The New York Times Magazine

The New York Times website has just posted a preview of this week's Times Magazine featuring an excerpt from media columnist David Carr's forthcoming book, The Night of the Gun.

The story, like the book, tells of Mr. Carr's years of drug and alcohol abuse and his various scrapes with the law as he somehow managed to rise in journalism and raise his twin daughters. There's also a video in which Mr. Carr explains the book's title and how his attempt to remember "the night of the gun" set the tone for his investigative approach to his own experiences.

Not included in the extract? Tom Arnold, who plays a special role in Mr. Carr's book and in his life.

There's an old philosophy in journalism that when you're in a jam, or you're at a loss for an idea, do a pets story! No matter what, it's almost always a hit with readers (just like it is on the web). So just over a month after the Emily Gould cover story in the Times Magazine, which came a week before a puffy profile on Tyra Banks, the Magazine has its pet story on the cover for this weekend.

And it works beautifully. The story is about our increasing—and maddening—tendency to medicate pets for things like anxiety and compulsiveness. James Vlahos, a science writer for National Geographic and Popular Science, is a first-time writer for the magazine, and we want to see more.  read more »

George Lois is nothing if not opinionated. The universally heralded adman and creator of Esquire's most canonical covers from the '60s, shares his take on AMC's Mad Men with The New York Times Magazine's Alex Witchel this week:

When I hear ‘Mad Men,’ it’s the most irritating thing in the world to me. When you think of the ’60s, you think about people like me who changed the advertising and design worlds. The creative revolution was the name of the game. This show gives you the impression it was all three-martini lunches. ...

We worked from 5:30 in the morning until 10 at night.  read more »

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This past winter, Paul Tough, a story editor at The New York Times Magazine, brought Emily Gould, a recently retired editor of Gawker.com, to the sixth floor of the paper’s skyscraper on Eighth Avenue. Sometimes, writers meet with the magazine’s editor in chief, Gerry Marzorati, and this was one of those times.

Mr. Marzorati had never before heard of Ms. Gould, he told Off the Record.  read more »

Emily Gould's New York Times Magazine cover story hasn't even landed with a thud on front porches and newsstands yet, but it's already garnering a ton of criticism online.

Some of the critical outlets weren't surprising.

Like Gawker, for example, since Ms. Gould's article is in many ways a rebuke of the site.

Gawker's first post officially linked to Ms. Gould's Times Magazine story received 9,133 views and 170 comments.

A follow-up post clocked in at 8,814 views with 149 comments, while a post announcing comments had closed on NYTimes.com received only 4,150 views and 83 comments.

Sadly, another, about the article's photos, topped out at only 2,556 views and 55 comments.

Finally, it seemed, for Gawker, the horse had been kicked to death.

New York magazine's Daily Intel had a wonkishly incisive post in which its editors calculated how many dollars Ms. Gould was presumed to have been paid for the words "I" and "me" in the 7,937-word article. (Eight hundred and sixty dollars, by Daily Intel's math. One wonders how many I's and me's were in New York's equally controversial first person cover story this week.)  read more »

A "Make Ready" of this week's New York Times Magazine just arrived, featuring the much buzzed about cover story by former Gawker editor Emily Gould. The story is headlined Exposed and features three photos of Ms. Gould excluding the cover. (One photo shows just her hands at a laptop, an Instant Message window and a web page on the screen.)

The article is heavily diaristic; for a magazine that exists to explain "The Way We Live Now" every week, it's light in sociology or cultural grasping, focusing instead on the writer's relationships and her job.

Samples after the jump:  read more »

"Every generation thinks it's special—my grandparents because they remember horses and buggies, my parents because of the Depression. The over-30's are special because they knew the Red Scare of Korea, Chuck Berry and beatniks. My older sister is special because she belonged to the first generation of teen-agers (before that, people in their teens were "adolescents"), when being a teen-ager was still fun.... My generation is special because of what we missed rather than what we got, because in a certain sense we are the first and the last. The first to take technology for granted."–Joyce Maynard, An 18-Year-Old Looks Back On Life, The New York Times Magazine, April 23, 1972.

July 4, 2006 1:37, 1:39 a.m. 4 pounds, 10 ounces; 4 pounds, 14 ounces  read more »

July 4, 20061:37, 1:39 a.m.

4 pounds, 10 ounces; 4 pounds, 14 ounces  read more »

The Village Voice announced that David Blum is the latest choice for its hard-to-fill editor-in-chief post. The memo making the announcement is after the jump.  read more »

An irregular posting from the New York Observer's mens' blog, The Cockpit—in which our manly hero reads the New York Times and realizes Peter Sagal has been utterly unmanned. The Incident at Comiskey OK, so I'm reading the New York Times Magazine, and I'm in "The Funny Pages," which everybody likes to say isn't funny, ha ha, get it? Except, you know, all the complainers are New York Times readers, by definition, which means they don't know from the funny pages, 'cuz if they did, they'd know that funniness is by no means a necessary quality for the actual funny pages, 'cuz otherwise Broom Hilda and Non Sequitur and Dennis the Menace would have been kicked to the curb long since. And Cathy, Jesus.

What defines the "funny pages" is that they have the FUNNIES on them, aka the comics, which the pedants should be warned are not necessarily comical, for instance, again, Cathy. Although some of them are comical, like Mark Trail. Man, it would be boss if Mark Trail showed up in Cathy and punched Cathy in the face. Pow!  read more »

Old pal and New York Times Magazine writer Benoit Denizet-Lewis alerts us to a hot opportunity! (The redactions are ours.)

From: "Benoit Denizet-Lewis" Date: October 14, 2005 3:56:16 PM EDT Subject: my new roommate Hi All, Some of you know that I have a new roommate, Natalie. What I just found is that she's an AMAZING [REDACTED]. She was being all quiet/modest about it, but her talent is unbelievable (I don't get easily blown [REDACTED] but DAMN). Have a [REDACTED] to Natalie's [REDACTED] at www.nataliericcio.com. My favorites are "Lovelight On," "Come, Come, Come," and "Waiting." Peace Out Benoit Denizet-Lewis Contributing Writer, New York Times Magazine www.benoitlewis.com 617-XXX-XXXX

 read more »

Seems like all those sweaty press conferences this summer about breaking ground on the Calatrava transit station, fortifying the Freedom Center and subsidizing Goldman Sachs did little for the way New Yorkers view the Governor. Just 18 percent of city voters want Pataki in charge at Ground Zero, compared to 24 percent in May, according to a Quinnipiac poll cited by Crain’s. Some 65 percent of those surveyed would rather the Mayor take the reins. The Mayor said yesterday that’s exactly what he plans to do.

This turn of sentiment has something, though perhaps not everything, to do with the Governor’s pushing out the International Freedom Center. The Times teamed up with Pace University for an excruciatingly focused poll also released today—of 518 residents living below 14th Street—and found them split on the Governor’s decision.

David Dunlap adds:

“And 1,011 New Yorkers were asked six weeks ago by Blum & Weprin Associates for The New York Times Magazine what they thought should be built at ground zero: something shorter or taller than the World Trade Center. Fifty-four percent replied, ‘Any size building as long as they stop arguing about it.’”  read more »

-Matthew Schuerman

We all saw the photo on the cover of The New York Times Magazine: a skeletal Joan Didion showing us  read more »

In the generally fun New York Times Magazine New York Politics issue (don't miss the back-page Sheinkopf monologue), Matt Bai's piece on Hillary Clinton is a useful antidote to the deathless "Hillary Moves Right" meme.

Bai makes the point that The Politicker has been hammering at for a while: Hillary's not "tacking Right" in a conventional way. She doesn't seem ever to have been a real lefty. She is where she's always been, albeit stressing different elements of her political persona at different times.

His take, for what it's worth:

"The truth that emerges from talking to many of those who have worked closely with the Clintons is that Hillary's ideology is best understood through the prism of her upbringing. She was raised as a Republican and a devout Methodist in suburban Chicago, and these influences, particularly in the turbulence of the 60's, created two philosophical impulses that were commonly linked in that era. The first is an unshakable notion of right and wrong and an almost missionary zeal for imposing it on others, mainly through political action. The second is a strand of moral conservatism that borders on prudishness."

Hillary also flirted with the student left, but Bai chalks up the public sense of Hillary as a leftist to her role, in the White House, as ambassador to the left from Bill/Dick Morris triangulation land.

That may be true, but there's also more to it: Hillary's camp, at times, encourages the "Hillary Moves Right" story, since it's a way to amplify her centrist positions. If her anodyne words on abortion earlier this year were not just anodyne, but also old news, they wouldn't have made A1 of the Times.

You can argue that this is a short-term gain, and that the notion that Hillary is shifting her positions damages her in the long term. But Hillary's formidable team doesn't seem to have done anything to pour cold water on the stories on her "shift" on abortion and religion. (They easily could have by, say, putting out copies of her old speeches in which she said exactly the same stuff.)

Bai also paints Hillary as more of a centrist in the Senate than she's really been. Her gestures to the Right tend to be on easy issues, like violence in video games. She'll stand next to Santorum and Gingrich on these side-issues, but that's very different from, say, McCain picking up the fight against global warming. On important and contested issues (with a sole, important exception), Hillary has been a party-line Democrat. Her cultural conservatism -- Bai has a nice scene of her being appalled that young Chelsea would pierce her ears -- hasn't been tested in a public way, though she has said that she would have voted for the Defense of Marriage Act.

Anyway, Bai thinks that Hillary's main challenge for 2008 will come from the Kos-land, where the "net-roots" (whose rise Bai has been anticipating for quite a while now) have a different, take-no-prisoners way of doing business.

Over at Tapped, meanwhile, they're of another opinion: that Hillary's real problem won't be style, but substance, and that substance is the war.  read more »

Depending on how Iraq looks in a couple of years, it seems plausible that there's an element of truth to both arguments: Hillary will have to cope with an anti-war movement inside the party that draws its organizing strength from the Web.

One thing that's for sure: They'll still be writing the "Hillary Moves Right" story.

From The $10,000 Question by John Tierney, The New York Times, Aug. 23, 2005:

I don't share Matthew Simmons's angst, but I admire his style. He is that rare doomsayer who puts his money where his doom is.

After reading his prediction, quoted Sunday in the cover story of The New York Times Magazine, that oil prices will soar into the triple digits, I called to ask if he'd back his prophecy with cash. Without a second's hesitation, he agreed to bet me $5,000."

Whatever happened to the good old days when only 'citizen journalists' baited The Times?  read more »

—Matt Haber

Last Tuesday, April 26, a disgraced former New York Times Magazine writer named Michael Finkel was d  read more »

We in no way mean to throw cold water on the Times's excellent scoop that ex-Senator Bob Kerrey is thinking about running for Mayor, a story which brightened our Sunday. (Though we don't blog on Sundays. Sorry!)

But we did do a quick Nexis search of "Kerrey" and "considering," and it gave us some caution.

First of all, Kerrey was widely reported to be considering a 2004 presidential bid -- until the New York Times Magazine carried an article accusing him of war crimes in Vietnam.

Concord Monitor, November, 1997: ""I haven't made that decision yet. I'm widely rumored to be running" [for President]."

Manchester Union-Leader, July 1994: Bob Kerrey "has told at least one high-ranking Democrat that he is seriously considering taking on the sitting President in a 1996 primary battle."

Kerrey did run in 1992, but later said this:  read more »

"That was the problem last time.... I only threw my hat in. If I do it this time, I put a lot more in."

It happened one Saturday afternoon while walking down Seventh Avenue in Park Slope: I actually stopp  read more »

"I see part of the magazine's job, a big part of the magazine's job, as starting conversations," New  read more »

Over the past 25 years, Thomas Nozkowski has established a sturdy career as an abstract painter.  read more »

What's this: We're still hung up on day traders?  read more »

Monday, July 12, was a big day because my wife was taking her driver's test and we were closing on a  read more »