“’Between Michel [Houellebecq] getting the Goncourt and Virginie Despentes winning le Renaudot,’ [Frédéric] Beigbeder exclaims, ‘a whole generation — our generation — has finally won!’ There’s a brief silence, and we must all think the same thing without saying it: If we’ve won and there’s nothing to fight for, it’s probably downhill from here.”
 — Yes, après succès, now comes the… dénouement. Let’s all buckle down for the entertaining dissolution of France’s formerly striving and now-entrenched weirdo intellectual class!

Congratulations to the Tuberous Bushcricket, which Science says has the biggest balls-to-body weight ratio on earth. The Daily Mail offers some scale: “To put this into perspective, a man with the same proportions would have to carry testicles weighing as much as five bags of sugar each.” Can you imagine? I’m carrying around three bags already, and it is hell on my groin.

Recently a news organization published a photograph of a rather recently dead body. The former person in question photographed had been murdered and presumably the news outfit felt that a murder on its local turf had some news value. The victim’s family and friends were about ten kinds of furious. Meanwhile, written coverage of the murder and its circumstances was vigorous and regular on a number of New York City-based websites, including Gothamist and the Times, in large part because it took place in the East Village. Year-to-date, there have been four murders in the East Village’s Ninth Precinct, though I couldn’t tell you what the other three were. It’s reasonable that this is an item of news. The other publications’ stories include neighbors bad-mouthing the victim and their accounts of seeing the body and also praise for the character of the alleged killer. But it’s the picture that’s enraged people and sent the family’s friends and social networks into a campaign of furious mail. Eventually, the publication apparently reasoned it just wasn’t worth the harassment and they took down the photo.

“Someone with absolutely no conscience snapped a cell phone pic of his body before the police arrived and sent it to GAWKER.com who published it, unlike every reputable news site that ran photos of the covered body,” the victim’s uncle wrote. He wanted people to write the editor a letter — “to write this arrogant little shit a note,” is how he put it.

And then later:

It’s is a sad reality that we needed to mount such an effort and bring the Hammer of God down on them to rectify something that should never have been an issue in the first place. Don’t be fooled by the seemingly altruistic post on the GAWKER site concerning the photo’s removal. Remy Stern was adamant in his refusal to remove the picture before last night. The credit for it’s removal lies solely at the feet of all of you who took the time to voice your disgust and revulsion at such irresponsible yellow journalism in it’s worst incarnation.

There was a lesson. “Apparently when enough voices are raised in opposition to something so immoral the offenders have no option but to concede.”

That might be true but it’s also true in this world that when a group of people send a stream of invective-filled emails, sooner or later, one does tend to not want to deal with it. When the victim’s uncle wrote “Hammer of God,” he’s not really kidding. The emails were pretty intense!

The family — if not their random social network acquaintances — are, I think, entitled to behave pretty much as they wish at such a time. If they want to spend the days after a tragedy writing blistering emails to the media about a photograph, that’s a far better channeling of rage than hunting down the alleged killer’s family for retribution. And if you put yourself in their shoes, I bet any coverage of the murder at all feels invasive — at best.

And still it all keeps coming back to the body. “Every reputable news site… ran photos of the covered body,” he wrote. So that’s okay. It’s the idea of “disrespect” to the body that rankled. For those of us who aren’t Christian or religious at all, this idea can seem so odd — as weird as the (expressed) rationale for the Bush administration banning photographs of war dead (photographs which surely do have decided news value — less true in this case) or as weird as the idea of heaven.

The one media critic to address this came to a conclusion. “Having to speak with, say, the friends of a murdered man — as the Times did in its Jusko coverage — will make a journalist think twice about publishing a photo of the man’s bloody corpse…. Gawker probably believes its lack of engagement with its subjects makes it more independent — more free to report the actual truth, that is, rather than a truth mitigated by emotional considerations. In reality, this disconnect simply allows the site to be more callous in its coverage.”

This certainly reaffirms the idea of publishing photos of dead bodies as an explicit insult, a “callous” one, one made from a distance. If we knew the body, or if we knew the people who knew the body, this reasoning goes, we wouldn’t dare publish photos of it. Because to do so can only, apparently, be evil.

Well, it is a little rankling to read about how Slate’s Jacob Weisberg INVENTED THE INTERNET. Or, as he puts it, in a “we got new offices” profile of Slate, “We basically invented blogging.” Which, okay, no, not really. But you know what? While investigating the historical record, we stumbled across this little bit of history from May 10, 2002, in an article headlined “APOCALYPSE IS UPON THE BLOGGERS OF THE WEB — OR IS IT?,” by one Seth Mnookin, then a reporter at the New York Sun.

Mr. Sullivan, for his part, didn’t respond to an email seeking comment. But, of course, he had posted a small item on www.andrewsullivan.com. “In my opinion, most online magazines will in the not-so-distant future become agglomerations of bloggers,” he wrote. “Their most popular features are already drifting in that direction. What they will eventually become will be more like talk-radio stations, where a handful of provocative bloggers will create a branded talk environment, rather like the blogosphere itself, but with a few editors picking which people to include.”

Ta da! We actually should give him some kind of award for this.

And, to even be fair to Weisberg, he has come down on the right side of history for quite a few years! Also in 2005, he wrote:

[M]any old-line journalists have tried to define their work in a ways that exclude the new aspirants. Insitutionalized journalists argue that bloggers don’t do conventional reporting, aren’t accurate, aren’t responsible, or aren’t paid “and hence are not genuine reporters. They fret that the current influx of amateurs will undermine professional standards or that seasoned professionals will be unfairly brought down by an electronic lynch mob, as some posit that Dan Rather of CBS and Eason Jordan of CNN were.

Disregard all such self-interested whining.

So with that in mind we won’t even get fussy and picky about the rest of the things Weisberg puts forward in the interview. Here’s to everyone! The Internet, it is full of friends! And mostly: thank God everyone’s done fussing about “what journalism is.” That was the worst conversation ever, and the annoying people lost that argument quite thoroughly.

Update: Weisberg thoroughly trashes the piece in a memo as “a good example of a kind of bad journalism we thankfully seldom see at Slate.” SHEESH.

“I have to believe,” said some seer several months ago, “that within five years every pack of cigarettes sold in this city will be mandated to include a piece of diseased lung affixed right to the front.” He may have been exaggerating for effect, but he was not all that far off.

Federal drug regulators unveiled 36 proposed new warning labels for cigarette packag on Wednesday, including some that are striking pictures of smoking’s effects.

Designed to cover half of a pack’s surface area, the labels are intended to spur smokers to quit by providing graphic reminders of tobacco’s dangers. The labels are required under a law passed last year that gave the Food and Drug Administration the power to regulate tobacco products for the first time.

You can find the warning labels at the FDA’s website. They’re all here: hole-in-the-throat guy, child at risk, toe-tag dude, skeletal cancer man, preemie, zipper-chest fella, weepy lady… it’s like a United Nations of tobacco victims. I’ll tell you what: As a smoker, I have no objection to this. I know I’m going to die. (So are you, non-smokers!) I don’t have any illusions that when I’m drawing that sweet nicotine into my lungs I’m actually doing something healthy for myself. So this is fine. I’m happy to see a little extra graphic design on my pack of cigarettes. It’s pretty bland right now, it’ll be nice for them to shake things up a bit.

Cash Money Records owner Bryan “Baby” Williams (a.k.a. “Birdman”) has put together quite a spectacle for his new video. The opulent setting of “Stunna Island” (he is also known as “The No. 1 Stunna”), the $2.5 million Bugatti Veyron he bought in August, helicopters, babes in bikinis, Asian caricatures straight out of a 1960s James Bond movie, and craziest of all… is that the most interesting man in the world in there doing business with the Birdman?

Today in total planetary collapse: “An increase in the number of whales with sunburnt skin has been documented by scientists after they took photographs and tissue samples of the animals. In the worst-hit species — the blue whale — researchers found that the numbers affected rose by 56 per cent between 2007 and 2009, which they said has ‘worrying’ implications for their health.”

Just as Laura Miller has recently suggested, those who are writing a lot don’t have much time to read — and so I’m making miserably slow progress with Iain M. Banks’ new novel Surface Detail. But I do so far agree with the space ladies of io9: it’s excellent, weirdly structured and either ingeniously or callously organized. Here’s a brief bit from my allotted fifteen minutes of reading last night that reaffirmed why I am loving it.

Veppers smiled thinly at the alien…. “Why did they build all these? Why so many? What was the point?”

“Insurance, possibly,” Bettlescroy said. “Defence. You build the means to build the fleets rather than build the fleets themselves, the means of production being inherently less threatening to one’s neighbours than the means of destruction. It still makes people think twice about tangling with you.” The little alien paused. “Though it has to be said that those inclined to the fuck-up theory of history maintain that the Disk has no such planned purpose and is essentially the result of something between a minor Monopathic Hegemonising Event and an instance of colossal military over-ordering.” It shrugged. “Who is to say?”

The both stared at the dark network of threat and promise arrayed before them.

I’d tell you to read chapter one online but it’s actually sort of a misleading introduction to the book and you really could just buy it.

With its stomping martial beat and heraldic horn synths, Liberty University’s new rap anthem sounds like something you might hear Young Jeezy or T.I. spitting greasy southern trap tales over. But when Jason “Humble Tip” Lewis gives props to school founder Jerry Falwell, or rhymes about the dangers of having an open mind, or why it’s not cool to drink or do drugs or have sex, the sharp cadence of his voice bears the influence of venerable East Coast MCs like Jay-Z or Treach. The heads at Right Wing Watch are bumping this joint all day. But I actually prefer the live version. Because I like watching the Liberty administration dudes throwing the university gang sign in the background.

Oh, and if you thought Waka Flocka Flame’s new jam is crunk, Humble Tip has a message for you:

And if you’re planning on taking a vacation to sunnier climes this winter, he has a message for you, too:

“God makes it clear in Scripture that deaths of people and livestock at the hands of savage beasts is a sign that the land is under a curse. The tragic thing here is that we are bringing this curse upon ourselves.”
 — Bryan Fischer of the conservative American Family Association declares that it is time we take out the bears.