In the October Vanity Fair—the one with Angelina Jolie’s most recent spin on the cover, this time in an ultra-zoomed-in portrait leaving her looking like a close-up-ready revision of Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein—Joan Didion was depicted in her biennial being-thin tour, occasioned by the upcoming release of her memoir Blue Nights. The picture, taken by Annie Leibovitz, depicts a gaunt and dimly lit Joan, her hair overtaken by wispy flyways and even a small sweater piling upon itself on her frame. Some meager light plays across her face. The photo, in uncopyrighted reproduction, has 625 notes right now on Tumblr, and the actress Zooey Deschanel reblogged it without further comment beyond the reblogging. READ MORE

As a human being whose personal blog is primarily about cats, I would be extremely offended by the above passage in Keith Gessen's piece in the October Vanity Fair (the one with Angelina Jolie on the cover, zzz), except that Gessen keeps company with a person whose blog can often be cat-centric, so, he is EXCUSED! In more important news, this is a very exciting piece that breaks down exactly how Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding was agented and published. The funny thing is that the book is going to be published tomorrow—so who knows what'll really happen with the tale of the million-dollar first novel? (Gessen reveals, among other fun facts, that the combined foreign rights sales came to about half of the novel's $660,000 advance.) The Art of Fielding is #42 in books on Amazon currently, so that's pretty good! And I'm sure the publisher paid for good front table placement in all the remaining bookstores out there! Anyway, this is a really excellent idea to make a book sale transparent, and there's even some good actual gossip in it. (Also let us never forget the hilarious Bloomberg headline announcing the sale: "Unemployed Harvard Man Auctions Baseball Novel for $650,000.") There's also a wee bit of hagiography of the oh so brilliant editors and agents involved in the world of publishing, and of course it all ends happily (so easy to feel on publication's eve, if you're the one who's the exception to the rule, and who just paid off your student loans), and all success is credited entirely to the power of the writing of the book—but really, an awesome read, and it could only be improved conceptually if Gessen announced his word rate for the Vanity Fair piece at the end. (Maybe they'll put it online even.) READ MORE

Exactly how intense is Vanity Fair's love affair with the Kennedys? The math may or may not shock you: "Roughly one-third of the issues of Vanity Fair since 2003 have contained at least one article about a Kennedy, written by a Kennedy, or mentioning a Kennedy at least seven times.... The October 2009 Jackie cover sold 437,000 issues, beating out both Gisele (281,000) and President Obama (370,000) in 2010. Angelina Jolie seems to be the only star with enough power to consistently outsell the family—her most recent cover sold 512,507."

I was thrown into a brief quandary when I thought that the "hacker" group Anonymous was trying to get us to boycott Vanity Fair because of the Koch Brothers. What has Graydon gotten up to! I thought. But no, they mean the paper plates and napkins. Oh. READ MORE

The great social prophet in consumer society is the bearer of taste refinement. This is a figure who can assuage our innermost disquiet over the dizzying rounds of having, holding and re-leveraging that make up our economic lives. Sure, we might, from time to time, inspect the great storehouse of disposable junk and value-free financial instruments that sustain the fictions of our pecuniary well-being, and find a still small voice offering variations of the great existential questions “what does it all mean?” or “why bother?” But tastemakers can briskly smooth over our worry-ravaged brows; they realign the often brutal prerogatives of the market with the heaving tremors of the soul, and divine in the passing stuff of our consuming fancies the very essence of our expressive being. READ MORE