Matt Haber

Charlie Rose's website features an interview with Clay Felker from 1995.

"I've often said that editors who are successful have confidence of their own ignorance," Mr. Felker told Mr. Rose. "By that I mean, What is a story? You ask a question what a story is. And then you find someone else to go out and find the answer... You just need to be able to find the questions."

Clay Felker, the editor who created New York magazine and sat atop the mastheads of The Village Voice, Esquire, Manhattan, inc., M., and New West, has died.

As far back as 2006, Forbes' James Brady was reporting that the legendary editor was ailing and had been moved to a nursing home. That same year, Mr. Felker's wife, the writer Gail Sheehy, wrote an article for Tango magazine wrote about their life together.  read more »

In an obituary for Mr. Felker on the Web site of the magazine he created first as a supplement to The New York Herald Tribune, then as a stand-alone magazine in 1968, Kurt Andersen (himself a former editor of the magazine)

Frighteningly prolific author Joyce Carol Oates talks to Time Magazine's Andrea Sachs about her latest novel, My Sister, My Love: The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike.

Since the book is a fictionalized take on the murder of JonBenét Ramsey (12 years later and still unsolved), Ms. Sachs asked the author "What do you think of tabloids?" Here's Ms. Oates' response:

I talk about Tabloid Hell in the novel ... Basically, I read the New York Times, the New York Times Book Review, the New York Review of Books and the New Yorker ... One doesn't have an unlimited amount of time for reading everything.

According to Time, My Sister is Ms. Oates' 37th novel so we tend to believe her when she says her time is limited.

Variety's Michael Schneider reports that HBO has optioned Terry Cheney's book, Manic: A Memoir, about a Beverly Hills entertainment lawyer struggling with mental illness. According to a video on Ms. Cheney's publisher's Web site, as a lawyer the author represented Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones.

The show will be a one-hour drama, executive produced by Janet Tamaro, a news correspodent-turned-writer (her IMDB bio says she "produced investigative stories for long-form newsmagazine shows and won several journalism awards for her work," but fails to note which shows or awards; her credits page includes shows like Lost, CSI:NY, Bones and others) and Gavin Polone, who executive produces Curb Your Enthusiasm and Tell Me You Love Me for HBO and previously brought the world Gilmore Girls.  read more »

In today's New York Post, Keith Kelly reports that Jann Wenner may be trying to sell US Weekly to Condé Nast for $750 million.

That's a lot of scratch for pictures of Katherine Heigl getting Starbucks, but according to Kelly, the magazine is not only "lucrative" (he uses the term twice), but profitable as well:

With weekly paid circulation of more than 1.8 million—and the lucrative newsstand accounting for 1 million of that total—Us Weekly is highly profitable, with an operating profit last year estimated to be around $75 million.

"Us Weekly is one of the more remarkable success stories in recent publishing history," Mr. Kelly writes.  read more »

Music critic. Blogger. Photographer. Composer... Advice columnist?

That's the newest gig The New Yorker's Sasha Frere-Jones can add to his C.V. after appearing in Jezebel's popular "Pot Psychologist" video advice feature this week.

Mr. Frere-Jones appears alongside the usual Pot Psychologists, Tracie "Slut Machine" Egan and Four Four's Richard Juzwiak, answering questions about sex, dating, ailments, and the difference between ambivalence and ambiguity. (Don't even ask about ambidextrousness.)

It's unclear if Mr. Frere-Jones properly prepared himself for the role of Pot Psychologist (he's seen enjoying a large glass of red wine at one point and admiring Ms. Egan's Ikea bedspread), but as always, the video comes with a warning to kids to stay away from drugs.

The other day, Rachel Harris of The New York Times' Paper Cuts blog, posted about some of the silly swag publishers send out to promote books since books alone are, like, so boring.

In an accompanying slideshow, Ms. Harris shows all the great junk, including a handmade mixtape, pictured above, to promote Charles Bock's Beautiful Children. "We liked the music," Ms. Harris writes. "But that's not the reason his novel was reviewed on our cover." (Sure, but how does she explain Charles McGrath's profile, Janet Maslin's review, and this "Inside the List" column about those very same tapes? Did someone send out a few collages or Papier-mâché projects to his favorite newspaper of record?)  read more »

This morning on CNBC's Squawk Box, Carl Quintanilla interviewed Tribune owner Sam Zell about everything from the housing market to the elections to the Chicago Cubs. (This comes via Jim Romenesko.)

When the subject turned to the advertising market, Mr. Zell asked, "What ad market?" Mr. Quintanilla clarified that he meant newspaper advertisers, which prompted the outspoken Mr. Zell to bark, "I'm trying to find one of 'em!"

Here's how Mr. Zell described his newspaper business:

I think the case of Tribune, really, or newspapers in general basically comes down to producing a newspaper that the customer is willing to pay for.  read more »

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Good news—maybe?—for Kelly Gray, the 23-year-old Virginia Beach hairdresser who auctioned off a bridesmaid slot in her wedding on eBay. The winning bidder (at $5,700) is a doctor. In fact, it's the Dr Pepper Snapple Group, which decided to up the sponsorship to $10,000 according to The New York Times' Katie Zezima.

"I'm very grateful. It’s way more than I could have asked for or imagined," Ms. Gray told the paper. Nick Rangone, a spokesman for the beverage concern (who reportedly bid under the nom de eBay "Nick from New Jersey"), says the company is considering opening the bridesmaid role to a contest or possibly a celebrity.  read more »

Well, that was fast.

Yesterday, Portfolio's Jeff Bercovici honored New York Times TV Watch columnist Alessandra Stanley on 103 correction-free days. At the time, Ms. Stanley warned Mr. Bercovici that there might a correction on the horizon telling him, "I'd hate to stand corrected, but I think your count could prove wrong... There could be one coming in the next few days—[it's] still under study."

Today, The Times issues this "For the Record" correction on Ms.Stanley's column from June 19:

The TV Watch column on June 19, about Michelle Obama’s appearance as a co-host on 'The View,' referred incorrectly to her mention of her gratitude to Laura Bush after Mrs.  read more »

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Boing Boing's Xeni Jardin posts a letter from dot-com-era entrepreneur Josh Harris in which he criticizes The New York Times for knowingly promoting his company Pseudo.com even though it was "a fake company."

Actually, Media Mob isn't clear on what Mr. Harris is charging—or why he's bothering, since most of the references are to articles from 2001. But some of the articles were written by a pre-scandal Jayson Blair, which prompts Mr. Harris to ask:

Is it ethical for The New York Times to carry the banner of 'the newspaper of record' and claim journalistic integrity since it failed to thoroughly and completely follow up each and every article that Mr.  read more »

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Two weeks ago this reporter delved into the shadowy world of adorable animals and the people who love snorgling them. If you'll allow me to break from journalistic objectivity (while simultaneously breaking into first-person), it was a hairy assignment, full of wet noses and wagging tails. It was also one that changed me forever. I don't think I'll look at kittens being adopted by rabbits in quite the same way again.

With that in mind, I read with great interest as Slate ran a moving and funny story yesterday by writer and gentleman farmer Jon Katz about his dog Lenore and her intense relationship with one of his rams, Brutus.  read more »

Does Hallmark make a "Happy 103rd Consecutive Day Without Corrections" card? Maybe there's some sort of TDF "Fact-Check-Me-Up" bouquet?

There's gotta be some way to honor New York Times television critic Alessandra Stanley this week. As Portfolio's Jeff Bercovici notes, Ms. Stanley, who has been the butt of many pop culture bloggers' jokes for her occasional lapses in fact checking, hasn't had a correction in 103 days.

After cataloging a few of her memorable mistakes—"All About Raymond"?—Mr. Bercovici quotes a surprisingly good-humored Ms. Stanley, who cautions him not to uncork the champers just yet: "I'd hate to stand corrected, but I think your count could prove wrong," Ms. Stanley says. "There could be one coming in the next few days—[it's] still under study."

The first step is admitting you have a problem.

Two fresh takes on YouTube in today's New York Times.

On the op-ed page, Daniel Kimmage files a piece from Baku, Azerbaijan, titled "Fight Terror With YouTube" about how Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda aren't keeping up in the Web 2.0 world.

As Mr Kimmage writes:

Statements by Mr. bin Laden and his chief deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, that are posted to YouTube do draw comments aplenty. But the reactions, which range from praise to blanket condemnation, are a far cry from the invariably positive feedback Al Qaeda gets on moderated jihadist forums. And even Al Qaeda’s biggest YouTube hits attract at most a small fraction of the millions of views that clips of Arab pop stars rack up routinely.  read more »

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Today on Salon, Sarah Bird pens a humor piece in which she wishes her son were gay.

With palpable yearning, Ms. Bird writes:

How could I not dream of having a son who cared deeply about all the right things: fashion, musical theater, interior décor? But mostly a son who cared deeply about the most right thing of all: his mother? How could I not yearn for a son who would tell me that the bias cut emphasized my saddlebag thighs, that no one was staining concrete anymore, that the tiniest bit of white on the upper lids would open up my eyes and make me look 10 years younger?

Sadly, she finds herself stuck with a straight kid.  read more »

Today's Page Six reports that blond Russian tennis star Anna Kournikova wants to follow in the footsteps of shirtless Vogue "intern" Sean Avery and work for Anna Wintour since "it's so inspiring to see a woman be so powerful."

According to the item, Ms. Kournikova made this plea on her blog, where she also name-checked Tom Ford as one of the "10 people she wants to work with after she retires."  read more »

Media Mob checked Ms. Kournikova's Web site, but couldn't find the quote or the list. We did, however, find a list made by Maria Sharapova, a different blond Russian tennis star, on her

Mere words cannot express the awesomeness that is Barack Obama. At least that's what the new cover of Rolling Stone tells—or doesn't tell—us. The cover of the magazine's new issue features only a photograph of a smiling Senator Obama (with prominent flag pin!) and no text whatsoever. In keeping with the photo theme, Rolling Stone's Web site features a photo gallery called Barack Obama, a History in Pictures, with a whopping 98 (!) images of the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate.

The wordless cover is not Rolling Stone's first. The motif has also been used by the magazine for other important, "words are not enough" stories like the deaths of John Lennon and George Harrison.

It was also used to great effect on February 1995 for a cover story about Demi Moore.

John Koblin does a post-Murdoch Wall Street Journal roll call of all those writers and editors who've left and says, "it’s fair to say The Journal hasn’t experienced anything quite like this, well, ever." Plus: The Los Angeles Times' Patrick Goldstein launches a blog.

Felix Gillette wonders who will be replacing Tim Russert as NBC's Washington D.C. Bureau Chief. Whoever fills that role "must continuously grapple with producers in New York to make sure his reporters get plenty of airtime on the morning and evening newscasts."

Leon Neyfakh tells the tale of Reif Larsen, a "28-year-old Columbia M.F.A. student [who] wrote a novel about a whimsical child from Montana who likes maps, and suddenly all kinds of famous editors in New York were calling his agent, Denise Shannon, and telling her they really wanted to publish it.  read more »

“I’ve been getting e-mail for years from people who think that I’m a moron,” the Los Angeles Times’ entertainment columnist Patrick Goldstein said in an interview with The Observer this week. “I don’t think that’s gonna change.”

Mr. Goldstein, who’s been with the Tribune paper since 1979 and has written an entertainment column called The Big Picture since 1998, was talking about his newly launched blog, also called The Big Picture. “I have a thick skin,” he says, when asked how he plans to deal with any negative feedback he’s sure to get from commenters and other more established industry bloggers.  read more »

Author Barbara Ehrenreich appeared on The Colbert Report last night to promote her book, This Land Is Their Land and offered a rallying cry for class warriors the world over. "I'm fighting back," she said. "But the other side started the war."

"We've had too many employers, say like Wal-Mart, who've made huge amounts of money by squeezing down their workers, not letting them form unions, for example, holding down their wages."

Ms. Ehrenreich got in a few good jabs at Mr. Colbert, asking him how much he paid his security guards ("What are they paid? I would be surprised if they got more than $12-an-hour.  read more »

Two things we learned from reading Andrew Ross Sorkin's Dealbook column in today's New York Times: 1. Tom Wolfe rides the Hampton Jitney; and 2. He thinks Sherman McCoy, the protagonist of his 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities would be sunk in the current economic climate. (Join the club, Sherman!)

As Mr. Wolfe tells Mr. Sorkin: "He would be eating his heart out wanting to run a hedge fund, but he’s not smart enough!" Well, thankfully he's also totally fictional.

In the column, Mr. Wolfe shares his views on the current crisis in late-late capitalism with vague, oracular pronouncements like "It sounds like even the firms that aren't in trouble are in trouble" and "It has always interested me that the word 'credit' comes from the word 'credere,' which means 'to believe'.  read more »

Late Night Underground, the totally official unofficial website for Late Night with Conan O'Brien has an amusing (but maybe a bit overlong) video of Mr. O'Brien and his former head writer, Robert Smigel, goofing around on the set. (This comes via TVTattle.)

According to the clip, Mr. Smigel, who recently co-wrote You Don't Mess with the Zohan, but is probably best known for gifting the world with Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, is not pleased with the persistent promotional "bug" on NBC's programming. (The "bug" is that translucent logo/ad in the lower left corner of the screen.) After learning how to use a telestrator—the device that allows sportscasters to scribble notes on the screen— Mr.  read more »

Tonight, VH1 will present the latest installment of its decades-spanning, nostalgia clip 'n' quip series I Love the New Millennium. All your favorite stars—Michael Ian Black! Scott Ian of Anthrax! Um... Michael Ian Black!—will share their insights into the wackiest, most hilarious decade that's nearly 8/10ths over.

In addition to the obligatory Britney Spears and Friendster references, here are a couple of things we hope they find time crack wise about:

2000: George W. Bush, et al., Petitioners v. Albert Gore, Jr., et al.. What the heck!

2001: 9/11. Who can forget that?

2002: Mount Nyiragongo erupts in Congo destroying 14 villages.  read more »

Jon Friedman is back with another amazing Media Web Minute as part of his MarketWatch column.

This week, an animated, gesticulating Mr. Friedman (has someone had some coaching?) address a nagging error on his part. It seems that he was wrong in rejecting Time magazine's selection of "You" as the person of the year in 2006.

Now, Mr. Friedman wants you to know that "the YouTube phenomenon has taken over the country. Media. Communications. Business. Everything. Society. Young people. It's all in there. And I was sure wrong. Time Magazine, you were right and I owe you one. Sorry. "

We forgive you, Jon Friedman! You had us at "O.K., America."

George Lois is nothing if not opinionated. The universally heralded adman and creator of Esquire's most canonical covers from the '60s, shares his take on AMC's Mad Men with The New York Times Magazine's Alex Witchel this week:

When I hear ‘Mad Men,’ it’s the most irritating thing in the world to me. When you think of the ’60s, you think about people like me who changed the advertising and design worlds. The creative revolution was the name of the game. This show gives you the impression it was all three-martini lunches. ...

We worked from 5:30 in the morning until 10 at night.  read more »

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In a recent New Yorker essay on the subject of theodicy, James Wood wrote:

Theologians and philosophers talk about 'the problem of evil,' and the hygienic phrase itself bespeaks a certain distance from extreme suffering, the view from a life inside the charmed circle. They mean the classic difficulty of how we justify the existence of suffering and iniquity with belief in a God who created us, who loves us, and who providentially manages the world.

With this philosophical framework in mind, let's look at some of the reviews of Mike Myers' The Love Guru.

"A whole new vocabulary seems to be required. To say that the movie is not funny is merely to affirm the obvious.

Today on the Huffington Post, Ben Cohen interviews National Magazine Award-winning Rolling Stone columnist Matt Taibbi.

Back in April, Mr. Taibbi got into a spat with another HuffPo writer, novelist Erica Jong, that hinged mostly on his description of Hillary Clinton's "flabby arms." In the interview with Mr. Cohen, Mr. Taibbi explains why he chooses to write about his subjects' physical flaws:

Um ... it's funny? (Laughs) That's one thing. ... You know, I make these caricatures of people, and a lot of it sure is gratuitous, and on some level I am trying to be funny, but I'm also trying to make it an easier read for some of the people who maybe aren't so interested in politics.  read more »

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Just who is Carl Icahn? According to the bio on his newly launched blog, The Icahn Report™, he's just a humble, decent person like you:

I was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Far Rockaway, Queens. My father was a frustrated opera singer and settled on being a cantor in Cedarhurst, Long Island. The fact that he was a dogmatic atheist did not exactly help him to get ahead in this profession and after a number of years he became a substitute teacher. My mother also worked as a schoolteacher. I attended the local public school, Far Rockaway High, later heading to Princeton University.  read more »

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Yesterday, Salon published a piece by writer Neal Pollack about his experiences with this year's moral panic-inspiring quasi-legal drug, salvia divinorum, in a piece called Confessions of a Salvia Eater.

Fans of Mr. Pollack will no doubt enjoy his description of what he saw on the other side:

I put the salvia in my freezer and didn't touch it for almost two years. Then I had a free midnight, and it occurred to me to try some. ... Almost immediately, I had visions. ... The next night, I repeated the dose. While I had a few small visions, I mostly felt that my body was stretching out beyond its boundaries, moving into infinite space.  read more »

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Miracles come in all shapes and sizes, apparently. For the next two or so hours, you can bid on eBay for a piece of toast burned with the image of Sirius Satellite Radio host Howard Stern.

According to the seller's description:

I can't vouch that this is an authentic miracle. I was listening to Howard Stern on the radio while I was making breakfast. Thinking of him I was startled to see the toast which came out of the toaster was burned in a way that resembles Howard Stern! My gardener thought it looked like Jesus. Someone else told me it looks like Mickey Mouse and I said, no, not the shape of the toast -- look at the image the burnt parts make.  read more »

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On Paper Cuts, The New York Times' book blog, Barry Gewen writes about Mark Bowden's recent Atlantic article about Rupert Murdoch's acquisition of The Wall Street Journal and his desire to kneecap the paper of record.

Mr. Gewen, you may recall, revealed the inner-workings of The Times Book Review at Harvard last year. Among his revelations: the names and roles of several NYTBR editors, how they choose what books to review, and some intramural gripes like "the magazine pays the salaries of all the rest of us. It makes money hand over fist. And you can see it in the physical plan.  read more »

Portfolio's Jeff Bercovici is reporting that Hachette Filipacchi Media, C.E.O. Jack Kliger will be stepping down from the company at the end of the summer.

As Mr. Bercovici writes:

Kliger took over Hachette in June 1999, and immediately faced a crisis when John F. Kennedy Jr., founder and editor of George magazine, died in a plane crash. Kliger ended up shutting down George, and has pulled the plug on a slew of other titles including Premiere, Mirabella, ElleGirl and Shock. Nevertheless, he received a lifetime achievement award from the Magazine Publishers of America in January.

Leon Neyfakh tracks the latest bookish fad: Picking up girls (or boys) using a galley: "This is what happens when someone reads a galley (a.k.a. ARC, or advance reading copy) in public: publishing people take notice and begin to wonder about certain things. There’s the galley’s provenance, of course. But what about its owner? Where does he work? Does she like the same things I do? Is he single?"

Felix Gillette looks back at the life and career of Tim Russert. "He was shrewd enough to make his shrewdness appealing. ('He was a ruthless guy,' one of Russert’s former coworkers told The Observer.  read more »

Salon's Vincent Rossmeier has an interview with Kerwin Swint, biographer of Fox news Godfather Roger Ailes. Mr. Swint, a Professor of Political Science Kennesaw State University, says he "couldn't believe that no one had written a book on him yet. He's been such a central figure for so long."

In 2003, The New Yorker's Ken Auletta described Mr. Ailes as "a man of Falstaffian girth... Ailes is sixty-three and does not look immediately fearsome. He says he is five feet nine inches tall and weighs two hundred and twenty-five pounds; his jowls droop over his collar. With his pallor and barely perceptible eyebrows, Ailes looks like someone who has spent a lifetime under fluorescent lights.  read more »

The Associated Press is reporting that the defamation lawsuit brought by former New York Post writer Jared Paul Stern against Ron Burkle, The New York Daily News, and Bill and Hillary Clinton has been dismissed by State Supreme Court Justice Walter Tolub. (This comes via Jim Romenesko.)

In April 2006, The Observer's Choire Sicha profiled Mr. Stern at his Catskills cottage and reported on his book deal which was subsequently cancelled .

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman brings his considerable knowledge to bear on all things from the economy to intellectual property to the elections in his twice-weekly columns. But on his Times-hosted blog, The Conscience of a Liberal, Mr. Krugman also plays media critic for his own paper.

In an impassioned post titled "On Not Knowing Who," Mr. Krugman scolds his colleague Sarah Lyall for writing the following bit about British TV series Dr. Who:

The show followed the adventures of a time-traveling character whose spaceship was cunningly disguised as an old-fashioned telephone booth and who saved the universe by means of immortality, brilliance, a mordant sense of humor and an array of useful enemy-thwarting devices.

"No, no, no!" Mr. Krugman scolds. "The TARDIS looks like a police box." (TARDIS stands for "Time and Relative Dimension(s) in Space.") He even provides a Wikipedia entry to back up his claim.

More layoffs in the newspaper industry. This time it's 1,400 workers at The McClatchy Company according to The New York Times' Richard Pérez-Peña. That staggering figure accounts for 10 per cent of the company's staff.

As Mr. Pérez-Peña reports, "The deepest cut will hit The Miami Herald, one of McClatchy’s largest papers, which told its staff on Monday that it would eliminate 250 jobs, or 17 percent of its work force."  read more »

Another tribute to the late Tim Russert, this time from Late Night with Conan O'Brien on Hulu.com. On Friday, just a few hours after Mr. Russert's death was announced, Mr. O'Brien said in his monologue, "This is pretty shocking for us He's been a pretty good friend to me and us here at the show." Mr. O'Brien added that Mr. Russert's son, Luke, had been one of his show's interns last year.

Mr. O'Brien praised Mr. Russert by saying, "From the moment I met him, he put me at ease. I always told him countless times, he reminded me of my Irish Catholic uncles: Big head"—here he gestured to indicate he meant big in size, not in self-regard— "big laugh, huge heart."  read more »

This was a tough weekend for a certain segment within the media community, but together, they got through it.

It started out with excitement on Friday: A journalistic fact-finding mission to Las Vegas. But even before the plane took off, some key members of the expedition almost didn't make it. Thankfully, they arrived safely and twittered word that others had arrived as well (perhaps a bit blurry), despite the fact that the trip's sponsors did not pay for their transportation to the airport.  read more »

During the flight, something happened on the ground involving someone in media, which they agreed was

As you may know if you read half a dozen media news and gossip sites, Howell Raines profiled the Poynter Institute's Jim Romenesko in this month's Portfolio. Mr. Raines calls Mr. Romenesko's media news site, "a high-tech tom-tom for angst-ridden members of a dying tribe" and calls the man himself "both the medium and the message." (Mr. Romenesko linked to the story himself, pulling one of the least flattering statements, "From guru to geezer in cyberspace," as befits what all media writers are contractually-bound to refer to as his modest Midwestern demeanor.)  read more »

"Copy editors are my favorite people in the news business, and many I know are still alive and doing what they do...

"As for what they do, here’s the short version: After news happens in the chaos and clutter of the real world, it travels through a reporter’s mind, a photographer’s eye, a notebook and camera lens, into computer files, then through multiple layers of editing. Copy editors handle the final transition to an ink-on-paper object. On the news-factory floor, they do the refining and packaging. They trim words, fix grammar, punctuation and style, write headlines and captions.

"Copy editors are the last set of eyes before yours. They are more powerful than proofreaders. They untangle twisted prose. They are surgeons, removing growths of error and irrelevance; they are minimalist chefs, straining fat."— Lawrence Downes, In a Changing World of News, an Elegy for Copy Editors, June 16, 2008.

The last time The New Yorker's George Packer was in Iraq was January 2007. He's not sure if he wants to go back, but that doesn't mean it's not on his mind. "I do find myself thinking about it all the time still," he says. "Thinking of other ways to write about it."

One of those ways was the play, Betrayed, which was based on his article of the same name from March 2007. (In January, The Observer's Doree Shafrir profiled Mr. Packer as his show was set to debut at the Culture Project in Soho, where it will close June 16th.)

>> Click here to check out this week's special coverage of the Baghdad Bureaus from observer.com

He also says he has "a little novelistic idea," but, for now, that project remains in his head. "It's as if, maybe the journalism has run its course," Mr. Packer says. "But there are other levels of experiencing it that journalism can't capture."  read more »

Mandatory luggage check-in fees. Canceled flights. Las Vegas party jets rerouted to Rochester. Can air travel get any worse?

In fact, it can. Joel Stein, Time's navel correspondent and lover of the 70s, 80s, and 90s, has become a flight attendant. Or at least he got to play one to get over his fear of flying for a stunt column.

Of course, he makes some hilarious xenophobic jokes ("My fellow future flight attendants weren't at all what I expected, based on my experience with service-sector jobs—which is to say that none were illegal immigrants.") and the obligatory gay panic cracks ("Even more shocking, some of them were straight men."). Then Mr. Stein shows his sensitivity to what John Edwards would call "the two Americas" by making fun of a woman who used to work for Hooter's: "She, I believe, just wanted to upgrade her wardrobe."  read more »

If you're finding your RSS feed a little thin today, that may be because your favorite media and lifestyle bloggers are away on an important reporting assignment. In Las Vegas. Paid for by the nice folks at Thrillist.  read more »