Saturday, July 18, 1998

David Remnick is in

"Brad is kind of hard to describe. He's like a cross between Nathaniel West and Mae West." — someone describing me at a recent party, to which I was not invited.

Maybe there isn't a First Time for everything: New revelations about Our First Time fortify original suspicions that the planned public deflowering of two "teens" is, in fact, a big ol' hoax:

• The Web's sacrificial virgins [Salon]
• A tangled Web for virgins site [Salon]
• Teens to Lose Virginity Online — Or Are They? [Netly News]
• And, of course, the inevitable parody site.

I will say this, though: But for the black box covering his head, that "Mike" is kind of cute. <grin>

I'm a bit behind the curve on this, so by now pretty much everyone who cares knows that senior writer David Remnick is in as the new editor of The New Yorker. [Washington Post]

This is a good thing. While I was intrigued to imagine what Spy's Kurt Anderson would have done at the helm of "maybe the best magazine that ever was" (Harrison Salisbury), and I'm fairly overjoyed that weasly Michael Kinsley didn't get the nod, I think Remnick will bring some of the literary cachet and edgy zip the magazine's been missing in the Brown years.

I mean, I liked most of the pop accessibility Tina Brown brought to The New Yorker, but the pendulum had begun to swing too far. And while Remnick promises "some radical changes" and the buzz that we may be facing fortnightly publication rather than weekly (as has been expected for some time), I'm fairly hopeful about the long-term prospects.

Some random weekend reading:

I recently rewatched the movie Clue (Madeline Kahn is great!), but—musical theatre fanatic though I am—I had no idea there was a stage musical. The plot is quite different from the movie (some would say thankfully), but it looks like fun.

Only 18 months remain until we see if the Y2K problem is much of a problem. Forbes wonders if, in addition to our ATMs going wonky and the national power grid suffering some glitches, we might have to worry about the former Soviet Union raining nuclear death upon us for want of a couple of digits. [Forbes]

The Vidiots are gearing up to present the best and worst of the 1997-98 TV season, as only they can. The fun continues all next week. [TeeVee, multi-part episodic]

The Education of Little Geek: I spent a fair amount of my adolescence noodling around programming Apple ][, Texas Instruments and (God help me) TRS-80 computers. Greg Knauss recalls his days as a starry-eyed game writer with dreams of fame and fortune in this on-going 8-bit memoir. [An Entirely Other Day, multi-part episodic]