Jeff Lester's revisionist take on the famously botched conclusion of Kirby's New Gods saga. A must.

Nicholson Baker on "The Charms of Wikipedia."

Sweet pedagogical technique of the day: lie.

Your reading for today: This NYMag piece on media coverage of the Democratic primary candidates contains many smart points that I haven't seen elsewhere. Elsewhere on the site: nude LiLo pix! Holy buckets!

Profile of a Long Island ranch house that's home to seven convicted sex offenders.

Weirdly long and poetic article from the Washington Post on how Apple Stores are getting more crowded:

The question so recently was: What is the Apple Store doing to us, as a people?

Now the question is: What are we doing to it ?

Can you smother a store to death?

Headlines that might at first seem to come from the Onion, but in fact come from the Daily Telegraph: "Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything."

I have posted before about Jezebel's "Write Like a Man" feature, but there's a newish episode up and it's kind of a doozy: an anonymous men's-magazine writer compares celebrity profiles in women's magazines with those in men's magazines, and argues that the mensmag ones are better because they're more meta about the total fraudulence and inadequacy of the celebrity-profile form. From the nutgraf, which comes almost exactly halfway through:

The modern mensmag celeb profile is actually a surprisingly prayerful, if superficial, blend of braggadocio and dogged practice.... The work of writing about celebrity is not real work. It's a break from the real work. It is The Writer's Time To Jizz -- a way to keep that writerly muscle loose and limber and tuned up for the next Big Plunge ... for that 14,000-word hillock of ASME-judge porn that all of us contract heroes have got sitting on our laptops. (Many of which, if we're being truthful, are nowhere near as playful or, in a weird way, honest as our best celeb pieces.) ... Each celeb profile becomes a little underdog story, an uplifting tale of a ragtag writer saddled with a task that Nobody Thought He Could Ever Pull Off: Can he spin a few hours' worth of smalltalk and smiles into a revolution?

There's 2,300 words of this stuff, with detailed examples from both sides of the fence. The next time someone claims that the Gawker Empire does nothing but cookie-cutter snark, point them here.

Your recommended reading for today: Sam Anderson's funny review of How to Talk about Books You Haven't Read.

So much to read! Vanessa Grigoriadis's NYMag feature on Gawker is extremely chewy and satisfying. Margaret Talbot on The Wire is like a big birthday present for me and probably you. And of course it is necessary to say something about Sasha Frere-Jones's takedown of indie rock, which I will do in a little while.

This NYRB piece on Gordon Brown put me in a really good mood.

The positive view of Brown was set abnormally early. He had been in Number Ten for about thirty-six hours when a car bomb was discovered in London's West End, followed by a failed attack on Glasgow airport. There was no sign of panic. Brown did not rush before the cameras insisting that he was taking personal charge or proclaiming a struggle for civilization, as his predecessor might have done. Instead he had his home secretary, Jacqui Smith, report to the public, making good on his promise to replace the presidentialism of Blair with a return to cabinet government.

When he did comment, following the Glasgow attack, he did so plainly and soberly as if discussing a serious crime rather than an act of war. This fitted Brown's disavowal of the phrase "war on terror," which he believes grants too much status, even dignity, to the murderers of al-Qaeda. The new approach, which instantly took the heat out of the moment, spreading calm rather than panic, won universal plaudits, including from Britain's Muslim communities....

Nowhere was the shift more apparent than in his relationship with the Bush administration. Brown used his first visit to the US in July to signal, by means subtle and overt, that a change had come.... Gone were the chinos, first names, and chummy informality of the Bush–Blair summits. At Brown's request, prime minister and president wore suits and addressed each other formally. Brown wanted to convey that the relationship from now on would be strictly business. Brown's inability to make smalltalk underlined that he did not want to be Bush's buddy and that the "special relationship" would be between Britain and the US rather than between Number Ten and the White House. As one of Brown's allies remarked later: "It was fascinating to watch Gordon turn his pathologies into assets."

From The Economist:

Once upon a time, the only ideologically acceptable explanations of mental differences between men and women were cultural. Any biologist who dared to suggest in public that perhaps evolution might work differently on the sexes, and that this might perhaps result in some underlying neurological inequalities, was likely to get tarred and feathered.

Today, by contrast, biology tends to be an explanation of first resort in matters sexual. So it is salutary to come across an experiment which shows that a newly discovered difference which fits easily, at first sight, into the biological-determinism camp, actually does not belong there at all.

Another James Wood piece, this one from the Boston Globe. Wood's rep seems to have congealed around the fact that he sometimes criticizes books by famous and admired writers. As a corrective to this unfortunately reductive idea, see his reviews of McEwan's Saturday and Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty.

Joshua Green's Atlantic cover story on "the Rove presidency" came out just before Rove called it quits, but it's probably going to be the ur-text on Rove-in-the-White-House -- a deep, intelligent, well-reported look at how the guy who Republicans and Democrats alike had annointed the greatest political genius of his time managed to screw the pooch so royally. The piece is behind the Atlantic's subscriber wall, but you can still read it -- pages one, two, three, four, five, and six -- thanks to the magic of Google cacheing. [Update: Some of the cached pages are gone, unfortunately.]

One suprise is the parallel between Rove and the Hillary Clinton who botched universal health care in 1993. Both tried to push their own political ambitions through Congress without properly deferring to the congressional leadership, and both thus lost the ability to pass ambitious legislation even when both houses were held by their own party. Something about winning the presidency apparently makes people think they get to call all the shots.

Midweek readings

We wanted to do comedy that was about something, have the character articulate something about the baby-boomer generation that is now getting old and disconnected with the world. Nobody has properly articulated that.

Steve Coogan on Saxondale

The font is one of the oldest tricks in the book. You typeset text in a regular font, I think this was Rotis, and then you blow it up really big on a Xerox machine and then you shrink it down really small. The trick is to see just how much you can distress it and keep it readable. It's gotten harder to do because Xerox machines are so much better.

Chip Kidd on designing book jackets
for Amis, McCarthy, and Updike

Hansen and NBC News maintain that law enforcement and Dateline simply conduct “parallel investigations” that never influence each other. But by this afternoon, in front of Bill Conradt’s house, whatever wall may have once divided Dateline and the police has essentially collapsed.

Esquire on NBC's "To Catch a Predator"

The NYT posts Clive James's poem, "The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered."

Terrific Sopranos appreciation by Geoffrey O'Brien in the NYRB.

Surowiecki fans: Here's a smart review-essay from Foreign Affairs, covering globalization, progress, and simplistic free-market homilies.

More on Sao Paulo's advertising ban:

The law was hailed by writer Roberto Pompeu de Toledo as "a rare victory of the public interest over private, of order over disorder, aesthetics over ugliness, of cleanliness over trash… For once, all that is accustomed to coming out on top in Brazil has lost."

Astute analysis of The Sopranos -- the whole thing, not just the last five minutes -- by New York's Emily Nussbaum.

And it was no wonder we, as an audience, identified with Melfi. She was—hard to remember, but it’s true—a perfectly decent therapist. She handled Tony’s transference gently; she gave him tools to cope with his mother and uncle (tools he used to consolidate power, but still). She even saved a life, that of Meadow’s child-molesting soccer coach. Instead of ordering the murder, Tony stumbles stoned into the family rec room, stunned with the effort of not killing, moaning to his wife, “Carmela, Carmela, I didn’t hurt nobody.”

Back then, this scene struck me as the show’s iconic moment—a bravura sequence in which the decision not to commit violence was as thrilling as any bloody hit. In a drama built on gore, it was thrilling. Though Tony continued to collect envelopes, order hits, screw goomars, it seemed like evidence that he could be a different man.

And then something in Chase's vision went black.