• Kirsten Dunst bailed early on the Spiderman 3 premiere to attend her own birthday party, which seems like a good call to us. [Page Six]
  

"My 22-year-old son, a humor writer who finds Imus an anachronistic and unfunny throwback to the racial-insult humor of the Frank Sinatra-Sammy Davis Jr. Rat Pack ilk, raises a complementary issue. He argues that when Sacha Baron Cohen makes fun of Jews and gays, he can do so because he's not doing it as himself but as a fictional character." That is such a good point in the Times op-ed pages! Gee, I would be interested to hear more of this precocious youngster's deep thoughts. But where to find them? I'll just look at Amazon under humor and... ah ha! Check that out! Simon Rich's book came out April 3rd. Proceeding to checkout!



Everybody Hates Don Imus [NYT]

What do the king and queen of weekend media do together when they're alone? We find out, all gory details intact, in this month's issue of Harvard Magazine, a once-stodgy alumni glossy that has reportedly been trying for a sexier, more 'now' sort of look ever since the presposterous 02138 started crowding the field with their famous attitude and cool thoughts about lifestyle.

Fall has always been the busy season in publishing, with its inevitable crush of titles scrambling for attention and a toehold in bookstores, but at no time in recent memory has there been such a traffic jam of big-name authors unleashing top-drawer books. Already, the October best-seller lists read like a who's who: Mitch Albom, Bob Woodward, Frank Rich, John Grisham, Michael Connelly, John le Carr , Cormac McCarthy, Charles Frazier and Janet Evanovich. In coming weeks, they are likely to be joined by literary rock stars like Stephen King, Michael Crichton, Richard Ford, Thomas Harris and Thomas Pynchon.

We're going to go for one more bite of the apple on that 9/11 photo story. It's been previously established that Thomas Hoepker took a photo of Brooklyn hipsters acting in a potentially douchebaggy way on the day of the terrorist attacks. Frank Rich weighed in at the NYT, saying that they weren't callous, just American. David Plotz of Slate disagreed, declaring them not douchebags but citizens engaged in discussion. One of the photo subjects, a Brooklyn artist, popped up to say that, yeah, that's exactly what they were doing, and had Hoepker looked a little more closely, he would have realized that. Now Hoepker himself emerges, rather articulately discussing the ambiguity of the photo itself. At this point we're inclined to believe that the person who comes off the worst in this scenario is Frank Rich, who used the image to promote his political agenda, but our view may change when Slate publishes the next few installments in the series ("I Published That 9/11 Photo," "I Wrote That New York Times Column," "I Flew That Plane Into The Tower," etc.). We'll keep you posted.

Yesterday we asked you whether the young hipsters in the "taboo" 9/11 photo above were callous douchebags or concerned citizens; a slight majority of you opted for douchebags. As it turns out, one of the subjects got in touch with Slate. Walter Sipser, a Brooklyn artist (because, you know, of course) disputes both the "callous" characterization and the accusation of youth (dude's 45). You can read his statement here and decide for yourself; we're just going to say that, looking at those frames, we've decided that our original dichotomy may have unnecessarily suggested that the two options were mutually exclusive.

The story so far:

It's not so much that we don't quite understand this fish-nor-fowl business of Bruce Bartlett's work being billed on the Times homepage as though he's an op-ed columnist when he's more of a Suellentropian highbrow blogger. It's not that he's seemingly using the Times and this quasi-op-ed gig as little more than an ongoing plug for his new book, which his bio helpfully notes "has just been published by Doubleday." It's not even that his latest bit — the offering being flacked on the homepage — is just repeating the same stuff Paul Krugman has been saying for months.

• Times Op-Edster Frank Rich's son Simon signs a two-book deal before he even graduates from Harvard. Well, good for you, Simon — but can you make a mean and tasty Chex Mix like Dad? [HC]
• Best publicist quote of 2006 thus far: "I very much resent and am amazed that our agency was not named to the shortlist of 'Small PR Firm of the Year' by PRWeek." Courtesy, of course, of Ronn [sic] Torossian. [PRWeek]
• Because every alcoholic is a lonely soul, the Drinking With Steve DVD features a fellow boozehound sitting there, silently, drinking beers and smoking cigarettes. If he had a bong, it'd be perfect. [Ad Freak via Pulp Culture]
• A blog solely devoted to bad pitches — as if there were any other kind? [Bad Pitch Blog]
• The CorcoDevil's new ad campaign tugs on your heartstrings, pokes at your stomach, and ultimately fucks with your bowels. [Corcoran]
• The soft launch at Morimoto begins; start saving your paychecks now. [Jossip]
• The day we lost our virginity, we realized that Cosmopolitan was on crack regarding all matters sexual. Maybe if they hired this guy, it would help the situation. [Is Anyone at Cosmo Getting Laid?]

• James Risen's State of War — the impending publication of which forced the Times to finally publish the domestic-spying story — also makes Judy Miller's WMD excuses fall apart. [NYO]
• Still, the domestic-spying articles were better than the book is, says Jack Shafer. [Slate]
• Lunatic talking head Bill O'Reilly promises to "get into the lives" of Bill Keller and Frank Rich if (perhaps imagined) Times attacks on him continue. We really hope he does, because Keller would be so much sexier if he were a little less earnest. [Media Matters]
• Yesterday was CBS's first day as its own company. Well, except for all those all days as its own company. [WP]
• New Oxygen show features middle-aged women partying with college guys. We're pretty sure we saw that same show on Cinemax once. [NYT]
• Not-quite-victorious — but still really good — GMA staffers get cheesy commemorative trinkets. [NYO]
• Jon Friedman is clearly smoking crack, as proved by (among other things) his prediction that MSNBC will beat CNN and Fox News in 2006. [MW]
• Latest Q-ratings study shows Katie Couric isn't as popular as she used to be. Clearly not in the polling sample: Les Moonves. [WWD]

• Arianna: "The qualities I look for in a man are the qualities I look for in a blogger: passion, relentlessness, risk taking, and a light touch." [Esquire]
• Mags remake Katie Couric's life. Because she could never afford to do it on her own, of course. [WWD]
• Valerie Plame is a MacGuffin, says Frank Rich. [LA City Beat]
• Ford cannot say no to the gay mafia. [NYT]

• Ken Auletta is right about Pinch Sulzberger, Timesmen tell Keith Kelly. [NYP]
• George Stephanopoulos named ABC's chief Washington correspondent. And he doesn't even have to share the title. [B&C]
• Frank Rich is a New York celebrity, speaking pitch-perfect Manhattan liberalism, and that's his problem, says Bryan Curtis. [Slate]
• Atlantic publisher David Bradley to back 02138, a "Vanity Fair-like alumni magazine for Harvard students," which, we imagine, will increasingly be littering the 100TKs. [Boston Globe]

• Walter Cronkite thinks CBS should keep one-anchor format. Also, he thinks the Evening News should keep its commercials for Depends, Just for Men, and Metamucil. [LAT]
• Sexy Jon Fine digs Vice. [BW]
• And less-sexy Jon Friedman digs Frank Rich. [MW]
• Upcoming NYT Mag poll of New Yorkers finds a quarter of Republicans would never fuck a Democrat. Unfortunately, those running the country come from the other 75 percent, and are happy to fuck us all. [E&P
• Peter Jennings left $50 million estate. For the record, our annual salary was under $25k when we worked for ABC News. [NYDN]
• The average U.S. household watched 8 hours and 11 minutes of TV per day in 2004-05, setting a record. USA! USA! [Reuters]

Even on the most-emailed list, the rich end up on top. Unsurprising.

A culture writer on Frank Rich's new position as Associate Editor for the NYT's Arts & Leisure section: I wouldn t want to be Ben Brantley or anybody else in Frank s line of fire...Bigfoot is his middle name.
Nouveau Rich [NY Magazine]

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