Germany, although a second tour brought him back to Iraq on Thanksgiving Day, 2008.

This afternoon, Mr. Beauchamp snuck onto Gchat during a class at the New York Institute of Technology, where he is studying nursing with plans to become a physician's assistant, to talk to The Observer about his experiences with Mr. Foer. (I've edited his words for capitalization, spelling and punctuation.)

"While I certainly wish him the best of luck with whatever he does next, I obviously still feel very strongly about how he defended me, my wife, himself and the magazine," Mr. Beauchamp wrote. "I feel like Frank Foer put my wife and I in an impossible situation."

Mr. Beauchamp is still stung by the magazine's having asked him and his wife, Ms. Reeve, to re-report his pieces after their accuracy was challenged—and then retracted them anyway.

"Fourth-rate milblogs got guys not only to Iraq, but to our base. And TNR couldn't do that?" he wrote. "I don't understand why TNR didn't send someone over. I don't understand why they took the army's word, when it was literally my battalion investigating itself, which makes no sense. ... [And] I don't understand how he wouldn't even offer any sort of apology after my first sergeant was convicted of murder, for executing Iraqis, during this same period."

Come again? It's true. Conservative bloggers had attacked Mr. Beauchamp for impugning the character of troops in his unit. In April 2009, Master Sergeant John Hatley was convicted of brutally executing four Iraqi prisoners. (Ms. Reeve wrote about the crimes here.)

The Observer asked Mr. Foer to respond to Mr. Beauchamp's recollection of events. "I think the coverage of Scott Beauchamp was an object lesson in media stupidity," Mr. Foer wrote in an email. "Every single major American news organization made a huge deal about possible embellishments in his description of plausible incidents-and ignored the actual war crimes committed in his unit."

Mr. Foer continued: "I understand why Scott is angry. He should be pissed at the way his case was covered. But my treatment of the incident was very nuanced—and I stand by it. I spent several thousand words trying to present a careful, nuanced narrative of events."

The two men haven't spoken since the retraction.

"I haven't really talked about it much with anyone since I got out of the army," Mr. Beauchamp wrote. "I think some of my friends were even sick of talking about it. But it's something that Elle and I think about every day. I wonder if Frank does."

"I honestly don't know much about his career outside of what happened with Elle and me," Mr. Beauchamp continued, "but I do hope that if he considers my writing for TNR a low point in his career"—here he seemed to be referring to Mr. Kurtz's tweet—"that he blames himself, and not my wife and me."

Today Mr. Beauchamp lives in Brooklyn, while his wife, Elle Reeve, keeps an apartment in Washington, where she works for The Atlantic. He still dabbles in writing; as if his life did not contain enough twists already, he happened to sit for a job interview with Russian spy Anna Chapman in March 2010, an episode he wrote about for The Daily Beast.

He is still just 27 years old. "Hopefully there's more to come," Mr. Beauchamp wrote The Observer. "And hopefully none of it involves Frank Foer OR the United States Army."

The hire is Hugo Lindgren's second since taking over the editor's seat at The Times Magazine last month. He pulled Lauren Kern — a former colleague of his at New York — from her position at O: The Oprah Magazine to come aboard as deputy editor. Lindgren told Women's Wear Daily that there wouldn't be much staff overhaul as he began to implement his vision at the magazine. "There's no shortage of talent," he said.

 nfreeman [at] observer.com | @nfreeman1234

It began with a report in the Daily News that Ruth Franklin's review of the novel would not be kind. It wasn't -- "This is the stuff of the MFA workshop," she writes at one point -- and the magazine joined the select few who were disappointed with the book, particularly annoyed with its conversational language and "soap opera" plot.

Yesterday, in the backlash or perceived backlash of this review, literary editor Leon Wieseltier has published a blog post defending the negative writeup, by defending critical reviews in general. The post actually touches on none of the book's content, but equates the culture of positive reviews with careerist blurbing. "Has the book struck a chord Of course. But that is anthropology, not literature," he writes.

Then, as if raising the stakes, Adam Kirsch posted an item about how one of the Jewish neoconservative characters in the book perpetuates the myth that "Jewish puppetmasters" led the country to its invasion of Iraq. How anthropologically topical!

Franzen faulters, rally 'round The New Republic! It's nice to see them getting along with David Brooks.