So Tina Brown's job as creative consultant to troubled HBO—"If I collide with some interesting material, I’ll call or e-mail them"—has finally paid off. The former New Yorker editor is to produce a movie version of Tom Wolfe's college novel I am Charlotte Simmons. It's not as much as a stretch as one might think. The magazine veteran and the Bonfire of the Vanities author are both still on the Upper East Side scene; many editors, including Clay Felker of New York and Graydon Carter of Vanity Fair have been flattered by Hollywood into the movie business; Tina Brown's father George was himself a moderately successful producer in the UK. But it's still a perplexing role.

First of all, Charlotte Simmons is supposed among other things to be an indictment of college promiscuity, something Tina Brown had no trouble with as an ambitious young undergraduate at Oxford University with boyfriends such as Martin Amis. (I'd been looking for an excuse to rehash Brown's active college sex life.)

Second, it is a profoundly conservative book—George Bush's favorite—by an author who has mocked Tina Brown for her salon liberalism. Tom Wolfe tells of a dinner party at which the guests engaged in ritualistic disdain for George Bush, only to be punctured by one of those workers they professed to care about so much, a waiter who planned to vote for the despised Republican. Wolfe told the Guardian: "Tina and her circle in the media do not have a clue about the rest of the United States."

Above all, how on earth can Brown spare the time? In her career choices Tina Brown has of late become as promiscuous as the college students ridiculed in Charlotte Simmons. She pops up in the restroom to which reporters covering Hillary Clinton's campaign had been exiled, working on a book on the candidate which now seems redundant; she's still pitching her book on Lady Diana to middle-aged women in cities such as Pittsburgh and Naples, FL; originally British, Tina Brown is one of the candidates to take over the BBC's famed Letter from America radio broadcast; as the supposed founder of the forthcoming Daily Beast web site, she's been establishing her internet bona fides talking to the dreary Online News Association.

That wouldn't matter except that she's been presenting herself as an internet convert, full of passion for a new medium “vibrant with life instead of constantly obsessed with fears of its own extinction.” She's a founder of a website which is supposed to launch in weeks. One would have thought Barry Diller would be expecting the degree of maniacal commitment that Brown once brought to magazines and that internet entrepreneurs are expected to bring to their ventures.