Now. I know you might want to read about Padma Lakshmi's dress or the new shoes I regretted buying or all the booze and the chocolate fountain or this 30 Rock guy I talked to or Obama Girl but the fact is I didn't get into this fucking business to do work, I did it because I loved magazines and it actually sort of saddened me to be reminded how much of a pain it is for editors to actually read magazines; to sit down and ponder stories that other editors had deemed good enough not simply to assign to a writer; not simply deem fit for publication in their storied professional magazines; but enter for consideration to the National Magazine Awards.

I have never understood awards shows. I hate watching the Oscars, for instance, because I have never seen enough decent movies, and feel the same way, but exponentially, about words that are worth reading. It was worthwhile only in that I will carry with me the misery of sitting on a dark balcony wearing a dress through an excruciating two-hour sermon on the Things I Could Have Read Last Year that weren't TMZ posts on Brandon Davis' fat brother.

Later in the evening an award was given for some sort of internet feature. Before the winner was announced, a presentation of the nominees cited the "Primacy of Digital News." I didn't catch this; my brain was preoccupied by the all abiding alcohol anticipation anxiety that generally follows a worshiping at the altar of the Primacy of Digital News, but an editor at a monthly magazine was annoyed. "Who do they think they're fucking talking to?" he asked. Perhaps they hadn't read Autumn of the Multitaskers, Walter Kirn's ASME-nominated essay on how "infinite connectivity" is "dumbing us down and making us crazy," or, for that matter, Stephen King's Last Word On Harry Potter, a nominee in the same category that appeared last summer in Entertainment Weekly:

The very popularity of the books has often undone even the best intentions of the best critical writers. In their hurry to churn out column inches, and thus remain members of good standing in the Church of What's Happening Now, very few of the Potter reviewers have said anything worth remembering. Most of this microwaved critical mush sees Harry — not to mention his friends and his adventures — in only two ways: sociologically (''Harry Potter: Boon or Childhood Disease?'') or economically (''Harry Potter and the Chamber of Discount Pricing''). They take a perfunctory wave at things like plot and language, but do little more...and really, how can they? When you have only four days to read a 750-page book, then write an 1,100-word review on it, how much time do you have to really enjoy the book? To think about the book? Jo Rowling set out a sumptuous seven-course meal, carefully prepared, beautifully cooked, and lovingly served out. The kids and adults who fell in love with the series (I among them) savored every mouthful, from the appetizer (Sorcerer's Stone) to the dessert (the gorgeous epilogue of Deathly Hallows). Most reviewers, on the other hand, bolted everything down, then obligingly puked it back up half-digested on the book pages of their respective newspapers.

I'll start with Pat Dollard's War On Hollywood, the 23,000-word Vanity Fair profile of a stoner-turned-Hollywood agent-turned-documentary filmmaker-turned-crackhead who also happens to be a left winger-turned-right winger. He's friends with Ann Coulter; Billy Bob Thornton says he's the only guy in Hollywood crazier than him; apparently it gets really good in the middle; the tragedy is I don't know this, even though it not only won the award but was written by a guy I used to date. (Who is, incidentally, always trying to get me to quit drinking.) (And also: is now married and apparently didn't show up at the event because his wife had not been invited; times, they are tough.)

Dollard's target audience is the same as any rock band's: kids—the more disaffected the better. He aims to alter the course of pop culture. "What we've celebrated since at least the 1950s is the antihero," Dollard says. "Today, even though our country has been attacked, nothing has changed. If you are a young man in America right now, the coolest fucking thing you can aspire to be is like a gangsta rapper, or a pseudo bad guy. The message of my movie is simple: If you're a young person in America, the coolest, fucking most badass and most noble thing you can be today is a combat Marine. Period."

Breitbart believes Dollard is onto something important. "There needs to be a confrontation at the pop-culture level of the kids who are over there fighting versus the kids at home who are totally disconnected, immersed in this mindless Abercrombie & Fitch-MTV culture." Breitbart adds, "There needs to be a revolution, and Dollard is the man who can kick it off. I don't care if older conservatives are offended by Pat Dollard. I was not looking for someone pristine. He brings to our cause this whole spirit of, like, the Merry Pranksters Two."

There is a certain stylistic uniformity to all forms of propaganda, but the personality of the propagandist is never far from the surface. Bin Laden's murmuring voice belies the contempt in his words. Zawahiri speaks in the confident, rhythmic clauses of a master strategist. Adam Gadahn, though he tries to adopt the composure of a statesman, exudes the zealotry of a convert, and of youth. Sometimes his syntax is so baroque, his sentiment so earnest, that he sounds like a character from "The Lord of the Rings." "The call has gone out," he proclaimed in one video. "The era of jihad and resistance has dawned in all its glory." Mostly, though, Gadahn sounds angry. In 2005, with his head wrapped in a black turban and his face covered with a black veil, he warned, "We love nothing better than the heat of battle, the echo of explosions, and slitting the throats of the infidels." Last July, while discussing civilian casualties in Iraq, he said, "It's hard to imagine that any compassionate person could see pictures, just pictures, of what the Crusaders did to those children, and not want to go on a shooting spree at the Marines' housing facilities at Camp Pendleton." In a feature-length Al Qaeda documentary that was released on the Internet on September 11, 2006, Gadahn referred to the United States as "enemy soil," and celebrated the September 11th hijackers as "dedicated, strong-willed, highly motivated individuals."

At the end of our meeting Dollard offers to become my manager. "Seriously, dude, I could get something set up for you like that," he says, clapping his hands to indicate how fast he is going to make a deal.

But Dollard never becomes my manager. In the coming weeks, he breaks several appointments. One day he phones. Rapid, shallow breaths come across the line. "Dude, I am so, so, so fucking sorry for not calling you." No explanation is required, but Dollard offers one anyway. "I was fucking kidnapped."
Dollard claims that members of an A.A. meeting abducted him after promising his wife to get him sober. Instead, they held him prisoner at a hotel in Palm Springs while plying him with call girls and coke. Meanwhile, they used his credit cards to charter a yacht and a plane for business deals they were conducting. The story is incredible, but Dollard's fourth wife later confirms its essential truth, adding, "I'm sure those A.A. people started with good intentions, but Pat twisted their intervention around until they thought the right thing to do was buying coke and hiring prostitutes for him."

Which reminds me, one reason I don't generally read magazines is to learn about how to spend my time in ways that aren't reading. Nonetheless, eating and exercising and travel are all more valid topics, in my mind, than shopping and makeup application, which is my excuse for reading Women, Money And Friends Come And Go, But Dogs Are Forever, which won Men's Health an award in the category of "Leisure Interests."

Wolves, like men, come in an assortment of personality types. Some are naturally aggressive — a trait that hardly endeared them to Stone Age hunters. Such wolves learned to stay the hell away from humans altogether or they would have faced extermination by our Paleolithic forefathers. Those wolves blessed with a more peaceful nature, on the other hand, adapted better as the human population boomed. One theory holds that these laid-back wolves benefited from an easily accessible food supply: human garbage. We, in turn, benefited from their warning howls whenever predators or marauding tribes came near. At some point, perhaps following the adoption of orphaned pups by a Stone Age hunter, these pacified wolves stopped living beside us and started living with us. This most likely happened toward the end of the last ice age. In a grave near modern-day Bonn-Oberkassel, Germany, archaeologists discovered the bodies of a Stone Age man and woman and the first "morphologically unambiguous" dog, dating back 14,000 years. "People have been burying or otherwise ritually disposing of dead dogs all over the world for a very long time," says Darcy F. Morey, Ph.D., a zooarchaeologist at the University of Tennessee at Martin. His hypothesis: Humans at this point in history began to view these animals less as beasts and more as creatures imbued with spiritual qualities and thus deserving of proper burial.

Until the seventies, the cart business was dominated by Greeks. Now, coffee carts are run mostly by Afghans. Bangladeshis man virtually all fruit stands and most hot-dog carts, though many uptown hot-dog carts are Dominican. The Vietnamese run smoothie carts. Nut carts are manned by Brazilians and Colombians. The trade is so ethnically fragmented that even Bangladeshis, the largest single group of vendors, make up less than 20 percent of the total number.

The Full List Of Links, Please Go Read Something Good And Tell Me About It; I'll Add More Here Later [Andrew Lavalle]
Autumn Of The Multitaskers [The Atlantic]
Pat Dollard's War On Hollywood [Vanity Fair]
Azzam The American [New Yorker]
Know Your Footprint [Popular Mechanics]
Women, Money And Friends Come And Go, But Dogs Are Forever [Men's Health]
Cartography: The Complete Road Map To New York Street Food [NY Mag]
The Last Word On Harry Potter [EW]
Engineering The Megacity [IEEE Spectrum]

"Really? Did you grow up there?" I asked. "My friend used to live there and he said he had to leave because it was too depressing, even the NGO workers were fucking 12-year-olds."

"Oh, now it's most popular to have sex with 7- and 8-year-olds," she said. "They like them younger because they think they won't have AIDS."

Whoa.

"Anyway, my family left in 1981, after Pol Pot, and moved to Australia, but I came back in 1992," she replied calmly.

"Was anyone in your family killed?" I asked.

"Yes, they came and got my father, and killed him."

At which point my phone began to ring, for the seventeenth time. It was another media clusterfuck person who could not find the location of the party. "Excuse me," I said. She smiled and slipped me her card. My phone does not work very well, so the conversation took longer than it should have, and by the time it was finished the NGO worker, who rescues young girls from sex slavery, had slipped off. I sat beside a media person.

"Are you covering this?" I asked.

"Probably not," the person said. "I mean, Mariane Pearl is not exactly a boldface name."

"But Angelina Jolie played her in the movie!"

"Yeah, but nobody saw that movie."

It was true. In a town in which being a boldface name requires spending a lot of time getting party pictures taken of you to reinforce your boldface namedom, Mariane Pearl, who had logged, according to an introduction by Glamour editor-in-chief Cindi Lieve, 100,000 miles of air travel in her year reporting from hellholes (Uganda! Liberia! Hong Kong!) for the magazine, did not really rank anymore. The space was small, and the book, while produced by the esteemed publisher of the memoir of a graffiti artist friend of mine, seemed like more of a vanity project than an actual literary endeavor. To her credit, Mariane looked really hot, in red lipstick and a pair of wedges. Thandie Newton would have made much more sense playing her in the movie. I had a third glass of wine and then some other stuff happened and then I went to the bathroom.

I saw another lady I recognized as one of the Cambodians; Somaly Mam. (Her name was confusing, because Mariane Pearl had maybe also gone to Somalia, but most people figured it out fast.) Somaly had started an NGO to rescue young people from sex slavery after somehow figuring out how to escape from sex slavery herself. I said something like, "Tell me about how your parents sold you into prostitution."

"It's hard, to talk about your life," she said.

"How old are you?" I pressed.

"I don't know," she said.

"When did you get out of prostitution?"

"I don't know, really" she said.

"How did you meet Mariane?"

"Well it was crazy, because right when we met was when my daughter had been abducted and kidnapped, so all I remember was trying to get her back."

At that moment someone came out of the bathroom and Somaly stood up to use it. I figured out from Mariane's book what she was talking about later: Somaly doesn't know where she was born or who her parents were because she was basically born a slave. (Cambodia killed a third of its population in the seventies and they tended to go after anyone who could read so that might have something to do with it.) Like I said, Mariane is not that evocative a writer — she could actually use help from whoever wrote Jenna Bush's book — and the details are fuzzy, which is a shame, because once you slog through it you're like, Holy Shit, what a Horrific Yet Unbelievably Compelling Story DETAILS PLEASE!

But anyway, the basics:

Somaly was sold into prostitution that she eventually escaped "with the help of an aid worker" and married a French citizen and started an organization to help women get out of prostitution at some point in time that is not clear from the story. In the midst of divorcing the French guy for unspecified reasons, one of three children, a 14-year-old daughter named Ning, was kidnapped by a family friend and taken to Battambang, a province near Thailand, where whores can make more money, and raped by three guys. The police, however, tracked her down, and Mariane was there the whole time.

Also in Cambodia one of the ways they apparently prepare youngsters for whoredom is they put hot chiles up little girl's vaginas.