Here's Rex Sorgatz's video of various people reading from the de-Harvardized copy of tortured soul Keith Gessen's All The Sad Young Literary Men. It was shot largely in the Gawker offices! And it involves such noted internet personalities as Andrew Krucoff, Choire Sicha, Julia Allison, Alex Pareene, Rachel Sklar — the d-list goes on and on. You'll either find it entertaining and funny (I did!) or feel like you need a decoder ring. A cheat sheet to the best moments is after the jump, if you want all the surprises spoiled, along with an update on the status of the modified All The Sad Young Literary Men, now an official literary hot potato.

The cheat sheet, via Sorgatz:

Personal faves include Krucoff stumbling across Emily's name, Julia musing about Google hits, Sklar standing in front of Balthazar, and Choire closing the house. But all of you! All of you have made America (and perhaps Russia) a better place!

Also, we are told that the book copy in this video, the FSU Middlebrow Remix of All The Sad Young Literary Men, has passed from Andrew Krucoff, who bought it from us at $890 (proceeds to the homeless), to the blogger 99, who bought it at $275 (discounted by the bundling of a date) from Krucoff (proceeds to a soup kitchen).

We are all witness to something very special! Don't you already feel more literarified and shit??

John McCain made a pair of not-bad ads mocking the schoolgirlish moments of pundits talking about Barack Obama. Sure, it was hypocritical since McCain's no stranger to favorable press — he famously joked that reporters constituted his "base." Also politically dangerous for the same reason. But if he gets away with tweaking the Fourth Estate it's because he offers the kind of access other pols don't. This is why Jonathan Chait and Jacob Weisberg may not vote for him but still kind of admire the guy. Obama, however, is the anointed presidential hopeful (if he doesn't say so himself), and he clearly has more to lose if the media's infatuation with him ends. Gabriel Sherman of the New Republic has a good piece explaining how the bloom's already gone off the rose. Obama's press liaison Robert Gibbs is a dick, and his other handlers are prickly and micromanagerial.

Key evidence: The Times' Adam Nagourney and Megan Thee wrote a story about how the candidate had failed to bridge the race gap. This precipitated a gentle question to Nagourney from the Obama campaign, which he answered. He then awoke the next morning to find himself attacked in an eight-point press release issued by Obama's team and leaked to Talking Points Memo and Marc Ambinder. "I've never had an experience like this with this campaign or others," Nagourney tells Sherman. "I thought they crossed the line. If you have a problem with a story I write, call me first. I'm a big boy. I can handle it. But they never called. They attacked me like I'm a political opponent."

So I guess Nagourney's less of a fan. True, McCain went out of his way to antagonize Elisabeth Bumiller of the Times for probing his red-meat conservative credentials (didn't Kerry offer him the VP slot?). But again, this wasn't schema-altering. Who didn't already know McCain could go from Mogwai to Gremlin when his status as a Maverick was either questioned or affirmed by the wrong inquiring mind? With his wafer-thin lead in the polls (don't email me, Gibbs!), Obama can scarcely afford to keep a reputation like this:

[A]s Obama ascended from underdog to front-runner to presumptive nominee, the flame seems to have dwindled. Reporters who cover Obama these days grouse that Obama's flacks shroud the campaign in secrecy and provide little to no access. "They're more disciplined than the Bush people," a reporter on the Obama trail gripes. "There was this idea of being transparent, but they're not. They're total tightwads with information."

[TNR]

newVideoPlayer("/foxnews_lights_up.flv", 506, 423,""); Never let your coworkers or viewers know that deep down, you might actually be cool, Fox News lady!

So weird orange rutabaga Blayne, from the new season of Project Runway, likes to nance around the design room saying "girlicious," among other annoying things. He seems to be reeeeally pushing it as a catchphrase (though, he didn't coin it). This has incurred the wrath of last season's fitfully gay catchphrase machine Christian Siriano, who more organically wove "fierce," "tranny," "hot mess," and various combinations of the three into the fabric of the New York fashionista vernacular. Though, you know, "fierce" was there way before little mister monkey man Siriano came chimping along. As were the other two. I guess he just used them more effectively than people before him, or something. What fucking ever, he doesn't like Blayne's lame "forced" word and he's not afraid to say so. Watch a video, from Popwrap, of Christian doing just that after the jump. Oh, and that new collection of his? Already sold out. How rude, tranny. You got it, girlicious. Cowatranny! Or, um, Eat my hot mess. Ew. Wait. Um, one more. Life is like a box of trannies. Does that work?

Error-prone Times TV critic Alessandra Stanley made a mistake everyone!

Because of an editing error, the TV Watch Column on Wednesday, comparing coverage of Senator Barack Obama’s trip overseas with coverage of Senator John McCain, gave an incorrect title in some copies for a Frankie Valli song used in a video by the McCain campaign to mock reporters’ coverage of Mr. Obama’s trip. The song is “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” — not “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You.”

Looks like her new dedication to caring enough to get things mostly right most of the time is paying off! (Oh, and the "forthcoming" correction was probably this one, which ran one day after that Stanley item. Hah.) [NYT]

The Washington Redskins Kill The Injuns Yee-Ha football team has somehow flexed its legal muscles and made it impossible for bloggers who care about racist football franchises to embed news videos of the team. How? I don't know, maybe with repeating rifles and relentless Westward expansion and blankets infected with smallpox! [WP via TBL]

This is what happens when publicity-shy authors let someone talk them into doing something on the Internet. Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami's agent or publisher was probably going on and on about how it was important to have an "online presence" or whatever, resulting in Time magazine collecting questions for him from readers—via their website. Slog has pointed out some of the more intelligent questions, such as "ur gay right?" After the jump, the rest of the proof that user-generated content is utter crap:

"How would you own funeral be like?"

"When it is cool and drizzling rain, when time seems to congeal into something viscous, and you are feeling a little melancholy, perhaps remembering a day in your youth when the weather was similar, is there a certain record you might want to listen to?"

"Do you have any plans of launching a worldwide book signing?"

Ask Novelist Haruki Murakami [Time]

Monocle, the worldly Tyler Brule-helmed lifestyle magazine for young, stylish, business-oriented jetsetters who receive free subscriptions, is sending out the following note to editors: "Monocle magazine offers a briefing on global affairs, business, culture and design. It is not a lifestyle magazine." Hmm. Monocle has formerly been described on Gawker as a "travel-culture magazine" and a repository of "lifestyle sensuality and gaywad uptightness." Close enough. [NYO]

For the wealthy and famous, suing people on the Internet is like the new Kabbalah, not just in terms of trendiness but also geographical focus. Britain is the hot destination if you want to take a blogger's house away because our cousins across the way have got the same draconian libel laws that put away Oscar Wilde. People don't like to read unpleasant things about themselves on the Internet (and where would the NYT Magazine be if they did?). But even where the targets of bloggy exposure or lampoon do have a legitimate grievance, must they head straight to the courts to settle it? Below, two recent libel cases involving the Internet, and one bonus intellectual property dispute involving a moppet and a Christian fantasist.

My Mood Is Litigious. Mathew Firsht was awarded 22,000 pounds after suing former school chum Grant Raphael, who had created a bogus Facebook profile of Firsht listing his location, activities and lying about his politics and sexual orientation as well as a profile of his company titled "Has Mathew Firsht lied to you?" The two men were at one point business partners, and according to the judge who presided over the civil case, Raphael was bitter and envious of Firsht's success. The BBC quotes media lawyer Jo Sanders: "Sat at home or school or in the office, it's easy to think of social networking sites as harmless fun, that it's like chatting with friends, and that things posted there are either a joke or just a mischievous way of causing embarrassment. This ruling puts an end to that."

Clearly Raphael had low motives and he really was his own worst enemy — Firsht would have accepted an apology and the removal of the profiles, but Raphael was defiant and decided to try his luck in Britain's notorious libel courts. However, the case raises the question of how social networking sites have failed to self-regulate. Even Blogger has "terms of use" that are routinely violated whenever someone posts another person's home address and incites violence against him. Why couldn't Firsht, having spotted his effigy, simply ask Facebook to yank the page by offering the easy proof that it wasn't his own?

Touchy Terrorists. David T at the popular British blog Harry's Place was threatened with a libel suit recently by Mohammad Sawalha, a man the BBC has identified as the mastermind behind "much of Hamas’ political and military strategy." Sawalha heads a Hamas front organization known as the British Muslim Initiative and was gravely offended when David posted a translated Al Jazeera script of a speech Sawalha had given at an anti-Israel rally in Trafalgar Square. In the original version, Sawalha referred in Arabic to "Jewish evil." But then he must have realized that was no way to dupe multiculturalists in London, and asked an obliging Al Jazeera to alter its record and reprint the term "Jewish Lobby." (HP posted the Google cached page of the relevant Al Jazeera website, so there was really no arguing with its evidence).

Once Sawalha got lawyers involved, the blogosphere retaliated — I believe "blogburst" is the technical term — with a massive show of solidarity with Harry's Place. Again, this proved the so-called "Streisand effect": If you sue people on the Internet, you draw more attention to yourself than you would by keeping quiet. And after all, was it really going to do more harm to an agent of Hamas to be thought of as anti-Semitic?

(This wasn't the first time David T has had subpoenas sent to him for something he posted at HP. Then, as now, the would-be litigant's measures backfired.)

The Lawyer, the Book, and the WIPO. Libel isn't the only preserve for the web's pettifogging game wardens. Copyright is, too. An 11-year-old Scottish boy, Comrie Saville-Smith, was sued by the estate of C.S. Lewis after his father gave him the present of a Narnia-themed website — www.narnia.mobi — and guess who had jurisdiction? The U.N. Its World Intellectual Property Organisation, which grunge anarchists in Seattle would hurl rocks at if they took their lazy asses to Geneva, decided that the young Comrie might use the site for commercial purposes and recoup ad revenue on the Lewis brand just as Prince Caspian was hitting international theatres. The Saville-Smiths weren't fined any financial damages (save, I guess, the cost of counsel), but they did have to give up the URL.

The case became a wee cause celebre in Scotland, and you'll never guess which Manichean novel series was invoked to distinguish the big bad literary estate from the devoted but plagued innocent. Feel even sorrier for Comrie. His mom goes around talking like this: "We put up a spirited fight because we wanted to prove that you do not have to hand something over just because someone richer and more powerful tells you to do so."

Weinstein Company head Harvey Weinstein is blogging away at Portfolio in a perfect storm of terrible news that we are required to cover. He is mad at you for going to Batman instead of some bullshit pretend indie he released to no acclaim. IT WON FOUR BAFTAS. The problem is the lying, biased media. "So, you see, its not that I'm not focusing on great independent films, it's just that no one is paying attention to them." So go see some weepie pretend indie and help Harvey Take Back the Multiplex! [Portfolio via NYO]

Just how gay was our Dark Knight in days of old? Um, pretty darn gay. [Bilerico]

Jay Babcock, former Los Angeles scenester and founder of the music/art mag Arthur, up and moved to Brooklyn recently. Why? "Culture in L.A. is in a race to the bottom, and all the smart and creative people there are [involved in] new ways to do social networking or figure out what YouTube video is going to get the most views. That isn’t culture, it’s pure pandering," he tells the L.A. Times today. Also: nobody in L.A. even noticed that he had moved:

What prompted the move to Brooklyn?

New York is just a more hospitable environment than L.A. ever has been or will be. L.A. is devolving quickly, and I think I got out in the nick of time. The L.A. Times is imploding, our public radio is terrible, the [L.A.] Weekly’s been devolving for years. Local media’s being run into the ground and I don’t think anybody cares. The public’s dumbed down and poorly educated. L.A. is a psychic death hole to me, and I don’t want a part of that. There are so many impending crises — the political structure, the traffic, the educational system. L.A. is failing worse than ever, and I felt that if I can get out, I should. I found a way out. For a long time now I’ve been going back and forth between L.A. and New York, and every time I got off the plane in L.A. I felt dumber.

...I’ve been [in Brooklyn] for weeks, and nobody noticed. I don’t mean to sound petulant, but I realized that a lot of people actually didn’t know I’d left, so I let Kevin Roderick [of L.A. Observed] know."

We're not really smarter or more cultured here, though—we just think we are! In two weeks, Jay, you will find yourself at some rich person's party on the Upper West Side, where you don't know the host—but some friends said you should come. Someone might pass you the cocaine and although you said you wouldn't, or shouldn't, do that ever/anymore, you'll try it—what the hell—and will spend the next hour staring as people's heads turn into insects as they conversate—or more accurately, wait for others to stop talking so they can chime in. You'll spill red wine on your shirt, accidentally hit on the host's daughter, and watch the day break as you head home in a cab, wondering if this is perhaps an inauspicious start to your new life in New York. Cab fare to Brooklyn: $30. Note to self: sign up for Internet dating account.

But seriously, welcome to Brooklyn.

Poor Nike just cannot catch a break these days. First all the gays and their blog commenter followers got upset about Nike's new ads featuring a guy with his nuts in another guy's face, which some say are homophobic. (Nike's ad agency would like you all to STFU with your whining about that, BTW). And this controversy is distracting them from the process of pulling all their "Air Stab" shoes out of UK stores because the god damn Brits can't stop knifing each other!

The insatiable British appetite for stabbing their fellow citizens caused bad PR levels to rise so high that Nike had to start pulling the shoes last week—even though they've been selling them for 20 years.

A company spokesman said: "Given the current climate we have withdrawn the shoe indefinitely from Nike's own stores in the UK."

He said the Air Stab name reflected the fact that it was first launched in 1988 as a stability shoe and had no connection to knives or stabbing.

"While it may be an unfortunate coincidence timing-wise, given current problems regarding knife crime, we completely reject the idea that we are in any way condoning or encouraging the issue of knife usage," said the spokesman.

If the Brits decide to start using Lebron James as a weapon, it will truly spell trouble Nike's European marketing plan.

[Telegraph UK via Adrants]

[Defiled rockabilly Pete Doherty leaving a Somerset courthouse today; image via Splash]

Last month MTV announced that it would finally start accepting political ads in order to better engage the youth of our nation in the political process and also because Barack Obama has a huge multimillion-dollar ad account that's not gonna spend itself. But look, the crafty right wing is getting out ahead of the curve here! Because the first political ad ever is now running on MTV, and it is against Barack Obama! Unfortunately it is incredibly trite and may have been assembled by a middle school child with rudimentary video-editing software and a YouTube account. Watch it after the jump and join the McCain revolution! Don't be a stereotypical youth in bed with Two-Way Barack:

[via Wonkette yo]

"Just found out the the former President of my company is a lesbian. She was married w/ 4 kids! HINT—I work in Publishing," whispers a snitch on the YouBeMom parenting messageboard. No, not Bonnie Fuller, the secret lesbian was an "editor," someone else chimes in. Or, wait: "Wasn't an editor, she was in Advertising.. she has her own company now." Despite the unholy thread that unspools, we still have no idea who the secret lesbian—posited to be somewhere inside Conde Nast—could be. In case you were wondering what else these moms have on their shriveled little minds:

Other quality threads include,

"omg— did the criminal search thing and found SO much on my brother. so sad."

"what would you buy for 100.00 at Bendels?"
and finally:

"i think i have finally decided to go ahead and have my tail surgically removed."

Like... a devilish gossip tail, similar to Satan's? We have no idea.

Anna Kournikova in a tiny gold bikini? Hell ya! (Click here) Mariah Carey looking way hotter than she should (Click here) Hayden Panettiere is ridiculously hot! (Click here) Jodie Marsh’s breasts are...

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

In the long-fought battle between New York and Los Angeles, New York has finally won. In terms of which city is better for openly gay actors, at least. After Elton runs a feature today interviewing various gay thespians (redunnndant) about the trials and tribulations of both playing dress up and publicly doing it with men. And one thing is made abundantly clear. Los Angeles has a long and noble history of shaming its gay players into sham hetero relationships and degrading game show appearances, while New York has always let its freak pflag fly and welcomed queers with open arms:

“Everyone knows everyone, and it’s fantastic. No one cares if you’re gay," says homo actor Christopher Sieber (best known for playing the Olsen twins' dad on the important sitcom Two of a Kind) of his experiences in New York City. Adds Xanadu actor Cheyenne Jackson, “People know if you've got the goods, if you're easy to work with, and if you can get the job done. Besides it's New York theater. Everybody's gay!” Except sometimes even New York isn't perfect:

According to Bryan Batt, a longtime theater actor who now plays a closeted gay man on AMC's critical darling Mad Men, he never saw much obvious anti-gay prejudice in the theater community. But even in New York, he’s known agents to counsel actors to stay closeted if they wanted to play straight roles.

And when he was cast as the understudy for the male lead in Sunset Boulevard opposite Glenn Close and Betty Buckley, Batt remembers concern on the part of some that he couldn’t play a convincing heterosexual. “There is this preconceived notion your [gay] personality is going to come through,” he says. “But what’s the difference, you’re playing a role. How many straight men are playing gay, but that’s okay?”

Terrible. Though, none of this is really news. It's just good to remind everyone that, yes, they can get married. But we can play pretend.

Commenters, it has been noted, are the single greatest threat to freedom facing America today. They are mean and libelous and should be rounded up and deported to Narnia. From YouTube to the New York Times, commenters are useless noise machines and racist cowards, and their mothers would be ashamed of them if their mothers weren't also forwarding nonsensical conspiracy theories to blog editors with CCs going out to Tom Brokaw, Perez Hilton, and Iron Man. But it turns out that sometimes commenters are awesome! Like on this BBC story about a court in New Zealand that took custody of a 9-year-old girl so that it could change her name from "Talula Does The Hula From Hawaii" to something New Zealanders consider more normal, like "Number 16 Bus Shelter." "You've been telling us about your unusual names," the BBC says. "Below are a selection of your comments." The first one is from someone claiming to be named "Russel Sprout" who says that his unusual name has helped him "make friends and improve my confidence," and they only get better from there.

No-one ever considered that the child might like the quirkiness of their name. Nothing has ever held back my development or progress in the world. I'm now working in the catering trade and everyone calls me Eggy. I don't see the problem!
Egnorwiddle Waldstrom , London, UK

I hated my parents for what they named me up until I was a teenager, but then I just became comfortable with it. I suppose it was just bad for me as my sister was called Judy.
Ftango Molasses, London England

My friends call me Manny!
Mangled Brown Fence-Post, London

We're sure they do, Mangled Brown Fence-Post. We're sure they do.

Everyone, including their own creator, thinks that Beijing's Olympic mascots suck. Slate asks: "Or are they really good?" [Slate]

A show about depressed industrial workers ruled by a unfunny megalomaniac is headed for its natural demographic — Russians. The BBC has just sold Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant's mega-hit sitcom The Office to the country, which plans to adapt its own version as over 70 other countries have already done. (Slave labor being the high concept that unites us all). This might give Slavic fans of Belle and Sebastian something to do with their free time now that the Russian state legislature has decided to outlaw emo. The reason? Unlike anything else you might associate with the land of nihilism and revolution, it "encourages anti-social behaviour and glorifies suicide." [Guardian, NME]

It seemed strange that the Wall Street Journal—so concerned about beating the competition in hard news—would choose for a Page One story today a piece on business people who do yoga. Really, WSJ? It's a pretty standard, low-hanging "take a trend, and add business angle" story that might have more rightly been in the back pages. But their work had this added benefit: a WSJ editor owns her own yoga studio, and one of her employees gives great on-the-money quotes:

Tina Gaudoin was brought over to the WSJ from the UK early this year to edit the paper's upcoming "lifestyle magazine." She's also the owner of Triyoga, a chain of yoga studios in the UK. And she used to tout that fact over and over again in her column! Which tends to go over less well in the US than in the UK. Still, it was so hard for the WSJ to find a good yoga-as-business quote that they ended up using this one, from Claire Missingham (pictured):

Finance "is the antithesis of what yoga is about in terms of inner peace," says Claire Missingham, a yoga teacher in London. But Ms. Missingham, whose pupils have included bankers and hedge-fund managers, says it can be highly beneficial for them. Yoga traditionalists say practicing yoga should be about more than just gaining physical benefits: It's a way of approaching life, including work. "Yoga teaches you to embrace fear and cultivate patience," says Ms. Missingham.

That's the Claire Missingham who happens to work at Gaudoin's Triyoga Soho! Way to keep it all in the family, WSJ.

If Hulk Hogan can't make it work with his lookalike, equally bleached-blond wife, what hope is there for the rest of us? And what about Matthew Broderick and those rumors of his cheating on American's princess, Sarah Jessica Parker? And the impending divorce of the Yankee's A-Rod and his wife, after the Madonna/stripper liaisons? Summer is the season of celebrity divorces, and our Intern Morgan Miller put together a chart of the juiciest scandals, from Lucy and Desi on up. Transsexual prostitutes, drug paranoia, and herpes—as Ivana Trump once said, "Don't get mad, get everything."

Blonde actress megastar Scarlett Johannson has been accused of drug use by a random graffiti tagger! But there's even more to the imaginary rendezvous; what did you and the busty Tom Waits fan do after the party, random graffiti tagger?:

That's good enough for Page Six!

[HYB via Animal]

Literary critic James Wood left a comment at New York's Vulture blog, objecting to its prior characterization of his new book How Fiction Works. It is not, he says, a "prescriptive guide to writing one kind of book," nor is there is any such thing as "the high realist novel," and even if there were, he would not be its Zhdanovite champion. He esteems "stylistic flourishes," for one — just don't go thinking you can write a pretty little book about nothing. In its defense, Vulture argues that nowhere does Wood actually deny being the leader of a new lit school; the original post referred to Leon Neyfakh's Observer profile of exultant, MFA-carrying Woodies, which quoted the master as saying that his favorite remarks are from writers who claim his essays helped them escape this or that brier patch in their own work. Not sure that makes him a didactic commissar so much as just good. Full comment after the jump:

For the record, because the record matters, and the record is now online rather than anywhere else, I must respond to the nonsense above: my new book is precisely not a prescriptive guide to writing one kind of book (it praises the novel as the virtuoso of exceptionalism); it is precisely not a defense of 'the high realist novel,' whatever that is (the chapter on character defends a postmodern idea of a kind of 'character of gaps'); and to say that I champion the fiction of character and dialogue over 'stylistic flourishes' is almost the opposite of the truth. As almost every word of criticism I have ever written attests, I pay the greatest attention to 'stylistic flourishes,' examine them, and revel joyfully in them. They are everything. — James Wood

"Literature has a kind of life of its own, you know," says an Oxbridge don to Charles Highway, Martin Amis's alter ego in The Rachel Papers. "You can't just use it...ruthlessly, for your own ends..." It isn't the vitriol or scabrous wit that bothers readers of Wood's reviews; he's a Royal College surgeon compared to Dale Peck's Hannibal Lecture. What they seem to object to his attempts at pattern recognition, bulk categorization, the better to explain what's gone wrong with a whole host of contemporary authors. ("He doesn't like Don DeLillo — who doesn't like Don DeLillo!?") Wood's crime is hysterical discrimination. It's like watching F.R. Leavis ply his trade in an age in which judgmental has become a dirty word.

EARLIER: Is James Wood Really That Good?
[Vulture]
[Observer]