Do movies make you drink?

Maybe we're still a bit fuzzy-headed after too much cheap New Year's champagne (we had no idea you could buy champers in a box!), but we've been trying to figure out what—if anything—David Brooks was trying to say in his Jan. 1, 2005 column in The Times.

Oh, and that whole devastating tsunami thing.
It Happened Last Week: The Big Chill [New York]

... It's a time for vigorous self-abuse, apparently.

Gasp! Another scandal is brewing hotter than a cup of ice water over at the New York Times. Jennifer 8, formerly a Harvard co-ed and currently a Gray Lady reporter, has her very own anecdotal Deep Throat: a quote-spewing, dog-walking, model/actress named "Amanda Tree" who has popped up in two articles of 8's in as many days.

Music critic for the New Yorker, Sasha Frere-Jones, takes a time out between deadlines and holiday family matters to let us know how he sprints the last ten yards of 2004 and what dance moves he would teach Clay Aiken and the advice he would offer to Pedro Martinez.

Cliff Kincaid of the conservative media watchdog group Accuracy In Media (AIM) thinks the proverbial cat is out of the dimebag with a story exposing the employment history of American Association for Retired Persons (AARP) magazine editor Ed Dwyer, who worked for High Times and Playboy, as well as Penthouse with top AARP editor Steven Slon. When the AARP released a study showing 75% of elderly Americans favor the use of marijuana for medicinal purposes, the ears of suitcase sniffing dogs perked up and now seek to damage the credibility of AARP with their alleged drug and pornography backgrounds.

Back when we published a daily interview here we paraded out book/writer types left and right. Maybe that's why we killed the feature. One leftover that never got posted is from Daniel Maurer who's been an editor-type at Grove/Atlantic the last 4 years. Instead of his interview, we offer this exclusive analysis he conducted of New York Daily News headlines since 1997 and what it takes to get killed in them.

Speaking of books, how much would you bid for Ann Coulter's How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must)? If the answer is somewhere between stick of gum and McDonald's Happy Meal then check out the listing on eBay from a poor college graduate just looking for beer money. He says:

The big guns, Vanity Fair's Christoper Hitchens in Slate and Charles McGrath for the New York Times, come out and write tribute pieces for Susan Sontag that describe a rare life and body of work that was capable of influencing a range of people and subjects few will ever see again. Perhaps it wasn't their place to mention it, but surely her longtime companionship with photographer Annie Leibovitz would turn up in the NYT's proper obituary. Instead, there's only the odd mention of Susan being photographed by Annie for an Absolut Vodka ad, which we're not sure is a euphemism for something. Well, at least the New York Daily News doesn't shy away from the fact.

Here's a post-Christmas present for the media junkies in the audience: Tina Brown likes to remind people she put The New Yorker on the path to profitability before she left and lobbed the softball to David Remnick who knocked it clear past the Hudson River. Conde Nast publisher Si Newhouse likes circulation numbers that go up and back then she got it "up" with the wide-spread use of four-letter words. We dip into the retro-media files and produce a scan of SPY magazine from November '93 that illustrates this point more clearly. Full blown fucking after the jump.

In a seasonal tale of the publishing industry's propensity to give and receive (mainly the latter), Mary Lisa Gavenas, an ex-beauty editor of such rags as Glamour and InStyle among others, reveals all the free loot she got from publicists in a confessional diary style. Beauty editors reel in the most fish, though not always the priciest ones, and it's warming to hear a story where magazine staffers willingly chain themselves to their desks lest they miss a goodie to the wandering hands of piss-broke assistants.

Drudge's headline just about sums it up for us. Sri Lankan officials report that no dead animal corpses were found in the wake of the tsunami disaster leaving them to believe animals have a "sixth sense" and knew to seek higher ground. This is in sharp contrast to all the media outlets who lack a sense of moral decency and usually take the lower road. After the jump we provide a rundown of the more sensational aspects ("where are all the celebrities??") of the tsunami tragedy coverage sent in by you, the readers, under the guise of media criticism.

Anticipating a slow news week, we asked a few media and blogging luminaries to play Santa and tell us what gifts they would deliver to five people or entities of their choosing. First up is the always affable and holiday-sluttering Michael Musto who's been writing about gossip and pop culture for the last 20 years in the Village Voice. His picks:

Now, getting back to our regularly scheduled programming of ridiculing the people who deserve it (and even some of those who don't), we'd like to steer your attention to this AP story on Yahoo News about Michael Moore snooping around drug companies. The most interesting part is the curious photo of a whale. It looks so weird in that baseball cap and beard.

Since there seems to be a serious mood going on around here today (we promise to get back to the levity soon), here's the news you might have already seen about Susan Sontag's death.

Many of you have written to show us other instances of absurdity in the media's coverage of the Asian tsunami tragedy. Of course, nothing is really newsworthy unless there are sensational pictures or rich white people involved. But who are we to lecture about journalistic integrity? Such are the inevitables when disaster-porn and the 24 hour news cycle collides. We know it must be tough to write stories when all the AP wire offers are photos of poor little brown people. Here are a couple of your examples after the jump.

Two excellent pieces in this week's Talk of the Town section of the New Yorker:

We try not to tread on serious issues here but today's cover story on the New York Daily News cannot go unremarked. What the hell were those people thinking? Normally I'm the first person to love any article that begins with the words "Jet-setting supermodel..." but color me horrible (if you must) for my lack of sympathy for miss model, especially when reports are coming in of over 40,000 dead. But hey, that's a classy picture to accompany the story.

1. Vanity Fair's Graydon Carter and his love, sort of, for photographers. [The Corsair]