Malcolm Gladwell's fellow intellectuals, bloggers and Canadians were the first to turn against the New Yorker essayist's accessible and apparently all-too-convincing ideas; now the various professional classes are, one after another, joining the backlash against his DANGEROUSLY misleading anecdotes. Fearsome reviewer Michiko Kakutani was brutal in the Times ("glib, poorly reasoned and thoroughly unconvincing"); the Malcolm Gladwell of computer programmers rather ironically ripped into him ("utterly lunatic theories"); and now a pilot writing in Salon warns that Gladwell will kill us all! Or at least perpetuate untrue stereotypes, false assumptions and incorrect statistics around commercial airline safety, which is almost as dangerous, if you'll grant us some Gladwellian license here. Take, for example, this exchange:

New Random House CEO Markus Dohle, who put forth a program of massive changes at the publisher yesterday, is now totally excited that his house's books made the most prestigious end-of-the-year books list at the New York Times Book Review. Dohle "delighted in the fact that fully nine of the ten books on the NYTBR list had been published by Random House." So he sent another memo, which the New York Observer duly captured. Instead of the last, ominous one ("a plan for our future that aligns existing strengths and publishing affinities and fosters teamwork throughout the company") which translated into "we killed two of our divisions and shuffled a lot of imprints around; maybe people will lose their jobs also," this memo is more of an OMG! type affair.

Oh, to be a fancy author these days! Palgrave MacMillan is an academic publisher, founded in 1843, that's published everyone from Keats to Thomas Hardy to Rudyard Kipling, John Maynard Keynes, and Margaret Mitchell. Yet even they are worried about the predicted holiday book-buying holocaust. So they're having a BIG SALE for and turning to the last reliable market for books: authors and their friends. Um, so: The Palgrave MacMillan authors should buy copies of books from Palgrave, at a 55% discount. Happy holidays! (25 copy minimum.)

A memo from Simon & Schuster president Carolyn Reidy: "Earlier today we enacted a reduction in staff in which 35 positions across the company were eliminated, from areas including our publishing divisions and international, operations and sales."

Random House has a new CEO, Markus Dohle (who previously worked for a printing company owned by corporate owner Bertelsmann AG), and he's finally made the big changes people have been expecting for months, reports Leon Neyfakh at the New York Observer. Dohle just released a "jaw-dropping memo" that was decidedly un-cheery—as well as "effective immediately." The memo is too hard to read in its corporatespeak ("created a plan for our future that aligns existing strengths and publishing affinities and fosters teamwork throughout the company") so we will translate:

Remember when absurdist Brit novelist Martin Amis said a Racist Thing in the London Times Magazine back in 2006? "There's a definite urge—don't you have it?—to say, 'The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.' What sort of suffering? Not let them travel. Deportation, further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they're from the Middle East or Pakistan... Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children." Now he's given an "Exclsuive [sic] interview" post-debacle to the Huffington Post (why them? It's as puzzling as his poorly-chosen remarks). His excuse?

Media critic Michael Wolff's new book, The Man Who Owns the News, is excerpted in the London Guardian today. But it glosses over the details of a joke in particularly poor taste that the reptilian Newscorp billionaire told his Sun tabloid editor Rebekah Wade—who was was arrested a few years back for assaulting her supposed "hard man" British actor husband—after "a few drinks in a posh London restaurant," about gay sex. "Seeing [Wall Street Journal publisher Robert] Thomson arrive, Murdoch whispered: "For God's sake, don't tell Robert what I said. He's a gentrified man ... very clever," it reads. The actual joke, as it appears in the book, comes after the jump.

The Wind in the Willows —featuring the adventures of Mr. Frog and Mole, among others—has been entertaining kids since 1908. Its cover has gone through countless iterations, none of them quite as irksome as the cover of the 100th anniversary Vintage Classics edition, which they allowed a kid to draw. He was the winner of the cover contest! "It took me about an hour and a half to paint, quite a long time," young Harry Jones told London's Times. But it's all scribbly. Here, compare to Wind in the Willows covers from over the years:

We've heard mostly sad news about publishing recently, from Harcourt temporarily freezing manuscript acquisitions to layoffs at Doubleday to Random House freezing pensions to holiday sales predicted to be awful this year.... but in what the Times calls the industry's "split personality," publisher Hatchette is giving out extra bonuses this year. So Christmas isn't cancelled for everyone!

Web publishing zealot Jeff Jarvis like to yell Darwinian slogans at print journalists . "There is no divine right for newsroom jobs," he wrote earlier this month. "Nor is printing and trucking an eternal verity of the field." It was surprising, then, to hear the media futurist's complaint about today's cover story on him in the Observer: The paper didn't promote his new dead-trees book! And after he gave the reporter so much of his precious time:

Everyone knows that New Yorker writer and Tipping Point author Malcolm Gladwell is an expert self-promoter. He's rolled out quite the campaign for his latest book, Outliers: webcasts, doing TV appearances on the CBS Evening News, CNN and the Colbert Report, speaking everywhere, etc. But we just saw a television ad for his book on MSNBC, which is unusual for nonficton—the only other TV ads for books we can think of are for potboiler novels, not books by "counterintuitive pop business theorists." Remember, most authors are lucky to get the promotion budget for a five-city book tour at most—and forget about a fun release party. Click to watch one more reason to start creating "You the Brand"!

It's true: a book by lame-duck First Lady, librarian Laura Bush, will really and truly be foisted upon us. She's talking to publishers! [AP]

We thought the deep freeze predicted by the Observer and others for book publishing this winter would result in more boring blockbuster-hopeful books and lower advances for new and middle-range authors. But a publishing company temporarily suspending the buying of new books is even worse. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, reports the NYT, the "publisher of authors including Philip Roth, Jonathan Safran Foer, Günter Grass and J. R. R. Tolkien, has temporarily suspended acquisitions of new manuscripts." Yet another disaster for people who write for a living, and one less option for laid-off and underemployed professional typists who thought that "getting a book proposal together" might be a decent career move.According to Josef Blumenfeld, vice president of communications:

Popular nostalgia act Ann Coulter's new book is called GUILTY: How the Liberal Media Is Biased Against the Lizard People. Well, just kidding about that subtitle but you get the basic idea. The book is about how Ann Coulter is still marketable. Maybe her jaw will be unwired in time for the promotional tour. [Drudge, Earlier: Ann Coulter's Top Secret New Book!]

How convenient that former $2,000 an hour girl Natalie McLennan's escorting memoir is being released tomorrow, hot on the heels of Spitzer escort Ashley Dupre's tearful Dianne Sawyer interview! Sometimes, it's just synergy, sometimes it's just luck. Kind of like the time a website sprung up "accusing" her of ratting out her former friend/call girl comrade Ashley Dupre to law enforcement officials, which resulted in a nice Page Six item. (The guest column a few days later was gravy.) For someone who's in a line of work that makes publicity dangerous, McLennan has always known how to work the press; she made the cover of New York magazine in 2005. Now that her book is finally out pretty much the only thing anyone cares about is the Ashley Dupre stuff. So, what does it say? Well. Frankly, it's mostly pornographic! So if you're offended by hottt XXX lesbian action, please do not click here.

New York magazine broke news of a new gig for Silda Wall Spitzer, wife of the disgraced, whoring former governor: The former corporate attorney will try and "recruit new investors" (good luck with that) for a hedge fund run by some of her husband's old friends. It's a living, and is already helping her look less victim-y and dependent. Less wisely, Silda's husband is thinking about writing a book. Not one that grapples with the hooker thing and maybe clears the air, allowing him to walk past construction sites without getting snickered at, mind you, but one returning him to the holier-than-thou position that once made him so reviled:

I know that you will probably stab me in the heart with a wooden stake for doing this, but I'm going to write another post about Twilight. You there, under the rock? Twilight is: spectacularly shitty book series by Stephanie Meyer and now a movie (out today! it's bad!) about a dimensionless girl named Bella and the suave sex vampire that she loves, named Edward. It's swoony moony goony shit, and, again, is terribly, monstrously, embarrassing-for-the-whole-of-the-craftly bad. So why on earth is it so popular, and what is Twilight, I mean really what is it? I will attempt to answer those IMPORTANT questions after the jump. Then you can elucidate (please! please!) in the comments.

Famously harsh New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani has clearly taken a liking to prolific New Yorker writer and "Deadline Poet" columnist for The Nation Calvin Trillin's latest political book: apparently moved to write a poem, she reviewed it in verse. You know, in the style of his book, also written in verse! "Trillin recounted this all with verve and élan/Charting the candidates’ every slogan and plan." Check out the excerpt—and then you can turn the table and judge her poetic efforts.

They say human happiness depends largely on your position (social, economic) relative to those around you, an axiom that would explain why the bunch of struggling New York writers at the National Book Awards on Wall Street seemed so giddy in press reports about the "determined... party." "Our dinner here is larger than it's been in five years... we have an afterparty (with) 300, 400 people coming," the executive director of the foundation behind the gala told GalleyCat (video after the jump). Call it the awards' year of hope, then, particularly with the hopey president-elect getting a shout-out in several speeches and an African American author taking home the nonfiction prize for the first time since 1991. A short (fun!) video and winners after the jump.

Surprisingly, everyone appears to have missed the subtle nuance in a chapter of comedian Denis Leary's book entitled "Autism, Schmautism." Go figure. Controversy arose after the Post excerpted a paragraph from Leary's Why We All Suck reading, in part, "I don't give a [bleep] what these crackerjack whack jobs tell you - yer kid is NOT autistic." Last night Leary appeared on the Daily Show to explain that he was quoted out of context, and in reality was taking a sophisticated stand on the scientific mystery of surging autism cases: