Here's a good question: what if the discomfort expressed, on different fronts and with rationales, by the Malcolm Gladwells and Bill Kellers and the Zadie Smiths and whoever else hates the Face-Twitters now, was mostly just a love of (or addiction to?) narrative? Facebook stories don't really have any endings, and neither do they always have multiple conflicting sources (not like the newspapers have much of that either anyway). "At the end of every magazine article, before the "■," is the quote from the general in Afghanistan that ties everything together. The evening news segment concludes by showing the secretary of State getting back onto her helicopter. There's the [...]

Political protests are hardly occasions for subtlety, but even so, the overblown analogies to the Middle East in Wisconsin are rather difficult to take. Scott Walker is the "Mubarak of the Midwest"— or, to more Biblically minded commentators, a "Pharoah." Similarly, the protesters are the people who have finally risen up to bring a "Tunisia Moment" to America. Paul Krugman has fallen for it too, terming Paul Ryan's comparison of Cairo and Madison "unintentionally apt." No list of pizza donations goes by without mention that some benefactors are Egyptian. Even the protesters themselves have picked up on it, suggesting Walker become President of [...]

Tiny Facebook demon-beast Alexa Chung, hired to host MTV's daily "Twitter with Tweens" segment, will soon be gone from our country, as they have got to get her off the airwaves. Now here is an example of the kind of hate that Alexa inspires back in her home country of "England," in an astounding example of literary mountain-molehilling that our British friends do so well. It is an entire piece of old-school gossip column writing about how Anna Wintour gave Alexa Chung a dirty look at a fashion show. Read it and believe in narrative again! Here is just one sentence that should warm your heart: "Coming eyeball to [...]

.bbpBox68355674643509248 {background:url(http://a3.twimg.com/images/themes/theme1/bg.png) #C0DEED;padding:20px;} p.bbpTweet{background:#fff;padding:10px 12px 10px 12px;margin:0;min-height:48px;color:#000;font-size:18px !important;line-height:22px;-moz-border-radius:5px;-webkit-border-radius:5px} p.bbpTweet span.metadata{display:block;width:100%;clear:both;margin-top:8px;padding-top:12px;height:40px;border-top:1px solid #fff;border-top:1px solid #e6e6e6} p.bbpTweet span.metadata span.author{line-height:19px} p.bbpTweet span.metadata span.author img{float:left;margin:0 7px 0 0px;width:38px;height:38px} p.bbpTweet a:hover{text-decoration:underline}p.bbpTweet span.timestamp{font-size:12px;display:block}

I am proud to be involved with contemporary American political satire.less than a minute ago via Echofon Favorite Retweet ReplyDanny TrippDannyTripp60

A few weeks ago, the cast and crew of "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip" joined Twitter en masse. And it's not just head writer Matt Albie and multi-talented S60 star Harriet Hayes. Just about everyone involved with the [...]

This weekend's walk-about with Courtney Love in the Times was both excellent and at the same time fundamentally indistinguishable from any other long-form profile of Love written in the last twenty or so years. There is a simple and straightforward reason for this. Courtney is the Dorian Gray of the American celebrity-industrial complex. Her public face shows us exactly what we want to see, while her private face is revolting (and even aging) and seeing the two in close proximity unsettles the viewer on an almost biological level. There's no denying that Love can be personally unpleasant; a former co-worker who went on to be Courtney's assistant [...]

Well here is the big Where the Wild Things Are Spike Jonze profile, for this Sunday's New York Times magazine. The piece is made up of the idea of the struggle between a brilliant, unusual director and a stultifying studio system. Gosh, it is hard to make a good movie in the studio system! And gosh, directors are difficult little children. This is probably a thing that is always true! And here, not at all appearing in the article, are the names of the producers of the film (except Carls and Sendak, who, you know, were shopping a movie version together for ages), which sort of leaves the article [...]

.bbpBox1226935889 {background:url(http://a3.twimg.com/a/1299876209/images/themes/theme1/bg.png) #C0DEED;padding:20px;} p.bbpTweet{background:#fff;padding:10px 12px 10px 12px;margin:0;min-height:48px;color:#000;font-size:18px !important;line-height:22px;-moz-border-radius:5px;-webkit-border-radius:5px} p.bbpTweet span.metadata{display:block;width:100%;clear:both;margin-top:8px;padding-top:12px;height:40px;border-top:1px solid #fff;border-top:1px solid #e6e6e6} p.bbpTweet span.metadata span.author{line-height:19px} p.bbpTweet span.metadata span.author img{float:left;margin:0 7px 0 0px;width:38px;height:38px} p.bbpTweet a:hover{text-decoration:underline}p.bbpTweet span.timestamp{font-size:12px;display:block}

Greetings. I'm going to be tweeting for a while about the misadventures of 'Citizen', a character who was cut from my novel, Lowboy.less than a minute ago via webJohn WrayJohn_Wray

So began novelist John Wray's great, strange experiment in Twitter narrative, which last weekend attracted the notice of the New York Times. Started nearly two years ago, the project is still going—not a novel exactly, but some new form [...]

There are now two conflicting 2010 and 2012 election narratives. (Well, three, really, if you count the "Mayan disaster" narrative, in which, in '12, everyone in politics is killed when the Mayans RELEASE THE KRAKEN.) One is the Republicans' "resist and repeal and refuse and other words that start with 'r'" about how they will use the giving of health insurance to the working class to get the Demoncrats out of office. And now, well, this is different: the Dems and their labor union pals think they can crucify the five Democrats who switched their votes on health care reform to "no." Basically Nancy Pelosi is going [...]