Today Jonathan Franzen is getting all the attention, thanks to the Time magazine cover story that is unlinkable and probably unread behind Time’s paywall. That’s all ok, but the one writer with initials J.F. you need to know is Joshua Ferris, who wrote the awesome “Then We Came to the End” and the possibly even better “The Unnamed.” The former is about an ad agency as it unravels through round after round of layoffs. It’s written almost entirely in the first-person plural, a tact that could seem gimmicky but isn’t.

His second book is about a big-shot New York lawyer who comes down with a perplexing condition. He suffers from long bouts of being compelled by his body — or his mind maybe (it’s never clear) – to walk and walk and walk andwalkandwalkandwalkandwalkandwalkandwalkandwalkand walkandwalkandwalkandwalkandwalkandwalkandwalkandwalk. He walks until he can walk no longer and passes out wherever he is: a parking lot in Newark, a dumpster in Queens and so on. The only way to stop him from walking it to physically restrain him.

Suffice it to say, this kind of behavior is not something that can be easily integrated into one’s life. That fact means “The Unnamed” is not a happy book and that is not something you would regard as a spoiler were you to read it. I am offering up an excerpt and, in the effort of providing context but not spoiling, I will say only that at a point in the novel the protagonist begins to hear voices. (And you would be wrong to assume that those voices are causally related to the walking.) There’s a passage, which I typed out below, in which one of those voices is addressing the protagonist’s self. Or something like that — I can’t be metaphysically precise on this matter.

Ferris is a extremely controlled, powerful writer. With just these two books, he’s carved something of a niche that I hope he keeps adding to. He’s the master of portraying the miseries of modern, corporate life in a fresh way. I feel like everyone else –Chabon, Lethem, all those guys who are one tangle with Oprah from being on the cover of Time– wants to write about detectives and comic books. This guy Ferris writes about work — and these are jobs that people who would read him actually have i.e. not gumshoes or dicks or codebreakers or whatever — and how that work chips away at one’s being.

I can’t say I get this freshness from Franzen. I think his essay on birdwatching in “How to Be Alone” is wonderful, but a recent rereading of “The Corrections” left me cold. I found myself skimming large swathes and all the characters felt very type-y and, again, very dated. And for some reason being dated in the late 1990s is worse than other ways of being dated. I guess that’s why we wear Journey t-shirts and put “Don’t Stop Believin’” in our HBO finales, but hide our Third Eye Blind CDs in a cardboard box inside a red Rubbermade bin and mislabel our MP3s so as to disguise them. Hypothetically.

Here’s the excerpt, which feels like Wallace Stevens is alive, writing novels. Again, it’s someone essentially talking to his self and not in a fun or functional way:

I respected you more when you were indifferent to God. You were beset by matters of urgency in your life that took precedence over the lofty speculation of divinity studients and men in pews on Sundays. You didn’t jave the time. You didn’t make it a priority. You formed the notions on the fly, in flashes of grim insight, in brief feelings of certainty that consumed you entirely and then quickly faded into the background. When you die, you thought, you die. Why linger on that unpalatable truth? And the alternative, the alternative was a sham. You hated the institutions and the corruptions and they hypocrises and the evils. You thought it was all a racket designed by the mighty to fleeced the weak and keep them in check. The existence of the numinous, the mystical, the godhead itself — who knows? Maybe. But what evidence was there? You had been chiseled by reason to a diamond point. You were deferential to logic and evidence, skeptical of specious oratory, an enemy of hearsay. At best, you put the possibility in abeyance, knowing that even when one of your cases went to trial, when every detail was presented and picked over, every side aired and attacked and defended, there was slippage, lacunae, things no one would ever know. God was like that. God was a trial. But if pressed you sided with disbelievers and sometimes you even showed contempt for those who spoke with the conviction of the weak and the credulous. You had that luxury. You stood outside of the wind and the rain. Your insights and argunents came to you in prosperity. Death was far off. You could afford to be leisurely. A drink was better than a thought. A meal was better than a conviction. Your family and your work were more meaningful to you than the ministrations of a hundred gods. That is, until you caved….The verdict arrives in doses, century after century, and looks increasingly grim. The world is too old. The soul is the mind and the brain is the body. I am you and you are it and it will always win.

You can buy “The Unnamed” on Amazon, naturally.

From an MTV.com piece:

“I got to the point where I didn’t even wanna do interviews anymore because I would have the interview and we’d be laughing, me and the reporter, and that’s funny, and then you read it and they completely just demolished all of my jokes,” West told New York hip-hop station Hot 97 host Angie Martinez. “They just set ‘em up wrong.”

I haven’t read “Super Sad True Love Story,” Gary Shteyngart’s new and much buzzed-about novel, and I don’t know if I will. I do know that this trailer is kind of funny, even if it doesn’t really have anything to do with what I understand about the book. It gets bonus points for featuring James Franco, even though I’ve realized that James Franco is becoming a bit too ubiquitous for my tastes.

It doesn’t, however, rise to the level of this video for “Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters.”

Usually Captchas make me feel visually- or cognitively-impaired. This one reminded me that, at some point, I’m going to die.







At least, I”ll be receiving Jason Hirschhorn’s media newsletter throughout the journey.

As the series a small subset of white people likes hurtles toward 1965, it’s time to think about what shape the historical backdrop will take. (All dates are from Wikipedia and, thus, accepted without question.)

March 10: Goldie, a London Zoo golden eagle, is recaptured 12 days after her escape.

Don turns from his newspaper, picks an errant tobacco leaf off his tongue, gazes out his office window, and thinks birds should not be kept in cages. Then, tired, he moves to his couch for a nap.

April 9: Charlie Brown and the Peanuts Gang appear on the cover of Time Magazine.

Cooper calls his man at Time.

April 14: In Cold Blood killers Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, convicted of murdering 4 members of the Herbert Clutter family of Holcomb, Kansas, are executed by hanging at the Kansas State Penitentiary for Men in Lansing, Kansas.

Sally reads “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Glenn puts Betty’s lock of hair in the Draper mailbox.

May 6: A tornado outbreak near the Twin Cities in Minnesota kills 13 and injures 683.

Don turns from his newspaper, looks out his office window and is stung by sadness and regret. He remembers those twins he passed up with Sterling. He puts the issue of “Time” with Charlie Brown in an envelope, addresses it, and adds the parcel to the outgoing mail.

May 22: The first skateboard championship is held.

Peggy ollies, prompting Pete to say, “A thing like that…”

June 19: Houari Boumédienne’s Revolutionary Council ousts Ahmed Ben Bella, in a bloodless coup in Algeria.

Ben Bella shows up at the agency, looking for help with his image. Don is bored, tells him to gather his things and get out.

September 25: The Tom & Jerry cartoon series makes its world broadcast premiere on CBS.

Don sips his scotch, squints at his black-and-white set, then, reminded of cats, lays down on the couch for a nap. Harry integrates Pond’s Cold Cream into the series — almost.

October 3: Fidel Castro announces that Che Guevara has resigned and left the country.

Ernesto lands at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce when he hears there is work to be had on Lucky Strike, which, the revolutionary is surprised and disappointed to learn, is a cigarette brand.

Sample dialogue:
Che: We are overcome by anguish at this illogical moment of humanity.
Draper: What do you do?

October 28: Pope Paul VI announces that the ecumenical council has decided that Jews are not collectively responsible for the killing of Christ.

Upon hearing the news, Sterling says to Pryce, “Then I guess we can trust them with Don. Let’s hire one and then tell Advertising Age.”

November 7: Pillsbury’s world-famous mascot, the Pillsbury Doughboy, is created.

The Lucky Strike client asks “for one of those” and then wiggles his finger into Sterling’s tummy. Don takes a nap.

is over at AdAge.

There are many, many things I like about Gawker Media: the journalistic aggressiveness of Nick Denton’s bloggers; their focus on original content, not rote aggregation; their broad and ever-shifting definition of “original” and refusing to define it as an endless cascade of lists and slideshows; its endless inventiveness that keeps alive a formula that should have grown stale long ago.

That admiration is why it hurts to say that Gawker’s latest journalism-as-PR-stunt is wide of the target. The former journalism student in me is far from offended by the idea of hiring a paparazzo to shadow Mark Zuckerberg for a few days, turning his mundane moments into a slideshow of photos. This is the world we live in and the private lives of celebrities have become fair game. And Zuck qualifies as a celebrity. I’m not sure what the official test is but I’m pretty sure that running one of the most important tech/media companies around and having a major motion picture made about your college years qualifies.

Gawker’s lofty notion of “turning the tables” on the guy who turned Facebook’s 500 million users’ “intimate moments into riches” is not a bad one. But there are a few problems with how it’s executed.

First, there’s the whole making the “punishment” fit the “crime” thing. I’m no fan of Zuckerberg’s broad dismissals of the idea that people should enjoy some level of privacy. In our day, privacy is probably more an ideal than something terribly practical. Nevertheless, it does seem important for anyone who operates a social platform whose revenue model is based on the upload of large quantities of personal data to give users the tools to control the flow of that data. That’s basic product design and transparency with your customers. But Facebook has failed on that score enough times, offered an apology while proceeding to screw up again that its whole approach to privacy seems more kabuki theater than real organizational focus.

But for all the playacting, what Facebook doesn’t do is hire photographers to butt into the everyday lives of its readers. True, Zuckerberg has created a platform that is helping to disintegrate most conventional notions of privacy, while offering varying degrees of utility to web users. But he’s at worst an enabler, a high-tech indulger of the most preening, narcissistic human urges, not a perpetrator who deserves like-for-like punishment. Degree of severity makes a difference.

The other thing that makes a difference is the goal of an exercise like this. Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems more about embarrassing Zuckerberg than anything else. I know we’re dealing with Gawker here, not ProPublica. But when humiliation or mere annoyance is your endgame versus, say, education or creating dialogue around the issues at hand, making Facebook’s many, many users understand what’s at stake for them in the privacy issue, it’s tough to defend.

As an example of the latter approach, I’d point to this piece, strange as it may be, in which a former colleague decided to see just how much personal data she could divine from the online presence of a person who happens to be a friend of mine, present it to him, and then publish it. Creepy and especially strange for me, but interesting. Another good example was a 2005 table-turning on Eric Schmidt. There CNET used Google to see what information it could turn up about its CEO, thus using his own platform — not gossip rag tactics — against him.

Both examples make privacy and digital life worth talking about. Rather than push the dialogue further, Gawker’s approach would just seem to just toss another turd into the privacy shitshow.

Finally, there’s the whole issue of whether Zuckerberg will actually care. Before yesterday, he was rich (at least on paper), powerful and famous. He was also unknowable, a little shady, a little sweaty. Today, he still has that paper wealth, power and fame, but his image has sloughed off a bit of that aloofness that made him so aloof. The Gawker snaps depict his lifestyle as relatively modest. His Palo Alto home is unspectacular, his girlfriend far from a model, and he seems to enjoy cakes that come in plastic clamshells ans Smirnoff Ice.

He also has bigger fish to fry. As I mentioned, hundreds of theaters around the world will soon be showing a two-hour movie that, by the looks of all the brow-furrowing, stink-eyeing and maniacal grinning going on in the trailer, strongly suggests that he ripped off the idea for Facebook from a friend and that he is, generally, a scheming bastard.

With all that going on at the multiplex, it’s hard to imagine he’ll get at all that wound up about a gossip blog publishing some pictures of him.

As my knowledge of Scotland is by and large confined to “Trainspotting,” I was surprised recently to learn that something other than kicking the sheets, vomiting into trash pails, and watching dead-baby hallucinations crawl on the ceiling goes on in the bedrooms of young Scottish men.

Some choose death. Some choose life. Some, like Pete Cashmore, choose to create a news site about social media that grow into a proper a business with nearly 30 employees in five years’ time. Yep, Mashable, the site Cashmore started in his Aberdeen bedroon, is five. That makes it older than both Twitter and Foursquare, two of the companies who regular grace its pixels.

As you’ll see in the video below, Cashmore has a square and stubbly jaw, enviable hair and an accent that gives off a nice burr without sounding as though he’s speaking through a sheep. And he has four million uniques per month. It’d be far too easy to begrudge him the success he’s had because Mashable, in all its giddiness about the proliferation of what we’ll call social platforms, is an easy target.

This isn’t about hating on the handsome devil’s creation, especially not on its b-day, which was celebrated with a Googlesque logo redo on the home page, videos, Cashmore’s first post (it’s about machinima) and (nice!) sponsored content. It’s creation offers as good chance as any to reflect on where what we’ve come to describe as social media is today.

In cultural terms, this is easy. Facebook, now with half a billion members, is the subject of a forthcoming movie that will have David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin rehash the social network’s not-so-LOLy early days. Twitter has 100 million users. And, again, I’ll point out that four million people stop by Mashable every month, good evidence that the attention span for short-attention span media seems perversely long.

Putting these companies in business terms is another story entirely. And it’s a grimmer tale. Here’s a completely arbitrary barometer: Of the seven stories comprising Ad Age’s Digital newsletter yesterday, fully three had bad news to deliver on the matter of these very famous sites being of use to advertisers.

One actually called into question just how well-known Foursquare is. Research by Forrester found that only four percent of adults had heard of the geolocation service, which often –and, apparently, deceptively –feels ubiquitous. Another described how some Starbucks’ baristas weren’t aware of a Foursquare promotion that should have won the writer a discounted beverage in reward for his mayorship. (No caramel frappuccino for him!) While blame for this bungle has to go to Starbucks, this situation is more a metaphor for the rough time social apps are having as they try to get into bed with corporations. Finally, a long study of brands on Twitter by the digital agency 360i, also reported in AdAge found that, despite the best hopes of marketing types, only 12% of Tweets that were studied mentioned any brands. And only 1% were part of a conversation with a brand. Consider that advertisers as a matter of course book up a full one-third of an hour’s worth of TV programming. (Yes, there’s no guarantee anyone’s watching those ads, but still…)

Taken altogether this is far from apocalyptic news. But it does show that for all their popularity, the biggest names in social media have a long way to go before they become indispensable to advertisers. Some of the pressure to make it work is on the advertisers themselves and the agencies they pay for good ideas with enough imagination to take the audiences that live and breathe on these platforms and turn them and create a sustaining and sustainable environment. That comprises an ecosystem that hangs in the balance.

That ecosystem is this site’s jurisdiction. I’ll aim to separate out the truth from the hype in the heavily-hyped topic of social media and try to do it with some humor.

Let’s hope it doesn’t end up like this: