New York Times official rich person-in-residence, plastic surgery addict, and orgy enthusiast Alex Kuczynski has a long, long, torturous story in the Sunday Magazine about her recent experience with a surrogate mother. Would you like to know how stressful and terrible it is to pay another woman to bring your child to term? No, probably not, but here you go.

The Times is always willing to expand the breadth of its readership. We can only assume the troubling economy is the reason for Katherine Zoepf's piece in today's New York Times Magazine about militants who are rehabilitated by the friendly Saudi government and by Penn State's International Center for the Study of Terrorism. Her considered and sympathetic portrayal of those caught up in the jihad rat race might sell some newspaper subscriptions, assuming the rehabilitation plan includes a new car to go buy the paper in. Apparently, it usually does:In Zoepf's formulation, all Saudi militants need to see a nonviolent path is a little helpful instruction, and maybe a new wife:

The explosive New York Times Magazine story on the complete disarray of the McCain campaign is live online! It's full of revealing exclusive info that one was previously forced to just infer based on the available evidence! Like: the tone, strategy, and narrative of McCain's campaign has been inconsistent because the candidate himself is terrible with organization and consistency, and has relied on metanarrative crafter/biographer Mark Salter, Rovian media guru Steve Schmidt, and close friend and day-to-day campaign head Rick Davis to work it all out between the three of them. And there is infighting, of course, and everyone will soon blame everyone else, but honestly the ultimate responsibility for the failure of the campaign (should it fail in two weeks, obv) comes down to Senator McCain. He's a terrible candidate, unable to read from teleprompters and unwilling to do campaign events before 9 a.m.. He chafes at taking directions—told to gently explain once in the first debate that Obama might not understand an issue, McCain condescendingly repeated the mantra "Senator Obama doesn't understand..." ten times. These are unfair and surely maddening criticisms—ability to read from a teleprompter is not actually that presidential a quality, or else Sarah Palin would be qualified—but this is the world we live in, and GOP strategists certainly helped create it. But more importantly, his high self-regard makes him utterly unable to forgive or get over minor personal slights. He can't understand why everyone else doesn't see how much of an unprepared phony Barack Obama is, and the "I can't believe I'm losing to this guy" attitude is always, always a loser—ask the last five Democrats to run for President not named Clinton. His ability to justify his own inconsistencies isn't shared by the electorate either. In his mind, he can square Palin's inexperience and robocalls and negative campaigning with the honorable man he's always been. The constant schizophrenic narrative changes are, of course, Steve Schmidt's fault. And here's some inside shit on the Palin pick—the serious grownups had a decent shortlist that included Pawlenty, Romney, and even Bloomberg. But they weren't exciting and mavericky ernough, so Schmidt and Davis quietly picked Palin based entirely on image without examining substance.

Hey, this Sunday's Times Magazine features an awesome "Domains" interview with everyone in the world's favorite tee vee pundit Rachel Maddow! We read an advance copy and can officially break the news that Rachel Maddow is totally cool. She lives way out in western Massachussetts with her partner Susan (pictured). She is seemingly the most normal and charming and totally well-adjusted cable news host in America. Seriously! Totally without the crippling ego of everyone else on every other cable network! She still has no television of her own, she is annoyed at having to dress like "an assistant principal" in order to be allowed on tv, she identifies with Wally Cleaver, and after learning her favorite hobby we decided conclusively that we want to be her friend:

Perhaps yesterday's Sarah Palin email hack reminded you of that brilliant engrossing story the New York Times ran back in July about 4chan, the juvenile message board community of hackers, trolls and sundry internet misanthropes that pulled it off? The writer hung out with that molestation victim who wrote the nasty fake blog about that thirteen-year-old MySpace hoax suicide case and got his identity stolen by a hacker with a Rolls Royce named Weev. Well, we found the writer, Matt Schwartz*, on the internet to engage in a brief exchange on hackers, trolls, and why the Lulz Generation hates Sarah Palin. He even gets Weev to weigh in on how he might have done it better! A full interview after the jump.SCHWARTZ: A few random thoughts: 1. The question of whether the email of public servants is public or private is an interesting question. Public servants now have reason to behave as if every email might be read aloud in court. This standard might not actually be in the public interest, in the long run. It might make it harder for public servants to do their job. 2. It appears Palin used passwords that were too weak, and didn't change them often enough. Passwords should not be real words. they should include at least three digits and at least one non-alphanumeric character. Example: foo&&b@x7978. That's what a strong password should look like. 3. Weev's take: i wish they'd done it properly screenshots? should have archived the mailspool and waited a few days for the logs to go away i figure someone is going to get seriously v& for this maybe not the person who actually did it but someone MOE: Uh, v&? SCHWARTZ: What? oh. I dunno. That's what he said. I'm guessing it means "fucked by the national intelligence establishment." If you run that please be clear that he is NOT taking credit. MOE: Pareene wrote that the /b/ hacker didn't really seem to know what he was looking for and should have probably figured that out before sharing the password with the world. Do you think this sort of demonstrates the limitations of 4chan, like, ideologically? This was maybe their chance to get mainstream attention for doing something with a potential public interest. SCHWARTZ: All this demonstrates is that 4chan knows how to break into peoples' email accounts. 4chan has no coherent ideology ... it's more like a series of memes/trends. It might have some sort of ideology but for the fact that it doesn't have a memory. It erases itself multiple times a day. Moot can't afford to archive stuff. Server space is too expensive. So it's really hard for people to follow 4chan for a long period of time. There's no institutional memory. People drop in and drop out. It's like a mosh pit. But I do thinks it's significant that you can have 4chan and other anonymous people breaking national news. MOE: I guess Sarah Palin is the ultimate meme generation politician. SCHWARTZ: What do you mean? MOE: Her absurdity lends itself naturally to Lulz. Her averageness. Her momness. To the kid who doesn't remember Ollie North or Reagan or hear in her rhetoric the echoes of the destructive Reagan-era "culture wars", she is just a clueless lady with a funny accent and a bunch of fucked up kids. And like, of course her password is something stupid, you know? SCHWARTZ: I guess you're right. She doesn't make me that angry, either. Nor am i especially interested in why she makes others angry. I was already angry. I've been angry for a long time MOE: Right, and if she doesn't make us that angry, she is definitely not making 4chan angry. SCHWARTZ: It's interesting that all these pols use Yahoo! Or that Palin does. She writes pretty long emails. Very different from say, [former Philadelphia mayor and federal probe subject] John Street. The Alaskan government seems to have a rather vital textual culture. It has yet to succumb to the shorthand of the handheld thumbwriting favored by John Street, Eliot Spitzer, etc. What her email tells me is: "I am a mom. I write real, substantial, long, single-paragraph email with sincere expressions of my feelings." MOE: Yeah, and those are just the earnest, near universally relatable sort of positive qualities 4chan CAN'T STAND.

Harper's has made available online eleven essays by David Foster Wallace following the postmodern writer's suicide last week. Bloggers have rounded up other DFW work available online, including his Times profile of Roger Federer and 2000 Rolling Stone profile of John McCain. There are also videos, including the writer's appearances on Charlie Rose (other) and these moments collected by the LA Times. All told, the world is left with a reasonably extensive sampling of the writer's work available at the click of a mouse — at least enough to draw in new readers and perhaps even convince them to attempt his daunting masterpiece, Infinite Jest. [via Daring Fireball, Wonkette, LA Times]

The Wall Street Journal's glossy "Modern Wealth"-themed magazine WSJ is debuting September 6. Just in time for your curiosity to have been thoroughly piqued by the smartified explorations into fashion and luxury commissioned to fill up the heaving style issues of the New Yorker and New York, T Magazine and Vanity Fair! Here's what we know: there are 51 advertisers, 19 of which are new to Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal. And here's what we hear: Buzz in the newsroom is that the content, penned by a mix of staff reporters and freelancers, is "very disappointing"* — save for an apparently hilarious piece by veteran retail reporter Ellen Byron. Hey, suggestion!I don't know what Byron's piece is about, but: the cool thing about covering the luxury and consumer goods industry for the Journal is that the whole nature of the relationship between reporters and the companies that they cover is predicated upon the notion that said companies want to look good to their investors. Which is generally the exact opposite of trying to look good to customers! Essentially that means that the Journal is the one venue in which you will regularly find executives being forced to roll the "curtain" and say, "Here is our ingenious strategy for scamming people this quarter!" Or: "Isn't it amazing how when you put a giant logo over everything suddenly it's like, a Veblen Good?" Etc. etc. etc.

The most telling economic indicator about Sunday's New York Times Magazine investigation into Advanced Obamanomics is how it is not very economical with the words! There are 58 incidences of the word "but" alone. (Plus 10 "yet"s, 6 "however"s and 2 "on the other hand"s.) See, he is at heart a radical Marxist, but also a Clintonian sellout! A lover of markets, but also regulation! Etc. etc…1. He wants to cut taxes BUT he also wants to raise them! Barack Obama actually wants to cut taxes by an average of $900 a year for the average household, which is wayyyy more than John McCain. BUT, for the average household in the .01% of households, he wants to raise taxes by an average of $800,000 a year! This is radical socialism yes BUT we agree with former Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin who maintains that studies show it is not sufficient to "stifle innovation" especially with regards to how rich people do their taxes. 2. He thinks Ronald Reagan did some good things for the economy BUT he also thinks Bill Clinton did some good things for the economy. Put another way, he is from Chicago BUT he is also from the Chicago School. As we all know, Barack Obama was a community organizer in Chicago. That job led him to think welfare reform was not a good idea, probably because he worked with people on welfare. But at the same time he also taught a constitutional law class at the very "Chicago School" that is the hotbed of all those people who think despite all evidence to the contrary that markets solve everything. By some form of "osmosis" Barack Obama is said to have absorbed the realization that markets do actually solve some things and now he wants to apply them to solving pollution or something. 3. He likes Bob Reich BUT he also likes Bob Rubin! So did Bill Clinton, you say? True enough BUT! Treasury Secretary and Goldman Sachs moneylover Bob Rubin ultimately prevailed in the "Battle of the Bobs" with Labor Secretary Bob Reich over Bill Clinton's economic policy. BUT! It is not 1993 anymore! Fifteen years have passed! Bob Rubin got Bill to cut the budget deficit, which was good for interest rates, which was in turn good for rich people, and also deregulate the fuck out of everything, which was really good for rich people, but guess what he just told the Times? He said: "The distributional issues are obviously more serious now." A few weeks ago Obama even tried to broker a little peace agreement with the Bobs over dinner!

Are you one of the 48% of Americans who is "hearing too much about Barack Obama"? Then you certainly won't like this Sunday's Times Magazine story by professional Democratic Party Underminer Matt Bai. It's about how Barack Obama represents the End of Black Politics, because he's a black person who white people don't feel threatened by. In the story, Bai harangues Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter about why he didn't endorse the black guy and then feels guilty about it, interviews Newark mayor Cory Booker about childhood experiences with racism and then feels guilty about that, and finally says that President Obama will actually be a secret step BACK for black people because he won't be able to get away with helping black people as much as a white candidate might. Get it? [NYT]

"The more I study mathematics, physics, history and the natural world, the more I know that this reality is a construct created to test us." So you'll find in the LiveJournal lament of "weev," one of the top trolls Mattathias Schwartz investigated in this Sunday's NYTM (see previous post). Weev says his quotes on "philosophy" were taken out of context in the piece and that he only agreed to be interviewed to discuss his deep thoughts on chivvying people on the Internet; his personal life was out of bounds. Sigh. Even the trolls can't trust journalists any more. Something about the Seven Ages of Man, the mass murder of Egyptians and fishing nets follows. Decide for yourself whether Schwartz was unfair to weev or all too kind:

Now here's an instructive feature in the New York Times Magazine about the cultural and mass psychological ruin being wrought by the Internet. Mattathias Schwartz becomes a Jane Goodall among the "trolls," those anarchic misfits of the binary world who live to toy with other people's emotions (sorry, they elicit "lulz") by making bedlam of comment threads, and tossing up fake MySpace pages of their enemies. The more pretentious fancy themselves philosopher-revolutionaries; they believe they're actually improving society by committing identity fraud and issuing violent threats because these and other mean acts force the easily duped to wise up. Posting animated color fields designed to cause seizures in an epilepsy forum? "Demonstrating these kinds of exploits is usually the only way to get them fixed," says "Fortuny."

Right-wing talk radio host Rush Limbaugh is signing a contract with Clear Channel and Premiere Radio worth more than $400 million, the New York Times Magazine will report this Sunday. In addition to finagling a nine-figure signing bonus, Limbaugh has also taken to purchasing a new G550 jet and a pyramid of gilded skulls belonging to the financiers of Air America. The profile already seems like a softball (it'd have to be if Limbaugh agreed to it). The author is Zev Chafets, NYTM's house conservative and a former press officer for Menachem Begin (!), who previously wrote about Mike Huckabee's forgettable down-home charisma ("Lunch with Mike Huckabee is a study in faith-based dieting," "If there was magic there, it was working."). So far, the only advance Limbaugh quotes are the following:

In the New York Times Magazine, Peggy Orenstein argues that stress has less to do with physical ailments than we think. She says it's just another way of blaming people, primarily women, for their illnesses. This seems like a perfectly good reason to avoid going to yoga.[NYT Magazine]

Yep, the inevitable: agency Trident is hawking a book proposal by the self-revealing former Gawker writer and controversial New York Times Magazine covergirl. The working title is And The Heart Says... Whatever; "I assume it's 400 pages of the word me in different fonts," says one publishing industry spy. Dewy Gould's latest career move isn't that surprising: Ana Marie Cox went out to publishers the week after the Wonkette editor appeared on the front cover of the same Sunday supplement. Gould's outline is being messengered rather than emailed to prevent a leak to a certain website. But I'm sure someone can sneak at least a few pages to the scanner. Email us.

Here's the best entertainment piece you'll read all weekend: Alex Witchel's New York Times Magazine profile of Matthew Weiner, the creator of Mad Men, a brilliant drama on AMC entering its second season that does to the 60's advertising industry what Boeing Boeing tried to do to the 60's airline industry. Lots of sex, booze, smoking, shellacked hair, and modular furniture, but also some of the smartest scriptwriting on television. Whether or not Weiner stays true to the nature of jingle-and-tagline executives as they formerly existed (the secretaries' breasts are right out of the John Currin catalog) is almost besides the point once you hear him describe a plot motive:

There was much consternation in the media world earlier this week when it emerged that Tribune's Los Angeles Times would take its Sunday magazine out of the hands of trained journalists and hand control over to the newspaper's sales staff. Editor Russ Stanton even insisted that the magazine's name be changed so readers didn't get the idea that it still had, you know, integrity. But journalists are as much to blame as the business side for the fact that their work increasingly sounds like catalog copy. Here's ink-stained wretch Rob Walker in his most recent "Consumed" column for New York Times Magazine:

For former Gawker blogger Emily Gould's raw "Blog-Post Confidential" essay in the upcoming New York Times Magazine, she was photographed by Elinor Carucci, who specializes in "portraits of everyday female vulnerability." The photo on the left is Emily Gould by Carucci, the one on the right is Carucci, from her Closer series. Shoot the Blog remarks that Carucci, admirably, is able to "delivers editorial imagery that is barely distinguishable from her own [fine art] work." That's the photographer equivalent of making it big writing personal narratives! (Click to enlarge.)

Hey, bloggers! The countdown to the three-day weekend clusterfuck of examining and reexamining former Gawker editor Emily Gould's forthcoming New York Times Magazine piece may be cut short! Because The Observer has a copy, and it'll probably be online tomorrow. You are forewarned: there is a photo of a blogger at a laptop, blogging. It's just Emily's hands, though. According to Matt Haber, the piece is "heavily diaristic." Do you want to read about Julia Allison? Sure you do.

It was self-righteous and catered to the rich. But was the New York Times Magazine "Green Issue" green enough? Not according to anyone who actually cares about the future of this precious island we call Planet Earth. The magazine was printed on non-recycled paper. Egad! That means all those eco-friendly car ads were actually leaving a gigantic carbon footprint. Vanity Fair's annual green issues are also printed on non-recylced paper. It's like these magazines really just care about the advertising market for environmentalism instead of the actual environment. Let the Times Magazine Green Issue be a lesson: Never care about anything unless you're prepared to be called out as total a hypocrite. [Folio]

Virginia Heffernan (and supposedly other people) lives in constant dread that her beloved Friday Night Lights will be canceled. It's her favorite show but draws only half the viewers of many other, dumber shows. Heffernan, the our favorite breathless TV critic, mournfully parses the situation in the Times Magazine, and it's sort of like when your articulate but totally misguided friend explains why nobody's into her fiance. She chalks up the show's flop to the unwavering artistic integrity of its creators and a lack of sophistication that leads laypeople to reject high art, just like when Shakespeare wrote the totally under-appreciated first season and a half of Hamlet. Hey, remember the time Heffernan compared lonelygirl15 to Jane Austen? We sure do. [New York Times]