Tom Scocca: And she doesn't supply any first-person text to go with it. This all amounts to a pretty deftly coded critique of the entire Julie & Julia phenomenon, doesn't it? And then Nora Ephron gets a page to explain "How to Whip Up Dinner in Only 10 Minutes." (Pasta with parsley, garlic, and bread crumbs.)

Choire Sicha: If she ever serves me that, I'm walking out.

Tom Scocca: It might be good. It probably is. But it's not 10 minutes! The spaghetti I use takes 9 to 10 minutes to cook. In boiling water. Which has to be brought to a boil.

Choire Sicha: Well you don't have Nora Ephron's stove. With the RIGHT stove you can bring water to a boil in 2 minutes.

Tom Scocca: Perhaps she has a boiling-water tap.

Choire Sicha: Yes. From inside her. She is like Yellowstone.

Tom Scocca: Now I feel bad about YOUR neck.

Choire Sicha: Me too. It's hungry. But you know I love some Nora Ephron. And her $25 mil gross.

Tom Scocca: But there is no recipe from Amanda Hesser! I thought you said she was in this movie.

Choire Sicha: She plays herself, just like she always has.

Tom Scocca: Sometimes she plays editors.

Choire Sicha: So. Well. What we're talking about is.... magazines as... access? Julia Child comes in your kitchen and helps you please a frenum.

Tom Scocca: For an entire workweek. With Jessica Simpson. Speaking of leftovers. Does her face move magazine covers?

Choire Sicha: In 2009???? Couldn't possibly.

Tom Scocca: The Washington Post Style section this week time-traveled forward to 2009 from the old days when it used to try to do readings of the popular culture, and it ran a newspaper essay about people being "famesque," aka being fixed in the public mind without having done anything of interest to the public mind, with Sienna Miller as the lead, Jessica Simpson as the definitive example, and Ashton Kutcher as the conclusive example. Rule of three and all.

Choire Sicha: Well. Hmm. Jessica Simpson is at the top of a multimillion dollar business empire. (Yes, still.) So actually is Ashton Kutcher! Him and his 3.1 million Twitter followers. But Sienna Miller is just slutty noise in the TMZ signal.

Tom Scocca: These business empires are poorly understood, aren't they?

Choire Sicha: Yes! Totally!

Tom Scocca: It all goes back to the Olsen twins. They created this incredible business almost entirely outside the realm of entertainment gossip, discussion, or news. Then they became celebrities–like dazed, body-image-problematic, explicitly objectified debutantes.

Choire Sicha: Yes. While getting rich at Wal-Mart.

Tom Scocca: No, AFTER getting rich at Wal-Mart. First they were sitcom-famous, then they were semi-invisible and incredibly lucrative on the straight-to-DVD market, and only after that did they go Famous. Via I believe a gross and molest-y Rolling Stone cover.

Choire Sicha: Also the infamous Age of Majority Countdown Clock.

Tom Scocca: Who was running that? The whole thing was a strange and confusing act of publicity-as-reality. The Olsens had never done anything that the adult human audience for popular culture had any reason at all to care about.

Choire Sicha: It was really impressive, in retrospect!

Tom Scocca: And creepy. Because they certainly weren't better-looking or sexier or more charming than the average young actress. They were cyphers as far as persona went. They were just sold as the idea of Barely Legal. And as Twins, another pornographic trope. Did you know that in their hidden-in-plain-sight years, they had made a version of The Parent Trap, or a version of the source story? I learned this after we saw the Lindsay Lohan version on TV the other day.

Tom Scocca: That movie is amazing, the Lohan one. It has horrifying retroactive subtext. Nothing quite like seeing a (well-acted) scene of parental love and mother-daughter reconciliation between a young Lindsay Lohan, making her film debut, and Natasha Richardson.

Tom Scocca: Oh, jeez, thanks, Wikipedia: "Lindsay Lohan had to have her ears pierced especially for her role in this film." That is one of the saddest sentences I have read in a long time.

Choire Sicha: Oh that is terribly sad!

Tom Scocca: "AFFLECK: One of the things in your book that I find difficult to understand is the extent to which women perpetrate violence against other women. Why aren't women more protective of one another?"
"....WUDUNN: It's frustrating to be looking in and to say, 'How come they don't get it?' But it's the rules of their culture."

Choire Sicha: Oh! Oh dear.

Tom Scocca: