I woke suddenly in the middle of the night and, it being far too early to get up, did all the things you do to coax your brain back to bed, i.e. had a series of disconnected thoughts about things, but was caught short when I could not recall the name of an actress who had somehow slipped into the stream of semi-consciousness that I had hoped would lead me back to a state of slumber. Now, I have never seen any of this actress’ actual work — not her first film, for which she received an Academy Award nomination and which I had passed on due to a combination of Cameron Crowe fatigue and a disinclination to spend three hours watching anything that glorifies the middling arena rock of the Seventies, nor the one where she plays a magazine writer who has a certain amount of time to meet a guy and then have him break up with her, nor the one where she and Catwoman are best friends who try to ruin each other’s weddings. I’m sure she’s good at what she does, she just doesn’t tend to turn up in the kind of movies I go to see.

But I know who she is. I know that she was married to the dude from the Black Crowes and had a child with him. Also the dude from Muse. I know that she is the daughter of Goldie Hawn and some musician, but that she considers Kurt Russell, her mom’s longtime boyfriend, to be her real dad. I know that many New York sports/gossip writers consider her responsible for the New York Yankees’ 2009 World Series championship, because she was dating Alex Rodriguez, the game’s best-paid player, at the time and was somehow instrumental in his having a successful postseason. I know that her biological father was in a band called the… Something Brothers. The Holmes Brothers! Her name is Katie Holmes!

But no. Katie Holmes is the former “Dawson’s Creek” star who married Tom Cruise and had the baby with the name that sounds like the new iPhone assistant.

Here’s the thing: because of the ludicrous “career” I find myself in, I read a lot every day. I literally scan thousands of items throughout the course of the morning, and those are apart from the three local papers I actually look at cover-to-cover. Yesterday I read a long piece in the New York Review of Books which pretty fundamentally discredits Gretchen Morgeson’s disingenuous accusation — a favorite of conservatives, because it helps shift the blame from the financial sector to the state — that government-sponsored enterprises such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were the real cause of the economic crisis, rather than an out-of-control banking industry that never saw a debt obligation it wouldn’t collateralize. In spite of its length, the article was clear, cogent and free of the kind of technical minutiae that often makes reading about finance such a chore. And yet I could not give you a simple summary of the thing, even after reading it again. But the actress? The one whom I’ve never seen act yet know more personal details about than I do most members of my family? I am willing to wager that even if you read considerably less during your day than I, you probably know just as many of those details. They are all around you, inescapable and permeating everything. They clutter up the space that could be better used for more important information about the way the world is really run and who is really running it.

And that’s why this whole “Occupy Wall Street” thing isn’t gonna work. Because Kate Hudson.

Jeff Jarvis’ Public Parts, released September 27th and currently 12,098 in “books” on Amazon, has come under review by Evgeny Morozov. It is a rather singularly vicious review. From early on: “Why are we so obsessed with privacy? Jarvis blames rapacious privacy advocates — ‘there is money to be made in privacy’ — who are paid to mislead the ‘netizens,’ that amorphous elite of cosmopolitan Internet users whom Jarvis regularly volunteers to represent in Davos. On Jarvis’s scale of evil, privacy advocates fall between Qaddafi’s African mercenaries and greedy investment bankers. All they do is ‘howl, cry foul, sharpen arrows, get angry, get rankled, are incredulous, are concerned, watch, and fret.’ Reading Jarvis, you would think that Privacy International (full-time staff: three) is a terrifying behemoth next to Google (lobbying expenses in 2010: $5.2 million).” And then!

Two things:

Jarvis’s understanding of the law is as careless as his understanding of technology. Discussing the proposed “Do Not Track” legislation that would allow users to opt out of online tracking, he complains that “there’s no real need [for it], since users already have tools to stop tracking.” How far can such logic take us? Should we acquiesce to the NSA’s wiretapping of our phones because we can already speak in code? Should we allow dubious food products to be sold in supermarkets because we already have the tools to disinfect them?

And, a comparison of Jarvis’ last book, on Google, with his new:

Alas, Jarvis 2.0 says nothing about Digg.com’s Kevin Rose — whom Jarvis 1.0 proclaimed to be “the new Turner, Murdoch, Hearst — or Oprah,” which is understandable, given that Digg.com tanked right after it received Jarvis’s blessing. Public Parts has its own Digg.com moment, when Jarvis breathlessly celebrates Blippy, an Internet start-up built on the ridiculous premise that consumers want to share details of their credit card purchases. According to Jarvis, “this start-up will blow your mind” — but the only thing that Blippy has blown so far is its investors’ cash. It shut down its flagship service back in May, but you won’t learn this from Jarvis.

This being the age it is, of course there has been spillover!

Jarvis’ rejoinder on Google+! (on Google+!) wasn’t all that, although he followed up his follow-up with a comment: “That’s the topic where I agree with and compliment Morozov: The technology is neutral.” This gave Evgeny an opening to make the case that Jarvis can’t even say he agrees with Morozov on one thing because Jarvis isn’t even familiar with the chapter headings of Morozov’s book.

Well anyway. Everyone involved will go on getting paid well.

A few weeks ago, Alexander Abad-Santos wrote about Jarvis’ classes at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.

[Annaliese Griffin, the collaborative editor for The New York Times: Local in Fort Greene and Clinton Hill] recalled a time when he tried convincing her class to create jobs instead of jockeying for the existing (and endangered) jobs at mainstream outlets. At a certain point in the discussion she says that Jarvis was trying to get students to give up attachments to books, CDs, steady paychecks and other outmoded devices, Griffin interrupted and asked, “Well, don’t you pay your mortgage with checks signed by The New York Times and CUNY? I mean, aren’t those two institutions pretty much the definition of old media?”

“Jeff totally started laughing and just said, ‘Touché.’ which enraged the class because he was admitting that he has a pretty sweet deal getting paid by big institutions to talk about how outdated they are,” she said. “So the class started saying, ‘Yeah, why are you telling us this from your cushy spot?’ He, in a matter of words, said, ‘I figured out how to get here in this market. I’m trying to help you figure out how to find your own job or build your own company in any market.’”

It’s been quite a morning for Occupy Wall Street, which didn’t find out until nearly this morning’s deadline that the City was going to back down from evicting the protest for “cleaning.” Here’s how it all went down for them (and some others too).

[View the story “Occupy Wall Street’s Wild Morning” on Storify]

Sunday, October 16

At Green Bay -14.5 St. Louis
The Rams have no chance.
They may as well stay home and
watch the game and drink. PICK: PACKERS, BREWERS

At Pittsburgh -12 Jacksonville
Did you know that in
Pittsburgh they put the french fries
inside your sandwich? PICK: STEELERS

Philadelphia -1.5 At Washington
If the dream team keeps
Losing we may have to take
Their Liberty Bell. PICK: EAGLES

At Detroit -4 San Francisco
O Motor City!
The Lions are hotter than
Devil’s Night houses. PICKS: LIONS, TIGERS

At Atlanta -4 Carolina
Falcons’ Second Half
Was an AMC ad for
“The Walking Dead” show. PICK: PANTHERS

At Cincinnati -7 Indianapolis
Let us count the ways
Indianapolis sucks.
Every single way. PICK BENGALS

At NY Giants -3 Buffalo
You should still Bill-leave!
The G-Men play lousy at
Met Life Stadium. PICK: BILLS

At Baltimore -8 Houston
Mario Williams
Linebacker, out for the year.
Texans, pecked to death. PICK: RAVENS

At Oakland -6.5 Cleveland
Al Davis’s ghost
won’t rest until Raiders break
Penalty records. PICK: BROWNS

At New England -7 Dallas
Pats Offense is Great.
And Defense is Wicked Bad.
But Romo blows games. PICK: PATRIOTS

New Orleans -4.5 At Tampa Bay
Can the Saints win in
The Pirateship? As Balk says,
Sure, why the hell not? PICK: SAINTS

At Chicago -3 Minnesota
Both these teams stink and
don’t even deserve haikus.
But I like purple. PICK: VIKINGS

Monday, October 17

At NY Jets -7 Miami
Reggie Bush might get
300 yards running straight
through Jets’ sad run. D. PICK: DOLPHINS

Last Week’s Haiku Picks went 11–2–1. You read that right. Season to
date is 36–39–3.

Jim Behrle tweets at @behrle for your possible amusement.

Will the astoundingly talented Sharon Horgan finally break big on these shores? Here’s hoping.

If you’re a reviewer, once in a while you’re sent a book in the mail so chintzily produced by a publishing house too busy to edit that you wonder how it is that its sensationalist claims aren’t better known. This was certainly the case with the full-color illustrated, under-proofed Confidential: The Life of Secret Agent Turned Hollywood Tycoon Arnon Milchan. Written by two journalists, Meir Doron and Joseph Gelman, with Milchan’s cooperation, it tells the story of how one of the world’s most successful movie producers spent decades spying for Israel, and still had time to introduce Angelina to Brad (that Brad).

— Whoa, this sounds delightfully weird, I might have to buy this!

Here you will find a treatise on books, including The Art of Fielding, in which dudes kinda randomly go gay.

Is #soros cash behind #ows protests? We took a look and here’s what we found http://t.co/v5rto1FY @michellenichols @reuters #occupywallstThu Oct 13 14:29:47 via TweetDeck

Mark Egan
markegan1

This amazing piece of trolling by Mark Egan and Michelle Nichols at Reuters has set the world on fire with the news that George Soros is the sole financial backer of Occupy Wall Street! Oh except he isn’t. (He granted cash to an organization that then made small grants to Adbusters, a publication of which Soros had never heard, and which was one of the organizing groups behind Occupy Wall Street.) But good job, shady mega-trolls, from your headline (“Who’s behind the Wall St. protests?”) to the whole rest of it (“there has been much speculation….”). Mark Egan really went the extra mile on Twitter: “Here’s what we found”? What you found is a handily shareable non-connection between the right’s favorite lefty bogeyman and an independent protest movement. Kudos go to Reuters editor Claudia Parsons for really juicing it up. Gross job, everyone!

“Thanks to the rise of the cellphone, there are only about 425,000 pay phones left nationwide, down from a peak of 2.2 million in 2000, according to the American Public Communications Council, a trade group representing many of the country’s roughly 800 independent pay-phone operators.” For a little perspective, that number is slightly smaller than the total population of Staten Island.

Okay, we had our launch fun. Now The Wirecutter, our always-updated guide to the best tech available, is also pretty to look at.