So: Bret Easton Ellis is on the cover of expensive Amsterdam-based magazine Fantastic Man, drinking a Diet Coke. In it, he calls the soul-sucking experience that is The Hills "the greatest show that I have ever seen in my life."

"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!