Malcolm Gladwell deepens our understanding of smarm by explaining that when Dave Eggers wrote the words "Do not be critics," he meant people should be critics.

Last month, Isaac Fitzgerald, the newly hired editor of BuzzFeed's newly created books section, made a remarkable but not entirely surprising announcement: He was not interested in publishing negative book reviews. In place of "the scathing takedown rip," Fitzgerald said, he desired to promote a positive community experience.

The Circle, Dave Eggers’ new novel about an increasingly totalitarian social networking corporation, won’t hit shelves until next Tuesday. But the work of “pure speculative fiction,” which was excerpted on the cover of last week’s New York Times magazine, has already earned adulation from fans in high places (the Wall Street Journal called Eggers a modern-day muckraking Upton Sinclair) and accusations from critics on the margins—in particular Kate Losse, former ghostwriter to Mark Zuckerberg, who says Eggers ripped off her 2012 Facebook tell-all, The Boy Kings.

In your pleasant Tuesday media column: Glenn Beck vs. Joe Klein, a stranded-in-the-airport magazine, Dave Eggers wants to marry print and live in Never-Neverland with it, and Les Moonves struggles through another year of penurious wages.

The "real Timothy McSweeney" has died.

Predictably, Dave Eggers wrote a remembrance of J.D. Salinger for The New Yorker. And here I could riff on this, but I'd rather just copy-paste this comment from their website...

The moment's almost here: one lucky bidder is going to be the proud owner of our charity-friendly National Book Award-winner and James Franco-endorsed copy of Sarah Palin's Going Rogue, which is going to benefit Save The Children. Not Dave Eggers.

At 2009's National Book Awards we honored Sarah Palin's Going Rogue as 2010's frontrunner for the NBA Fiction Prize by getting it signed by the gathered literary luminaries. And now, it can be the best charitable, tax-deductible present ever.

In your trepidatious Tuesday media column: we hear the Time Inc. layoffs hit Fortune (and others?) today, BusinessWeek speaks robot language, Dave Eggers will not stop saving print, and a horrible massacre of journalists in the Philippines.

2009's National Book Awards went down last night. In delightful twists of irony, they were a) sponsored by Google, b) held on Wall Street, and c) James Franco was there. So were Party Crash Photog Mo Pitz and I. BOOKS!

After a couple good weeks at the theaters, its a bit of a minefield awaiting your weekend entertainment. But no one ever said going to the movies was a coward's game; once more into the breach!

Dave Eggers, lord of twee literature, has declared he will personally save print media. But not until the author and McSweeney's publisher starts selling this lamentable little iPhone app.

You may recall a few weeks ago that Dave Eggers promised to email anyone who needed reassurance that print wasn't dying. He even emailed Gawker! In a Q & A with Salon, Eggers insists that America's children are print's savior.

Dave Eggers has a new book coming out in October! It's an adaptation(?) of the children's book Where the Wild Things Are called The Wild Things, and the cover is, well, precious!

Coming just on the heels of twindie (twee + indie) movie Away We Go, the film's co-writer Dave Eggers is releasing a new book. It's a non-fiction tome called Zeitoun, following a Muslim-American family during and after Hurricane Katrina.

Last month, San Franciscan literary figure Dave Eggers promised to personally email anyone who feared that print is dead, and cheer them up. He's done it! Here's your full Dave Eggers 'Print Lives' Reassurance Email:

Do you fear that Print Is Dead? Allow America's most venerable human, Dave Eggers, to assure you—via email—that it is not:

Liza Minnelli turns 63 today. Darryl Strawberry is 47. James Taylor is turning 61. Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney is turning 62. Playwright Edward Albee is 81. Pete Doherty is 30. Author Dave Eggers is turning 39. Publicist Ken Sunshine is 61. Director Rob Cohen (The Fast and the Furious, XXX) is 60. Al Jarreau is turning 69. Actor Aaron Eckhart is 41. Novelist Carl Hiaasen is 56. SportsCenter anchor Steve Levy is 44. And the most famous male porn star in history, Ron Jeremy, is 56 today.

What is the twee-est contribution that literary twee boy, McSweeney's Dave Eggers, could make to the world of music? Oh—he whistles on the new Aimee Mann track. Of course. [via Daily Intel, who has the audio clip!]

"All the Sad, Young Literary Men has too many men, none of whom is particularly sad, literary or, for that matter, interesting." That's The L Magazine's Jonny Diamond on N+1 editor Keith Gessen's first novel. The interesting bit is how Gawker, you dear commenters, and the scribblers of Magical Brooklynism fit into the equation. "Gessen has rightly and eloquently lamented the impoverishment of intellectual discourse in 21st-century America, particularly in a New York literary scene that prefers whimsy to gravitas, adolescence to adulthood and typography to teleology." (Yeah, Gessen and his privileged band of bores are the answer. Okay, I'll stop.) "And if lit journal-cum-publishing house McSweeney's has come to stand (albeit unfairly so) as shorthand for this particular style of whimsy-sotted, Brooklyn-born preciousness, then online media gossip Gawker has served as its natural enemy, employing snark and irony to interrupt the daydreams of thousands of Michel Gondrys and Miranda Julys." Sounds good. But it isn't!