A more cocksure man might have played along, but Graydon Carter's tenure atop Vanity Fair has apparently taught him the danger of hype and high expectations, so he's denied a flattering sex story.
The Associated Press's list of the Top 10 Quotes of 2008 featured two from Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman. But Krugman, it turns out, was not actually quotable enough to merit credit for either.
You may have been surprised to open the Times today to see a letter to the editor by the mayor of Paris harshing on Caroline Kennedy's bid to take over Hillary Clinton's seat in the Senate. Why would the mayor of Paris, like, you know, care? He doesn't: "Earlier this morning, we posted a letter that carried the name of Bertrand Delanoë, the mayor of Paris, sharply criticizing Caroline Kennedy. This letter was a fake. It should not have been published." In a related story, officials on the Caribbean island of Monserrat have no particular opinion on whether Hiram Monseratte should give up his State Senate seat. [NYT]
From page 8 of this week's New Yorker: "EDITOR'S NOTE: On the Contributors page of the December 1st issue, the book "In Sickness and in Power," attributed to the New Yorker writer David Owen, was in fact written by a different David Owen." Even funnier? The "other David Owen" is, in fact, the former British Foreign Secretary one of the founders of their Social Democratic Party. And it's Lord Owen to you.
"Vanity Fair is taking over the Four Seasons Grill Room this morning... The magazine is shooting the power lunch hot spot and its regulars for an upcoming piece on the restaurant’s 50th anniversary. Among the regular customers expected to participate in the shoot are Blackstone Group founders Pete Peterson and Steve Schwartzman [sic]; designers Ralph Lauren, Zac Posen and Thom Browne; Martha Stewart; Aby Rosen; Peggy Siegel [sic]; Lazard CEO Bruce Wasserstein; Dolly Lenz; the Edgar Bronfmans, both Sr. and Jr.; former New York mayors Ed Koch and David Dinkins; Georgette Mosbacher; Ed Lewis; Tim and Nina Zagat; Leonard Lauder of The Estée Lauder Cos.; Henry Kissinger, and gossips Richard Johnson and Liz Smith." [WWD]
This morning, I blogged that Dell had "unpublished" CTO Kevin Kettler from the company's executive staff page. Kettler had been planning to leave as part of a reorganization, but his sudden disappearance from the management headshots would indicate a food fight behind the scenes. Truth is, Dell had never put Kettler on its exec staff page. As CTO, he wasn't considered one of the suits. There's a lesson here for me: John Paczkowski, from whom I got the factoid that Kettler had been removed from the management page, can be as wrong as Valleywag when he really tries. Sorry for the error. I have only one question for Paczkowski's publisher, AllThingsD: You guys hiring? (Photo by CNET/Stephen Shankland)
I feel sorry for Courtney Holt. Partly because the MTV executive is rumored to be taking a terrible job running MySpace Music, a feature of the social network masquerading as a separate company. But mostly because of his name. In a previous article, I was enough of a bonehead to refer to Holt as "she." Trying to do my part to promote the role of women in the tech industry, okay?
Here's a new ethical conundrum for Randy Cohen, advice columnist for the New York Times magazine's Ethicist: is a letter-writer obligated to tell an advice columnist that their ethical dilemma has already been dealt with by the same paper? We were wondering if the Ethicist stole a letter from the Social Qs column that runs in the Sunday Styles—after all, they printed the same question this week that appeared in the Styles in September. Well, we heard from Beth Rose Feurstein, the woman who sent the question to both columns, which involved a blind date who turned out to be a serial blind-date-canceller who kept invoking the same "got hit while riding my bicycle and ended up in the ER" excuse. And she says when the Times fact-checker called, she didn't bother to let them know that the question had already run:
Everybody in the media fucks up once in a while. Sometimes the fallout is bad. Remember when Bloomberg accidentally ran Steve Jobs' obituary while he was still alive? Then shortly afterward they mistakenly ran an old headline about United's bankruptcy as if it was current, and temporarily destroyed the company's stock price? Both are very bad errors, but at least Bloomberg apologized for them. Which is more than you can say for Dow Jones, which handily fails to mention its own mistake that crushed GE's stock price yesterday: With 15 minutes left in the trading day yesterday, Dow Jones ran a mistaken report that (almost singlehandedly) erased the day's gains in the DJ Industrial Average:
Sometimes the wheels of justice turn slowly, it's true. But it is surely unexpected that a Supreme Court justice, of all people, would have to wait so long for deliverance from reckless cruelty. Over and over and over again, year after year since 1980, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has had to endure the sight of her name carelessly rendered "Ginsberg" or some similarly awful facsimile in the pages of the Times. Would the paper deign, even once, to run a correction? No, it would not. Any formal objections were presumably, well, overruled. Until now.
In its story today on the rise of mall-based tattoo parlors like Tattoo Nation, the WSJ said that Tattoo Nation "has bought Inked magazine to be a larger part of the tattoo culture." Inked's Jason Buhrmester emails us to clarify: "We are actually published by Don Hellinger, the owner of Nylon and Nylon Guys. We want nothing to do with Tattoo Nation and begrudge it for wasting valuable space that could be filled with a tasty Orange Julius." The more you know.
Remember December of 2006? We sure don't. However, that was the year that Wall Streeters, as we noted at the time, took home $23.9 billion in bonuses. Their money trickled down to certain segments of the economy, like image consultant/personal shoppers, who certainly had a busy season. One of them, Samantha von Sperling, told Bloomberg about how her phone was ringing off the hook in search of $50,000 canary diamond engagement rings, $175,000-a-week outings to the Amalfi Coast and $185,000 Marquis Jets gift cards. The market correction probably means that Mrs. von Sperling's phone is a bit quieter this year, but we recently heard from her husband, Georg, who said our two-year-old item had a glaring error that demands its own correction:
The Times ran a special editors' note this morning accusing one of its freelancers of twisting the truth "to fit his theme, contrary to the Times' standards of integrity." The writer, Paul Burnham Finney, apparently distorted an American Psychological Association survey to reflect his article's thesis that business travel and the Wall Street meltdown are stressing people out more than anything else. In fact, the survey showed the economy generally is stressing people out. Also, he rewrote a therapist's quote to also be more specific in the same way, the paper said. Having developed something of a history running false stories, the Times seems to have been eager to get out in front of this one, running its correction barely one week after the original article came out — quite a speedy timeframe for deciding one of your contributors is a liar. The full editor's note is after the jump.
