Google-Really-Bombing: But it turns out Google's biggest journalist fans are not at 4 Times Square. No, that honor goes to the hardworking scribes at the Los Angeles Times. In a January 18 article, Times staff writer Steve Lopez writes, "I went to Google on the Internet, typed in the words 'Buddhist', 'bait', and 'Marina del Rey', and got a hit." (Remarkable work, Steve!, I can imagine his editors marveling.) In another January story, the newspaper's magazine ran a feature on sports scribe Frank Deford. He's a "distinguished writer," claims staff writer Glenn Bunting. The evidence? "A Google search of his name produces more than 21,000 hits." And when Katharine Hepburn passed away last year, at least one member of the paper's staff got busy and did what any brave, pull-no-punches journo would do: She Googled "Audrey Hepburn" and found 793 websites devoted to the movie star. [more]

No, I am TMFTML.

Confession.
I AM TMFTML
OKAY, WE'RE JOE KLEIN. HAPPY?

So should you read the The Atlantic Monthly's "State of the Union" package? Jack Shafer does the math: [This] 33,000-word barge grinds bottom for 40 pages, unimpeded by wit, verve, originality, or any of the other attributes we associate with successful political rhetoric or good magazine journalism. If you can imagine a dozen 750-word New York Times op-ed pieces, each bloated by a factor of three or four or five, suffused with the earnestness of a parson, and constructed with the flattest language available, then you've still not comprehended the pomposity of this special section. [more]

This is actually our strategy too: [Kushner's] devotion to Brecht and Benjamin has about it a college freshman's starry-eyed susceptibility to the first difficult ideas that he encounters. And the characters wear the dialectical technique like a straitjacket: Louis will attack Reagan's heartlessness, and then Belize will expose Louis's own insensitivity while deriding Louis's ineffectual intellectualizing. Kushner thinks that by contradicting his pieties, he is moving beyond them, but he has really just found a way to hide his pieties behind the veneer of "complexity." [more]

Going shopping for an identity in the marketplace of multiculturalism: It is hard not to conclude that Monica Ali shied away from the tough truth because opening the narrative to the troubled reality of British multiculturalism would have violated the basic dictate of the Zadie Phenomenon as seen by the publishing industry: the financial pull of the potential bestseller demands that a writer beset her characters with such familiar, mainstream problems as adultery rather than engage with the unfamiliar, distasteful, dark side of multiculturalism—the real multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural society that the majority of us do not want to see. This is where the cheat of the successful commercial “multicultural novel” is laid bare: for all its multicultural packaging, Brick Lane is a strictly monocultural, “see-they-are-just-like-us” affair. [more]

Funny because it's true! (Dale Peck reviews his day): 6:35 am The Plental XR-280 is the worst showerhead of its generation. Its adjustable neck is limp and ineffectual, and the valve has the pressure consistency of a Mormon tobacco lobbyist. I'd have better luck with a hose and a space heater. [more] (Via Bookslut)

Reviews we wish we had written: WHITE STRIPES (The Greek Theatre): After watching this show, I was a bit confused! The two of them are at such different musical levels, they sometimes seem like they're in two separate groups. For instance, the girl seems like she's doing perfectly fine drumming in her Half-Retarded Make-Believe Band. And then he has to spoil it all by playing loud, proficient rock and roll over it! [more]

Emotionally neutral for you, maybe. For some of us, quite redolent of pain and suffering: In this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Bryan Strange, of University College, London, and his colleagues provide [actual data on the relationship between unpleasant experiences and memory]. Rather than abuse their experimental subjects, though, they merely showed them streams of words on a computer screen. Some of these words (murder, massacre and so on) had bad connotations. Others (meeting, gathering and conference, for example) were emotionally neutral. [more] (Thanks, Cordelia!)

It's all over but the remainder binnin': "I'm just a survivor. When I think about it, it keeps me awake at night." [Lynch has said.] As well it should, along with, one might add, scores of reporters and editors, most notoriously at The Washington Post, who midwifed the Lynch myth from the Army to the front page without double-checking the initial reports to see if they were true. (The Post later produced a fuller account of Lynch's rescue, which it also ran on the front page.) If that weren't really enough, now comes Bragg, a former New York Times reporter, with a final indignity, a gamy allegation that America's sweetheart was sodomized by the Iraqis. Maybe the paperback should be renamed "I Am a Victim, Too." [more]

I have met the enemy and he is, apparently, a subscriber to the Nation: Last month, in a blast of gusty oratory that defied physics, logic, and patriotic correctness, Democratic congressman Jim Marshall laid out the prosecution's case: "The falsely bleak picture weakens our national resolve, discourages Iraqi cooperation and emboldens our enemy...I'm afraid it is killing our troops." The Department of Defense must have been frustrated by that last declaration: all those billions spent on body armor and other protective gear, and it turns out the real danger isn't bullets, rockets, and improvised explosive devices - instead, it's pessimistic reporting. [more]

When's the last time you read something funny in PW? Besides the best seller lists, we mean: The Boston Globe's revelation that the NY Times Book Review will soon name a replacement for Chip McGrath had us thinking about some possible candidates. So we made some calls and turned up a few contenders. As it happens, sources were both helpful and prescient, willing not only to give us names but to tell us how they'll do. Our findings. . . Donald Rumsfeld: Inscrutability and a tendency toward information of no discernible value helps him fit in at beginning. But his tenure ends in disaster when he is overheard wondering to an assistant "if these bestseller lists here give out too much information." . . . Dave Eggers: Introduces several welcome innovations, such as printing an entire issue on Bill Keller's tie. [more]

But if the new Martin Amis if could do Mach 3, it might actually get a good review: There is little doubt that the tabloid section is long overdue for a change. It has retained a certain canonical influence in the literary community; for a writer, getting a Times review is like getting a college degree. If you don't have one, you have some explaining to do. But as each year passes, it increasingly resembles Jane's Defence Weekly; the latest Martin Amis novel, like the latest Northrop fighter plane, is reviewed not because it is good but because it is there. [more] (Via Gawker)