“It is a scenario familiar to long-suffering wives everywhere. Hopelessly lost on a country road, the man behind the wheel refuses to ask directions, grits his teeth and drives even faster into unknown territory. While women are more than happy to use all available resources to help them reach a goal, men will rigidly stick to their original ‘system’ — such as a map or set of directions — even though it has clearly led them astray. But while the reluctance of male drivers to accept any outside help certainly seems like pig-headedness, it may actually stem from a less macho cause: blind panic.”

★ The shade rolled up to reveal rain beading on the windows, with gray behind. Showers went and came and went or did both simultaneously, bursts of droplets outside a doorway ending before an umbrella even made it out of a bag. Outside Secaucus, billows rolled through the massed phragmites, their seedheads bowing to the east. The thick, wet air coming through the screens into the Princeton Junction station, with its varnished wood and tile, gave it the precise feel of a sealed hothouse, belied only by the burnt-edged leaves on a potted plant inhabiting it. The car was exactly as it had been left — a scant quarter-tank of gas, a stranger’s forgotten keys — only sheeted with water. Amid the game controls, the info and eco buttons, the lever for the wipers at least was where it belonged. Back in the city, a drizzle blew right under the scaffolding. Along a fencetop on Prince Street ran a crepe festival streamer, once red, now washed mostly white.

by Maria Bustillos and David Roth

Maria Bustillos: I’m trying to parse all these Metacritic reviews of The Master. Mainly they seem to be saying, “I hate it, but I think I’m supposed to. A masterpiece.”

David Roth: David Thomson, in the New Republic, had a great first line. Which was “Well, at least it’s pretentious.”

MB: Yay? I’ll say this, whoever reconstructed M. Phoenix’s shoulders deserves a special Oscar. His bod is all Cubist, suddenly.

DR: It seems to me like this: a fine director made a mostly perfect-looking film, with an interesting musical score and fine performances. Except that it is also totally inert, with no real characters one can or could care about, no real sense of the world they live in, and doesn’t touch upon any ideas with pulses of their own.

MB: It looks amazing but my blood pressure still sank like a stone. 20/10 by the end.

DR: At the ArcLight in Los Angeles, someone comes around defibrillating people, I’m sure. They snap back to life like, “AAUUUUGHH IT’S BRILLIANT AND BRACING.”

MB: Fittingly enough, that theater is just a stone’s throw from the monstrous blue Scientology HQ. I worry that they have Beck Hansen tied up in there somewhere.

DR: There is nothing more LA to me than a second-generation Scientologist. Maybe if that person was also, like, wearing weird pants and taking pictures of the dumplings s/he’s eating in Monterey Park.

MB: I can’t tell you about their dumpling-photo habits. Us common or garden Angelenos just drive past their compound and shudder.

DR: It is, to be fair, a punishing building, like if a 1950s luxury hotel was also a prison.

MB: We had the usual ArcLight pep talk at the beginning. Water is now $4.50 over there. Maybe I became so grumpy because I was parched.

DR: Yeah, you want to stay hydrated while soaking in 70mm footage of Joaquin Phoenix acting feral, Phil S. Hoffman being orotund, and boats driving around, and period-appropriate haberdashery.

MB: At least the L. Ron Hubbard thing, I can tell you because I slogged through Dianetics, is not entirely inaccurate. Though I thought the movie kind of failed to capture the depths of Hubbard’s real sordidness. Maybe Philip Seymour Hoffman is too civilized a guy. Whereas L. Ron was a real troglodyte. Hoffman totally built his voice around the real Hubbard’s voice, though (start around 1:51).

DR: The problem, for me, was that The Cause, which is the stand-in for Scientology, was never really graspable as either a philosophy or something else. It wasn’t good hucksterism or bad, and there was no real sense of what its appeal might’ve been, beyond Hoffman/Dodd/Hubbard.

MB: They were also missing the Art Theory part. Scientology kind of worships Art and Artists though they do not know Thing One about any of that. Like that terrible 19th-c. poem they slap on everything?

DR: Please share the poem. I always thought Scientology was more into celebrities than artists, and then wrote some sort of virtue back onto those artists’ success.

DR: Like how Ayn Rand thought Mickey Spillane was one of the great writers in the language and that Cyrano de Bergerac was the finest book ever written. It would be really interesting to know the artistic tastes of truly epically crass, self-interested people. Like, what’s Donald Trump’s favorite band?

MB: Here it is. It’s by Arthur William Edgar O’Shaughnessy.

“We Are the Music-Makers”

We are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams.
World-losers and world-forsakers,
Upon whom the pale moon gleams;
Yet we are the movers and shakers,
Of the world forever, it seems.

With wonderful deathless ditties
We build up the world’s great cities,
And out of a fabulous story
We fashion an empire’s glory:
One man with a dream, at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
And three with a new song’s measure
Can trample an empire down.

We, in the ages lying
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself with our mirth;
And o’erthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world’s worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.

I particularly like the “deathless ditties” line, which has the same effect on my scalp as, like, eating a tablespoon of wasabi. The Scientologists quote this poem on half their literature.

DR: “With wonderful deathless ditties/We build up the world’s great cities” > “We built this city with rock and roll.” IT’S NOT CLOSE.

MB: I know, sign me up for ten billion years of indentured servitude.

DR: The images are arresting, though. “I just got together with all these creative people, and we were sighing, like creatively, and then all of a sudden there is this huge city.”

MB: Well, you have to write ditties first. Don’t let’s get ahead of ourselves.

MB: So, the movie? For what it’s worth, I thought the acting was fine, though as Anthony Lane said in the New Yorker: capital-A Acting.

DR: I was thinking about this. I didn’t necessarily sense the depth of vulnerability you usually get with Hoffman, which I would’ve appreciated, and which he usually brings to the (many) frauds he plays. But he at least communicates the restorative joy a certain type of grandiose person gets from a certain type of attention.

DR: Who would you cast as L. Ron Hubbard?

MB: I’d cast the young Gene Hackman but make him go to his most horrible incarnation. As for the Cause, you know, as depicted in this thing, it makes neither more nor less sense than Scientology does, from what I can make out.

DR: Joaquin Phoenix, for his part, is maybe too good. Which is also a nice way of saying bad. His performance is so majestically gnarled that it’s kind of impossible to see or care about Freddie Quell as a human being. He is so perfectly feral.

MB: The Phoenix character is a stone psychopath. How come all these women are giving this obviously dangerous weirdo the come-hither?

DR: Yeah, it’s one thing to be into, like, bad boys or conflicted people. It’s another thing to be like “I’m going to let this guy, who is 145 pounds of clammy torment and screwed-down violence, take my top off.”

MB: The department-store model is taking off her bra and every woman in the audience is like what?! NO. GET OUT OF THERE NOW WHAT ARE YOU THINKING. I guess it was the Lysol cocktail he gave her. Can we talk about Freddie’s way with experimental hooch? Because you can’t drink paint thinner! Or Lysol! Not even a little bit!!

DR: It is an interesting bonding point. “You simply must make me another batch of that homebrewed poison of yours,” the suave, cultured cult leader says to the frank psychopath who moves like one of those inflatable tube men outside car dealerships. “You have access to whatever you want from the garage, or from inside of the car.”

DR: Although I guess there’s something to the power of shared appetites. Was Hubbard a lech? Because, although the script implied it, Hoffman’s Dodd didn’t really seem to have the usual Svengali’s wild fuck-appetite.

MB: I am not sure about Hubbard. He had those teenage Messengers, but from what I’ve read it doesn’t sound like it was really a harem situation?

MB: Did this whole thing kind of remind you of Charles Willeford? Because it did me.

DR: It was roughly that stank and poker-faced. There was a certain lack of humor, though.

MB: Those two things. This distanced horror-comedy, like the Hare Krishna’s broken finger. The casual brutality: David Lynch for example has your featured psychopath, but you get the sense that David Lynch knows/cares how awful this all is. In the case of Willeford, he takes great care to avoid judging the horror.

DR: Right, or Lynch knows it and is sort of kidding in some grotesque or distanced way. This was different. Paul Thomas Anderson can be very funny when he wants to be. But I think that in his two Crazy People Movies — which would be this and Punch Drunk Love, which I don’t really like all that much — he recedes a bit too much.

MB: Oh gosh, I loved Punch Drunk Love.

DR: There is also, for me, the question of just how crazy a protagonist a movie can stand.

MB: Pretty crazy, I think. Do you love Taxi Driver? Because I really do, though I am in no hurry to watch it again. Yikes.

DR: I do love Taxi Driver. And that is maybe your maximum of inarticulate crazy person. But De Niro helped so much in that one, because you could feel how angry/sad/disgusted he was as he slipped away from himself and into his surroundings. Phoenix starts The Master pretty close to the edge, and never gets terribly close to humanity except when under hypnosis. If Anderson had cast a different actor than Phoenix or sought a different performance, there might’ve been some sort of recognizable humanity there that recedes or is subsumed; Phoenix managed that in To Die For, for instance. Instead the performance is 105% seethe all the time.

DR: Although the New York that surrounds Travis Bickle is so luridly and lovingly (it’s a very nauseous love) depicted. The bleak joke of that movie is how long and how well someone that damaged can fit into a New York City of extravagantly messed up people and, like, Tad’s Steaks with peep shows in them on every corner.

MB: Maybe that’s the bar Anderson was trying to reach. No soap, though.

DR: In The Master, the environs are very… art-directed. There’s no real sense of what 1950 was like or would be like for Freddie Quell or anyone else.

MB: That is SO TRUE, you can’t evoke a time on art direction alone.

DR: And this was good art direction. Period sweaters for dayz.

MB: They WAY overdid the ties also, which to me appeared more like 40s ties? Here is about the minorest quibble a person could have with a movie, I realize.

MB: But I did feel the lack of any sense of what a normal person’s day was like, from this movie; what was on the radio, who was frackin’ president. This whole thing takes place in a complete vacuum.

DR: Which, maybe given that it’s about a cult, you could say the claustrophobia is by design.

MB: Which like, it’s an Art Film so whatever its defects are going to be wallpapered over with this veneer of Artistic License.

DR: Right, exactly. “It’s lifeless and loveless. Which is surely the point.”

MB: There is also something very condescending about oh, these dumb “regular people” would obviously fill a lecture hall to hear P.S. Hoffman free-associate.

MB: There really needed to be an explanation of why Laura Dern, for instance, was so into The Cause, and there was a giant crater in the movie where that explanation would have been.

DR: And inside that crater: LONELY MEN have a hard time relating. All the women in the movie, all these great actresses are left doing so little.

This is what bums me out about Anderson’s ascent — if that’s the word — into his new and novelistic seriousness. There are GREAT parts for ladies in Magnolia and Boogie Nights. I was going to write “great lady parts in Boogie Nights” but the weight of the notional That’s What She Saids was crushing.

DR: And then as he’s sort of achieved this icy new virtuosity, and lost that shaggy Altman/90s Postmodern Novel approach, the women are sidelined. So that the men might scowl and not-relate better. And you lose a lot with that, not least because women are such a huge part of why men do anything.

MB: I guess we are supposed to think that Amy Adams is kind of the prime mover of the whole thing? It’s like she’s the one guiding Hoffman, who is clearly completely bonkers but has all this charisma. How can she “believe”? I had no sense of her true position on his nonsense. “Which is by design,” right? Ugh.

DR: I would take Amy Adams out for a nice dinner and walk her all the way home even if she lived somewhere weird.

MB: The handjob scene was horrifying. Well, all the sex in this movie, which was constant and just bludgeoning, was horrifying.

DR: That is true. If I can recommend this movie to anyone without reservation, it would be to fans of gnarly unerotic sex. Be it with Twitching Tearful Beef Jerky Stick In Period Sweater Phoenix or anyone else.

DR: The handjob scene, we should explain at the risk of further spoilers, is when an Academy Award Nominee MILKS an Academy Award Winner into a sink while issuing vague but pointed ultimatums about the milkee not straying from marriage.

MB: Which milkee then basically collapses into the sink.

DR: SO HOT. I give it five boners. #MrSkin

MB: Also? That was really cheap how Anderson stole the mildly exasperated hand-wiping-after from “Mad Men.” Am I making that up?? I THINK NOT.

DR: Oh, did he? I just assumed it was a period detail. I haven’t read Dwight Eisenhower’s biography in a while. Sorry, imagery.

MB: Ack.

DR: The scenes that I thought were best in the movie involved that mimetic hypnosis that happens when people are hypnotized in movies.

DR: The first scene of Lars Von Trier’s Zentropa is a particularly obvious example of how this can work. It’s a cool feeling to be hypnotized by proxy, and fairly well pulled off during the first few scenes in which Hoffman audits/processes Phoenix. But that’s as illuminating or interesting as their relationship gets.

DR: And so the thing that should pull it along — Hoffman as discoverer or charlatan, Phoenix as someone who discovers or is hustled — is absent. Neither ever quite seems like someone who understands or even knows what he’s doing.

MB: “Which is by design”? because if so, whatever. Who is the sick one? etc., blah. It leaves way too much unanswered. Why do you think Hoffman refused to ditch Phoenix, when he was asked to by his fam? For example.

DR: No idea? In David Thomson’s review, he writes that the suggestion of a homoerotic subtext is more a result of empty space in terms of the characters than anything really suggested in their relationship. That it’s just two dudes hanging around thwarting each other and not-quite-communicating, to no end, over an extended period of time.

MB: I didn’t read a particle of homoeroticism in this movie? Is there a claim for that?

DR: Not in Hoffman’s final serenade of Phoenix? I thought it was somehow implied in the Punitive Amy Adams Handjob™, too.

MB: Hmm. Well, they wrestled, I guess.

DR: But yeah, I think mostly the relationship was impenetrable. If you’re inclined, then this is a director elegantly refusing to reveal too much. If you’re not, it’s more “these jerks, I think, are maybe going to fight?”

MB: I thought more like, Hoffman is a narcissist who just sucks up attention like a vacuum cleaner. And narcissists are really good at paying enough attention to rope you in; they choose people who pay close and good attention; either desperate people or really aware people, because the other person is the pool in which the narcissist can see his own reflection. Otherwise they don’t exist, even.

DR: So maybe there’s your truest Hubbard parallel in the movie, finally.

MB: That works, certainly.

Maria Bustillos is the author of Dorkismo and Act Like a Gentleman, Think Like a Woman.

David Roth writes “The Mercy Rule” column at Vice, co-writes the Wall Street Journal’s Daily Fix,, and is one of the founders of The Classical. He also has his own little website. And he tweets inanities!

“The so-called ‘superweeds’ have arisen because of the success of genetically modified crops, which now account for the vast majority of US corn, soya and cotton. GM essentially means that crops are protected from one type of chemical weedkiller. But because farmers have become over-reliant on this one product, weeds with natural resistance have spread rapidly and have strangled production on millions of acres.”
 — Do you know about ambrosia trifida, a.k.a. giant ragweed?

Well, you should because it’s scary. It’s scary like a combination of Children of the Corn, Godzilla, Cheech & Chong’s Next Movie, Little Shop of Horrors, and Michael Pollan’s Botany of Desire. It can grow up to 18 feet tall and is destroying America’s agriculture industry. (Man, if the ragweed can grow so tall out there on the Heartland’s genetically modified fields, imagine how big the roosters must get!) But don’t worry, scientists are developing a powerful new weedkiller to combat the scourge. It’s made from some of the same chemicals that were in Agent Orange. So that’s comforting.

“A foremost goal of modern physics is to formulate a working theory that describes the entire universe, from subatomic to astronomical scales, within a single framework. Such a theory, called ‘quantum gravity,’ will necessarily account for what happened at the moment of the Big Bang. Some versions of quantum gravity theory that have been proposed by cosmologists predict that the Big Bang, rather than being the starting point of time, was just ‘a transitional stage in an eternal universe,’ in Carroll’s words. For example, one model holds that the universe acts like a balloon that inflates and deflates over and over under its own steam. If, in fact, time had no beginning, this shuts the book on Genesis.”
 — Sean Carroll, a theoretical cosmologist at the California Institute of Technology, talks to Live Science’s Natalie Wolchover about why “there’s good reason to think science will ultimately arrive at a complete understanding of the universe that leaves no grounds for God whatsoever.” Personally, I think the book should have been shut on Genesis a long time ago. Like, if not immediately following Peter Gabriel’s departure in 1975, then definitely after Abacab in 1981.

by Emma Garman

A series dedicated to explaining Britain’s manufactured celebrities to an American audience.

It was an unforgettable scene: a wayward prince in virile command of a nubile gathering, booze and shrooms flowing, billiard cues brandished suggestively, gratuitous nudity set against an opulent backdrop. But enough about my “Game of Thrones” fan fic. Matters of even greater import summon our attention, such as the apparent inability of young British royals to keep their goodies concealed from the public’s prurient gaze — even though “not being photographed naked” falls fairly high on an unchallenging list of official duties, somewhere between “attending photo-calls with terminally ill children” and “accepting hospitality from Richard Branson.” But as the plebeian world slowly processes the shock and awe of seeing some bona fide fuzzily captured royal B-cups, and of witnessing HRH Henry Charles Albert David of Wales behaving like a particularly un-decorous “Jersey Shore” cast member — I for one have only just titrated my off-brand benzos dose down to a level where I’m able to type — let us spare a brief thought for the person Harry’s shenanigans will have upset the most.

I refer, of course, to Damian Lewis, aka Marine Sergeant Nicholas Brody, who is about to return to our screens on “Homeland.” Until last month, Lewis felt secure in the knowledge that he was America’s Favorite Ginger Brit, a truly impressive achievement given the unfathomably cruel prejudice endured by the Titian-locked in his country of origin. Yet alas, he’s been mightily upstaged by another freckled carrot-top and fellow old Etonian who, with one debauched and blurrily documented Vegas trip, has strode into that elevated rank of celebrity whose glory knows no parallel: an exposé on TMZ. Lewis’ Emmy nom, the dazzling reviews of his performance, President Obama’s avowed addiction to the show — what does it even mean next to the peerless imprimatur of a strategically placed red star? Or an eight-figure offer from esteemed adult film auteurs Vivid Entertainment? That Harry is also known to don a splendid soldier’s uniform from time to time (sometimes even for official duties) must only sharpen the sting. As for Sergeant Brody’s Al Qaeda allegiance, and those evil-doers’ attempt on Harry’s life last week — well, that’s one of those troubling collisions of art and life upon which it’s best not to publicly dwell, unless you want Mandy Patinkin to have you arrested for your own safety.

Captain Harry, who turned 28 last weekend and is an Army helicopter pilot now stationed in the Helmand province of Southern Afghanistan, has always insisted that regardless of the danger, he wants to serve his country in active combat. “There’s no way I’m going to put myself through Sandhurst [Military Academy],” he once manfully asserted, “and then sit on my arse back home while my boys are out fighting.” Now, it is not this column’s place to pass judgment on the finer points of military strategy, but perhaps Harry’s brave stance would be more admirable if it weren’t for the financial and logistical burden entailed by safeguarding him, not to mention the increased danger his presence causes “his boys” and their American allies. Take Saturday’s bombing of a British base, one of the largest and most heavily defended in the region, which killed two US Marines: “We attacked that base because Prince Harry was also on it and so they can know our anger,” said Taliban spokesman Qari Youssef Ahmadi.

Indeed, Harry’s army nickname is “Ginger Bullet Magnet.” If only someone would sit him down and patiently explain that while co-piloting an Apache helicopter in a war zone is ripping good fun, drunkenly partying with naked girls in an enormous lavish hotel suite in the gambling capital of the world is also a perfectly valid means of fighting the Taliban — especially if photographic evidence is immediately forthcoming, thus supplying an incalculable financial boon to the Western infidel media. And look at the global gaiety sparked by Harry’s hijinks — if that’s not sterling public service, I don’t know what is.

Of course, as spare to the heir, dear Hazza can’t be blamed for committing to a respectable occupation, especially when his elder counterpart, Prince Andrew, is such a salutary reminder of the grimly disreputable potential his future holds. The third in line to the throne after his father, Charles, and his older brother, William, Harry will only become King if Wills dies without an heir. The fecundity of Kate Middleton’s womb is thus almost as personally relevant to Harry as it is to the editors of tabloid magazines, since ruling the land and adjusting his behavior to a standard befitting a monarch is not a prospect he finds in any way appealing.

Still, when he wakes sweating from a terrifying nightmare about hosting a Buckingham Palace garden party with no banging house tunes or pneumatic cocktail waitresses, at least he can comfort himself with the thought that he may not technically qualify as King, if longstanding rumors regarding his parentage are to be believed. The laws of succession state that the monarch must bear the blood of German Princess Sophia, Electress of Hanover, the heiress to the British crown who died in 1714. But Harry, widespread speculation has it, is the son of Diana’s onetime lover James Hewitt and therefore a purebred Englishman. Prominent biographer Christopher Andersen, author of After Diana, found sources to confirm that Hewitt’s affair with the Princess had begun at least nine months before Harry’s birth — and that Diana and Charles’ sex life was all but dead by then anyway — contrary to Hewitt’s previous claim that he first met Diana when Harry was “already a toddler.” That demonstrable lie simply proves the firm got to him, say supporters of the theory, who also point to the resemblance of Harry to Hewitt, and the similarity of their coloring. A rejoinder is that Harry’s maternal uncle, Charles Spencer (Boris Johnson’s old bestie, whom we last met in the context of high-society fisticuffs), also had red hair as a young man, albeit not quite as brightly-hued as Harry’s.

Royal true blood or not, Harry receives no salary from the British taxpayer for being a prince, although he does enjoy the perk of a rent-free apartment in Kensington Palace. As a soldier he earns about $60K a year, plus extra combat pay for when he’s in a battle zone, a combined sum that more or less covers the bar bills when he’s letting off some steam with the chaps. He also receives an allowance from Charles and interest from his late mother’s fortune, which is held in trust. Then when Harry turns thirty, he’ll receive his full Diana inheritance of about $10M, so whatever ups and downs fate thrusts upon him, he’ll probably manage.

And he’s always got his loyal chums to prop him up, some of whom are considerably richer than him. Close pal Arthur Landon, one of the Vegas contingent, is the son of Austro-Hungarian Princess Katalina Esterhazy de Galantha and the late Brigadier Tim Landon, from whom he inherited $300M. Arthur, a “model” and “filmmaker,” was good enough to share with the press his outrage regarding the leaked photos, which he lamented put “a real dampener” on the holiday. Well, quite. To have your complimentary stay in an $8,000-a-night hotel suite sullied after the fact by a scandal that anyone with half a brain would see coming a mile off — doesn’t your heart go out to him? Harry’s other travel buddy, his omnipresent wingman Tom “Skippy” Inskip, no doubt suffered comparably but, unfortunately, we must use our imagination to feel his anguish: Skippy, an old Etonian city banker whose moneybags father is friends with Charles, has maintained a discreet silence on the matter. We would expect nothing less from the man who once posted a Facebook photo of his entirely naked self driving a flashy convertible down a Californian freeway.

Harry’s current girlfriend, Cressida Bonas, who was present on the earlier Caribbean leg of the vacation, seems to be standing by her man despite prior reports of her “devastation” and “humiliation” over the nude romp pics. A 23-year-old dancer and aristocrat — her mother is Lady Mary Gaye-Curzon, a four-times-married debutante and former model — Cress’ blue blood isn’t what qualifies her to date Harry. Rather, it’s her adherence to a physical type from which the Prince’s romantic leanings have scarcely veered since his first serious relationship with Zimbabwean-born Chelsy Davy. To have a chance with Harry, you need to be golden of skin and coltish of limb with long blonde hair, a snub nose, and an outdoorsy aura; an exemplar of the species is Florence “Flee” Brudenell-Bruce, the stunning lingerie model and distant cousin with whom Harry dallied last year, but who reportedly dumped him over his wandering eye. Aspirants to princessdom are also advised to cultivate an interest in horses. Like his brother, Harry is a keen polo player, and regular participates in charity matches. (For abstainers of “RHONY”/the otherwise uninitiated: polo matches are basically the sporting event version of Joan Collins — anachronistic, Eurotrashy, champagne-soaked and sponsored by jewelry companies.)

Harry’s avid female fan base suffered a major setback recently, when to everyone’s chagrin his secret Facebook page, a vital stalking aid, was deleted in the wake of the Vegas brouhaha. “Spike Wells” had 400 friends, mostly well-known members of his and Wills’ upper-crust clique, and at one time had a profile picture of a redheaded child with the slogan OH MY GOD I’M GINGER. Around the time the account disappeared, Harry connoisseurs — among whom a leading light is 20-year-old Cornwall student Emma, the curator of the Very Prince Harry Tumblr (warning: music) — were being deluged with questions from journalists desperate to access his clandestine online existence, but woefully lacking the social-media savvy imprinted Lamarckian-style on Millennial DNA.

Harry’s own natural embrace of his generation’s defining values — warmth, openness, informality, zero concern over privacy or qualms about being stark bollock naked around camera phones — makes it pretty unlikely that he lost a minute of sleep over the dissemination of his jolly japes to all four corners of the globe. Not that anyone else, including the older royals, would have been genuinely perturbed; Charles and Camilla surely concurred with the summing up of Boris Johnson, viewed by many as Harry’s kindred gaffe-prone posho spirit: “I think it’d be disgraceful if a chap wasn’t allowed to have a bit of fun in Las Vegas. The real scandal would be if you went all the way to Las Vegas and you didn’t misbehave in some trivial way.”

Nevertheless, we can expect some vague gestures toward image rehabilitation to be made over the coming months. It won’t hurt for the public to be reminded of Sentebale, Harry’s charity for AIDS orphans in the small Southern African country of Lesotho, for which he has raised huge amounts of funding since its inception in 2006. Arguably more dubious an approach is a proposed official visit to China, “to improve tense British relations” with the country. Of Harry’s various talents, a knack for high-level foreign diplomacy hasn’t been significantly in evidence, unless you count the time — and I’m sorry to inflict this image upon you, but sometimes harsh, squirmy reality must be faced — he broke into Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds” during a speech at a Jamaican state dinner. The Jamaicans politely humored the lovable scamp, but somehow it’s harder to envisage Hu Jintao, 69, Jiang Zemin, 86, and Xi Jinping, 59, (the three senior comrades of China’s Communist Party, or to use Charles’ affectionate pet name, those “appalling old waxworks”) falling prey to Harry’s particular brand of impishness.

In the meantime, as he sees out his deployment, the world’s paparazzi will be making extra sacrifices to Mephistopheles, in the hope that he pays a visit to a certain ambitious young woman with close familial connections to the prince. We’ll know if their efforts bore fruit by the time Pippa Middleton’s party-planning book comes out next month.

Related: How Kate Became A Princess

Emma Garman no longer lives in her native UK, but she still watches lots of its TV. She’s also on Twitter.

“Batman may be saving more than Gotham City. For throngs of devoted male fans, the muscular superhero may bolster body image too, according to a new study. Men in the study who said they felt a bond with Batman or Spider-Man also reported feeling more satisfied with their own bodies after seeing a picture of the muscular superhero, while men who felt indifferent toward the superhero felt worse about themselves.”

“This fragment suggests that some early Christians had a tradition that Jesus was married. There was, we already know, a controversy in the second century over whether Jesus was married, caught up with a debate about whether Christians should marry and have sex.”
 — There goes another “utopian hero.” Mark Grief is going to be bummed out.

Here you will find a picture of a dog feeding a lamb with a bottle. I KNOW.

Hahahaha I just googled Ames and he’s born the same year as my dad. Dude is a46 year old man.

— Malcolm Harris (@BigMeanInternet) September 19, 2012

Well, here’s a mildly misguided takedown of someone you’ve likely never heard of. Are you in the mood for that? It’s Wednesday, why not! So it’s Mark Ames — of the eXile infamy — on the topic of Malcolm Harris, who writes for The New Inquiry. Have you had enough already? Walk away! Be free! Otherwise… Ames’ point is basically like this: Occupy was kind of irritating, then kind of amazing, but then really irritating, and that’s all because pretentious, obnoxious twits were trying to use Occupy as a platform. “To me,” Ames writes, “the Occupy Movement will always be conflated with Malcolm Harris and the brand of marketing-concocted ‘anarchism’ that he represents.” Ames’ central complaints are that 1. Harris pulled the “Radiohead is performing at Occupy!” prank/scam and 2. this remarkable marketing sheet for Harris, which goes like this: “Often called the Naomi Klein of the 21st century, Malcolm’s sharp and prescient critiques carry weight — unlike other theoriests, Malcolm makes his stand outside the establishment.” [sic, etc.] My beef is that’s true and not true.

It’s not true in the sense that you could go to endless Occupy meetings (sorry, “people’s assemblies”) and never see the likes of a Malcolm Harris, and you could go to plenty of demonstrations and never catch a whiff of him or his ilk. The people across the country who did the real heavy lifting of Occupy were, you know, busy doing the heavy lifting. (Just like in every political movement: it’s the people behind the scenes getting people fed and working out logistics who are the real backbone of these organizations.)

But then it is also a good point Ames makes, in that Malcolm Harris is a force of chaos and surely ambition, and also a terrifically catty and unfiltered piece of work, as you can see from his Twitter. Should you want more, by the way, takedown publisher Paul Carr and others were going at it on Twitter all night. Then for several hours they were getting their beauty sleep while people with square jobs were doing things. But seriously boys, can’t we all just do cocaine-Adderall halfsies together in Bushwick and get along? (No? We can’t? Okay.)

UPDATE: Oh good, everyone’s awake and back at it!

.@rachelrosenfelt only unethical thing I saw in there was labeling Malcolm Harris the Naomi Klein of the 21st century

— moe tkacik (@moetkacik) September 19, 2012

UPDATE UPDATE: And here’s another side of the story.