Shouts & Murmurs is pretty reliably unfunny, and this week's, which parodies over the top destination weddings and the high-maintenance types who throw them, is not really an exception. But there is something special about it: it's got links in it that take you to an actual website! But when you get there, instead of directions to a remote mountaintop there is a sad announcement that the wedding in question has been cancelled because "Someone cannot decide between being an adult and a career in professional paintball." Haha. Most burning, though, is the question: which interns were forced to pose for this ridiculous photograph? If anyone knows, drop us a line.

Share Our Joy [NYer]

Okay, so maybe they're not quite invading, but there sure seem to be a lot of them in this week's issue. First there's Dana Goodyear on page 28 with a short piece on Liza Dalby's East Wind Melts the Ice. Then Louisa Thomas, who appears to be an editorial assistant to David Remnick, chimes in six pages later on Cristina Garcia's A Handbook to Luck. Finally, Harvard Med School professor/New Yorker medicine man Jerome Groopman closes out the issue with a back-page essay about how doctors should be reading Tolstoy, Turgenev, Philip Roth, and Rhonda Byrne.

We know that Atoosa Rubenstein wishes the Times had "more color and less words," but how does she feel about The New Yorker? Perhaps some insight can be found in her latest MySpace post, in which she writes, for a change, about how she believes in her dreams and you should too. "The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho is my guidebook to life. I'll probably talk about it again, but something about it reminded me of what we talked about last week regarding us being Alpha Kitties — girls who follow their dreams," she says before quoting that book, which is like The Celestine Prophecy crossed with The Secret, but dumber, at length.

Tina Brown's stint as editor of the New Yorker is considered a disaster, or a bizarre accident, or an obvious symptom of a Manhattan-specific lunacy. It's up high on the list of New York trainwrecks just adjacent the Broadway musical of Anna Karenina.

This morning, Doree roused herself at an ungodly hour to attend a panel discussion called "Do Newspapers Have a Future?" at the W Hotel in Midtown, with the New Yorker's Ken Auletta lobbing questions at Times Washington bureau chief Dean Baquet and McClatchy CEO Gary Pruitt.

In today's Observer, new media reporter Felix Gillette gives Tina Brown a chance to do take-backs on having Roseanne Barr guest-edit that infamous issue of the New Yorker. "Frankly, the ideas, I didn't like them," Tina says. And of celebrity guest-editors: "They don't know how to get it right, any more than I would know how to commission a bunch of songs. As an editing idea, it's fraught with road kill." Funnily enough, we just talked to Roseanne about this the other day. And even though she doesn't see it the same way, she really didn't have anything nice to say either!

• NYT managing editor Jill Abramson gets into it with playwright David Hare, tells him that the Times is "the central arbiter of taste and culture in the city of New York." We'd argue with that—but if it isn't, well, what is? Right. Also: theater people are never fucking happy with anything. [NYP]
  

"The history of American poetry, like the history of America itself, is a story of ingenuity, sacrifice, hard work and sticking it to people when they least expect it," says Times poetry specialist David Orr, before going on to do just that. The stick-ee is New Yorker contributor Dana Goodyear, who recently pontificated at some length about Poetry magazine's unseemly efforts to make poems more mainstream and palatable, perhaps in order to please the rich philistines who recently gave the foundation that owns that magazine a buttload of money.

A secret thing that happened this past week is that Cond Nast finally launched a semi-respectable New Yorker website. Looks like that 1998 purchase of Wired is bearing fruit! Just like sister site vanityfair.com, which was re-made in October, the new newyorker.com is laid out all neo-classically (important stories are bigger!) and uses the Tinsley Mortimer of Web 2.0 typefaces, Georgia. But the really earth-shattering news: for apparently the first time ever, the magazine is facing temporality! Yes, folks, New Yorker cartoons are now animated.

With another hectic M-to-F trough-slog in sight, the New Yorker—witty, urbane, perhaps a bit of a poseur—seems like the perfect companion for a lazy Sunday afternoon. This is false. The New Yorker is not a weekend read; it is a prelapsarian one. That is why it makes us so sad: its facts-to-words ratio suggests a positively Renaissance store of leisure time. Indeed, what purpose could the dieresis umlaut possibly serve other than as an aid for ancien regime heads of household, gaily reading aloud the Talk of the Town with the wives and children and servants gathered round? Our parents never read to us.

Last year's long New Yorker article about Wikipedia relied heavily on a Wikipedia contributor and administrator who goes by the handle of "Essjay." He had been recommended to the writer by Wikipedia management, and his bio described him as "a tenured professor of religion at a private university" with "a Ph.D. in theology and a degree in canon law." Unfortunately, it turns out that Essjay is actually 24-year-old Ryan Jordan, a gent who has no advanced degrees and has never taught canon law or anything else.

Jordan has lately been hired by Wikia, the for-profit incarnation of Wikipedia, and continues to hold his Wikipedia administrative positions. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has no problem with any of this, saying he regarded the Essjay persona and bio as a "pseudonym" (he even appointed Essjay/Jordan to Wikipedia's arbitration committee last week). Wales has shown a casual attitude toward altering one's own biography in the past, but this seems a little much. Further revisions may make everything okay, however!

Despite its residency in 4 Times Square, the New Yorker has long held its corporate parent at arm's length; you'd be hard-pressed to find a mention of Conde Nast anywhere within the magazine's august pages. Take this week's review of the Waverly Inn: "Apocrypha abound, as ever—though lately, since the editor in chief of Vanity Fair, Graydon Carter, and several partners took over, they're of a less hoary variety." It's a classic New Yorker move—mention just enough information to seem like they're giving you context, but withhold just enough information so that only those in the know may enjoy. Like the Waverly Inn's patrons, we suppose. So perhaps in some way it's all come full circle.

Like you, we're always overjoyed when the alternating New Yorker film critic is David Denby rather than Anthony Lane; it's one less review we have to read that week. Today's issue, however, produces something of a master class in why Denby is despised by all right-thinking people: "The New Disorder" is a four thousand word essay in which Denby lets you know that nonlinear narrative (apparently invented by Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avery in 1994) is difficult to follow. As Denby examines "the overloading, the dislocations and disruptions," you realize that this piece is equally, if not more, difficult. We're not sure what the bigger mistake is here. Is it the sheer pointlessness of attempting to codify narrative techniques that have been in place for at least a century, or the idea of having Denby as the explicator in the first place? In any event, in a fit of postmodernism of our own, we've recut and remixed Denby's essay. If you somehow have the fortitude and the free time, you can read both and decide which makes more sense. Or any sense at all.

You know the way the cover of the New York Times magazine always arrives just a bit floppy, little white tears already reaching out from the spine, taunting you like crow's feet. The way they spread, causing the cover not so much to rip off—that might be more humane—but rather to slide out of alignment, slowly shifting up and down, up and down, until it's too late. Dig out the most recent issues if you don't believe us. Why does the New York Times spend their cash on super-stylized comic-book art and super-cute doggie pictorials if they're unwilling to spring for half-decent saddle-stitching?

In a New Yorker review of Bar Martignetti (which we'd previously nominated as our inaugural Douchebag Restaurants Hall of Fame entrant), we couldn't help but notice how they'd perfectly encapsulated not just the restaurant, but all Manhattan twentysomething douchebags.

Most of these fictional tie-in games for the Nintendo DS range from lame to silly — usually just a book cover or movie poster slapped in for the briefest of chuckles, if that. However, as usual, Jason Kottke takes/kicks it to/up the next level/notch, with his "The New Yorker Draw Your Own Cover Electronic Entertainment With Noncompulsory Co perative Mode." It's the diaeresis that seals it.

Yes, yes, caveats and all that, but a tipster asked us to look into the case of the "known sexual predator" on staff at the New Yorker. All our tipster had to go on was that the predator in question was a man and that "if you saw the name, you would recognize it. " Mmmkay then! There's not much to go on, and we think fingering known Internet porn addict (but not known sexual predator!) David Denby would be too obvious. So who is it? We can't stomach the idea of David Remnick as a known sexual predator, so we're knocking him out of contention just, well, because, but please do tell us whom you think the likely culprit is, and we'll out the motherfucker post-haste.

The Media Mole Rodeo is quickly winding down, and with every passing hour your chances of having a debaucherous evening in the company of all four Gawker editors and Page Six's sultry Paula Froelich grow ever dimmer. So send in your juicy anecdotes to mole@gawker.com, stat!

Courtesy of Style.com comes this fun news:

• "Be Adequite": The T-shirt. [MollyGood]