New Yorker gets Buzzed

Noah Baumbach wrote the funniest thing I've seen in print in a long time for The New Yorker. The piece is called Buzzed and is a first-person narrative from a bee on cocaine.

Check it out. It's a MUST READ. I read it aloud to my roommate. I suggest you do the same thing if you can find someone around to listen to you.

Baumbach's name may be familiar to you. He's the screenwriter behind The Squid and The Whale.

Here's the intro, explaining what inspired the piece:

To learn more about the biochemistry of addiction, scientists in Australia dropped liquefied freebase cocaine on bees’ backs, so it entered the circulatory system and brain.

The scientists found that bees react much like humans do: cocaine alters their judgment, stimulates their behavior and makes them exaggeratedly enthusiastic about things that might not otherwise excite them.
—The Times.

Oh, my God, get over here . . . hurry . . . come on come on come on. Taste this nectar, taste it, taste it. . . . Slurp. . . . Is that not, is that not the best fucking thing you’ve ever had? Like nectar of the fucking Gods!

Read on.

My baby has found a home

Well, summer plans are set. I'll be splitting my time between Above The Law and True/Slant. I'm very excited about this. And about not having to go to classes.

I feel a juvenile urge to chant "No more pencils, no more books, no more teachers' dirty looks." Except I heart my professors at NYU and have already sought them out since the semester ended. I visited Meryl Gordon down at the courthouse -- she's covering the Astor Trial for Vanity Fair. And Ted Conover met up with the small group of students in our Portfolio class last week for dinner at expensive-vegan-fare-West-Village restaurant, Gobo.

Speaking of Portfolio, back in February, I blogged the birth announcement of my blog for the course: The Not-So Private Parts. Well, my little blog baby has grown up and found a new home. It's now living at True/Slant.

Check out my musings on the erosion of privacy in the digital age, and sign up to follow me!

The Not-So Private Parts [True/Slant]

"Summer break" and a Supreme message

Yesterday, I turned in my last piece of the second semester and am now officially on "summer break." So far, it looks like summer break will involve lots of working. In this economy, that's great news for me!

Last week was an exciting one. After having written that story on the Fordham dossier on Justice Antonin Scalia, I called the Supreme Court to see if Justice Scalia might have a comment on the story.

He did!

He sent me a message through the Supreme Court's public information officer. We published it here. David Lat, ATL's formidable founder, is out of the country at the moment so it's not possible to ask him if this is a first for Above The Law (getting an exclusive quote from a Supreme Court Justice).

It's definitely a first for me.

Justice Scalia Responds to Fordham Privacy Invasion! [Above The Law]

Magazine Recession Watch: Portfolio Folds

Another magazine bites the dust. R.I.P. Portfolio. We hardly knew ye. Seriously. The only time I ever read Portfolio was to read David Margolick's work, because his stories are usually interesting and he was one of my professors in the fall (I blogged about an article he wrote on online gossip on Above The Law).

But for the most part, I didn't read Portfolio. So I was one of the many un-readers who contributed to its folding.

Employees found out today from the big guy at Condé Nast, S.I. Newhouse Jr. Word is that Wednesday is the last day for everyone on the magazine. Two days' notice. That sucks.

According to the NYT, the "upscale business publication," "failed to gain traction with advertisers and readers, in part because it was confronted by a historic recession in ad spending in its first few years of existence."

The magazine was just 2 years old.

There's nothing more depressing than watching magazines shutter their doors while one is in the midst of racking up debt to get a pricey degree in magazine writing.

Update: There's an excellent dissection of Portfolio's failure by James Ledbetter at Slate's The Big Money: Could Portfolio Have Survived?. And if you're curious, a little Google search leads me to believe that the Portfolio writer who refused to take his bet was likely Felix Salmon, who recently left Portfolio for Reuters.

Condé Nast Closes Portfolio Magazine [New York Times via Romenesko]
Conde Nast Closing 'Portfolio' [Portfolio.com]

Writings this week

My latest post on True/Slant is up, about U.S. News & World Report rankings for grad schools. Unfortunately, there is no ranking for journalism schools. So I can just pretend NYU is #1... at least within the confines of lower Manhattan.

I had fun with this story for Above The Law. It's a bit of a scoop, thanks to my being virtually the only journalist attendee at a privacy conference this week. It's about a Fordham Law class invading the privacy of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

That's all for now, folks. Just one week left of this semester. Then the summer o' many jobs begins. More on that later.

Grad schools put in their place [True/Slant]
What Fordham Knows About Justice Scalia [Above The Law]

Magazine Recession Watch: GOOD is having issues... or rather, less issues.

As noted back in January, I recently resubscribed to GOOD, "a magazine for people who give a damn." In February, I received a "recession issue" -- a little brochure really -- explaining that GOOD was in difficult financial straits and would be pubbing online only that month. It did include a coupon for a manicure, but I think I lost it.

This month, I received a real issue. On transportation issues. I was distinctly underwhelmed. It's not that I don't give a damn. I love public transportation, but I just don't find it sexy. Ah well, I hope future issues bring more of what I love, like last year's Travel Issue, which sent one correspondent to Paraguay for drug-and-gun-running tourism.

But future issues will be far and few between. Folio reports that GOOD is scaling back to be a quarterly magazine. On the upside, subscriptions are up from 25,000 to 60,000 people.

Good Scales Back Frequency [Folio]

The Latest Journalistic Venture: True/Slant

A new online magazine "alpha" launched Wednesday, called True/Slant. Newspapers and magazines may be folding left and right, but the Web is the Wild West and there's still lots of land there for those who want to settle it. At least I hope so. I must admit that the rise and rapid fall of conservative online mag Culture11 scared me.

But I've signed on with the True/Slant team and I hope the Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg is right in predicting a bright future for the site. Here's a screenshot:


True/Slant bills itself as the "digital home for the 'New Journalist,'" and will make it easy for users to follow the stories and voices of individual writers. I think that's a cool idea, and I hope readers do too.

I'm a contributor on the site. You can check out my page, Degrees of Recession, about pursuing higher education when hiring prospects are bleak-- a subject with which I am intimately familiar. One of my first posts on the student loan movement going viral got lots of traffic (Thanks, Above The Law!), making me one of the most popular contributors this week. If you look closely at the screen grab above, you'll see that I'm just two pegs less popular than Matt Taibbi.


Which is awesome. As those who know me know, I'm a big fan of the vitriolic Rolling Stone writer.

True/Slant Tests Another Model Of Web Journalism [Wall Street Journal]
Culture Shock [Washington Monthly]