Deborah asked yesterday about the pay model that Andrew Sullivan’s trying. He wrote today that the first day of the fund drive raised $333,000, with more than 12,000 jumping in. I wish him well, really I do, but I won’t be one of them. And I don’t see a pay model for NN.c anytime soon, barring catastrophe (job loss, etc.). It will be very difficult to do even under those circumstances. I lack Andrew Sullivan’s towering sense of his own worth.

I don’t read the Daily Dish, and haven’t read Sullivan (much) since 9/11/Iraq war. (Isn’t he the one who came up with the infamous “fifth column” observation? Why, I think he was.) My boss is a fan, and occasionally passes stuff along, and I gather he’s not as much of a douche as he used to be. But the site simply isn’t important enough for me to consider it a cheap magazine subscription. If you read his initial post on this, you know it’s not the entire site going behind the wall, just some longer posts, and even then, you get a few freebies a month before the wall goes up. That will suit my Andrew Sullivan needs for pretty much ever.

Still, I want him to do well. Writers should be paid, and he obviously has lots of readers. I also want to see various forms of pay-for-content schemes duking it out in the marketplace. Maybe one will work for me.

When we were doing GrossePointeToday.com, we were approached by a micropayment site, whose name I forget now — Jingle, Ka-ching, something like that. Here’s how it worked: You designated a monthly amount you were willing to pay for online content, sort of like a public-radio sustaining pledge — $10, $15, whatever, billed to your credit card. When you read something online that you liked, and that site was a Ka-jingle member, you clicked a button. At the end of the month, your ten bucks would be divided between all your clicks. If you only clicked one, they got $10. Two sites, $5 each. And so on. I don’t think it got off the ground, as I have never seen their logo anywhere, but the idea is interesting.

After 9/11, when “warblogs” were all the rage, a lot of them had “tip jars” through Amazon or PayPal, but I could never bring myself to put one up. If I accepted even a dime, I’d feel obligated, and I have enough obligations already. I always tell myself that if this gets to be too much of a grind, I can walk away without guilt. Believe me, there are many, many, many days when I’ve given a little less than my all here. If it bothers any of you, you’ve been kind enough not to say anything.

To my mind, the best free-to-pay transitions will be like Sullivan’s (and Talking Points Memo, which is trying something similar): Most of the site remains free, and premium content is there for paying customers.

No, I’m waiting until I do something else, I hope a book (and not lose my job and tumble into the fiscal abyss). Then, I’ll ask you to buy it, but this joint, for now, is and remains what it’s been since January 2001 — just a little key-clattering for fun, to take or leave as you see fit.

John Scalzi, as smart about balancing the paid-writer/unpaid-blogger life as anyone, mentions just a few of the headaches here:

To anticipate the question of whether I would/should/could do something like this, my short answer is that even if I could – a proposition I consider questionable for a number of reasons — I would prefer not to. Among other things it requires keeping track of subscriptions and handling customer service issues and doing all sorts of other stuff that I already know I would rather drag my tongue across a razor than to do. If I were hard up for cash I would probably put advertising up on the site before I did a subscription scheme. But I would be far more likely just to write something and put it up for sale; that seems to me to be the easier and more effective route for me.

In the ’80s, when I lived in a four-unit apartment building across the hall from Jeff Borden, he made an interesting observation about the party culture of the time. This is when cocaine was starting to appear at parties among the cool set, and Jeff said the ritual surrounding it was interesting and a little depressing.

Marijuana, he said, was a social drug. Light up a joint at a party, pass it around, make some friends. Cocaine was anti-social; you found a buddy or two, maybe someone you wanted to impress, and asked them to meet you in the bathroom for a special treat. You probably saw these duos and trios coming out of a bathroom or back bedroom many times, eyes glittering, noses twitching, expressions smug and superior. Sucks to be you, loser. This site will remain marijuana for the foreseeable future, or at least early ’80s-era marijuana — cheap or free, just mildly intoxicating, a giggle at best, sometimes a headache. Those other bloggers can deal in stronger stuff in their paywall bathrooms. But not here.

Bloggage? Some:

This is so outstanding, but be warned, it’s the unbleeped version: “Downton Abbey” cast members mash it up with “Breaking Bad.” Stephen Colbert’s staff are geniuses.

And while we’re on the subject: Vince Gilligan talks about crafting the final season.

Ezra Klein: Good riddance to the worst Congress in history.

A good weekend to all, and the full-week grind restarts Monday.

I wandered into a discussion about journalism today — which is sort of the cue for anyone with half a brain to turn the page — but it occurs to me that what it’s really about is something else. First, a piece by Susan Shapiro, writing teacher, over an assignment she gives her “feature journalism students,” i.e. “the humiliation essay,” which she calls her signature assignment. Students are required to:

…shed vanity and pretension and relive an embarrassing moment that makes them look silly, fearful, fragile or naked.

You can’t remain removed and dignified and ace it. I do promise my students, though, that through the art of writing, they can transform their worst experience into the most beautiful. I found that those who cried while reading their piece aloud often later saw it in print. I believe that’s because they were coming from the right place — not the hip, but the heart.

She goes on at some length about this assignment, and how to make it worth reading. It’s a good one. I’ve always felt the first job of any writer, whether one works in fiction or nonfiction, is to tell the truth. Telling the truth about yourself is frequently the hardest thing you’ll do as a writer, so learning how to do so early in your career is probably a useful exercise.

Hamilton Nolan at Gawker disagreed, making the very good point that a journalist’s last job should be to write about themselves. He points out that Shapiro, who seems to be only about 50 or so, has already published three memoirs, and maybe that’s not the craft’s highest calling. He’s onto something there, and notes:

…let us more generously interpret Shapiro’s attitude as not a cause, but a symptom—her own honest reading of the state of the professional writing market today. In a way, she is not wrong, although she is also part of the problem.

Shapiro is, in essence, telling her students that they only way they will get published and sell stories and books and have careers as professional writers is to exploit every last tawdry twist and turn of their own lives for profit. Why, she could be the editor of any number of popular websites! Her takeaway from editors’ and agents’ demands for interesting stories is, “Sharing internal traumas on page one makes you immediately knowable, lovable and engrossing.” She is teaching a gimmick: the confessional as attention-grabber. Her students could just as well include naked photos in their essays, for the same effect.

They’re both right, and they’re both wrong. Journalism students should be learning, first and foremost, how to write about other people, not themselves. But. Making yourself your toughest assignment is hardly a waste of time; besides what I mentioned before, confronting your own awful story may well help you when you’re trying to write someone else’s. So I’ll defend the assignment.

But Nolan’s position is more than defensible, and from how she described them in her piece, I doubt I’d find Shapiro’s memoirs very interesting. In fact, the one she talks most about — “Five Men Who Broke My Heart” — sounds ghastly. I have five heartbreakers of my own; why would I give a fat rat’s ass about yours, Susan Shapiro? He’s right that a typical memoir of today traffics in just this sort of overheated crap, which is why I don’t read many of them. But to reject the personal essay/memoir out of hand as “not journalism” is simply ignorant — “Out of Africa,” “Ten Days That Shook the World,” etc. etc. and more etc.

The difference, of course, is that these great storytellers were writing about something outside themselves, through their own eyes. They have the sense to know what’s interesting and what’s just self-indulgent twaddle.

I really don’t know much about Shapiro’s students; maybe “feature journalism” is what she calls memoir or personal history.

Ultimately, one of my favorite writing lessons is the one Norman MacLean’s father delivers in “A River Runs Through It” — an assigned essay of a certain length, which he requires his sons to cut in half, cut in half again and maybe a third time, after which he delivers the final verdict: “Now throw it away.”

Most writing can be thrown away, when you come right down to it. Newspaper work teaches you that, as you’re virtually assured that your precious words will end up wrapping fish, lining birdcages, training puppies, abandoned atop the toilet tank or shredded into insulation. The best you can hope for is to be pinned to someone’s refrigerator for a while.

A book note before I go, while we’re on the subject:

I didn’t say enough good things about “Capital” last week. The author is British, and I’d forgotten how much fun their slang is. “Naff” took me a while to figure out, and I’m still not sure I’ve quite got it. (I think it means tacky, but that’s not exactly right.) Speed bumps are “sleeping policemen.” And then I was sidetracked by the in/on thing.

New Yorkers stand on lines, everybody else stands in them. But there’s a difference between English and American English on the subject of addresses. Brits are more likely to describe life in a road than on it. Why is that? I always figured that the older the road, the more likely it is to be cut into the countryside by years of passing conveyances, and maybe there’s more in than on to them by then.

I’ll leave it to our resident Brit commenters. Because I’m mighty tired, and think I’m off to bed.

I thought perhaps another 24 hours or so would make me less jumpy, but it hasn’t. Although, hey, stress/disbelief/grief seems to be giving way to fury! Is that good? You tell me. If I hadn’t been alerted to this post by LGM, I doubt I’d have seen it. (I’m allergic to McArdle.) It’s long, and meandering, and not very good, but it does include this whopper toward the end:

I’d also like us to encourage people to gang rush shooters, rather than following their instincts to hide; if we drilled it into young people that the correct thing to do is for everyone to instantly run at the guy with the gun, these sorts of mass shootings would be less deadly, because even a guy with a very powerful weapon can be brought down by 8-12 unarmed bodies piling on him at once. Would it work? Would people do it? I have no idea; all I can say is that both these things would be more effective than banning rifles with pistol grips.

You know, I was sort of waiting for someone to say this. As I recall, something you heard from this corner of the internet after the Virginia Tech massacre ran along these lines. It wasn’t a full-throated roar — in fact, if I’m remembering correctly, it mostly came from the terra cotta-toothed, since-disgraced John Derbyshire — but it was there, couched as a rueful observation about the decline of the American male: All those shots fired, surely he had to reload at least a few times. Why didn’t one of these young men rush him and take him down? What has happened to the masculine impulse? Were no first-graders brave enough to run at the madman with the gun? What sort of children were these?

I still haven’t gotten over the columnists who, after 9/11*, were back on their old hobby horses within days, in particular the conservative women who sneered at the stewardesses on United 93 who thought they might join in the rush to the cockpit, using hot coffee as a weapon.

* or, as paid-by-the-word Mitch Albom put it in Sunday’s column, “al-Qaida’s diabolical Sept. 11, 2001 attack.”

To Megan McArdle and her Libertarian buddies, I say: Sounds like a plan. You first.

I really need to stop this now. One last story, thanks to Jolene: How our gun culture is unique in the world, in four amazing charts.

Oh yeah, and this, too: How Newtown, given the opportunity to examine its gun culture and consider new ordinances controlling it, took a pass:

“This is a freedom that should never be taken away,” one woman said. Added another, “Teach kids to hunt, you will never have to hunt your kids.”

You know what Dr. Phil has to say about that.

Palate cleanser? PALATE CLEANSER, STAT. How about this, Professor Hank Stuever’s supplemental reading list to his class at the University of Montana, on the occasion of class’ end. Just scanning the list, much of which I’ve read but much of which I haven’t, made my heart soar like a hawk. I have a very busy day today and won’t have time to read much of it, but just looking forward to dipping into something tonight will carry me through the day.

And by then, I might be back to something approaching normal. Let’s hope so. Happy Tuesday, all.

I spent eight hours — no, nine — straight, staring into my computer today. What’s another? Let’s get it on!

Seriously, there’s nothing I’d like to do better than watch “The Choice” on “Frontline” and I think that’s what I’m going to do. Actually, I’m watching it now, and my takeaway: Mormonism is one strange faith.

Fortunately, I have some bloggage:

Crain’s took note of our work at the park last week.

A great blog post about one sports moment that’s a pleasure for everyone, even non-fans, to read. Not very long. If you’ve ever wondered what I’d like to see running in Mitch Albom’s place — in most sports columnists’ place — well, this is it.

For you Buckeyes, a fascinating story about OSU President Gordon Gee’s ex-wife, her new book and their time at Vanderbilt, when she — gasp! — smoked pot in the president’s mansion. (Medicinally.)

Boy, “The Choice” is great. Wish you were here. And sorry I’m so lame, but man, it was a long day.

So, Miguel Cabrera clinched baseball’s triple crown night before last, and where was Detroit’s highly paid celebrity sports columnist? Beats me. I hear he’s on a book tour, but wherever he was, he wasn’t in the paper today.

Mitch did write about Cabrera. On September 23rd. First paragraph:

I remember Carl Yastrzemski. All the kids followed him. It was 1967, the Summer of Love, but for boys sporting high top sneakers and baseball cards in our bicycle spokes, it was the summer of the Triple Crown — or another summer of the Triple Crown. Frank Robinson had won it the year before. And being wide-eyed fans, we figured someone would win it every year.

Ooooohkay, then. Tell me, though: Did anyone ever put baseball cards in bicycle spokes? I remember that trick, but you used playing cards. Baseball cards were for trading, but then, if you’re phoning in yet another soft-focus remembrance of the good ol’ days, it sounds better to make them baseball cards.

Oh, I just don’t have it in me today. It’s the end of the week, it’s been a long one, and Mitch isn’t my problem. But considering this guy is now writing about twice in a blue moon, don’t you think he’d have the time to give us a better ending than this?

Cabrera stays away from newspapers or Internet sites or even TV shows about sports. He said he was spending time watching movies or playing with his kids to keep the pressure off when he’s not at the park. He even has read a few books.

“‘Fifty Shades of Grey?'” someone joked.

“Huh?” he said.

“‘Fifty Shades of Grey?'”

“No.”

Right. Who needs 50 shades of grey when you’re chasing three points of a crown?

And that, as Deadspin might say, is how the winner of the Red Smith Award puts a cherry on top. Booyah.

So let’s go to the bloggage, and congratulate Deborah on her well-earned retirement. Now she can write to us about the Frito pie at the Santa Fe Woolworth’s.

Tina Fey on the end of “30 Rock.” I would so like to work in a writer’s room. It sounds like a newsroom at its best moments:

What are some of the made-up words you’re going to miss from the 30 Rock world? What are your favorites?

I mean, sometimes they come out of skits, skits that we’re shooting in our writers room, so that’s where “lizzing” and “high-fiving a million angels” came from. Some of them came from my daughter [Alice] when she was smaller and didn’t speak as well. [Laughs.] “I want to go to there.” I remember our head of post, when we were trying to cut that episode down to time, said, “We could cut that,” and I was like, “I think we should leave it,” and I’m so glad we did, because you never know what’s going to stick in people’s brains.

Why should hurricanes get all the good stuff? The Weather Channel announces it will name winter storms this season. Bundle up for Orko!

Eh, I’ve hit a wall. Have a great weekend, all, and I’ll see you back here Monday.

Didn’t you guys start to talk yesterday about how to report race in crime stories? This is the rule I’ve always followed, which may or may not be the rule anymore. I’ve been gone from institutional daily journalism a long time.

The rule is: Don’t report race unless it’s important to the story, which can vary. When a suspect is at large and might be a threat to others, someone another person might see and report to police, by all means do so. The problem comes when the description is something impossibly vague like “a white man wearing blue jeans” or “a black man of medium height.” In the case of the two Grosse Pointe girls who were robbed, the description was pretty thorough, and included height and weight, clothing and, yes, race. The guy was armed and had escaped into the neighborhood. Totally defensible to use his color in the story.

Otherwise, if you wouldn’t write that someone was robbed by a person with red hair, I leave it out.

Others don’t follow the same rules. Our weekly newspaper here will sometimes write, for instance, “The 16-year-old was released to his 32-year-old mother.” Ooh, very subtle, just in case you didn’t catch on to the fact the perp was, how you say, not from around here. The worst of all was when they transcribed the written confession of a teenage female car thief, semiliterate spelling, fractured usage and all. It was repulsive, but I’m sure their readership got a real yuk out of it.

Meanwhile, here was the story TV did.

I can’t tell you how much I despise this sort of thing — the stupid hand gestures, the weird delivery, everything, including the obligatory exchange with the anchor at the end, which might as well run:

“Now I am asking you a question we both already know the answer to, in an effort to show you have deep knowledge of this situation.”

“And I am answering, both of us fully aware I’ve never set foot in this place in my life.”

Every crime story about this place has to talk about how peaceful it is, how unexpected the crime is, and of course, how the sucking maw of Detroit lurks just around the corner. It’s our cow picture, the cow picture being the standard photo of Columbus that ran for years with every single national-media story about how the city was starting to really come on strong. There’s a place at the end of the street where I grew up, where Ohio State University has some farm fields for the ag school. Sometimes they graze dairy cattle there, and when the air is clear, you can sometimes catch a nice pic of a cow in the foreground and the city’s skyline behind.

The cow picture. Because Columbus is shedding its cowtown image! Get it?

Oh, well. Moving on.

Anyone heard of Art Prize? It’s a festival held every year in Grand Rapids, where public art is installed all over the city for a few weeks, and the public votes on it. I’ve never been, and honestly, when I first heard about it, I imagined a lot of earnest crap and/or hostile Richard Serra stuff.

Looks like I was wrong. I love the taxidermy piece, and of course the wooden bicycle. Might be worth a road trip.

Time for bed. Hope your day was fine. Mine was busy.

There’s been a tragedy in Libya, and even if there hadn’t been, we would certainly have better things to talk about today than Bob Greene. But talk about him I must.

Thanks to our own Bob (not Greene) for tipping me to this Robert Feder piece catching up with the former Chicago Tribune columnist on the 10-year anniversary of his fall from grace, which my longest-staying readers will recall as a red-circled date around this blog, too.

The firing of Bob Greene was the first post* here that made a splash outside of my little readership, which had formerly numbered in the tens, or maybe the fives. The experience of being an overnight blog sensation was simultaneously exhilarating and disorienting, but I ended up writing my essay for the Knight-Wallace Fellowship on that incident, and I got that gig, so I guess I owe Bob Greene something. But having just read Feder, I think it still needs to be said: Ten years later, Bob still sucks.

In fact, I think that was the point of the blog that day: Who cares if he diddled a teenager? Fire him for being a lousy columnist.

It’s taken a long, long time, but I’ve come to accept that I am a minority voice in the career of Greene. There are plenty of people, people whose opinion I respect, who don’t think he sucks. There’s Feder himself, speaking of Greene’s current venue, CNN.com:

He doesn’t write about abused children anymore (as he did to excess in his final years at the Tribune), but he often returns to other familiar themes with the confidence and grace of an old pro. Reading him again reminded me why he once was a role model for many of us who came after him at Medill.

And there’s Eric Zorn, from whom I expected something more than this:

I had mixed feelings about Greene — he was, he is, an incredibly gifted observer, canny reporter and smooth writer.

With all due respect to Eric, who is all those things: No.

I’m just going to choose the most recent Greene column from his CNN home page. Headline: In Ohio, candidates are salesmen trying to close the deal. Writers generally don’t write their own headlines, but that is vintage Greene. Candidates are selling something? You don’t say! Wow, I never thought of it that way.

And sure enough, that’s it: It opens with a little bit of finger-on-the-pulse reporting, a woman who lives near a presidential speaking venue inconvenienced when she’s expecting a delivery of furniture. The truck can’t get through the crowded street. Not named. Nut graf:

Ohio is getting plenty of visits from the candidates. During the time I was in the middle of Ohio this summer, Paul Ryan was in the area twice, Mitt Romney was there at least once, and on this early afternoon Obama had made his way to Capital. Scenes like this repeat every four years; there are days in highly contested states when something seems almost amiss if you don’t encounter a motorcade or a police escort.

Followed by:

They are traveling salesmen, the candidates are; they hit the road bearing their products — the products being themselves. And although presidential and vice presidential candidates are the most celebrated politicians in the land, they become not so different from the thousands of other sales reps who lug their sample cases across America every work week of the year.

Love that writerly sentence inversion! Impressed, I am not. It helps usher in the tritest observation possible, that politicians are actually? When you think about it? Trying to sell you something. Wow. That’s heavy.

It goes on. We never hear from the furniture woman again, but we do hear from Arthur Miller, although I think this big finish really pegs the needle:

In less than nine weeks, two of the four men crisscrossing the nation — Obama, Romney, Ryan, Joe Biden — are going to find out that they failed to make the sale after all, and two of the men are going to find out that they have successfully culminated the transaction. The nervous uncertainty of that is what can make their high-level pursuit at times feel utterly life-sized.

Arthur Miller, in that same play in which he introduced Willy Loman to the world, understood the compulsion behind all of this quite well:

“A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.”

Or, as John Cougar Mellencamp put it more concisely: And there’s winners, and there’s losers, but that ain’t no big deal.

So let’s move on. Feder singled out the remembrance he did of Jeffrey Zaslow, the Wall Street Journal reporter and author who died last winter. Greene “recalled heroically” his more-talented colleague, Feder wrote, so let’s see what that was all about.

The good news: Better. Greene clearly liked and respected Zazz, but once again, faced with the task of finding one original thing to say about him, came up short. His lead:

“What # are you at?”

The brief e-mail arrived late on the morning of January 24. I keep looking at it.

It was from Jeff Zaslow. We first became friends more than 25 years ago. We got together as often as we could when we found ourselves in the same town, usually for long, laughter-filled dinners; Jeff, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, in recent years became the author of multiple big bestselling books, most of them on inspirational themes.

“What # are you at?”

I guess we’ve all experienced the disorientation of losing a loved one suddenly, of having to clean an office or a closet, thinking this was his, but where is he? This box of ashes, this corpse — I talked to him three days ago. Where did he go? Most of us, however, wouldn’t find a totally mundane, four-word-one-syllable email worthy of not only being the first words in our tribute to our friend, but something to repeat. What planet you on, Bob? Planet Bob, where he’s been doing this stuff for years.

It goes on, and yes, it gets better, but as always, the conclusion drawn is mundane. I’ll save you the trouble. You know why Zaslow was a success? Because he worked so hard. You’re welcome.

I said before that the first rule of writing is to tell the truth. So here it is: Greene is a hack, Albom is a hack, but Nall is a hack, too. Was a hack. Writing a newspaper column quickly becomes a grind, no matter how hard you work at it, no matter how brilliant you are. I wrote many, many shitty columns. I, too, tried to spin grand life lessons from trite observations. It is so hard to do it well, to not suck on a daily basis, sparkle occasionally and shine often enough that people want to keep reading you. The best you can hope for is a snappy prose style that will lift even your stupidest material on an ethereal soap bubble of wonder. That’s Jon Carroll’s secret, but even he fails, and fails often. On the other hand, one column as good as this can make up for a decade of failures. I think I read that column every day for about a year when I was miserable at my job, like a prayer. (Bonus: One of my editors also worked for the Mr. Stern Carroll disliked so. Said Stern wasn’t so bad. Lesson: Never let reporting get in the way of a great column.)

I’d like to point out that Carroll’s is an example of how to write about a death that affected you profoundly. Note that the lesson at its center is no less pat than the one in Greene’s. And yet, look how much better.

I guess, finally, what bugs me about Greene, about Albom, about all the other hacks out there phoning it in, is how they don’t seem to get it. They have the best jobs in the world, and they don’t feel any obligation to get better, to get smarter, to be anything other than crowd pleasers of the easiest audience outside of a cruise ship.

Zorn, despite that early stumble into praise, gets it exactly right at the end:

All writers have their private lives, of course, but columnists, in particular, at least ought to be genuine. Greene, however, always seemed to be channeling a character called “Bob Greene,” behind which the real person hid.

…the one book he hasn’t written — either doesn’t want to write or is perhaps incapable of writing — is a brutally candid account of his phenomenal rise, long cruise at altitude, devastating crash and painful period of recovery (tragically, his wife died of a respiratory illness four months after he left the Tribune).

A book by Bob Greene, in other words, and not by “Bob Greene.” It would be the capstone and perhaps spark the revival of a remarkable career.

Yep. It’s one I’d read. I don’t expect to ever do so.

* I’d link to the post, but it’s gone into the ether. I know I have it saved on a CD-ROM backup somewhere, but I’m not going diving for it now.

Hey, all.

In honor of the spirit of Labor Day, not much of a post today, but a link to a very nice Labor Day column by Brian Dickerson, the only columnist worth reading in the Free Press. If y’all looking for tips on how to write a personal column with a larger point, read this little gem — fewer than 500 words, simple, sincere.

Albom could take a lesson, but he won’t.

Happy Labor Day, all

I read the news today, oh boy. Actually, I heard it — one of those long-drive-to-Lansing days. Mitt Romney described Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, said “culture” is the reason for the gulf between Israel’s and the Palestinians’ GDP, made a serious factual error (the GDP figures), and otherwise had one of those days where, if it had been had by Barack Obama, would have been accompanied by screeching, real hysterical screeching, on the right. Because it was the other way around, it was accompanied by a sober report on NPR in which the reporter explained, in reasonable tones, the “controversy” attached to calling Jerusalem the capital of Israel.

And that’s the way it was on the drive home.

As always, don’t just consider the source, consider the audience. Romney was speaking to a group of rich donors at the King David Hotel. It must have been successful; he is said to have left with more than a million bucks in his pocket.

Enough time passes between presidential elections that I forget stuff. Is this the way presidential candidates are supposed to behave “on foreign soil,” a phrase we hear a lot at times like this. Because that struck me, even considering the audience, as a rather obnoxious speech. But what do I know?

Back to the mind-numbing palliative of men’s gymnastics. Boy, are these guys not my type — short, musclebound, as hairless as a baby’s ass. I keep thinking of real-world applications for this level of physical mastery. Many years ago, I read a column in the American Spectator — perhaps the only good thing I ever read in that rag — about Rudolf Nureyev, after he died of AIDS. It was a snotty column, but there was an eyewitness account in there, about a rooftop party busted by the cops, and somehow Nureyev ended up on the other side of an air shaft or narrow alley, and the cops said, “Get back over here.” The dancer gave them an arrogant look and leapt back across the gap like a gazelle, which somehow reduced whatever had brought the cops there to the level of ashing your cigarette on the sidewalk. That’s when it would be good to be a gymnast. You never know when you might have to jump across an air shaft or turn a few handsprings.

As it is, most of us will only go to parties with people who will have a few and then reprise their role as Sally Bowles in “Cabaret.”

Meanwhile, what the hell with this Jonah Lehrer guy? It’s not enough that he blew it. He had everything, and he blew it. I get really tired of these entitled little shits with their book contracts and their think pieces and all the rest of it. Don’t make stuff up. It’s not so hard.

OK, time to watch the end of these gymnastics, and try to pretend I don’t already know the U.S. team collapsed like a muscular little house of cards.

Because I care about my readers so very very much, and because Alan went fishing last Friday and Kate was off doing something, and it was hot and I was at loose ends and had an hour to kill, I did something I normally wouldn’t do, even for you.

I watched Bristol Palin’s reality show via my on-demand service.

I wish I could tell you it was a fine bit of bad television, worthy of an extra beer and a bowl of popcorn. Alas, I cannot.

Part of the problem is reality TV. I had a colleague who was always promising that reality TV was done, done, dunzo, and soon we’d have no more of it. This was more than a decade ago. Not only is it not dunzo, it seems stronger than ever, even as every last trope is as tired and clichéd as a CPAC flag salute for the mama grizzlies. There’s the mission (Bristol is restless, and wants to “give back” to a charity in Los Angeles) the staged think-it-over scene (Mama Sarah Grizzly sings a little of the “Beverly Hillbillies” theme song, screwing up the lyrics), the packing, the move, the reveal of the ridiculous mansion (“owned by a friend of my mom’s”), etc.

Ostensibly, Bristol is working for a charity called Help the Children, and isn’t that a great name for a charity? Guess what their mission is? Helping children! They have branded polo shirts, and Bristol gamely puts hers on and goes for a driving tour of Skid Row. Not a lot of children-helping can be observed, mainly because we have to endure long confessional interviews with Bristol and her sister, Willow, dragged along to be a babysitter to little Tripp, her 2-year-old son with Levi Johnston. Willow’s not very enthusiastic about being there, and whines on the phone to a friend back in Alaska. Tripp, we’re told, is the very reason for this excursion, because Bristol “wants him to see there’s a whole world out there,” something anyone who’s ever taken care of a 2-year-old for long knows is not exactly at the top of their bucket list.

Even this synopsis is boring, isn’t it?

Anyway, it all leads up to the big money scene, where Bristol is out frolicking with friends and an angry gay man yells YOUR MOTHER’S A WHORE. There’s some shakycam of the two of them squabbling, then a big meltdown in which she has the nerve to say, “And there are cameras everywhere!” and we end the episode on some note of sadder-but-wiser.

I feel sorry for Bristol. I feel sorry for Willow (although I think she has a chance). I feel sorry for Tripp. And I am reminded of a conversation I had with a woman from People magazine, who was applying for a Knight Wallace Fellowship the year after mine. She wanted to spend her year working on a book about what happens to people when they become famous overnight, not for something they did, but for something that happened to them. They go a little crazy, she said, mentioning Elizabeth Smart, whom I believe had just asked to play herself in the TV movie about her abduction, rape and captivity.

And then, because my self-loathing apparently knows no bounds, I did something I haven’t done in five years. I listened to a Mitch Albom show, or part of it, on the way home from Lansing Monday. I last tuned in during the Terry Schiavo affair, on a similar boring drive, and I was left with the impression that of all his media personae, radio Mitch was the least offensive. Maybe because so much of talk radio is so deliberately offensive, his aw-shucks regular-guy act was almost likable.

I’ve really, really lost my taste for that sort of commercial radio. There’s allegedly a conversation going on between Mitch and his co-host, but the whole show’s on ADD, what with stock-market closing numbers, traffic on the fives, weather and all the rest of it. But at one point they briefly chatted about “The Newsroom,” the new Aaron Sorkin series on HBO. It’s not being kindly reviewed, and having watched one episode, I’m agreeing with the critics — it’s preachy and speechy and rat-a-tat-tatty, and it left me pretty cold.

The co-host/sidekick said, “It’s not getting good reviews.”

“That’s because people are jealous of Aaron Sorkin’s success,” Mitch said, airily. “That’s what we do in this country. If someone is successful, we have to tear them down.”

Scratch the regular guy. The monsterfication of Mitch is fully complete.

And now, I know we all want to talk about whatever the Supremes had to say today, so I turn it over to you. Only one bit of bloggage, via Dexter: A numismatic ORGY!!!!!

I’m writing this Wednesday night. I can only imagine what tomorrow will be like — 100 degrees here, and I have two interviews and a meeting, with out 150 miles to drive. Oh, joy.