"There’s something about the way a magazine looks and feels when it doesn’t have advertising that is unbelievably disappointing..."

"... both as an editor and as a writer. Pages are not meant to be adjacent to one another. They need the advertising to give it body and fullness. There was always that sense of Newsweek being not the full-bodied thing that it ought to be."

Said Tina Brown, in whose hands Newsweek died, prompting Michael Kinsley to say, "It seemed wan." And then Tina says, "Yes, it always seemed wan, and that affects the way you read it. That was one of the big problems."

Makes Newsweek sound like a person... like an unsatisfying husband to whom poor Tina found herself married.

Much more at the link, by the way, including Kinsley's question whether it was really true that Newsweek was losing $42 million a year, and Tina's answer: "I’m not supposed to reveal the exact numbers. But I will tell you it cost $42 million just to print Newsweek.... Before you’ve even engaged one writer, or one copy editor, or one picture editor. Forty-two million dollars." And: "[A]ll the boundaries of print just feel so incredibly old-fashioned now—the need to do things in a certain shape, in a certain mix, by a certain time of the day in the week. All of that just seems so incredibly burdensome now." And:

In ten years, will we still have newspapers on paper?

“No” is the short answer, unless printed at home via the web.

"Is Niall Ferguson's Newsweek attack on Obama 'embarrassing' and 'unethical'?"

"Paul Krugman is among the intellectual heavyweights tearing apart the British historian for a 'careless and unconvincing' article."

In a forthright cover story for Newsweek magazine entitled Hit the Road, Barack, Ferguson argues that Obama has broken almost all of his campaign promises of four years ago, and attacks the US president's foreign policy, healthcare reforms and economic and fiscal policy.

To say that commentators in the US have criticised the piece would be an understatement....

Newsweek's new anti-Obama cover.

It's getting rewarded with big links from Instapundit and Drudge, incentivizing (perhaps) a little less biased coverage of the campaign. We'll see. I doubt it. It could happen.

"It wasn't very long ago they were trying to tell us that Romney was a bully.... Now he's a wimp?"

Rush Limbaugh riffed on the new Newsweek cover today:

Calling Romney a wimp is aimed at suppressing the white blue-collar vote.  Blue-collar voters hate wimps.  You know, the working white voters that Obama has abandoned, and now whose votes they're trying to suppress, this is all about trying to make those people think that Romney is a wuss....

Rush goes on to say that if anyone's a wuss, it's Obama:

We've all seen Obama throw a baseball.  He looks not even as good as an average girl throwing a baseball....

That is: You want to talk about who's wussiest? We'll crush you. We'll knock you down and cut off your hair...

But what I'd like to say is: Attacking a man as "wussy" is homophobic. Do the Democrats care about gay people or not? The effort to label Romney a "wimp" is a betrayal of liberal values. It's hypocritical.

What's the best response to the Romney's-a-wimp attack?
	Ignore it.
	Use it as evidence of pathetic media bias.
	Punch back with the idea that Obama is the wimp.
	Defend Romney as a strong, brave man.
	Make the homophobia/hypocrisy accusation.
	Flip it: Wimp is good. Wimp power! It's the new gentlemanliness.
pollcode.com free polls

ADDED: Rush introduced the word "wuss." I changed some of my uses of "wuss" to "wimp." "Wimp" is the word Newsweek used against Romney (and back in 1987 against George H.W. Bush).

ALSO: My quick research says "wuss" and "wimp" mean exactly the same thing. The OED says the origin of "wuss" is "uncertain" and "[p]erhaps a blend of wimp... and puss..." That is, "puss," defined as a name for a cat. "Pussy" — according to the OED, goes back to the 1500s, meaning "A girl or woman exhibiting characteristics associated with a cat, esp. sweetness or amiability." Beginning in 1904, "pussy" is seen denoting "A sweet or effeminate male; (in later use chiefly) a weakling, a coward, a sissy. Also: a male homosexual." "Pussy" meaning "female genitals," goes back to 1699. (And there's this from 1865: "My poor pussy, rent and sore, Dreaded yet longed for one fuck more." "Philocomus" Love Feast.)

The OED defines "wuss" as "A weak or ineffectual person." The earliest usage is from 1976:

1976 Campus Slang (Univ. N. Carolina, Chapel Hill) (typescript) Nov. 6 Come on you wuss, hit a basket..! John's a wuss.
1981 C. Crowe Fast Times at Ridgemont High 57 You out to meet her first, you wuss.
1984 Washington Post (Nexis) 28 Aug. c1 Everybody thinks I'm a wuss. And I don't impress any of the stunt women at all.
1996 Courier-Mail (Brisbane) 24 Jan. 29 (caption) Give us y'lunch, Hooper, you great wuss!
2003 R. Williams Fallout 22 Shanice I had him cryin his eyes out to me... Ronnie Wuss.

The OED defines "wimp" as  "A feeble or ineffectual person; one who is spineless or ‘wet.'" The origin is "uncertain," but perhaps based on "whimper." We're told this word is "Used only as a term of abuse or contempt," a notation that doesn't appear with "wuss," which makes me think "wimp" is the harsher word.

The usages of "wimp" go back to 1920:

1920   G. Ade Hand-made Fables 97   Next day he sought out the dejected Wimp.
1964   Amer. Speech 39 119   A baff is ‘a person who does silly things deliberately’; but wimp is still mysterious and undefined in my notes.
1966   Current Slang Winter 8   Wimp, a backward person... He's a real wimp on a date.
1970   N.Y. Mag. 16 Nov. 10/2   That Goodell, he's nothing but a wimp. And this Ottinger, it got so I couldn't stand the sight of him.
1976   New Musical Express 31 July 8/2   Although he's best known here as a fairly muscular MOR wimp,..he has a big reputation as a prodigiously talented multi-media whizz in the States.
1979   T. Gifford Hollywood Gothic (1980) xxii. 220   Solly Roth and his wimp of a son..what a wet bunch that family was.
1981   P. Theroux Mosquito Coast vi. 48,   I can afford to be robbed... But what about the poor wimps who can't afford it?
1984   Sunday Tel. 30 Dec. 15/6   In daily life Ronnie Lee is a wimp. Put him in a balaclava and he thinks he's a he-man.
1985   She July 140/2   Masseur! Huh! He sounds a right little wimp.

I'm interested in that use of "wet" (in the definition and in the 1979 quote). The OED gives as the 15b definition of "wet": Inept, ineffectual, effete; also as quasi-adv. and in comb. wet fish, a wet individual, a ‘drip’. Also spec. in Polit. (see quots. 1981, 1983)." Here are those 2 quotes:

1981   Observer 26 July 12/3   The term ‘Wet’ was originally used by Mrs Thatcher, who meant it in the old sense of ‘soppy’, as in ‘What do you mean the unions won't like it, Jim? Don't be so wet.’ It meant feeble, liable to take the easy option, lacking intellectual and political hardness. Like so many insults, it was gleefully adopted by its victims, and so came by its present meaning of liberal, leftish, anti-ideological....
1983   Age (Melbourne) 5 Oct. 13   Britain's Tory Prime Minister, Mrs Margaret Thatcher, began this vogue terminology by contemptously dismissing dewy-eyed dissenters from her arid Right-wing policies as ‘wet’.

Fascinating! Stepping back, I can see softness and weakness associated with the left. It's the conservatives who think they are hard, strong, manly, and courageous, and this must make liberals want to get the accusation of wussiness/wimpiness going the other way.

And let's not forget that the most famous political use of the word "wimp" was not the 1987 "wimp factor" Newsweek cover. It was "Mush from the Wimp" — which referred to Jimmy Carter. "Mush from the Wimp" has its own Wikipedia page:

On Saturday, March 15, 1980, the Boston Globe ran an editorial that began:

Certainly it is in the self-interest of all Americans to impose upon themselves the kind of economic self-discipline that President Carter urged repeatedly yesterday in his sober speech to the nation. As the President said, inflation, now running at record rates, is a cruel tax, one that falls most harshly upon those least able to bear the burden.

There was nothing exceptional about it except the headline: "Mush from the Wimp". The headline — which was supposed to have read "All Must Share The Burden" — was corrected during the press run after 161,000 copies had already gone to circulation.

In November 1982, Globe editorial page editor Kirk Scharfenberg wrote a op-ed piece discussing his creation of the phrase and the use of "wimp" as a popular political insult afterwards. "I meant it as an in-house joke and thought it would be removed before publication," he explained. "It appeared in 161,000 copies of the Globe the next day."

"The Rupert Murdoch tabloid loves to package other people’s reporting in World War III headlines."

Writes Howard Kurtz, mocking the New York Post article that has the headline "Mary Kennedy pummeled RFK Jr., ran over family dog and threatened to kill herself for years: court papers," which begins: "Robert Kennedy Jr.’s wife, Mary, beat him up, tried to blackmail him, killed the family dog and, finally, told a servant she needed rope for a new couch — then hanged herself with it, according to a bombshell report.”

The "other people’s reporting" used by the NY Post is in Newsweek/Daily Beast, which is Kurtz's employer. That article is headlined "Exclusive: The Last Days of Mary Kennedy," with a subtitle: "She was the love of Bobby Jr.’s life. Then everything unraveled. In Newsweek, bestselling Kennedy historian Laurence Leamer reveals the heartbreaking story of Mary’s long decline." Heartbreaking. Love of his life. That goes to a different extreme, trying to appeal to a different audience — presumably women who adore bestselling Kennedy historians.

It's not surprising that the Post — like a blogger — would pull out the most lurid details and state them plainly, for readers who don't want the romance and don't need their suicide porn swathed in the pretense of respectability.

From the hardcore Post:

“Mary’s violence and physical abuse toward me began before we were married,” Bobby said in confidential court papers that surfaced yesterday.

The bestselling Kennedy historian Laurence Leamer obtained the papers. That's the basis for the "Exclusive" in the Newsweek headline. Continuing with the Post, because I don't want Kennedy romance speed bumps in my access to the lurid facts:

“Soon after Mary became pregnant with our first son, Mary — in a sudden rage about my continued friendship with my ex-wife — hit me in the face with her fist,’’ Bobby said in an affidavit filed as part of his then-custody battle with his estranged wife.

“She was a trained boxer, and I got a shiner,’’ Bobby said. “Her engagement ring crushed my tear duct, causing permanent damage. Mary asked me to lie to her family about the cause of my shiner.”

Domestic violence. (Of course, the suicide — done at home — was also domestic violence.)

Bobby said that at one point after they separated, Mary “said she intended to kill herself unless I called off the divorce and unless I promised to recommit to the marriage.’’

Psychological abuse. (Of course, the suicide itself was psychological abuse.)

[Bobby said] to the judge that despite years of her abusing him, “she repeatedly says she will call the police and say that I beat her if I threaten to leave her."...

In his confidential affidavit, Bobby had claimed that Mary continued to physically attack him even after he moved out, recounting a May 2011 incident in which Mary asked him to come console the kids over their dead dog.

“Mary ran over and killed the dog, Porcia, in the driveway,” he said in the affidavit. Arriving at her house, he found her drunk, with their son Aidan in the room.

“I opened the door, and she leapt out of her bed and hit me with a roundhouse punch that, had I not blocked it, would have undoubtedly broken my face,” Bobby claimed.

She was “raining blows down on me as I backed down the hall,” landing about 30 blows in all, he said.

“She screamed at Aidan as she hit me, [saying, I’m] ‘a demon. He is the most evil man in the world. Everything he does is evil and a fraud. He is a philanderer, an adulterer, a sex addict.’ ”

This, culled from an article with the subtitle "She was the love of Bobby Jr.’s life."

According to the affidavit, during their marriage, Bobby would awaken in the middle of the night to find Mary beating him, and he said that he once had to escape through a second-floor window.

One time, she threw a plate of spaghetti at him in front of the kids and another, attacked him with scissors while he was in the bathtub, according to the report....

According to Newsweek, Bobby “pleaded” with Mary’s brothers and sisters to do an intervention, and e-mailed them in June 2011 that she was “sinking into terrible darkness.”

Mary’s siblings — who, along with many of her friends have contended that the Kennedy clan is trying to save face over Bobby’s mistreatment of Mary by making her look mentally ill — allegedly told him to take a hike.

So... what do the sisters say now that she's hanged herself? Was she mentally ill or did she rationally and intentionally commit suicide (and if so, why? To torture and punish Bobby?)?

Have you seen the cover of Newsweek?

5 or 10 years ago, it was a routine, almost daily practice for me to wander around a bookstore and so I always knew what was on the covers of the usual magazines like Newsweek. You could catch my eye. Nowadays, my daily glancing about is done on line, and crafty editors can't grab me with striking covers. But I did notice this:



Now, that's really silly. Who is this "working woman"? I guess by "working woman," Newsweek means a fashion model. And for all the striving to convey sexuality, the particular woman — with her plank chest and clothes-hanger shoulders — epitomizes abstemiousness, not lust of any kind. Anyway, had I seen that on the newsstand, I would have laughed at the embarrassingly striving effort to lure me into checking out the article. Don't I want to know "Why Surrender Is a Feminist Dream"? Uh, no. I was with the radical feminists back in the late 1980s/early 1990s when it seemed very important to take "The Story of O" seriously. And to despise Katie Roiphe, by the way. Who is the author of the Newsweek cover story, though her name isn't on the cover.

Why did the feminists attack Roiphe back then? The daughter of a famous feminist, she'd come out with a book "The Morning After: Fear, Sex and Feminism" when she was only 26, undermining the work of feminists who'd strained to expand the category of behavior to which the term "rape" attaches:

Writing for The New Yorker, Katha Pollitt delivered a scathing review of The Morning After, writing, "It is a careless and irresponsible performance, poorly argued and full of misrepresentations, slapdash research, and gossip. She may be, as she implies, the rare grad student who has actually read 'Clarissa,' but when it comes to rape and harassment she has not done her homework."

Oh, but that was nearly 20 years ago. I haven't been keeping track of Katie Roiphe since then, though I see I have a tag for her. I don't remember mentioning her on the blog before, but obviously I have. Anyway, she's getting cranked through the Tina-Brownified Newsweek that I'm not going to read, but I did notice the Virginia Heffernan attack on Roiphe's cover story:

Tina, my onetime boss, from whom in the late 1990s I learned the dark arts of buzz production...

Were vibrators involved?

... loves to seduce and betray female writers. And she's got skills. As she once proudly told the editorial team at her short-lived magazine Talk, she likes to ask lady writers to deliver humiliating "personal histories" that feature self-loathing and lurid intimate disclosures, on the promise that they can publish anonymously.

Once the droning, predictable, scandalous articles are done—Daphne Merkin likes to be spanked!!!!!—Tina appeals to the writer's vanity. The article is terse and fearless and elegant! You're Joan Didion! (always Joan Didion). You must put your name on this!

Disgrace. You want to know about gender politics during this trumped-up "war on women"? That's one way power is wielded between women—the alpha girl feigns sympathy to get her henchwoman to confess or act out and then sits back and sneers—and it's no joke. 

I'm cutting a lot here. Please read the whole thing. Roiphe, per Heffernan, "sneers" at the "older, suburban, possibly Midwestern woman" who is titillated by this popular new porn book "Shades of Grey," and this supposedly entertaining sneering is leveraged by Roiphe's own sexual confessions:

Tina has forced Roiphe into this uncomfortable pose, and in public (does any woman really want to boast, "I'm more twisted and accustomed to sexual violence than anyone!"), and Roiphe comparably trusses up Newsweek readers. Over a series of bad-faith and gibberish paragraphs, she sets up the reader as a hayseed who is turned on by lite porn because she's never seen how they do it in Berlin or whatever; or—worse still—so unsuccessfully feminine and so outside of the charmed circle of female literary power that she's satisfied by regular guys who don't hit her. 

The real sadism, it seems, comes from the powerful editor (Brown) who once oppressed Heffernan, who longs to get the upper hand at long last. Now, that's lurid (but not at all sexy, unless you're way more into the world of publishing newsrags than I am).

Anyway, I'm reading Heffernan, because I wandered by Slate this morning and saw a piece that successfully caught my eye with the title "Why Is Virginia Heffernan Being Sexist Toward Katie Roiphe?" It was written by a character with the silly name J. Bryan Lowder. He says:

Heffernan suggests that Roiphe has been “humiliated” by the article, but, by my reading, it’s the former who’s actually out to humiliate the latter in some twisted form of victim-blaming. It’s as if Heffernan is saying, “Tina Brown editorially raped you, Katie Roiphe, so why don’t you just slink away in disgrace!”

Key words: by my reading. Heffernan had her reading and you, J. Bryan, have yours. And your reading is that her reading is not the right reading. Readings, readings, readings. If it's all readings, we can choose which one to read, can't we? And Heffernan is more readable. And she's got the inside experience with Brown. Meanwhile — I just got to the end of J. Bryan's cryin' and I see he's "a former student and research assistant of Roiphe’s." Ha. I stand by my choice of readings.

Andrew Sullivan misunderstands why I did not read his "Why Are Obama's Critics So Dumb?" article.

He writes:

I wondered when I wrote this what the reaction would tell me. Just browsing at a few of the right-wing blogs, I see that they have attacked it without actually, you know, reading it. Althouse is a classic example:

I don't even want to read it. It just seems like red meat for Obama fans. And what a cliché! Republicans are stupid.

Half the article is devoted to liberals and Democrats! But it would be too much for her to actually read it.

If you look at my blog post, it's a reaction to the Newsweek cover, beginning with some analysis of the photograph of Obama and continuing to the question that Newsweek framed for the purpose of getting people to buy the magazine. Inside was Sullivan's article, which I did not have time to read. Not that Sullivan could know this, but we had to drive halfway across the country today. Another way of putting that is: I have a life. I can't read everything. Generally, I scan the web in the morning and find some things that feel bloggable to me. Today, it was the Newsweek cover photo and headline, and that's what I wrote about. Writing about the headline, I had the reaction that it doesn't work on me. It doesn't make me want to read. It's insulting! That is a journalistic failure by Newsweek.

Now, quite possibly Newsweek sold the article short, and I was fair enough to Sullivan not to presume to know what he said. But he has melded his web presence — once fiercely independent and alive — to the rotting corpse that is Newsweek, and he bears some responsibility for his predicament. Judging from his blog post, I think he wants his article to be taken as a sane, sober, balanced assessment of Obama's presidency, but he has opted to wrap himself in Newsweek — how much money is that worth to him? — and doing that, he loses many of the readers he purports to mean to speak to and persuade.

But how sober and balanced is he really? I can't help noticing that in talking about me, he wasn't fair. He called me "right-wing," and yet I'm a political moderate, liberal on the social issues, and I voted for Obama.

So there I was, en route from Texas to Wisconsin, pulling in the 3G on my iPad, and I could see that I had an engraved invitation from Andrew Sullivan to read his article. I read it out loud, as Meade drove. (Meade is my husband, and — speaking of personal insults to me from Andrew Sullivan — Sullivan insulted us for deciding to marry!)

The cover really does misrepresent the article. The internal headline is: "How Obama's Long Game Will Outsmart His Critics." Note the difference between calling the critics "dumb" and saying Obama will "outsmart" his critics. Sullivan does a good job of marshaling the evidence that Obama has done a pretty good job — not that it's impossible to quibble. (Sullivan claims that Obama has "not had a single significant scandal to his name." What about Fast & Furious?!) But his central theme is that Obama has an 8-year rather than a 4-year plan, so we need to reelect him to "recapitalize him to entrench what he has done already and make it irreversible."

I know that last quote will make many of my readers think: That's exactly why we need to oust him! The changes he's made need to be reversed, and if we don't act now, it will be too late. 

But maybe if you take the time to read the article, you'll agree that some of what Obama has done is admirable. It's still a separate question whether we should want 4 more years of him rather than the alternative. It might be better for the country to have Mitt Romney step in and give the Republican Party a chance to take ownership of the economy and national defense. Four years ago I saw the benefit of the Democratic Party having its turn in power after the Bush years left so many people feeling frustrated and excluded.

In short, Sullivan's article is elaborate and well articulated, but it doesn't answer all the questions, and it certainly doesn't answer the insulting and off-putting question "Why Are Obama's Critics So Dumb?" I don't expect Sullivan to address the larger journalistic question in which his career is embedded, but it's obvious that Newsweek fully intended to drag in some readers with that red-meat title, and in doing that, it knowingly repelled others like me. I'm not the slightest bit apologetic for passing over an article that didn't appeal to me. I can't read the entire internet. Like every other reader, I have to make choices about what I'm going to read, and that's a choice that must necessarily be made without reading the article.

If I choose not to read the article, must I also choose not to blog about it? Of course not. I'm careful not to say anything I can't fairly say. I don't assert that I know what's in an article I haven't read, but criticizing media, I often have very good reason to write about why I'm not reading something. I analyze covers as covers and headlines as headlines. I think that's entirely appropriate.

What's gone wrong with The Daily Beast?

Kaus looks at the evidence. There's a theory that "Tina Brown has now decamped for Newsweek magazine with all her favorite hires, leaving the remnants at the Beast web site feeling abandoned like unwanted stepchildren." But even so... it's weird for page views to fall. Are the "unwanted stepchildren" really that bad?

"I’m not so egotistical as to believe that it has to be me, or it can only be me, to turn things around..."

It's the other woman: Sarah Palin.

An example of Newsweek's subtle approach to undermining Palin:

Palin has also become conversant on the subject of quantitative easing, the inflationary effects of which she illustrated with a personal anecdote. “I was ticked off at Todd yesterday,” she said. “He walks into a gas station as we’re driving over from Minnesota. He buys a Slim Jim—we’re always eating that jerky stuff—for $2.69. I said, ‘Todd, those used to be 99 cents, just recently!’ And he says, ‘Man, the dollar’s worth nothing anymore.' A jug of milk and a loaf of bread and a dozen eggs—every time I walk into that grocery store, a couple of pennies more...”

So does she understand quantitative easing or not? There's no answer. The anecdote is about inflation, which we all understand, and it's put in that paragraph as if it reflects her comprehension of the much more difficult concept, about which Newsweek provides zero information.

They choose an unflattering cover photo too.

"It's not your Grandpa Jon's magazine anymore. It's slick, contemporary and feels like something out of the new millennium..."

"... sort of New York mag meets GQ, and pretty distinct from Time, with big photo spreads, graphics that pop and draw you into the page, lots of entry points into a story, infographics, sidebars, etc."

And look:



It's so new new new new that it's letting us know that Hillary Clinton is shattering glass ceilings everywhere! That's what I want to see on the cover of a supposedly brilliant reimagined old news magazine: the oldest feminist cliché in the world.

Plus, "150 Women Who Shake the World" and "Women Make Lousy Men." Well, apparently, it's all about stroking the vanity of women.

IN THE COMMENTS:PatHMV said...

She's the THIRD female Secretary of State. Heck, we haven't had a white male Secretary of State since Warren Christopher stepped down in January 1997, 14 years ago. Not much new ground to break in this area.

BJM said:

Uh-oh...looks like Brown just fired the first volly in the battle for the NYT's female/metrosexual readership.

This could get ugly.

Popcorn anyone?

Ha ha. That's basically what I thought. The inside research must show that it's women reading stuff printed on paper. Especially older women who like reading about the triumphant struggles of older women. It's so dreary! I'm an older woman myself, and I have no interest in being patronized like that. Or in buying magazines or newspapers. I can't think of the last time I bought one. Over a year ago?
Old Dad said:
T

ina bought it for a buck. Leveraged it at 100%. She knows it's toilet paper. It's a classic quick flip con. Dress up the corpse and flip it for a $100 bucks to some gullible schmuck.

Speaking of toilet paper, is "feels like something out of the new millennium" definitely a compliment?

Can the police break down your door and burst in on you if they smell marijuana burning?

They don't have a warrant, but no warrant is needed under "exigent circumstances," such as when there is evidence of destruction of evidence. In the case argued in the Supreme Court today, after the police knocked and announced themselves, they heard a toilet flushing. Is that enough?

Kennedy uses this opportunity to ask why the smoking of marijuana itself doesn't constitute the destruction of evidence.

Tina Brown entices Robin Givhan...

... to leave the Washington Post for the new Newsweek. What a coup!

Ms. Givhan spent 15 years at The Post, most notably as fashion editor, the job that earned her a Pulitzer in 2006 for criticism....

Her writing was famously provocative and punchy. She once described Vice President Dick Cheney’s outfit at a solemn Auschwitz memorial as “the kind of attire one typically wears to operate a snow blower.”

(Link added. Picture of Cheney in his embarrassing parka at the link.)

In a column about  Condoleezza Rice, then the secretary of state, Ms. Givhan wrote about the images of sex and power that Ms. Rice’s  high boots and fitted dresses conveyed. “Rice looked as though she was prepared to talk tough, knock heads and do a freeze-frame ‘Matrix’ jump kick if necessary,” wrote Ms. Givhan.

(Link added. Pic of Condi at the link. Hey, let's see the new Secretary of State try that.)

When First Lady Michelle Obama’s sleek attire turned heads at the 2009 Inauguration, Ms. Givhan declared “the era of first lady-as-rectangle had ended.”

(Link added. With pic — showing that the era of first lady-as-Glinda had seemingly begun.)

ADDED: Above are the examples of Givhan's writing that the NYT selected. Law folk are most interested in this one about John Roberts — on the occasion of George Bush announcing his nomination to the Supreme Court. Givhan took a shot at Roberts's wife and children —  "groomed and glossy in pastel hues -- like a trio of Easter eggs, a handful of Jelly Bellies, three little Necco wafers."

There was tow-headed Jack -- having freed himself from the controlling grip of his mother -- enjoying a moment in the spotlight dressed in a seersucker suit with short pants and saddle shoes. His sister, Josie, was half-hidden behind her mother's skirt. Her blond pageboy glistened. And she was wearing a yellow dress with a crisp white collar, lace-trimmed anklets and black patent-leather Mary Janes.

(Who among us did a double take? Two cute blond children with a boyish-looking father getting ready to take the lectern -- Jack Edwards? Emma Claire? Is that you? Are all little boys now named Jack?)

The wife wore a strawberry-pink tweed suit with taupe pumps and pearls, which alone would not have been particularly remarkable, but alongside the nostalgic costuming of the children, the overall effect was of self-consciously crafted perfection. The children, of course, are innocents. They are dressed by their parents. And through their clothes choices, the parents have created the kind of honeyed faultlessness that jams mailboxes every December when personalized Christmas cards arrive bringing greetings "to you and yours" from the Blake family or the Joneses. Everyone looks freshly scrubbed and adorable, just like they have stepped from a Currier & Ives landscape.

Yeah, that was mean — but deliciously so. (Mmmm.... Necco wafers.)

Yeah, it was political. Note that Cheney was underdressed, the Robertses were overdressed, and First Lady Michelle Obama was just right.

I hope that, teamed with Tina, Robin gets even meaner and more political. I love the fashion-politics-culture genre, and I want to see Givhan do her thing. And stop fawning over Michelle Obama!

Tina Brown.

Victorious.

Hey, what happened to Kausfiles?

I was complaining yesterday that in 3 days, there were only 2 paragraphs showing on the front page of the blog that got all us bloggers noticing that it went to Newsweek.

Today, I go there and not only is there no new post on this, the fourth day of the blog, the whole page is blank. The original 2 posts are gone!

I do see some sidebar links to other stuff in Newsweek, like "GOP 'Pledge to America' Looks Unlikely to Inspire." Ha. Well, to me, Newsweek looks unlikely to inspire. What ridiculous writing! How does one look unlikely to inspire? What a phrase. Could they hide their bias a little better? They can't report on something new that the other side does without getting the jump on it and assuring their brain-dead readers that it can't possibly be any good.

Jeez, the Kausfiles blank page looks likely to be the most readable thing over there.

UPDATE: Now, the page is back, with the original 2 posts, plus a new post, "Isn't Anybody Against Porn?"

Are we really such an advanced nation that even an extreme "staunch social conservative" has to deny opposing pornography? There's something depressing about that. If not Christine O'Donnell, who?

Not just "staunch," but "extreme 'staunch'"! What's that like?

"I tell you if there's anything worse than dealing with a staunch woman... S-T-A-U-N-C-H. There's nothing worse, I'm telling you. They don't weaken, no matter what."

Also, there's a difference between "opposing pornography" and wanting opposition to pornography enacted into legislation. Her old statement about pornography and adultery was her interpretation of religion. You can have a very high standard as a matter of religion and still leave people alone as a matter of law.

Sorry, I deleted my blogroll last night. It's Mickey Kaus's fault.

I put his new, Newsweek blog on the roll, then, trying to remove his old, dead link, I clicked a button that said "remove." Apologies to all whose links I've deleted. I'll rebuild it over the next few days.

Meanwhile, while I'm on Mickey's case, let me say that I hate the format of his new blog. There's one post a day, and you have to click through a separate page to see that there are multiple topics. So, on the main page, yesterday's post — there's no more recent post (get on it, Mickey) — is headed "Andrew Breitbart 'Pissed' at Glenn Beck?" And you can see the first 10 lines or so before clicking.

Do you click? Maybe not. Maybe you don't care about AB and GB. But if you do click, you get to additional stuff that's got nothing to do with AB and GB:  "why I can't get too worked up about GOP Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell's alleged ethics violation"... "the DREAM Act... a familiar tradeoff—compassion in the short term vs. preventing large social problems in the long term..."

So why are those subjects stuck where you might never see them? It's Mickey's old style of collecting in one continuous post what most bloggers would put up as separate posts, combined with Newsweek's format of limiting what is on the front page. That format is, I believe, motivated by a desire to boost page views. This turns something that was fun about Mickey's old blog — the rambling, gossip-column style of going from item to item — into bondage to Newsweek's commercial interests. Blech!

And the truth is, I didn't click through on Mickey's first post until just now — because I didn't bite on the first-page teaser: "Get Me More Sarah Palin! Her secret weapon? She gets hit on." Ah, I realize now that he's making the point I just made. He's grasping after page views. Ha. Anyway, on the inner page, he says:

--kausfiles on Newsweek won't be quite the same as kausfiles on Slate. My early New Year's resolution is to be a lot more interactive (e.g. responding to comments), a bit less insidery, and a lot more Instapundit-y--emulating the wildly popular Tennessee blogger who posts lots of short links to worthy articles by others. Please let me know how I'm doing.

Of course, Instapundit doesn't have comments — except on a very rare occasion when a Madison, Wisconsin revolutionary storms the gates — and I think comments will be great. But this post-page business that I can't stand is something Instapundit doesn't do. One reason we love to click on Instapundit is that there will be so much stuff there right in view, on the main page. Yeah, there are a lot of links, but the vast majority of readers don't click on any given link. He sends a lot of traffic to the people — like me — whom he links, but that's because so many readers go to Instapundit, not because everyone clicks. Why does he start with so much? Because there is so much there to be seen at the first click — exactly what Mickey is not doing.

You can go back to Instapundit many times a day and get your instant reward of something new right there. By contrast, Mickey's blog, with all the fresh attention it's getting for the first 3 days, still only has 2 posts — 2 paragraphs on that front page. That's negative reinforcement for clicking. You can say you want to be Instapundit-y (and therefore wildly popular) but you've got to give and give. You can't withhold. And if you are withholding because big media is hungry for page views, the readers — me at least — are the ones who will withhold.

ADDED: Lots of links on one page is also the charm of the Drudge Report. Talk about wildly popular. It's harder to stay off it than to indulge your addiction and check it out one more time.

Kaus to Newsweek.

"Basically I write about what I feel strongly about, which is the blog's strength and also its weakness. I don't try to cover every topic. Readers know I won't waste their time unless I think I have something to add."

ADDED: The link is to the New York Observer which headlines: "Newsweek Staunches the Flow of Talent with Blogger Mickey Kaus." Well, Mickey is a staunch blogger and Newsweek may be bleeding, but the Observer needs to stanch the flow of usage errors.

Newsweek loves Rielle Hunter.

A ridiculous puff piece by Jonathan Darman. It's called — I am not kidding — "The Quiet Dignity of Rielle Hunter." It ends:

That's not to say we've heard the last of Rielle Hunter. She is too rich and intriguing a character for her story to end here. Eventually, she will talk to someone. When she does the inevitable interview, the questions will be all about the affair: Did John say he loved her? Did she love John? Did she know it was wrong to go after a married man? But I hope someone thinks to ask her about what came after: What was the strength that kept her head down through the years? And why is that strength so elusive to the rest of the world?

Ha ha ha. Well, I've already written about Darman's writing about Hunter — back in August 2008. It ends:

Our adorable reporter tries to do his job as he teeters between falling for her and figuring out what is going on.

"Where's the sexy photo of Mitt Romney? Why not a picture of Tim Pawlenty with an unbuttoned shirt relaxing on a couch in the Twin Cities?"

Bitching about the Newsweek cover. But really, Palin (obviously) posed for that picture. It's funny and it gets your attention. It's a little silly and desperate of Newsweek to use it, but...

Sexism?
	Yes. Terrible.
	Yes, but not enough to matter.
	No. Stop making crap up.
	No. But I understand your concern.
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"When I worked at Newsweek in the late 90s, I used to wonder at how all these talented people could sit at their desks in a sort of haze..."

"... it was as if a soul-deadening gas was permeating the offices."

Says Mickey Kaus, pondering the problems of magazines that summarize the week's news.

Who will restore George Bush's tattered reputation? Barack Obama!

Charles Krauthammer explains:

The beauty of democratic rotations of power is that when the opposition takes office, cheap criticism and calumny will no longer do. The Democrats now own Iraq. They own the war on al-Qaeda. And they own the panoply of anti-terror measures with which the Bush administration kept us safe these past seven years.

Which is why Obama is consciously creating a gulf between what he now dismissively calls "campaign rhetoric" and the policy choices he must make as president. Accordingly, Newsweek -- Obama acolyte and scourge of everything Bush/Cheney -- has on the eve of the Democratic restoration miraculously discovered the arguments for warrantless wiretaps, enhanced interrogation and detention without trial. Indeed, Newsweek's neck-snapping cover declares, "Why Obama May Soon Find Virtue in Cheney's Vision of Power."

This is something I thought a lot about when I decided to vote for Obama. The Democrats need their turn in the position of power so they will own and take responsibility for the things that really do need to be done. And it is an opportunity for all of us to see and understand clearly what these things are.

***

By the way, I was surprised to see Krauthammer use that vivid expression "neck-snapping," when Krauthammer is paralyzed as a result of snapping his neck in a diving accident. I suspect there are many individuals with disabilities who make a point of using the very imagery that other people might apologize for using in their presence.