“Porpoises rescue Dick Van Dyke: Mary Poppins star feared death after apparently falling asleep on his surfboard but friendly sea creatures pushed him to shore”

In today’s episode, the intrepid Emily Gould meets Marcy Dermansky, the author of Bad Marie, which is about a woman who gets out of prison who is not so good at child care! So of course, here in our glamorous test kitchen, they make mac and cheese and instant pudding. Cooking the Books is directed by Valerie Temple and shot and edited by Andrew Gauthier. You can see all the Cooking the Books episodes here or even subscribe via iTunes. Previously: Tao Lin makes raw salad; Jennifer Egan makes macaroons. Plus! Veggie Burgers Every Which Way.

First they changed the face of politics, and now they’re changing the face of culture. Is there anything the Tea Party can’t do?

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

POEM ENDING WITH SOME ADVICE
I want to live in the rectangle it lights
me up I swear it is the nothing I have
never seen before reject this weather
I said to myself and fucked it out of
existence thank you for coming I am
happy to see you it is nice to see you
from across the prophylactic lake here is
my advice if you want to make a
commercial about two tortoises with
internet trouble their house should be a
one-story ranch if you want people to
you know believe you

SPRING POEM FOR HARPO
if we did not have skin we would not have
gladness skin is what keeps the
gladness in you know you are glad when
the skin begins swelling you can almost
not contain it the gladness the
feeling when you touch a warm stone with
all five of your toes then the others
the sun will one day grow so glad it will
destroy us our skin an immense
gladness will go all over all humming
like it is a farmer to dwell upon this
planet is a radical consolation already I
am swelling up like a berry not
smartly in a two foot patch of look
no snow

TRYING TO RETURN THE SUN
I don’t need anything but you and some
light the world goes on getting
inferred it is so stubborn and will not
erase things I think I should rub out my
eyes you will recognize me still won’t
you I am much older now older than
I’ll ever be all these eyes in my head
and the light what distinguishes my face
from a tree is the total lack of
commentary as in that tree loves you
honestly loves you I’m the noisy one
who has to say it

THANK YOU I WILL SEE MYSELF IN

this room without which I would shoot
into space is useful calms me your
face is a room I am resting in it later
refreshed I will walk out your mouth
this vase has room for only one flower I
am an unruly bundle a flip makes a room
it disappears when not in use no I am
not using it yes I do think you should
try

Heather Christle is the author of two books of poems, The Difficult Farm (Octopus 2009), and The Trees The Trees (Octopus 2011), as well as a chapbook, The Seaside! (Minutes Books 2010). She teaches poetry at Emory University, where she is a Creative Writing Fellow.

You may contact the editor of The Poetry Section at poems@theawl.com.

Would you like to read more? Why there’s a vast archive of poetry here!

Things not to tweet in Britain: “Police in Birmingham today arrested a Conservative city councillor who sent a Twitter message saying that the newspaper columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown should be stoned to death.”

Earlier this summer, the New York media world was rocked by the departure of Page Six reporter/mascot Neel Shah, who moved to Los Angeles to pursue a writing career with the upcoming NBC/Imagine Entertainment sitcom “Friends With Benefits.” Shah’s West Coast exploits have remained unreported, but now sources close to the former Postie tell us that, not content with working solely behind the camera, he is making plans to put himself in front of it.

We hear that these modeling photos, taken by rising photographer Skip Hopkins and showing a grim and menacing Shah — a far cry from the jovial New York persona he demonstrated on the popular MTV reality series “The City” — are just the beginning of a rebranding campaign for the Indian lothario, and have already been passed around various modeling and acting agencies on both coasts.

Although recent rumors suggested Shah would be returning to his old Page Six stomping grounds, our spies say that there’s little-to-no truth to these rumblings. “Neel is completely over [being behind the scenes]. He thinks he’s a star and is embracing that,” said a source close to Shah.

Representatives for Shah were contacted but refused to comment.

by Adrianne Jeffries

I used to write for a tech blog that got a hundred pitches for no-name apps and companies every day. Sure, some of these emails would start with “Dear Sir/Madam” and continue: “We developed an innovative concept: a set of two connected lamps called Ping!” But most of the pitches I saw were from tech entrepreneurs pitching all the wonderful social networks, web sites and productivity tools you’ve never heard of. Some even sounded interesting, even if the sender was usually either insecure and desperate (“It would great if you could give us some exposure, because we don’t have any investors”) or delusional and PUMPED (“KillerStartups.com called us ‘Twitter meets Groupon!’”) The thing would vanish regardless of whether we wrote about it, so you can scratch “insufficient enthusiasm in tech blogosphere?” off that sticky note you stuck to the mirror during your post-failure introspection. So why do so many startups fail so hard? Students of failure, I have found the answers, exquisite in detail, right here on the Internet!

Quora.com is a question and answer site similar to Yahoo! Answers, but much smaller, more feature-rich and way less dim.

The site was founded in 2009 by some former Facebook employees who have convinced people it’s worth somewhere upwards of $80 million. They raised $11 million earlier this year. Quora’s well-connected founders were able to get high-profile investors, entrepreneurs and personalities (Ashton Kutcher!) to sign up early, turning the site into a salon where techsters in Silicon Valley could talk inside baseball, like “Did Caterina Fake quit Hunch and if so, why?” (answered by Fake, who founded Flickr) and “Why has Craigslist innovated so little with its product?” answered by Craigslist founder Craig Newmark and 9 others (we’re all Craigslist experts now), and filed under the topic Questions That Contain Assumptions.

Other common constructions with their own topics on Quora include Is X Profitable, How Does X Make Money, and How Much Did X Acquire Y For, which is a wonderful catalog of cutesy startup names and Valley gossip, with queries like “How much did Kabam acquire Wonderhill for?” and “Is Adult Friend Finder really going around the valley begging VCs to invest in them?” (Ohhhhh shit!)

Regular people could care less, right? But one popular Quora topic holds interest for anyone interested in the human condition: Why Did X Fail. Quora now contains referenda on the likes of Google Buzz, Google Wave, Facebook Places, Friendster, “personalized news startups,” witch burning and “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” (actually, Why Did X Television Show Fail has its own sub-topic, but the only other question is about “Arrested Development”).

The Why Did X Fail questions often attract long thoughtful reflections by X’s founders. The question “Why did Jumpcut fail?,” referring to the video startup acquired and shut down by Yahoo!, elicited an earnest 830-word answer from a member of the Jumpcut team, mostly whining about the fact that Jumpcut never got hooked up with Flickr. But the answers come in from all over the web. Questions about failures at Kmart and Google elicited responses from former employees. The question about personalized news startups yielded a discussion so extensive and high brow, it was hard to believe it came from the Internet. Entrepreneur Nik Black wrote an extremely thorough 2,025-word pre-requiem, complete with 12 citations, for a company called Six Apart. Developer Eston Bond ruminated on memes, self-expression, novelty and penises for 1,925 words, in answer to a question about the decline of Chatroulette, the site that lets users video chat with random strangers.

These long-winded answers usually leave the impression that each startup was the victim of a perfect storm of problems.

Last week, News Corp hinted in an earnings call that it will shut down MySpace if the site doesn’t turn a profit, or at least stop bleeding money, soon. The suits are probably wondering the same thing posed on Quora: “Why specifically did MySpace fall so fast and so far?”

Here is a summary of the multi-step punch that knocked MySpace down: Users escalated their “freedom of expression,” a.k.a. sparkly animations, on their profiles until most of the site was painful to look at. For this and other reasons, including its immense popularity with 13-year-olds, MySpace got a reputation as a “cultural ghetto.” Then because of its bad rap, lack of stock options after News Corp bought it, and the facts that it was built on unsexy technology and based in L.A., MySpace had an “inability to recruit top-tier talent.” At the same time, MySpace was too focused on “young, alternative music lovers,” which drove away other demographics, and its “broad population of teenagers” began to flee. Then News Corp slowed down the company and squashed innovation with its “advertising priorities.” Also, Facebook came along (addressed more in a separate question under the less popular Why Did X Succeed).

Other companies were felled by some combination of PR stumbles, lack of resources, divisions within management, greed, strong competition, poor technology, being overrun by penises (Chatroulette) or users seeking “cyber pleasure” (Second Life), failure to recognize trends, lack of focus, etc.

However, I realized all the reasons for failure listed on Quora can be grouped into the following three basic explanations:

• People didn’t use it (it sucked, insufficient enthusiasm from the tech blogosphere, etc.).
• Incompetent management (greed, not enough resources, outdated technology, etc.).
• Got acquired by Google or Facebook and shut down.

The end.

Now that we’ve figured out why companies fail, consider this interesting twist. The ultimate Quora obituary would have to be for Quora itself. Why Did X Fail, the metameme. Every user on the site could offer a theory (confusing nested comments, encourages me to sign up with my Facebook account and I hate that, it’s a downer, not enough pretty pictures, etc.).

Of course if Quora fails, that’d be the most graphic answer of all — and the saddest, barring Quora and future failed startups from this ritual of public catharsis. Hang in there, Quora.

Adrianne Jeffries is a freelancer in New York City and person on Twitter.

It’s like a zombie movie, except instead of human flesh we will be eating Doritos: “Two per cent of the population became obese each year, with a person’s chance of becoming obese increasing by 0.5 per cent for each contact they had with an obese person. Taking into account recovery rates from obesity and extrapolating to the wider population, Hill’s model predicts obesity levels will plateau in about 40 years, at which time 42 per cent of Americans will be obese.”

Thank God there’s CONTROVERSY about the Google logo for Veteran’s Day. THERE IS A CRESCENT UP IN THAT PIECE. I mean it’s not at all obviously the BOTTOM HALF OF THE LETTER “E” IN “GOOGLE.” Also: why does Yahoo! hate veterans? Gosh we’re such a busy country.

“Democrats would have had fewer losses on election Tuesday if President Obama had embraced a ‘Christ-like model of leadership,’ says Ralph Reed, founder and chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition…. So who would be a Christ-like GOP challenger to Obama in 2012? Reed says his friend, Sarah Palin.”