Attila's non-singing supernumeraries — the opera's extras — had been cast months ago. But when Prada met the supernumeraries in person yesterday, the designer allegedly told the producers that there was no way she could outfit them with her costumes. As Paper's Peter Davis reports, a tipster says she "took one glance at the women and groaned: 'I cannot clothe them! I need models!' "

The Metropolitan Opera swiftly fired the non-model extras and threw together a casting for models who would take their roles. "Employing models is ridiculous," says Davis' source. "Being a supernumerary is about how you move, not how you look." The Met confirmed the abrupt about-face to Page Six, saying the re-casting was "due to a change in concept."

Prada has long been a sort of intellectual hero for a certain kind of woman: those who, and I class myself among them, respect the craft, beauty, and artistry of high fashion even while being put off by its materialism, its insistence on acknowledging only the merest sliver of the world's supply of female beauty, its pageantry of excess.

With her doctorate in international relations, her self-awareness, her covetable pretty/ugly aesthetic and obvious design chops, Prada always seemed like she got it. The existence of someone so level-headed, so reasonable, in an industry of puffery was living proof that it was possible to love fashion without forgetting or ignoring that there are very solid grounds on which it can be criticized. That she did not see a flat-out contradiction between being a smart woman and working in her industry was heartening. In 2004, she told the New Yorker "Today I am having a crisis. And why? Because I can't match a dress with a pair of shoes. I am embarrassed to say that. But in the end I cannot forget what I do. I make clothes. It's silly. But it's my job."

She's a serious art collector; she had a slide installed in her office; she used to be a mime. She always sounded pretty damn cool. So why the hell, of all people, is Miuccia Prada telling actresses to step off and let the skinny, pretty people have their jobs? Surely she ought to recognize that the most important part of a stage production isn't how it looks, but how all the elements come together to make the audience feel something — and while one might argue that these are "only" non-singing roles, it still seems fundamentally short-sighted and wrong-headed to institute a beauty standard for a production like Attila. Miuccia Prada is the last person I would expect to see a roomful of women with non-model bodies as problems to be solved, rather than as people to be dressed. And what must it say about her confidence in her own design skills that Prada balked at adjusting her designs to suit a different physical ideal? Consider my girlcrush canceled until further notice.

Miuccia To The Met — Models Only! [Paper]
Curves Banned From Attila [P6]

Yes, Cameron is something of a force of Hollywood. The famously extravagant blockbuster-makin' special effects pioneer has made his name on innovation and bold choices and from the piece it's clear he approaches his work with total dedication, is powered by real intellectual curiosity, and has a childlike enthusiasm for what he does. He's also, apparently, a bombastic narcissist with a predictable love of rich-boy toys, a penchant for nautical terminology, a store of boastful stories about facing down forest fires while his neighbors flee, and a tendency to, on occasion, deliver Tinseltown charmers like, "Tell your friend he's getting fucked in the ass, and if he would stop squirming it wouldn't hurt so much." He also says stuff like this:

I try to live with honor, even if it costs me millions of dollars and takes a long time...It's very unusual in Hollywood. Few people are trustworthy-a handshake means nothing to them. They feel they're required to keep an agreement with you only if you're successful, or they need you. I've tried not to get sucked into the Hollywood hierarchy system. Personally, I don't like it when people are deferential to me because I'm an established filmmaker. It's a blue-collar sensibility.

Lately, this integrity has led him to spend four years and upwards of two hundred and thirty million dollars on Avatar, his long-awaited next fantasia. It's an elaborate sci-fi effects-fest, because, you see, Cameron's over doing the kind of sensitive work we've allegedly come to expect from him.

With Avatar, I thought, Forget all these chick flicks and do a classic guys' adventure movie...Of course, the whole movie ends up being about women, how guys relate to their lovers, mothers-there's a large female presence. I try to do my testosterone movie and it's a chick flick. That's how it is for me.

Cameron, you see, is a champion of women in film. Building on the example of Alien, he decided to give Terminator a female lead (Linda Hamilton, who'd go on to become Cameron's fourth wife.)

Hollywood metonymy for female characters is "handbags," also known as "girlfriend parts"-in other words, incidental sidekicks. Gale Anne Hurd, Cameron's second wife, and the producer of his first three films, says that Cameron always found women more interesting than men as protagonists. "He felt that they were underutilized in sci-fi, action, and fantasy," she said. "And that just about everything you could explore in a male action hero could be explored better with a woman."

One of his old friends says, of "strong women," "He likes to write about 'em and he likes to marry 'em. If there's one or two themes that run through his life and work, that's at the top of the list." And how does he get in touch with the female psyche? Easy: "You write dialogue for a guy and then change the name." And this transference goes both ways: at Comic-Con, "when someone in the audience asked about his next movie, he replied, 'You know, it's not a great time to ask a woman if she wants to have other kids when she's crowning.'" In his new film, feminine power is represented by back-in-space Zoë Saldana, who plays an ass-kicking princess named Neytiri, and whose sketches the author describes as "hipless, lean, with proportions to make Barbie look like a Cabbage Patch Kid."

It would be absurd to accuse Cameron of writing one-note women, because it would imply that his men are fully-realized. And say what one will, Sarah Connor is a heroine for the ages and an arm-fitness trendsetter. We can argue the value of the Terminator franchise all day, but at least it's equal-opp! It is depressing though that this is what passes both for a great, landmark part and for a pro-woman director. All Cameron's talk of strong women is kind of like his talk of the "authenticity" of Titanic - who cares if the light fixture's an exact copy when you have your characters talking and acting like late-20th-century Californians? But it's obvious that he really believes everything he says - and who am I to argue with the King of the World?

Man Of Extremes [New Yorker]

OK, it's not as dramatic as all that. The story is fascinating if you're into learning how a successful company operates, but there's just not much dirt, beyond some rather half-hearted accusations of cultishness; if there are people willing to criticize Zappo's, Jacobs didn't find them. (Well, she does mention that upscale designers like Jimmy Choo and Gucci won't deign to be sold by Zappo's — unfortunately, I couldn't find a better shoe picture for this post — but even that's neither unexpected nor nasty enough to be very exciting.) The most scandalous thing we witness is one member of the "Customer Loyalty Team" hanging up on a woman and remarking, "Sometimes you just need to let them natter on." But she says it "not unkindly," according to Jacobs — and at a company where the longest recorded customer service call was 5 hours, 25 minutes, 31 seconds long ("We started talking about her sister"), that sounds like a fair point.

So how did Zappo's get such a great reputation? Well, by doing things like letting customer service calls go on for hours. And offering overnight shipping and a 365-day return policy. And having a selection so ridiculously vast — including sizes that are extremely difficult to find in bricks-and-mortar stores — that pretty much every shoe in existence not produced by one of those hoity-toity brands appears to be available there. And relying on a word-of-mouth marketing policy that means customers had damn well better be satisfied. And creating the kind of work environment where, in the words of 35-year-old C.E.O. Tony Hsieh, "we all want to be there, including me." "How can we create such a great environment," he asked himself, "where employees get so much out of it that they would do it for free?"

It's true, as Jacobs point out, that some employees are doing it for not much more than that, although $11/hr — the lowest wage she reports — is still considerably higher than the minimum. (Apparently, a good chunk of order fulfillment is done by robots. Cool!) And some of the team-building exercises and examples of self-conscious zaniness described are a bit eye-rolly — hula-hooping, random bell-ringing, an in-house a capella group called The Zappettes — which is where the concerns about what's in the Kool-Aid come from. As Jacobs puts it, "Zappos may not be a cult, but working there seems akin to sitting in a sports arena; you have to be prepared to stand up and do the wave at any time." Still, the employees generally do indeed seem happy to be there, even the one who took the 5-hour call.

I'm always amazed when companies that make a genuine effort to keep employees and/or consumers happy are held up as groundbreaking innovators, as though aiming for productive workers and satisfied customers is some kind of newfangled genius business strategy. Granted, not a lot of corporations manage to get either right, let alone both, which is why Zappo's is such a standout. But seriously, does it take an MBA to figure out that people who don't dread going to work will do a better job, and customers who are pleased with your service will let their friends know? Wait, actually, a lot of people with MBAs apparently haven't figured that out. Never mind.

There are limits, of course, to Zappo's greatness. Jacobs points out that the word-of-mouth marketing has only worked "up to a point" — recently, I learned my own husband had heard of Zappo's but thought it was a brand of shoes; he was shocked and delighted to learn he could order new Chuck Taylors there. ALONG WITH EVERYTHING ELSE IN THE WORLD, HONEY. Their generous return policy means they have to give back a lot of the money they gross, and operating costs are high, which may or may not be why Hsieh was happy to let Amazon buy the company recently. But still, perspective: Last year's net profits were $10.8 million. They're doing something right.

And if we've learned anything from the Dooce/Maytag showdown, it's that big corporations will not survive long without both outstanding customer service and an awareness of how word-of-mouth operates in the age of social networking. ("[U]nlike most companies," says Jacobs, Zappo's "encourages employees to let it all hang out on Twitter and Facebook.") Among my favorite things about Zappo's are the extensive customer reviews, which make me a lot more inclined to buy something I can't try on — I can usually get a pretty decent sense of whether a pair of shoes run a half-size big or small, whether they're as comfortable as the manufacturer claims, and — knowledge I can't even get from trying them on — how they hold up over time. Reviewers are basically an army of unpaid salespeople, recruited simply by giving them a decent experience. (And inevitably, half of them rave about Zappo's customer service.) As Tony Hsieh figured out early on, and the Maytag folks just learned the hard way, it's no longer safe to assume that one unsatisfied customer or disgruntled ex-employee can't do a company any real harm. The person you treat like shit might just have a popular blog, or 500 Facebook friends, or over 1 million Twitter followers. Turns out keeping people happy is good business. Let's hope it becomes a trend.

Happy Feet [The New Yorker]
Containing a Capital Letter or Two [Dooce]

Says Hilary Swank, "Amelia Earhart is an iconic figure. She was so ahead of her time. I'm inspired by her. It's incredible this woman from Kansas who died so many years ago is still so talked about." And that abpout sums up how most people feel about Lady Lindy, even if the rest of us don't get the chance to play her. Amerlia Earhart is, without question, an icon: an independent, adventurous woman recognizable enough as both a face and an idea that she's inspired the Gap and Ms. magazine with equal ease. We know her as the first woman to fly the Atlantic, the second pilot to do so, and a mysterious figure cut down in her prime somewhere over the Pacific in 1937.

If you have read any of the major biographies of Earhart, it's true that even at the time, she was more complicated than we acknowledge: she was considered something of a show-boater, a fame-lover, whose PR and connections helped her eclipse the achievements of less glamorous and more dedicated female pilots, like Ruth Law, Louise Thaden or Gladys O'Donnell. Despite her well-known progressive stance, many have pointed out that the only jobs and commitments she really stuck with were those of fame - although an advocate for women's education, she never finished school, and gave up social work when she became famous. In short, she was a complicated person. As Judith Thurman, doubtless wary of a new, simplified canonization in the form of a new Hilary Swank vehicle, puts it, "Earhart was saintlike only as a martyr to her own ambition, who became an object of veneration and is periodically resurrected-her unvarnished glamour, like a holy man's body, still miraculously fresh."

But how much does that matter? Because there's still this.

When she lectured at colleges-as she did frequently, to promote careers for women, especially in aviation-she urged the coeds to focus on majors dominated by men, like engineering, and to postpone marriage until they had got a degree. On Earhart's own wedding day, in 1931, the thirty-three-year-old bride handed her forty-three-year-old groom, George Palmer Putnam, a remarkable letter, which read: 'You must know again my reluctance to marry, my feeling that I shatter thereby chances in work which means so much to me. . . . In our life together I shall not hold you to any medieval code of faithfulness to me, nor shall I consider myself bound to you similarly. . . . I may have to keep some place where I can go to be myself now and then, for I cannot guarantee to endure at all the confinements of even an attractive cage.'

Thurman's point is that whatever Earhart was as a woman, an individual, she's been eclipsed by the myth. She's become an "icon" with all that implies - public property whose popular perception is more enduring than any reality. But I'd say that in this case, there's nothing wrong with that. Thurman writes,

Her flights were feats of courage and endurance, but compared with the achievements of the women in her scrapbook their significance was ephemeral. Her unique experience might have yielded a memoir that would still be read, yet she published only three slight books, one of them posthumous, which were rushed out, for commercial reasons, in weeks.

And yet, her legacy is so much greater than that. Whether she deserved to be canonized in the public mind - become the face of bold female courage in a male world - is almost besides the point. There is something to be said for the fact that Amy Adams in flyer helmet and slacks, even in a gratuitous sequel like Night at the Smithsonian, can automatically spell "courageous, brave, pioneering iconoclast" to a little girl. The important thing is that that icon existed, and continued to exist, and has inspired a lot more than biopics.

Missing Woman [New Yorker]
Hilary Swank On Dating Her Agent [Google News]
Ruth Law [Early Aviators]
Biography: Louise McPhetridge Thaden [Women in Aviation]
Gladys O'Donnell

Collins is ready with examples:

"Do you want me to hold something?" he will inquire. "Are you cold?" "Would you like a biscuit?" Adrian Hallewell, a chauffeur in Yorkshire, who has known Bailey since he was a boy, told me, "He keeps a low profile, does he, Christopher."

It's interesting that Burberry chose Bailey — whose father was a carpenter, and whose mother worked as a window-dresser at Marks & Spencer — as its new creative director in 2001, at a time when the venerable English house was trying, artfully and carefully, to distance itself from the appropriation of its brand by a distinctly lower-class kind of customer.

In order to revive Burberry from a beside-the-point position as a legacy brand, then-C.E.O. Rose Marie Bravo made Burberry and its distinctive beige-and-red check ubiquitous — but the paradox of an upscale-but-instantly-recognizable brand is that if it becomes too popular, or suffers from the wrong kind of exposure, the hard-won "upscale" image can evaporate. (Louis Vuitton waged a long-term fight to win back its identification with exclusivity by ending department store sales in favor of only own-store retail in the 1980s, but some would argue that the company's famous monogram — or imitations of it — metastasized to a brand-harming extent during the recent economic boom.)

In England, Burberry had gone from outfitting royalty, military top brass, and explorers to being worn by reality television personalities and second-rate soap opera stars making their first public appearances following septum-repair surgeries. (That would be Danniella Westbrook, of EastEnders, pictured above in 2002 with her daughter.) It used to count Roald Amundsen, Robert Scott, and Sir Ernest Shackleton as customers; by 2002, it had Jade Goody and a contingent of xenophobic soccer hooligans who were particularly fond of a $90 plaid hat.

Burberry stopped making the hat. It also began to devote much of its energies to policing its brand — no more pet products "in the famous Burberry design," or "Chavalier" Vauxhall Chevaliers with customized Burberry paint jobs. (Incidentally, virtually every tacky-Burberry example Collins offers up, including the "Chavalier," Westbrook, and a photo of a woman with Burberry-check acrylic nails, was highlighted in a thoughtful post about the history of the brand and its increasing identification with "chav" and football culture on the blog Finally Woken last November.) After new C.E.O. Angela Ahrendts took over in 2006, she discontinued many licenses and product lines she felt did not represent that brand well, or distracted from its core luxury image: "Burberry used to do little bottles of whiskey," said Bailey, "We're not experts on whiskey, so why the hell would we do whiskey?" Burberry Prorsum, the high-end line founded under Bravo's watch, is now the company's moody torch-bearer. But Bailey, who is understandably sensitive to any accusation of classism in the company's repositioning, especially in the class-fraught British context, is hesitant to cast the change in terms of sidelining "undesirable" customers. "I think that probably a lot of it was counterfeit," says Bailey, of the various Burberry-ish clothing items the paparazzi snapped in the early 2000s. In fact, the designer counts spotting one of his authentic designs in "a kind of skanky pub" as a highlight of his career, so far:

Few things please Bailey more than encountering his work in the nooks and crannies of the British experience — a trenchcoat draped over a Westminster politician's arm, lining out; a checked scarf, worn as a hijab, in the immigration queue at Gatwick. A small triumph of his career was spotting a checked purse that he had designed tucked under a table at a bar in Yorkshire. "It was this kind of skanky pub, and all of a sudden I was like, 'It's actually amazing that this little baby thing that I work on with my gang goes out into the world and then finds its way back to my home town,' " he said. "You want to know the story behind it."

Before coming to Burberry, Bailey worked at Donna Karan, and for another great recent fashion revival case, Gucci under Tom Ford. Although he didn't take much from Ford's sexy Cosmo-cover-line aesthetic, Bailey undoubtedly experienced an object lesson in how to design a venerable house away from the brink of irrelevancy.

Like almost every luxury company known to man, Burberry is facing hard times right now because of the economic crisis; since last fall, the company has laid off employees, closed factories, and still saw a 2008 loss of $8 million. (Perhaps partly because, as Collins notes, the company moved into expensive new purpose-built headquarters in London last November.) Nonetheless, Burberry has fared well enough since listing on the London Stock Exchange in 2004. Today, the company made the news when it was forecast to crack the FTSE 100 by the end of this week. With the news that Jaeger-reviver Harold Tillman is buying the fusty, bankrupt British classic outerwear label Aquascutum — with plans for a grand shake-up in place, according to British Vogue — it's clear that there are plenty of others seeking to meet the same challenges Burberry faced so recently.

Check Mate: Burberry's Working-Class Hero [New Yorker]
Harold Tillman Acquires Acquascutum [Vogue UK]
Burberry To Check In To FTSE 100 [FT]
Thinking About Buying Burberry? [Finally Woken]

• How cool are these Charlie Brown New Balance sneakers? Cool enough that we wish they weren't just for kids. [WWD]
• A London artist has created Kate Moss and Agyness Deyn paper dolls which look frighteningly like the real thing. [Pipeline.Refinery29]

• Your daily dose of the horrible: American Apparel shiny leggings for children. [Fashionista]
• Police in France have arrested 25 suspects in relation to last December's $118 million jewel heist at Harry Winston. Members of the alleged ring had been under police surveillance for months, and when arrangements had been made between the gang and some prospective buyers, the authorities swooped in. In addition to the 25 arrests, police found weapons and $345,000 in cash. [AP]
• Nicole Richie swears that her next collection for her House of Harlow 1960 jewelry line will be completely different than the first. In fact, it'll be "focusing more on old English, equestrian and more sophisticated looks" than the flea-market-inspired first trip out the gate. Richie's shoe and accessory lines, meanwhile, will be ready for Spring 2010. [People]
• Dolce & Gabbana, newly internet-savvy, uploaded Fall 2009 Dolce & Gabbana and D&G campaigns to its just-launched website. Steven Klein shot Mariacarla Boscono, Edita Vilkeviciute, and Heidi Mount at a casino for Dolce & Gabbana, and Mario Testino shot Katie Fogarty, Sara Blomqvist, Stephanie Rad, Hanna Rundlof, and Ragnhild Jevne for D&G. Heidi Mount also wears a giant pink Margiela-inspired fur and poses like an ape in one. [Fashionologie]
• The New Yorker sure knows how to give a bad restaurant review. Taking in the "sterile" and "unexuberant" fare at Armani's restaurant-within-a-store on Fifth Avenue, Lauren Collins writes: "At the bar, a manager and a bartender argued, loudly. The dispute seemed to be about a pen. Their passion did not extend to a pair of women who were waiting for a table, or, once the women were seated, to their full glasses of wine, paid for and awaiting transferral." [NYr]
• A historic Christian Science church on Park Avenue took a look at its dwindling congregation and finances, and its stellar real estate, and do the obvious thing: allow a catering company to use its building to host events, in return for necessary repairs, money, and continued access for regularly scheduled services. Even though the kind of events we're talking about here — shindigs with Sir Paul McCartney, Oscar de la Renta runway shows — are hardly Bushwick artist loft keggers, the Park Avenue set has gone all guerrilla in its opposition to the church's activities. One neighbour even parked her car in the middle of the avenue to block the access of de la Renta's show's guests. Is it too much to hope she was towed? [NYTimes]
• A maker of hypoallergenic beauty products has decided to associate its line with the 11th birthday of Malia Obama. Tacky. [US News]
• Natural cosmetics purveyor Dr. Hauschka is apparently swamped by demand — but, because of quality control concerns and its business philosophy based on the ideas of Rudolf Steiner (no, really), it's unwilling to expand too quickly. [Reuters]
• The website for MDLR, Moises de la Renta's fashion line, is now live. [MDLR]
• French documentarian Loïc Prigent, who made the excellent Marc Jacobs & Louis Vuitton and Signé Chanel, about the putting together of a Chanel couture collection, has a new series showing on Sundance starting September 10. Prigent's camera follows Sonia Rykiel, Proenza Schouler, Karl Lagerfeld, and Jean-Paul Gaultier in the last 36 hours before their respective runway shows. (It's a good thing Prigent is sensitive to the dramatic tension of a smoke break, because there'll be a lot of them.) Rykiel's show is her 40th anniversary extravaganza in Paris last October, Prigent finds Proenza Schouler and Fendi, designed by Lagerfeld, at the Fall/Winter 2009 collections of this Spring, and he'll catch up with Gaultier at couture week in Paris next month. I'm marking my freaking calendar. [Glamour]
• Looks like there's been a breakdown at Alessandro Dell'Acqua. The designer, whose namesake label has been owned since 2003 by Cherry Grove, an Italian corporation that produces high-end clothing, released an open letter informing the fashion world that he, Alessandro Dell'Acqua, would like to publicly distance himself from the Alessandra Dell'Acqua men's Spring/Summer or women's Pre-Spring collections, the former of which is about to walk in Milan, because he hasn't been given the opportunity to do anything beyond submit sketches to Cherry Grove. Alessandro Dell'Acqua lost his job with the Italian house Malo after holding it for less than a year following Itierre's bankruptcy; this angry letter reads like a gold-plated invitation to be fired from his own label, too. [FWD]
• Once every media outlet had dutifully covered the "outrage" over the Steven Meisel-shot Calvin Klein "foursome" billboard in SoHo, the brand replaced it with a tamer shot of a girl in a red bikini. Racked has a picture. [GoG]
• Well, lookie here: a male model who admits to having to maintain a diet to be catwalk skinny. [NYTimes]
• Everyone knows Abercrombie & Fitch has been struggling in the recession, and losing market share to lower-priced competitors like Aéropostale and The Buckle. Besides quietly breaking its rule against discounting its own stock and closing its Ruehl chain, the company hadn't exactly said what it was planning to do to reverse the tide that saw its May same-store sales slide a whopping 28% — until now. The proffered solution? Two hundred and ten store leases, which comprise some 20% of the chain's total, are up for renewal over the next two years. Abercrombie thinks it might save money by not renewing all of them. Revolutionary. [TS]
• A three-story Adidas factory in India was engulfed by flames on Tuesday night. There were no casualties. [HindustanTimes]
• Talbots may have had to cut 370 jobs, eliminate its 401(k) matching contributions, and suspend its quarterly stock dividend, but that won't stop it paying CEO Trudy Sullivan $1.2 million this year. Richard O'Connell, the struggling company's real estate and legal executive, will also get a 23% raise, to $500,000. [TS]
• Gen Art, an organization which supports emerging fashion talent in the U.S. and has helped launch the careers of such names as Vena Cava and Zac Posen, is in a bad spot financially. Already reeling from layoffs, the founders hope to raise $250,000 in ticket sales and donations for their 15th anniversary party tomorrow night. Gen Art needs another $500,000 after that to continue its operations. [WWD]

Menand is responding to a book called The Program Era by Mark McGurl, which makes the pretty uncontroversial argument that the rise of the creative writing programs in the United States has had an effect on American fiction. It's fashionable — or at least it was when I started my program two years ago — to argue that this effect has been a negative one, that creative writing programs produce bloodless, uninteresting "workshop stories" and teach everyone to write the same way. Rather than going to school, detractors said, writers should "live," as though living was something that could be avoided. The standard example of a writer who lived instead of going to some sissy school was Hemingway, revealing that the concept of "life experience" for writers is still a stereotypically manly one (hunting, boozing, womanizing) and explaining why so many men in creative writing programs feel the need to prove their masculinity.

Luckily, neither McGurl nor Menand makes this tired argument. McGurl's most interesting point — and one he made when I saw him speak last year — is that creative writing programs allow writers whose race or class puts them outside the mainstream to gain positions of cultural authority. Rather than making their writing less authentic (the idea that the "authentic" experience of people of color is a fundamentally uneducated one is, as McGurl points out, insulting and reductive), creative writing programs can make former cultural "outsiders" into authority figures, their work into instructional texts. McGurl points out that many of the most prominent Latino, Asian-American, and Native American writers have been on university faculties, and although some have argued that the university's privilege a certain kind of fiction (i.e. inoffensive) especially from writers of color, the truth is that creative writing programs have had a hand in making multicultural literature something all serious writers and readers are expected to know about.

Menand mentions something in passing that is much more important than he acknowledges — graduate creative writing programs are really cheap. In many cases they pay you to do them. They don't pay you very much — at almost all levels, writers could make more doing something else — and people with kids to support or hefty undergraduate loans to pay off sometimes struggle. But the relative cheapness of creative writing programs — coupled with the relatively short time commitment, usually two years for an MFA — makes them far more economically diverse than other academic programs. My undergraduate institution prided itself on its diversity, but in my creative writing program I encountered a community whose variety of ages and educational, economic, and geographical backgrounds was unlike anything I'd ever seen before.

A friend and classmate of mine recently said that our program was a place where people who ordinarily never would have met in their entire lives could become best friends. It's true that everyone in our program shared the same passion and the same privilege — the opportunity to pursue that passion pretty single-mindedly for two years. But in that time, we met and became close to people totally different from us, and incorporated their opinion into our views of writing and the world. We may not have hunted like Hemingway (although actually, several of my classmates do), but we certainly lived.

Show Or Tell [New Yorker]
The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing [Amazon]

Elbaz, who has long won accolades for designs that consistently hit at the sweet spot of the continuum between beautiful and interesting, started off in the industry working on "horrible mother-of-the-bride dresses" in New York's garment district. Given a leg up by Geoffrey Beene, who took him on as an assistant, Elbaz eventually earned his first head designer position at Guy Laroche in 1997. A stop at YSL followed, but what Elbaz is known for is the eight years he has now spent at Lanvin.

In the pages of the New Yorker's Style Issue, Levy captures Elbaz's uneasy relationship with the images of luxury he so skilfully creates. Elbaz is 47, and, Levy writes, "there seems to be something fundamental about him in need of comforting." He is also overweight, and in a moment that must ring familiar to almost any woman on earth, Levy observes him dithering over his breakfast order at the Carlyle Hotel: " 'Should we be good today or bad? Maybe we start good and get bad later.' He ordered the fruit salad. He wanted the pancakes."

Some designers are, or at least seem, to the manner born: Karl Lagerfeld, Ralph Lauren, and Tom Ford, et. al., embody the moneyed ease and supreme self-assurance their particular labels sell. Other talents clearly retain something closer to an outsider's perspective, some sense of a life beyond the lifestyle evidenced through frumpy outfits or quiet demeanors. (Some designers, like Marc Jacobs, start up in one camp and end up in the other — the early Jacobs, with his nerd glasses, pallor, and paunch is orders of magnitude away from the contemporary gym-toned, tanned, health-farm Jacobs; it's like looking at an El Greco and then a Botticelli.) Elbaz is clearly in the more modest category. He compares his job shaping the dreams and expectations of the select group of women that are his customers to working as a concierge in a fancy hotel — the concierge being the person who has to go home at night. "You have to go back to reality. You have to go back to nothing in order to maintain the dream," he says. "The moment the dream becomes reality and you start to mingle too much with all these people..."

Photo by Tim Walker

Levy's profile really heats up when she contrasts Elbaz's aesthetic with that of Tom Ford, who took the Moroccan-born Israeli's job at YSL Rive Gauche a few months after Gucci Group's acquisition of the brand in 1999. (Yves Saint Laurent had at the time been grooming Elbaz as his successor.) Ford, in Levy's construction, was the spirit guide and permanent booster of the ra-ra bling-bling late 1990s and early 2000s, while Elbaz was the quiet talent cut out for more unassuming times.

Ford could not have been a more maddening foil. Where Elbaz was pudgy and Jewish and self-doubting, Ford was toned and tan and Texan. Elbaz is shy and still not exactly a household name; when Ford guest-edited an issue of Vanity Fair, in 2006, he put himself on the cover, flanked by Scarlett Johanson and Keira Knightley in the nude. Perhaps most significant, Elbaz has always presented in his work a quiet, complicated conception of female sexuality. One of Ford's more memorable ads as the designer for Gucci featured a woman [Estonian supermodel Carmen Kass] pulling down her underwear to reveal the letter "G" shaved out of her pubic hair.

Perhaps the New Yorker's sense of propriety forbade Levy from mentioning Ford's other boundary-stretching campaign of the period, when, during his time with YSL Rive Gauche, he chose to advertise the men's fragrance M7 with a full-frontal nude portrait of martial arts champion Samuel de Cubber.

"But," writes Levy, "little by little, as the money and the grandiose sense of self-assurance of that era fell away, Ford's sensibility came to seem less stylish." The writer narrates Ford's retirement from women's fashion and the Gucci Group, in 2004, and mentions that a pair of cufflinks she recently browsed in Ford's eponymous Manhattan men's wear store costs $34,000. Her conclusion:

In our current moment, Tom Ford, with his tan, and his cufflinks that cost as much as a car, and his naked-man-on-bearskin-rug aesthetic, seems distant and comical. He has become Bijan. And Alber Elbaz has gradually won.

If Levy's skewering of Tom Ford, whose idea of recession-friendly pricing is a pair of jeans that costs $990, is a delight of schadenfreude, it's also a little easy. Elbaz, and his aesthetic, were never in any mortal danger after being cut loose from YSL; the designer walked into a dream position at Lanvin, where the label owner's only instruction was to "Please wake the sleeping beauty" less than a year later. Moreover, Elbaz's clothes for Lanvin are every bit as expensive as Tom Ford's were for Rive Gauche and Gucci. It's difficult to imagine many women who can admit a $4,000+ sheath dress into their wardrobes without hardship.

Elbaz explains the huge cost of his garments in terms of their materials and workmanship — which is true to a point. (The markups that retailers typically add, which can be 60-70% over wholesale prices, go unmentioned by both Levy and Elbaz.) Elbaz, who alternates in the profile between the airy fashion-speak of one who spends his life on the astral plane of aesthetics, and more articulate quotes, analogizes making a dress with the research and development requirements of pharmaceutical companies. "Doing a collection, for me, is almost like creating a vaccine," he says. "Once you create the vaccine, then you can duplicate it for nine dollars and ninety-nine cents. But see if you can create it for nine dollars and ninety-nine cents, and the answer is no. In that sense, I have absolutely no problem with the prices. I don't think we do it just to do it." (It's also worth pointing out that the Lanvin atelier is located in France, where garment workers earn a middle-class living, and where Elbaz claims his company pays 65% taxes.)

The designer has said in the past that he does not care to design the dress that will make a man fall in love with a woman; he wants to make the dress that a woman wears when she falls in love herself. But I'm not sure the rhetorical inversion necessarily works: although I appreciate woman-centered design, that departs from the first principles of the wearer and her needs and desires, as opposed to those of the implicit male observer of the dress, whoever knows ahead of time when they're going to fall in love? A dress to make you more loving is a curious idea indeed.

At times, Elbaz seems flinty and difficult, which can often be the downside to being a visionary (at least for those who surround you). When he visits a potential site for his fall/winter show with his team, a former load-out station in the 13th Arrondissement, Elbaz speaks in a stream-of-consciousness that must be impossible to parse. "I had many, many thoughts. The dogs. The black car waiting outside. The man with the white coat and the dirty hands. The crystal on the floor and the train station just in the back. I'm looking for something to clean my eyes!" He muses for a while on the "bad spirit" of the warehouse space, before, in what comes across as a self-pitying gesture for its very unseriousness, momentarily contemplating leaving fashion. There's also an episode over some handbags which aren't to his liking, and an hours-long meeting with the team of architects who are at work on his London store, in which he exclaims, "If a woman comes in and it doesn't smell right or the light isn't right, she will think the dress doesn't look good!" Elbaz sometimes seems like that maddening boss who expects everyone to do the right thing but cannot articulate what it is.

All in all, I think Levy's thesis — that women have moved beyond Tom Ford's sexy dresses, and into the prim refinement of Lanvin under Elbaz — isn't entirely spot-on. Any woman, no matter her career or age, wants at least occasionally to look hot; if that note is missing on Elbaz's scale, it's a lack. And it's a heartbreaking statement about women in general that Elbaz should have such a presumed accord with our needs because he personally understands feelings of physical inadequacy. (When Levy asks him what his life would be like if he were thin, Elbaz doesn't skip a beat: "Amazing.") But Elbaz's work as the concierge of Lanvin, ironically, displays all the assurance he himself can't seem to muster. He never exhibits the clumsy pretty-ugly tics of Miuccia Prada — he knows real women don't want to look dowdy. His idea of sexy is never louche, like Roberto Cavalli's. His clothes are tailored, but not restrictive like the work of Roland Mouret. Intellectual touches don't impede wearability, as they can at Comme des Garçons. ("If it's not edible, it's not food," says Elbaz. "If it's not wearable, it's not fashion.") Alber Elbaz's work, for those who can afford it, is classic without the connotation of dustiness. And it's nice to get to know, at least a little, the fevered, nervous, visionary personality behind the curtain.

Ladies' Man [New Yorker — sub req'd]
Ariel Levy On The Designer Alber Elbaz — Audio Slideshow [New Yorker]
Lanvin Fall/Winter 09 Collection [Style.com]

• Courtney Love vs. PETA: "Yep, I'm a fur whore... I've been very, very good for a very, very long time, and this ermine is ancient and tattered and feels like it belonged to a Queen." [Daily Express]

• We know Kate Moss has been a big hit for TopShop but...Christina Aguilera? The megastore “believes she would add something new to TopShop. Christina is the blonde bombshell who is into pop whereas Kate is the rock chick and model." [The Mirror]
• The utilitarian shoes famously ducked by lame-ducker Bush has become best-sellers for their Istanbul cobbler. "I have a sensitive relationship with this shoe. I designed it myself, so it's like a father and a child. I was very happy when I saw it on the video," quoth he. [Christian Science Monitor]
• Boyfriend jeans have spread their poison to India. "You might soon see Bipasha Basu in John Abraham’s jeans and Kareena Kapoor in Saif’s denims. This trend — ‘Boyfriend jeans’ — has become quite a rage in west and is fast catching up here, with Delhi’s hi-street brand outlets stocking the style." [Hindustan Times]
• Embattled jersey-porn peddlers American Apparel are being sued by an alleged European whistle-blower. [WWD]
• The New Yorker does the wincey treatment on Marni."This holiday season, I longed for world peace, universal health care, an end to poverty and disease, and, most of all, one of those chunky Marni necklaces made from colorful shapes of melted and stretched bovine horn. Oh, and could I also have that strand of fabric-covered beads anchoring a large plastron of midnight-blue resin? And the pendant that looks like a conference pass except that, instead of a name tag inside the clear plastic pouch, there’s a grid of acrylic gems?" [New Yorker]
• Sahar Daftary, the model who tragically fell to her death from a Manchester apartment, may have recently suffered a miscarriage after learning her boyfriend was married. Her family denies suicide and has requested a second post-mortem. [Telegraph]
• Dspite generally disappointing results from Target's accessories collaborations (accessories just can't help looking kinda budget, we suppose) we're cautiously optimistic about Hayden-Harnett's upcoming line. Quoth the Brooklyn twosome: “The thought, print development and design approach for the Target collection was exactly the same as for our own collection - style, quality, function and uniqueness...The only real difference is that we didn't do the Target collection production ourselves.” [The Fashion Informer]
• Chanel lays off 200 as luxury market continues its slump. [Guardian]
• The luxe sector is hoping Asia will be a more fruitful market. [CBS News]
• Online sales were slightly better this holiday season...which is not to say good. [WSJ]
• Is this because more women are online nowadays? Because why would we be online except to SHOP TIL WE DROP?! [WWD]
• NB kids: the much-ballyhooed Thakoon for Target is spreading cut-rate patterned cheer as we speak! [Fashionista]
• Fabsugar has named Leighton Meester aka Blair Waldorf the year's best-dressed. What say you? [Fabsugar]

MEGAN: Hey, how's the weather there, by the way? And I don't ask because I actually, you know, care, since I know the answer is probably hot and humid but mostly so I can say that it's sunny and 70 and not remotely humid, or at least that's what I can tell from my friend's living room in Germany from where I'm currently working.
SPENCER: Yesterday it was boiling hot, as Nationals Park gave me the lobster treatment during a 5-0 loss to Houston, but now it's dreary and wet.
MEGAN: I don't envy you the sunburn. Anyway, so, should we discuss the New Yorker's Obama cover first or the supposed story inside?
SPENCER: Let's do the cover first, and see which of us can out-outrage the other. To back up, dear readers, as you may have heard, the New Yorker ran a cover that, in John Aravosis's description "shows Oval Office with Obama as tribal African, wife as afro-70s-woman with machine gun, Osama on the wall, and flag on fire."
MEGAN: It's about to run it, it's the July 21st issue.
SPENCER: oooohhh being in Germany has made you so fastidious
MEGAN: Yes, I am surrounded by perfectionists. It does bring out the worst in me.
SPENCER: it's the issue that's out today, in any case
so: your thoughts on the cover?
MEGAN: Anyway, I'm most offended by the fact that they portray Michelle in combat boots. As if.
And ugly camo pants? WTF, people.
SPENCER: btw, I don't think Obama is, contra Aravosis, dressed as a "tribal African" — he's dressed as Usama bin Laden
the shalwar kameez, the sandals, the signature turban
did you see how the NY'er press release described it?

"On the cover of the July 21, 2008, issue of The New Yorker, in ‘The Politics of Fear,’ artist Barry Blitt satirizes the use of scare tactics and misinformation in the presidential election to derail Barack Obama’s campaign.”

MEGAN: No, I think it was supposed to reflect both that and the infamous Somalia pictures
SPENCER: so your only critique is the sartorial representation? Am I doing CH with Sadie this morning?
MEGAN: Actually, I mean, there are so many ways in which Michelle's portrayal are really offensive — the big lips, the Afro, the hand on the hip, the gun, the bad clothes and the way she's looking at him like "Yeah, we pulled on over on them, didn't we."
It's like, I get where he's going with the satire thing, I just don't think that it comes across as satirical and I don't know that incorporating actual stereotypes about African-Americans (big lips, curly hair, etc) gets across the other points he's trying to make.
SPENCER: dKos diarist irackobama had a good line:

How did you miss putting afros on the Obama children in stripper clothes on a pole in the background, cotton pickers outside of the window and a noose hanging in the tree?

MEGAN: Well, they are stomping on the eagle's head.
SPENCER: I mean, you're right, it's not like the artist or the editors were like, "We should really make sure people know that one of the presidential candidates is a SCARY BLACK MAN"
MEGAN: They're stomping on everything America stands for!
I mean, I actually think the portrayal of Michelle is more tasteless.
Hence with the joking about her shoes.
SPENCER: but that's besides the — hahahaha i missed that — point. The cover indicates quite a bit about how white people who think of themselves as The Good Ones believe they should get a pass when it comes to race
MEGAN: I would totally agree with that. I also wonder how much of that is about generating/manufacturing controversy rather than actual satire. Given their readership.
SPENCER: honestly, this doesn't seem like a manufactured controversy, since the New Yorker doesn't have to gin up gimmicks to sell magazines
plus they probably see themselves as above that
did you read the story? Written by Ryan "Snitch Bitch" Lizza?
MEGAN: They'd have to gin up a controversy to get me to buy it, but I'm the world's worst person at buying magazines.
I keep trying to read it, but the narcolepsy kicks in.
SPENCER: yeah, i didn't either
because NO ONE should trust a single thing Lizza writes
not his editors
not his factcheckers
not his readers
not his friends
not his family
MEGAN: Well, Ryan Lizza's trustworthiness aside, Ryan Lizza doesn't seem interesting enough as a person to be the secondary focus of the piece.
It's like, do I really need to read about Ryan Lizza talking about Ryan Lizza researching the story.?
SPENCER: fun fact: in Shattered Glass, the movie about Steve Glass & TNR, there's a hyper-obnoxious intern who keeps trying to butter Glass up
that dude is based on Ryan
wait, does Lizza talk about how he researched his own piece in the middle of the piece itself?
because if so, i wish there was a loud cackle function in HTML
MEGAN: It's all like, XYZ told me this, and Obama talked to me about this.
it's all written in the first person, I find it really annoying and I write constantly in the first person but not about how I met Barack Obama and everyone that's ever known him talked to Me.
SPENCER: (Yeah, but magazine editors make you do that, so you can signal to your readership that They could never do what Famous Glossy Writers do — it's the most anti-punk rock thing in journalism)
well, to be Serious and Substantive for a moment
check this out in the piece
Obama's reaction to 9/11, printed in the Hyde Park Herald on 9/19/01
ok, so this is Obama's response to 9/11 during a time when the whole fucking country had lost its mind

Even as I hope for some measure of peace and comfort to the bereaved families, I must also hope that we as a nation draw some measure of wisdom from this tragedy. Certain immediate lessons are clear, and we must act upon those lessons decisively. We need to step up security at our airports. We must reexamine the effectiveness of our intelligence networks. And we must be resolute in identifying the perpetrators of these heinous acts and dismantling their organizations of destruction.

MEGAN: "fundamental absence of empathy" is also a good way to describe how much of America feels about much of the rest of the world.
SPENCER: Ok, so totally sensible, if conventional, right? but then!

We must also engage, however, in the more difficult task of understanding the sources of such madness. The essence of this tragedy, it seems to me, derives from a fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers: an inability to imagine, or connect with, the humanity and suffering of others. Such a failure of empathy, such numbness to the pain of a child or the desperation of a parent, is not innate; nor, history tells us, is it unique to a particular culture, religion, or ethnicity. It may find expression in a particular brand of violence, and may be channeled by particular demagogues or fanatics. Most often, though, it grows out of a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair.

MEGAN: Ha, "dismantling their organizations of destruction." Wonder how that's going.
SPENCER: I mean, damn. This is when everyone's saying shit about eating bin Laden's heart out of his chest and they hate us for our freedom — and those were the liberals
MEGAN: Wait, we've stopped saying they hate us for our freedom?
SPENCER: now, it turns out that the connection between jihadism and poverty sort of runs in the opposite direction — most of the 9/11 hijackers had college degrees; some were advanced and shit — but at the time no one was brave enough to say that sort of stuff — besides Susan Sontag and The Nation and they got ripped apart for saying it
MEGAN: Right, that was back when Ann Coulter was all about forcible conversions and she got fired but people were still whispering that she was right.
SPENCER: but the next wave of jihadism — call it al-Qaeda 4.0 — is, according to Marc Sageman, sort of trending the way Obama describes it 7 years ago
And that's the sort of thing — you know, an actual understanding of the threats America faces — that makes me think this Scary Black Man will be not just a good president but a motherfucking transformative president
MEGAN: Also, the Middle East is one of many places where you can have a college degree and zero prospects. It's a problem in Saudi Arabia and Iran in particular, lots of educational opportunities — sometimes even for women — and then... a life of unemployed semi-leisure and no way to advance in the world.
I think boredom inspires radicalism, not poverty. When you're really poor, you don't have time to go around being all radical and shit, you have to survive.
SPENCER: yeah, Saudi subsidizes your education — especially religious education — and then doesn't have a job for you, since all their labor to support their affluence goes to dirt-poor Bangladeshis and Filipinos
if Moe were here she could discuss that shit
MEGAN: Um, I could discuss that shit because I just did?
SPENCER: oh sorry!
i guess we should end this before i embarrass myself further
MEGAN: Aw, you're far from an embarrassment. But we could end it just because I'm going to go have an early dinner and some fun since I'm supposedly on vacation.
SPENCER: mmmm spatzle
MEGAN: I'll pick you up some before I come home and if you ask nice I'll even cook it.
SPENCER: i don't actually know what spatzle is
MEGAN: German gnocchi
SPENCER: i am to spatzle what john mccain is to the internet
MEGAN: Well, I'll teach you German potato pasta like someone (likely not Megan McCain, but someone who is getting paid) is teaching John McCain the internet and we'll call it even. You bring the beer.

Making It: How Chicago Shaped Obama [New Yorker]

MOE: oh here you are...

MEGAN: As always, right here, just multitasking and reading crap on the internet

MOE: I just remembered it was my afternoon off which is really fucking good because I am totally out of ADD drugs again and um, I had to get really wasted last night.

MEGAN: Yeah, I'm taking the afternoon off as well, but mostly so that I can drive back to D.C.

MEGAN: So, want to see the shittiest ads of the Presidential race so far?

MOE: Oh Jesus. Oh fucking Jesus. Okay, let's play a game: what's more depressing?You knew we were holding Saudis, Yemenis and Pakistanis without evidence in Gitmo, but did you know about the Chinese???

MOE: There are 16 Uighurs there, picked up mostly in Afghanistan after they got sick of the Chinese oppressing them.

MEGAN: Aw, dude, we have 16 Uighurs? Great. How much you want to bet that the Chinese got their intel on the Uighur terrorist threat against the Olympics that they used to justify further oppression from us?

MEGAN: Oh, wait, that was easy. Here's an article about it from the Voice of America, which is America's radio station abroad.

MOE: Yeah aren't we not allowed to listen to VOA in America because it's propaganda? And yes the Chinese assistance in the war on terror is very invaluable to our struggle against Muslim extremism which is the worst problem a country has ever faced in the history of modern statehood!

MEGAN: "They" will destabilize our government if we let "them," so we must protect the most important parts from destabilization, and the Bill of Rights is only, like, the 3rd most important document, definitely.

MEGAN: It doesn't say anything about the pursuit of happiness or executive privilege.

MOE: I love this headline: Judges Cite Need for Reliable Evidence To Hold Detainees …

MOE: it's like something you'd read in the daily newspaper of some fledgling democracy!

MOE: here

MEGAN: Judges Ask Administration To Stick To Principles On Which Country Founded, Not Dismantle Democracy In The Name Of Security

MEGAN: Well, if we want to stick to depressing news, how about a Biblical justification for attacking Michelle Obama (and, basically, every Jezebel) for defying God himself by not being subservient and thereby attacking Barack for not being godly enough to appropriately control his wife?

MOE: Dude apropos of absolutely nothing while I try to slog through the Gail Sheehy piece on Hillaryland and the Sy Hersh piece on Iran under the influence of absolutely no drugs check.out. this outfit. It looks like something Huma Abedin might recommend!

MEGAN: Dude, don't slog, I can break that shit down for you.

MEGAN: 1: Hillary and Bill hired a bunch of people who didn't get along, thinking that was a great campaign strategy. Like her Senate office and, frankly, the Bush Administration, it was a insular group of people used to defending the hordes.

MEGAN: 2. Mark Penn sucks and blames everyone else for his failing.

MEGAN: 3. Everyone hates Mark Penn, who used to privately call Bill Clinton when he couldn't convince Hillary or the other staff to do what he wanted because he's a tattle-taling bitch.

MOE: Also there was this

He sounded giddy, recalls Congressman Altmire. "'We’re going to win Ohio for sure, and Texas looks good, and we’re coming to Pennsylvania 'he said. ‘Keep your powder dry. Don’t endorse anybody—just wait it out.’?"The flattered first-term congressman said he was concerned that Senator Clinton might not play well on the top of the ticket. "President Bush won my district twice … "

Clinton interrupted him. "How well did I do in your district?"

"You won it twice."

"Well, there you go," Clinton said, gloating."

There was silence for a while, and Clinton assumed he had won his case."

"With all due respect," Altmire finally said, "you’re not on the ballot this year."

MOE: NEITHER IS ROSS PEROT!

MEGAN: 4. Ickes is pissed that Mark Penn made $20 million dollars, sucked, ran roughshod over him and still went out of his way to take politically untouchable clients (i.e., the Colombian government).

MEGAN: 5. The chunky Chicos necklaces and jewel-toned pantsuits were all the fault of Huma Abedin who is herself impeccably dressed, so she's now the world's biggest underminer.

MEGAN: 6. Hillary's make-up artist matched her eyeshadow to her suit jackets.

MEGAN: 7. Mark Penn railed against Hillary every showing emotion because he is at his core a sexist pig who doesn't believe women can be women and still President EVEN THOUGH that's the times when she connected best with voters.

MEGAN: 8. Both Clinton's undertook a concerted effort to pressure Obama into taking her as VP to the horror of most other Democrats who found it unseemly

MEGAN: 9. Patti Solis Doyle was ousted because they were out of money, not that they were out of money, per se, they were just out of primary money because donors can give $2300 to the primaries and $2300 to the general election campaign.

MEGAN: 10. Reporters were all drunk on the plane between Iowa and New Hampshire.

MEGAN: 11. Mark Penn sucks some more and is insufferably arrogant.

MEGAN: The end!

MOE: Okay so far on this. 1. Bush wants "regime change" and he's paid $400 million to fund it so far but that doesn't get you so far.

MOE: 2. There's some group called the Baluchis who are going to help us out because, you know, they're SUNNI.

MEGAN: !. Not in a country with oil it doesn't. In Cuba maybe.

MOE: 3. Some Democrats have gone along with this TREASON

MEGAN: 2. Not that McCain knows the difference between that and Shi'ites

MEGAN: 3. Um, they totally did, like they always do. Bush gives good belly rubs!

MOE: 4. The Joint Chiefs are not fans of this plan.

MOE: 5. Admiral William Fallon: I want to have his babies.

MEGAN: 4. The Joint Chiefs don't want their military legacies to be tons more soldiers dying in a pointless war.

MEGAN: 5. I'll leave that one to you. I wouldn't want to quit drinking for 9 months.

MOE: You don't have to completely quit, and definitely not for the whole nine months! Also you don't keep it down very well in the first few months of pregnancy anyway.

MEGAN: Yeah, I've heard that, though it reportedly depends on the woman. Also, with my personal history of (probably but not definitely developmental) birth defects, I probably would have to be way stricter than average.

MOE: But also I was not actually saying that literally just in response to:

Too many people believe you have to be either for or against the Iranians,” he told me. “Let’s get serious. Eighty million people live there, and everyone’s an individual. The idea that they’re only one way or another is nonsense.”

When it came to the Iraq war, Fallon said, “Did I bitch about some of the things that were being proposed? You bet. Some of them were very stupid.”

MEGAN: Yeah, that is pretty fucking sexy. I'd hit it.

MOE: 6. There are some laws, about how Congress needs to hear about it if the CIA declares war on The Iran, because Congress is where the CIA would get money to do such a thing, but the Bush Administration maybe doesn't know about those laws, because they are still operating from the rule book that they were using when United Fruit chipped in most of the $$ for regime changes andsuch, only instead of United Fruit they are maybe finding another source for the money. (Bernanke?)

MOE:

"The agency says we’re not going to get in the position of helping to kill people without a Finding," the former senior intelligence official told me. He was referring to the legal threat confronting some agency operatives for their involvement in the rendition and alleged torture of suspects in the war on terror. "This drove t"the over-all authorization includes killing, but it’s not as though that’s what they’re setting out to do. It’s about gathering information, enlisting support."

And how are you going to enlist support if you don't kill a few evildoers here and there???

MEGAN: More likely Chevron.

MEGAN: And, obviously, if you didn't mean to kill them, it's, like, totally ok. Casualties of an undeclared war, man.

MOE: 7. There is some group called the Gang of Eight that includes Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and John Rockefeller and it occurred to me that I forgot the members of the Gang of Four besides Jiang Qing. You always remember the girl involved in something like that. BTW God bless YouTube!

MEGAN: I mean, the problem with getting a declaration of war is that no President has really ever bothered. They get an authorization to do whatever the fuck they want to do and then use it, bypassing Congress's constitutional powers in that regard.

MEGAN: His hip thrusting is kind of freaking me out, man.

MOE: Ew yeah I know…if cheap wine is doing that to him…btw Admiral Fallon's nickname is "Fox". Silver fox!

MOE:

"Fox said that there’s a lot of strange stuff going on in Special Ops, and I told him he had to figure out what they were really doing," Fallon’s colleague said. "The Special Ops guys eventually figured out they needed Fox, and so they began to talk to him. Fox would have won his fight with Special Ops but for Cheney."

The Pentagon consultant said, "Fallon went down because, in his own way, he was trying to prevent a war with Iran, and you have to admire him for that."

MEGAN: He really just does get foxier the more you read.

MOE: 8. Were we speaking of cheap wine? Because there was an explosion someplace in The Iran called "Shiraz."

MEGAN: Which the Australians pronounce Shur-azz instead of Shur-ahz

MOE: 9. Oh yeah, remember Mossadegh? Weird how you can't spell that name without "Mossad." Anyway he's briefly mentioned, not by name but I always wondered what happened to him and turns out he stayed under house arrest until 1967. He was TIME's Man of the Year in 1951. Dude old Timestyle was soooo trippy.

MOE:

For all its power, the West in 1951 failed to cope with a weeping, fainting leader of a helpless country; the West had not yet developed the moral muscle to define its own goals and responsibilities in the Middle East. Until the West did develop that moral muscle, it had no chance with the millions represented by Mossadegh.

Hahahah they sure found some growth hormones for that whole "moral muscle" problem!

MEGAN: But, like steroids, it kind of rots your brain and shrinks your testes and makes you pissed off and gives you unsightly acne. Or whatever the foreign policy equivalent of those things are.

MOE: 9. We are overestimating the amount of ethnic tension we can stir up in Iran because the Baluchis really hate the government but actually, the "Baluchis" according to Robert Baer, is just a more Italian family restaurant chain sounding name for Al Qaeda, and they are bad dudes who cut people's heads off and shit, no lie, KLS is a Baluchi, and so is Ramzi Yousef.

MEGAN: Oh, but, like usual, we'll just pay them now and depose them later!

MOE: 10. Then there is some Tufts professor who tells us about a violent Al Qaeda funded resistance movement called the Iranian People's Resistance Movement and wouldn't it just figure with a name like that they are supposedly connected to the "drug culture."

MEGAN: Wait, so there are two al Qaeda's in Iran? Nice.

MOE: 11. Probably more, but then there are some Kurdish groups too, and they all get shitloads of money from the CIA for doing absolutely nothing, and I think I just decided what to do with my life or at least the next year of it. "My Year In The Iranian Resistance." How about it Megan? We'd totes get famous. Angie and I were going to try to get a defense contract a la Efraim Diveroli but her boyfriend said it was probably too late for that. Her boyfriend who works, in the Pentagon, for a defense contractor. I wonder how much money the most highly remunerated person in the Pentagon makes. Anyway. Also I forgot to mention it but

MEGAN: Dude, I'm all up for going on the government cheese, especially if it's someplace cool like Iran and we could get a book deal out of it!

MOE: 12. Al Qaeda has money too and they're sending it to Algeria, maybe because it's the home of Zacarias Moussaoui and he was a hoot.

MEGAN: Well, if you're not talking defense contractors, the most highly remunerated person at the Pentagon is the SecDef.

MEGAN: Well, I guess that means al Qaeda doesn't like Sarko. If they're spending money their they must be recruiting there, and if they're recruiting there, I'm thinking Paris. They haven't had an attack yet, but we have, the UK has and Spain has.

MOE: No I am talking defense contractors. Also Pastor Pfleger I forgot to mention his appearance on GMA but he appeared on GMA.

MEGAN: Oh, well, then it's got to be, like, the CEO of Boeing or something. That's my guess.

MOE: Yeah but the CEO of Boeing ... not Mullally.. shit, I dunno, anyway, it's not important, his OFFICE is not in the Pentagon. See what I'm saying?

MEGAN: Ah, ok, I see what you're saying. I'll be the grunts who have to work in offices there still don't make more than the SecDef. I can't find his pay, but the highest guy below him makes $200,000, so I'm guessing it's about that or a little more.

He is, in other words, a terrible billionaire asshole.

Testimony in the Suen case proposes an answer to a subject of enduring conjecture in Las Vegas: how Las Vegas Sands triumphed over Strip rivals—such as MGM Mirage and, in a joint venture, Park Place Entertainment and Mandalay Bay Resort—that were also seeking a Macao license. At the time, Las Vegas Sands was smaller and financially weaker.
In July, 2001, after arriving in Beijing, Adelson and Weidner saw Olympic banners flying along the streets. They soon learned that the country was waiting to find out whether it would be selected as the site for the 2008 Summer Games. In addition to seeing the Vice-Premier, Adelson and Weidner met with the mayor of Beijing, who asked Adelson for help with a matter pending in the U.S. House of Representatives, which he believed was threatening China’s chance to host the Olympics. (In the United States, China was widely perceived as the frontrunner, and it is not clear that Congress’s position would have had any impact on its chances.) Adelson said in court that he immediately made calls on his cell phone to Republican friends in Congress—including Tom DeLay, then the majority whip—who had received generous support from Adelson. DeLay told him that there was indeed a resolution pending about China and the Olympics. (Representative Tom Lantos, then the highest-ranking Democrat on the House International Relations Committee, had introduced a resolution opposing China’s Olympic bid, saying, “China’s abominable human rights record violates the spirit of the games and should disqualify Beijing from consideration.”)
Weidner, in his deposition, described the relationship between DeLay—“a very religious guy”—and Adelson. “The link between Sheldon Adelson and right-wing religious Christians is the commonality of a strong Israel,” he said. “So it just happens to be Sheldon has taken Tom DeLay to Israel and he’s a friend.” DeLay told Adelson that he supported the resolution because of his concern about China’s record on human rights but added that he would be discussing the legislative agenda shortly. “Sheldon folds his cell phone up and says to the mayor of Beijing, ‘I’m going to do my best,’ ” Weidner said. “About three hours later DeLay calls and he tells Sheldon, ‘You’re in luck,’ ” he continued, “ ‘because we’ve got a military-spending bill. . . . We’re not going to be able to move the bill, so you tell your mayor that he can be assured that this bill will never see the light of day.’ So Sheldon goes and he goes to the mayor and he says, ‘The bill will never see the light of day, Mr. Mayor. Don’t worry about it.’ ”

Yeah, guess: 1. What bill didn't see the light of day 2. Whose designs on the Olympics were sealed within the next three 3. Whose designs on Asian casino domination would as a result over the next few years in him multiplying his already multibillion dollar net worth some fourteen times…

Anyhow, Sheldon was never interested in politics until he started hanging out with George H. W. Bush's brother William and learned Republicans support cutting taxes for the wealthy and "switched immediately." And he was never interested in Israel until he started going out with this Israeli drug addiction expert named Miriam, which is interesting because he might have just as easily become interested in drug addiction, which apparently took the life of his son Mitchell, but Sheldon didn't really give a shit about Mitchell or any of his other sons, who sued him a few years back charging that he'd tricked them into selling him back their shares in his company for less than what they'd been worth. (Sheldon even sued them to recoup deposition costs!) But anyway, Israel. It's sort of like the family he never disowned, and he thinks Jews need to have "lots and lots of sex" so their population eventually just overwhelms everyone else. Here's Sheldon at a Los Angeles event featuring Steve Emerson, who if you've heard of, you probably thought was pretty much as hardline as it gets. Not so!

After Emerson’s presentation, Pooya Dayanim, a Jewish-Iranian democracy activist based in Los Angeles, chatted with Adelson. Recalling their conversation, Dayanim observed that Adelson was dismissive of Reza Pahlevi, the son of the former Shah, who had participated in the Prague conference, because, Adelson said, “he doesn’t want to attack Iran.” According to Dayanim, Adelson referred to another Iranian dissident at the conference, Amir Abbas Fakhravar, whom he said he would like to support, saying, “I like Fakhravar because he says that, if we attack, the Iranian people will be ecstatic.” Dayanim said that when he disputed that assumption Adelson responded, “I really don’t care what happens to Iran. I am for Israel.”

He sure is! And he spends at a hundred million dollars or so proving it throughout the piece, culminating in a sixtieth birthday party for which one local columnist was not entirely grateful:

“I saw a gambling tycoon from Las Vegas who bought my country’s birthday with three million dollars. I thought with sorrow: Is the country worth so very little? Were the champagne, wine and sushi that were given out for free in the lobby—breaking convention for such events—worth the humiliation?”

And with that, I could sort of use a drink. But the whole story's up on the site if you need to get in the mood!

The Brass Ring

You know, that's just not who I am. He was, like" — she broke into a wishy-washy voice — "Marriage, it doesn't mean anything, it's really how you feel.' And I was, like, 'Yeah, right'"

"And he got me into one of these discussions again, where, you know, he sort of just led me down there and got fired up and it's like you've got blah blah blah blah, and then dessert comes out, the tray comes out, and there's a ring!"

In "The Audacity of Hope," Barack Obama perceives a vulnerability in his wife, one so closely guarded that even her brother professed to me never to have noticed it. There was "a glimmer that danced across her round, dark eyes whenever I looked at her," he writes, "the slightest hint of uncertainty, as if, deep inside, she knew how fragile things really were, and that if she ever let go, even for a moment, all her plans might quickly unravel."

The Other Obama [New Yorker]

At twelve, Donatella had her first highlights— "'Lighter and lighter and lighter,' I told them!" she recalled. At fourteen, she was suspended from school for wearing eyeliner to rival Cleopatra's; by sixteen, she was a platinum blonde.

It seems, however, that it is a lifetime of loss as much as a life lived among luxury that created the woman known as Donatella Versace. Collins tells us that Gianni wasn't the only Versace child to have died a premature death: The eldest child, Tina, died before Donatella was even born. (Knee-scrape. Tetanus. Almost-instant death.) Says Donatella on the 10th anniversary of her older, more-famous brother's death:

What happened to him, you know, this is a tragedy. He die, he's not alive anymore. This is really the worst thing that can happen to you, to lose your life. So I say to myself, 'You're going to make it. Grow up, you're a grownup here, you can do it.'

You know, you think you're in control, and you try to stop, but you're not. What happened was I was in a severe depression. I start to isolate myself from everybody, and I would see my children suffer seeing my life that, but I didn't have the strength to talk about it....Elton [John] said, 'Donatella, you know what, we're not forcing you, but you need to go to rehab. There is a plane waiting for you.' But I say yes. I was ready. I had no idea what rehab was, but I left that night.

Mondo Donatella [New Yorker]