“Many years ago an acquaintance of mine applied for a position at the Museum of the City of New York, over which Louis Auchincloss presided. The search committee met in the writer’s apartment on Park Avenue. When the candidate was asked to describe what he would do to improve the institution, he replied that too many people were not represented in its galleries, and noted in particular the inadequacy of the museum’s portrayal of African Americans. ‘What would you have us do,’ Auchincloss sneered, ‘create a period room with a hovel in it?’”
-Leon Wieseltier remembers Louis Auchincloss.

“We should take a page out of her playbook and take a nine iron and smash the window out of big government.”
-Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty , speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference, suggests that conservatives should behave in a manner similar to the wife of a Very Famous Person when she discovered that he had done several Very Bad Things. Pawlenty did not go on to suggest that conservatives “fly a plane into the building of big government,” but he totally should have.

Lessons learned in Florida: “A Longwood-area man who opened his door one day and was slapped by a bear pleaded no contest Tuesday to feeding wildlife and was fined $200 and placed on six months probation.” There is a four-minute video accompanying this story if you want more information, but, really, it does not get much better than that first sentence.

If Gucci (Alexander McQueen’s 51% stakeholder) doesn’t hire Christian Lacroix to execute the ongoing, post-McQueen line of McQueen, I’ll be very gay-upset.

“Time passed and, as it did, Lorrie Moore began to blog.”

At 12:15 a.m., while of course we were all recovering from the strange drama of Olympic figure skating, we received an email from a reader: “The second NYT Paterson story brings it.” At 12:45 a.m., we received an email from another reader: “I haven’t read the whole thing, but it seems even more boring and inconsequential than the last one.” For a story had gone up online at the New York Times, written by the same people who had written the story earlier this week about David Paterson’s work friends

. This new story was strange! No one quite knew what to make of it. There was some very real, inexplicable strangeness, like how Paterson spent “long stretches in the Hamptons, relaxing with friends and mingling with wealthy donors and celebrities.” Bizarre. If you’re not, say, Eliot Spitzer, whose father collects a million dollars in rental income each year and who gave Spitzer his own Fifth Avenue apartment, one must do some hobnobbing with rich people, it would seem obvious. And! They assess his expenses. “There is a $304 tab at Le Cirque in Manhattan.” Well. You try and get out of Le Cirque for three hundred bucks. Who’s writing this, the Peoria Daily Scold? The only good news is that, at the end of the story, comes some tick-tock on the revolt in Paterson’s D.C. office, where his ex-girlfriend was installed and considered, by the staff there, not worthy. She is still employed there and those objectors, they are not.

The Internet is over now. Sky mall kitties! The kitties of the air! Sky mall kitties! Kitties everywhere! Ladies and gentlemen, the everlasting genius Nina Katchadourian.

by Ana Marie Cox

John Heilemann and Mark Halperin’s ‘Game Change’ was many things, Ana Marie Cox discovered upon actually reading as one does with a book. It is a source of astounding sentences, for one thing!

But Hillary feared that her war vote would get her hooted off any campus where she spoke. (page 153)

The political gamble here was evident, but the upside was huge: If Clinton carried the caucuses, the nomination would be in the bag. (153)

They liked him and they didn’t like her, and there would be no changing that-her negatives were just too deeply cooked into the casserole. (156)

But she still had plenty of surrogates ready to sink their canines into Obama’s keister. (162)

Edwards had invited Ginsberg and Rubey to supper after seeing them at one of his events. He seemed touched that they were in Iowa, in light of the circumstances, about which he knew they were better versed than most. (169)

After Hillary left, Wolfson trundled in, bearing data from the first wave of exit polls. (188)

The next day, she resurfaced and began talks with Williams about finding a workable modus Vivendi for their jointly running the campaign. (195)

Seemingly out of nowhere, the race had suddenly turned racial with both Bill and Hillary being accused of insensitivity at best and perniciousness at worst. (197)

He’s causing agita for us, she said. It’s not good. (212)

Months later one of them shook his head and said in wonder, “It would take ten Freudians to explain what Bill Clinton did to Hillary in South Carolina.” (213)

Barack didn’t generally give a fig about endorsements. But the backing of Edward Moore Kennedy was an entirely different matter. (215)

Her Midwestern frugality made her a highly nervous Nellie about debt. (221)

Even when things had been going reasonably well, Clinton had never exactly been a buoyant Hubert Humphrey on the stump. But now her unhappy warriorhood was painfully evident. (224)

For than a month since South Carolina, Obama had been in the catbird seat. Now he braced for his turn in the barrel. (234)

And not just some ideas vomited verbally; he wanted to see paper. (244)

From Texas and Ohio onward, with a loaded gun pressed against her temple, she finally got with the program. (255)

Soon enough, the story was bannered on Drudge Report and being jibbered about on cable news. (257)

The unfolding scene was a semiotician’s fantasia. (259)

The path to peace between the Obamans and the Clintonites would not be strewn with primrose. (262)

But the truth was, dangling over his head was a sword of Damocles invisible to almost everyone, if no less menacing for that. The blade was in the form of a newspaper article that was threatening to drop any day. McCain thought it might kill more than his shot at the nomination. He thought it might destroy his career and his reputation — even though the woman at the heart of the story insisted that she’d never even been alone with him. (304)

Once again, Grisolano legged it over to the Brown Palace to take a gander. (348)

Schmidt wanted to get them on the horn and have the history of her AIP registration checked immediately. (367)

Ana Marie Cox is the Washington correspondent for GQ.

I’m confused. Why didn’t they just go with “WOMEN ARE WHORES”?

Goldman and Associates, the PR firm that just got a reporter fired from the Richmond, VA Style Weekly, is feeling that warm, winning feeling. The reporter, Chris Dovi, misfired an email to the PR person he was bitching about instead of to his boss. Jason Roop, the editor in chief with no spine, fired him, because Dovi USED A SWEAR WORD-Dovi referred to the PR person’s client as “this blind fucker.” Here’s Chris Dovi’s piece on a local transgender cop getting fired, a recent piece on gentrification and abuses of the community complaint system and one on the local Hasid population. He’s available for work, you know-and he could use a better editor!-since he was crucified by Goldman and Associates for his “sad and telling example of the prejudice” that blind people face, in exchange for some free attention. That is lame. OH GOD SORRY, DON’T HURT ME, I JUST MEANT IT WAS REALLY GAY. Update: Dovi responds!