Dave Cullen: Media/Journalism

A small gift from Chile

Fri, 22 Sep 2006 06:43:37 GMT

I tivo Charlie Rose every day. I don't always get to them right away. I use them as radio--while I cook breakfast, clean up, exercise . . .

The great joy of that show is the incredible breadth of ideas and perspectives you hear. I tend to get the most out of the various sorts of artists he has on the show, though those are people I can often hear elsewhere, just not in such depth. (Outside of Fresh Air, the other great source.)

But weeks like this are always special, when most of the world leaders are in NY for the UN assembly, and so many of them stop by his studio for a chat. (It kinda started midweek and will continue through much of next week, if he follows his past pattern.)

In general, politicians are the least interesting guests on his show, but he either culls out the few who are not full of hot air, or perhaps they're not windbags when they're not talking to a domestic audience. These people aren't running for anything here. They do have an agenda with the American public, of course, but most of the ones he has on are smart enough to know they're going to impress us a lot more if they leave the BS at home and just talk candidly. (Or am I just used to American politicians--have they not gotten so slick and full of shit everywhere else?)

It can also be a tough week, because you have to deal with a lot of accents--tougher if you're in the kitchen cooking and trying to listen with one ear and one brain hemisphere, and sometimes the ideas sound a little foreign . . . it's a little more work, but usually worth it.

Tonight, was pure pleasure. The President of Chile, Michelle Bachelet, a woman I'd never heard of--OK, I didn't even know they had elected a woman, I'm embarassed to admit--was something of a revelation. What an incredibly intelligent person. And such a wise, thoughtful take on everything. She had been tortured by Pinochet's goons, and her father, a general, had been murdered by them, but she spoke about it without anger. She spoke of the horrible anger she'd had in the past, but it was clear from her demeanor that it really was gone.

I think she was most refreshing the way she talked about issues passionately, but with none of the us/them mentality we have in our politics now. In fact, she talked about her frustration reading our press, which she sees as still speaking in a Cold War vocabulary, about good guys and bad guys in her region. She sees those countries struggling to enact economic reforms that will build their economies in the long run, but also improve people's lives, and how difficult that balance is, and how everyone is looking for the right answers. Essentially, she says that there are a lot of well-meaning people trying different approaches down there, and for us to split them down the middle and slap half of them with the goodguy label and half badguy is ludicrous, yet we do it with barely a thought.

She had a lot to say. I can't convey more than a fraction of it, but I'm the richer for having been exposed to her. I can't wait for the rest of the week.

'The Greatest Story Ever Sold'--what a title. and . . .

Wed, 20 Sep 2006 04:53:07 GMT

And the book looks pretty damn good, too, from my quick stab, tonight.

Frank Rich's The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina came out today, and is already #2 at Amazon, so you're prolly going to be hearing a lot about it.

I checked it out tonight at Denver's great local bookstore Tattered Cover. Really interesting opening, written in Frank's usual fluid style. And I was really glad to read this in the intro:

This book is not intended to be a harangue about George W. Bush or the war in Iraq, though my views will certainly be evident. What it is instead is a critical retracing of the sophisticated steps by which some clever people in the White House, handed an opportunity and a mandate by the shocking events of 9/11, unfurled a brilliantly produced scenario to accomplish a variety of ends . . .

Thank you! As much as our fearless leader irks the hell out of me, I don't really need to spend time on a detailed analysis of how. The man will come and go as a mediocre to horrible president, and I've already lost interest. He's just not an interesting guy. But, the way the media has been co-opted and participates in promoting these preposterous fictions upon us--that's important.

That's exactly what The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are ultimately all about, and that's why they are insanely popular, and brilliant at the same time. (And most of the press still doesn't quite get them--or chuckles along with them, but doesn't get that they are the butt of the joke more than the politicians. Either they don't get it or can't figure out how to change.)

Those shows do it on a daily basis, bit by bit, but so nice to have someone pull the whole picture together.

And what a gutsy move by his publisher to devote 100 pages to a timeline, showing side-by-side what the white house was saying internally, and the alternate reality they were pitching to us. That's worth the price of the book all by itself. (The book says the timeline will be updated continually at his website. It's not live yet, but there's a "coming soon" sign.)

So far, so good. I'll let you know more as I get further.

Meanwhile, he's going to be the guest on Fresh Air on NPR Wednesday.

And here's the PW review:

Starred Review. This blistering j'accuse has vitriol to spare for George Bush—calling him a "spoiled brat" and "blowhard"—and his policies, but its main target is the PR machinery that promoted those policies to the American people. New York Times columnist Rich revisits nearly every Bush administration publicity gambit, including Iraqi WMD claims, Bush's "Mission Accomplished" triumph, the Swift-boating of John Kerry and the writing of fake prowar letters-to-the-editor from soldiers. He uncovers nothing new, but his meticulously researched recap-cum-debunking—complete with appended 80-page time line comparing administration spin to actual events—builds a comprehensive picture of a White House propaganda campaign to bamboozle the public, smear critics, camouflage policy disasters and win the 2002 and 2004 elections through trumped-up security anxieties. Along the way, he pillories a sycophantic media (Bob Woodward gets spanked hard), spineless Democrats and an infotainment culture that happily accommodates the Bush administration's erasure of the line between reality and fiction. Sometimes Rich's critique of Republican politics as cynical image-manipulation goes overboard, as in his "wag the dog" theory of the Iraq war as a Karl Rove electoral maneuver; more often, though, it's on target. The result is a caustic, hard-hitting indictment of the Bush administration, timed to make a splash in the upcoming election campaign. (Sept. 19)

Amazon link here.

Wednesday Update:

Frank was on The Colbert Report last night, and NPR's Fresh Air today (the first 3/4 of the show). Listen to Fresh Air show here.

Comedy Central repeats Colbert endlessly through the next day, and a lot of stations play or replay Fresh Air at night, so you still have time to catch both. He was great on both.

(And if you watch Colbert, tune in two minutes early to see the preview on The Daily Show. Nothing to do with Frank, but it involves Stephen's word-a-day calendar, which I won't give away, but it still has me snickering just remembering.)

The stench of network news

Wed, 20 Sep 2006 04:29:06 GMT

OK, maybe I get the situation after all.

For years, I've been flumoxed about the pathetic state of network news: not what's wrong with it, but why the net execs don't get what's wrong with it.

They are well aware that something is wrong. Ratings have declined rapidly for several years, and the story is monumentally worse demographically. The average age for the nightly network newscasts is now something like 60, which barely even seems possible. (Median age of 60 would be bad enough, but average? That means for every 20 year-old watching, there are three 80 year-olds, or six 70 year-olds. Unbelievable. The number of young adults watching is trending toward zero.

That's a huge problem for the nets now--because advertisers don't pay much for old folks--and a life or death problem for them in the medium run, because as Les Moonves admitted in so many words last night on Charlie Rose, those viewers are going to be dying off, and if we don't attract some young ones, it's over.

That viewing pattern seems pretty obvious: old people who grew up with decent news shows established a lifelong habit and many continue. Younger people with other options who tune in are repulsed by what they see and choose not to watch.

So what's the problem with the shows? It seems so freaking obvious, yet they've tried a million different fixes and they never seem to address the obvious one: they're shitty storytellers. I mean, really shitty. I only check in occasionally these days--like yes, I did check Katie Couric out, and she was fine, better than fine, actually, I think she's really good. And they tried to change the show surrounding her, making it magaziney, more feature pieces and all that, but that didn't do diddly, because it's these same retched cliche-ridden pieces that tell us almost nothing, but in a magazine format. And it really doesn't matter how wonderful Katie is introducing all this crap; at some point we still have to watch the crap, and why would we?

The correspondents just seem to rely on all the same tired lines night after night, stringing together lame conventional wisdom and expressing it with a string of cliches, but worst of all, they try so hard to make it cute, or sometimes to make it cool, or sometimes funny--none of which 90% of them have any talent at. And most nauseating of all, they feel this perpetual need to tie every freaking story up with a little bow: a final line or series of lines that "puts it all in perspective," or some such twaddle, like ". . . in one small town, they are learning never to forget -- but sometimes not to remember either" or some horrible reach to sound profound or something.

For me, the defining moment of modern news was--I hate to say this, but it really was 9/11. But not in the sense that it was a watershed event or it was so important that it changed our world or blah blah blah with that nonsense. I mean that for about 24 hours, they QUIT trying to be so damn profound or cute or . . . over-produced, I guess. There was no title to the tragedy yet, and no theme music. Those are obvious hallmarks, but those are just the symptoms. What was really different, was that nobody tried to do these damn packed "stories"--they just said what the hell was happening. It was wonderful. They stopped doing the gross shit they normally do and just spoke candidly about what was happening, what they had learned, what they were finding out. No wannabee-profound bows at the end, just stripped away to no nonsense reporting. And to my utter amazement, they were really good at it.

I actually dreamed, briefly, that they would both notice the difference, and notice that it was actually much better than when they were trying to hard--or when they just didn't have the time to package it.

For a long time I thought the problem was that they were just pretty shitty storytellers, and I couldn't get why the editors or execs or whomever could not see that. (Although I wonder how much of the problem is that the "anchors" got way too much power. Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings were all made the top editors of their shows, as well. That's almost always a problem. If the people writing or creating are the same people editing--I think that fails to grasp the concept of what an editor is: someone standing a few steps outside the creation-process, who can more objectively assess, and tell you when it's not working.)

But still, why couldn't someone--say, Les Moonves--not see the problem of shitty storytelling and just tell them.

And then I saw him on Charlie Rose, addressing it, and saying off-handedly once again that the key to the news is just like sports or fiction or movies or whatever: great storytelling. And it dawned on me suddenly that he gets that, but maybe doesn't get that they're trying too hard. Maybe the format of three-minutes of spoken word is hard to tell much of a story, and/or the correspondents aren't that good at it, and they're trying to tell a beginning middle and end to something without the space to do that, and so they are getting these incredibly hokey attempts. They're OVERtelling it. They're trying to end every freaking piece with some brilliant capper line like it's the great american novel--and by the way, not noticing that most great novels don't end with thundering profundity lines--and they're screwing up by pushing the storytelling thing too hard and just producing really shitty ones.

Maybe someone just needs to tell them, "Look. It doesn't need to be clever. It doesn't need to be cute. It doesn't need a bunch of yucks--and by the way, you're not actually a comedian. It doesn't need to be revelatory every time. Just let it be what it is, tell it like it is, don't try to make it intense or dramatic or solemn or A Lesson. Just tell the freaking story naturally. Quit trying to jazz everything up."

I get the sense that they have gotten the message that it's about great storytelling, so they're overtelling every story, the first instinct to really bad writing. Somebody please tell them to stop.

When did 60 Minutes get so heinous?

Wed, 25 Jan 2006 06:48:30 GMT

Just a thought before I go.

Listening to 60 Minutes as I get my apartment ready for my mini convalescence. (Over the top anal on that score. Got a little nursing station for my ex, with ice packs, medication, and the assortment of remotes. And I covered every facet and refrigerator door plus my alarm cock and shouts with big sheets of paper labelled in thick magic marker: "NO WATER!" Terrified I'm going to wake up groggy and forget. Or take a show, so damn thirsty and wondering why I hadn't gotten drink, so I tilt me head back for a warm but refreshing fill-up. Better not happen. Or I'll be OFF schedule!)

God. A report from Bob Simon, who has always been hard for me to stomach, but the segment is puns and cliches and little cutesisms almost end to end. Interesting material--aside from being a total rah-rah for the oil industry, with a bit of the other side at the end--but who can listen past all that hokum? Who the hell wants to?

He's almost as bad as Dan Rather.

The worst thing about the invention of 60 Minutes II seems to have been that they packed it with horrifying correspondents, and presumably producers, and then merged them into the original show once the spinoff died. Yes, Simon already contributed to the old show, but mercifully rarely. Now they've got the awful people on there all the time.

Sad.

Only thing scarier, I checked out an episode of Love Monkey. Aggressively vile. Who will be punished?

Dork of the year?

Wed, 21 Dec 2005 21:08:05 GMT

Here's the surprise: I am not disgusted at Time Magazine's person of the year. I actually kind of like it.

Still disgusted that anyone acts like it matters.

Was Time Magazine ever . . . good?

How did they get in charge of person of the year? Yeah, I know that one, they started it. But why did anyone ever care? At some point, they must have actually been relevant.

So hard to picture now.

Of course they can do any cover they want. Who cares.

Our media. Ugh. Yet another example of our revolting lapdog media. Why on earth do they go along with it? They actually act like it's a big deal, like the person these bozos choose actually is the person of the year.

Can you imagine anyone less qualified to have their finger on any kind of cultural pulse than Time? Kind of comical. Dork Of The Year, sure. But person?

OK, here's a compromise: Time gets to choose Dork Of The Year, someone else gets Person. Sounds fair. Let's see if they'll go for it.

CO Supreme Court rules on Columbine

Wed, 16 Nov 2005 06:41:14 GMT

Hey. Just wrapping up writing for the night, and making a blog-free-weekdays exception to pass along this quick but important Columbine news flash my assistant sent me tonight:

From Wednesday morning's Denver Post:

The Colorado Supreme Court today agreed with The Denver Post that items seized from the homes of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold are criminal justice records, which clears the way for their release if Jefferson County Sheriff Ted Mink determines the release would benefit the public.
The Denver Post is seeking notes written by Wayne Harris about his son Eric and Dylan Klebold; medical records of the teenagers; the audio and videotapes they made; and their writings, including school papers, notations in the Columbine yearbook and the diaries.
Release of the items was strongly opposed by the Harris and Klebold families and by Mink, who must now decide whether to release the records.
If Mink refuses to release some or all the items requested, The Post can seek a judicial review of that refusal, said Steve Zansberg, The Post's lawyer.

Nice! I had faith the court would do the right thing. And unanimously.

I do not have faith that the sheriff will release the material -- at least The Basement Tapes -- but I still believe the lower courts will.

(And in a weird twist, the attorney, Steve Zansberg represented me last winter when the Air Force subpoenaed me and a bunch of other reporters for our notes in a rape court martial. Great guy. And I watched his performance in front of the court on this case. Very impressive.)

What a great magazine

Tue, 18 Oct 2005 04:40:49 GMT

Don't you just love the Times Magazine?

I have subscriptions to about six different magazines and I can't even bring myself to flip through them most months. (A friend picked a copy of Vanity Fair off the coffee table last week and sniffed all the perfume ads. That's the most anyone has gotten out of it in awhile.)

But the Times--as dry as I find the newspaper (with brilliant exceptions here and there), that magazine has some incredible writing week in, week out.

And interesting stories. Yesterday afternoon and this morning, I lolled my way through the wonderful Chasing Ground, and just got started on just got started on Meet the Life Hackers, which may end up being even more relevant to my life.

Rather than try to resummarize, I'll just give you the teasers directly from the (online) magazine:

Chasing Ground:

Whether or not there's a real-estate bubble hardly matters for a large company like Toll Brothers. The mega-developer is hungrily buying up land for its market-tested luxury homes and transforming the landscape of America's haves.

Meet the Life Hackers:

Can anyone find a way to make your constantly beeping and dinging computer leave you alone and let you work? Inside the nascent field of interruption science.

The upside of covering Columbine

Tue, 11 Oct 2005 06:16:06 GMT

I was just directed to this interesting site called The Trenchcoat Chronicles (tag line, "Poking society in the eye with a sharp pointy stick") and oddly enough, the latest post was about Columbine.

One of those whacked out readers writing to him praising the killers. Ugh.

I just had a brief email exchange with the author of the site, and he lamented that "unfortunately guys like that are an everyday occurence at my site." Double ugh.

Luckily they're not around here, for whatever reason. I've had a few, but rarely.

What I do get--as I pointed out to him, and realized I was way overdue in mentioning here--is a whole lot of high school and college kids emailing me asking for help with their reports. Usually about one a week. From the weirdest places in the world.

It's a minor hassle responding to them all, but there's also nothing in this world that makes me quite as happy. (And luckily, I got tired enough of repeating myself a few years back that I created The Columbine Almanac, which I can usually direct them to, and which I use all the time myself, to find the evidence I need as I write.

One girl actually entered a school contest and advanced up to the state level (in Oregon, if I remember), and her family flew her out here to interview me and Frank DeAngelis, though I was unfortunately out of town that week and had to do mine by phone. She asked great questions, though. (Much better than most journos I know. Seriously. Sadly.)

I wince sometimes when I get these requests, but always makes me smile, too.

NOTICE: See you on the weekends

Mon, 26 Sep 2005 17:17:40 GMT

Hey. You might have noticed I'm rarely here during the week these days.

Yes, by design. Trying to keep my focus entirely on my book during the week. Hence the big one-day bursts on Saturdays and Sundays. So look for me then. (Or on Mondays when you get back to trolling the web at the office, while your boss is away. heeheehee.)

OK, better try that bigger:

LOOK FOR ME MOSTLY ON THE WEEKENDS UNTIL THIS BOOK IS DONE!

Occasionally I may stop by in an evening, if I've had a great day and deserve an indulgence, or maybe once in awhile for a quickie. (Like just now. I figured since I was here to let you know this, I could pound out a quick reaction to the Housewives.)

But hopefully you'll see a lot of self-control.

See you Saturday.

A week with the ferners

Sun, 25 Sep 2005 17:36:25 GMT

Have you been watching Charlie Rose all week?

Presumably because of the big UN meeting, he had access to a wealth of foreign leaders, and took full advantage.

At first I thought it was overkill, or at least overload. I heard myself whining Oh not another ferner! around Wednesday. Too much heavy stuff, too many heavy accents to wade through, too much of the unfamiliar.

I use Charlie as radio when I'm cooking, cleaning, puttering, and sometimes I'm in the mood for a little levity. The arts stuff is always appreciated.

And painful as it is to admit, thick foreign accents are not always pleasant to my ears, and it can be wearying to untangle them.

And I didn't, frankly. I kept putting them off, letting them stack up on the Tivo.

So by the time I actually got around to listening to Wednesday's broadcast, I was in a little bit of heaven.

A bit of immersion actually makes the accents go down easier. A lot of it turned out to be initial reluctance.

And lack of the familiar turned into the thrill of the freshness.

Also refreshing to hear a stream of politicians not bullshitting. Prolly cause they weren't playing to their own domestic markets, they were remarkably candid. Of course they still all have agendas--every guest on the show does, from every field--but they're never going to be running for re-election here. About the only hardcore bullshitter of the group was the new Iraqi (president? I've already expunged the memory. Nothing but total unadulterated crap.) Which of all places, is pretty disconcerting to find it.

Most refreshing and enlightening goes to India's finance minister. Really helped open a window for me to a whole new world out there I often forget about in this country. Lots of reflection on both India and China, where more than a third of the planet lives. Amazing how little we think about them.

And I've been to India, I was surrounded by Indians for two years in Kuwait, I had an Indian assistant who I was very close to and and Indian boss for a year, it's not like these people are new to me. But so easy to let them slip away.

'The Supreme Court is not the abortion court'

Wed, 20 Jul 2005 06:57:26 GMT

At 10:23 p.m. this evening, Jeff Greenfield finally uttered the words on my lips all day long, "First of all, at some point, we will remind ourselves The Supreme Court is not the abortion court. There are really significant things . . ."

Thank you!

Yes, obviously, abortion is a major issue in America. And in particular, a key issue for any future supreme court. But please. Our freaking narrow-minded media. Seems like one issue is all they can focus on at one time.

There are a hell of a lot of issues the supreme court will rule on, many of them critically important to us, and most of them completely unrelated to abortion. Could you people please widen the discussion here just a tiny smidge?

Newsmodels. I tell you.

Calling a dufus a dufus

Thu, 14 Jul 2005 01:06:12 GMT

Just watching Matt Tiabbi, author of Spanking the Donkey, interviewd on The Daily Show.

Liked the guy immediately, then he told a little anecdote about his time covering John Kerry's campaign that ended like this: "So I have to give him credit for that, as much of a dufus as he is."

Nice! From that moment on, I was in full swoon.

This from an obvious leftie. The good kind, willing to tell the truth. No BS. The Dems nominated a dufus again. Twice in a row. (What is wrong with you people, by the way?)

Sure, I voted for him, and I'll bet Tiabbi did too, but that doesn't mean we have to pretend the guy had the slightest clue how to relate to (fellow?) human beings.

Ahhhhhh. It's an old story. But he didn't harp on it--as I am; whoops--just rolled off his tongue. Every moment of the interview felt honest.

And when Jon pointed out that journalists come off uglier than the politicians, I knew this guy could see clearly through the crap.

(Please don't tell anybody I often slither through that unspeakable profession ("profession.") Let's just keep that our little secret.)

---

Now then. I'd love to read Tiabbi's book, except for pet peeve #37, gifted writers who also work as reporters but are too lazy to actually write their book and instead just select a bunch of columns for their publisher to slap between two covers.

Come on. I would love to read your book, Matt, but first you have to write a book.

That mini format is lame enough for daily or weekly publications, who the hell wants to read it in a book? The whole point of diving into a book is that you can sink your teeth into something deeper, longer in narrative arc, not just in number of pages. A freaking storyline would be nice. Even a modest attempt.

So maybe I'll check it out at the bookstore, read a couple of the columns, hopefully generate a handful of gleeful smiles. And wait for him to actually write a book.

(Or maybe, just maybe he'll surprise the hell out of me and somehow transcend the form, but hard to see how that's actually possible. Will let you know if I was wrong.)

Meanwhile, looking forward to looking for his byline. He writes for The NY Press, Rolling Stone and The Nation, none of them a regular read for me, but maybe I'll start looking.

'We've secretly replaced the White House press corps . . .

Thu, 14 Jul 2005 00:40:23 GMT

. . . with actual reporters.'

Hahaha.

That was Jon Stewart's response last night, after showing clips of that pack of weanies suddenly attacking WH spokesman Scott McClellan over the Karl Rove fiasco.

It was odd, wasn't it? I read the transcript (link to much of it above), and it just didn't compute. Especially after the same group sat on the story for days, refusing to ask a single question of McClellan.

Perhaps once they smell blood in the water, and see their peers have grown a temporary backbone, they feel it's safe to pretend they have one of their own.

And Jon always knows precisely what to say. What would we do without him?

Anyone find a backbone?

Thu, 30 Jun 2005 20:56:47 GMT

I am stunned and sickened by Time's decision.

Where is their backbone?

This is not just horrible for Time, this is horrible for the entire field. This sends a signal to every potential source out there, that reporters cannot be trusted when they assure you of confidentiality.

As a reporter, I have given my word, and I have kept sources secret for years. And some of them have gotten very nervous. I once came under heavy fire, and the idiotic Jeffco Sheriff publicly accused me of being a liar over Columbine, and tried to undermine my credibility. It really rocked my world, and I could have immediately cleared my name by revealing my source. Imagine how he/she felt about that. Worried, I can assure you. Imagine if I were threatened with jail time? At this point--six years later, he/she trusts that I would still go to jail over it. But then what if the magazine publishing me took it out of my hands and turned the person in anyway?

My notes were recently subpoenead by the Air Force, and they threatened me with six months in federal prison. I didn't even have anything they wanted, but I had talked off-the-record with a few people who might be distressed to have their comments public. It probably wasn't a huge deal for them, but that's not the point. I would have had to go to jail to assure them and every other source out there that I would hold to my word.

Not just my sources, EVERY journo's sources. We, as a field, have to hold a united front, or we lose the integrity ALL the whistleblowers out there place in us.

This is just horrible.

---

As to their flimsy excuse about having to abiding by the court decisions: Ever hear of civil disobedience? If ever there was a time for them to stand up to the courst and say, No, we disagree, and we're willing to go to jail for it.

Fleeing the country to evade the court may be disrespecting it. Standing up and saying, "Fine, court, you do what you will, you mete out your punishment and I'll accept it. But I'm not compromising the free press!" That is not disrespect. That's respect for your own vital insitutution that you bear a sacred duty to.

I feel dirty

Tue, 28 Jun 2005 21:51:47 GMT

I just finished True Story: Murder, Memoir and Mea Culpa.

It gives me the shivers.

And I just realized something as I typed in the title. Maybe I don't hate it anymore. Because the first two words are aggressively ironic, though I'm not sure they were intended that way. (The author opens by imploring us of the opposite.)

So much of it was maddeningly boring, but I have to admit it had a powerful payoff. The climax was unexpected (I won't spoil with any specifics), and more revolting than I could have imagined.

Throughout, though, I had a lot of intense distrust of and occasionally disgust for the author--interspersed with intense empathy. But the empathy only made me quiver, because this is the story of a master liar and manipulator, told by an admitted liar and manipulator, and the juxtaposition just made me horribly wary of people like him. What on earth was he thinking?

Maybe I'll feel better about him some day. He's probably a really nice guy, and I really want to believe him and like him--and totally expected to--but after watching how effortlessly and adroitly this murderer could fool everyone around him . . . I'm just not ready to.

Most of all, I just feel sickened by the lying. When you can't believe a person, can't trust them, what do you have? Everything that matters between two people--or between individuals and large groups or institutions like our schools or churches or governments--is based on what we know and believe to be true about them. On truth we take for granted. It's hard enough to know who to get close to, who to spend our time with and develop our feelings for when the truth is laid bare in front of us. When it's not, when a person is full of lies and deceit and deception, when that person shatters our trust in other people . . . That's just the most heinous crime I think they can commit to us. Ugh. Nothing ever ever ever makes me more unsettled than people who shake my ability to trust.

Crying While Eating

Fri, 24 Jun 2005 21:12:33 GMT

There is an absolutely wonderful piece up on Slate, called Crying, While Eating. A first-person account from the founder of the site by that name, who's primarily a writer for a living, and it shows. The setup:

I had signed up for a "contagious media" contest. The rules: Make a (nonpornographic) Web site. Promote it any way you want, short of paid advertisements. The page with the most visitors after three weeks wins.

He and his partner came up with CryingWhileEating.com, which is exactly what it claims to be: a bunch of short video clips of people crying over oddball or mundane things, while eating.

And then:

Crying, While Eating launched on a Thursday night with 12 videos. Christy, who was drinking a vanilla shake, cried because she was "good at lots of things, but not great at anything." Tashi lamented the fact that "sex will never be that good again" while munching on Milano cookies. I ate buckwheat noodles with rooster sauce and blubbered about having "ruined Passover."

We waited until the next morning to send a batch of self-promotional e-mails. By the time we got out of bed, the blog Waxy had spotted our page on the contest Web site. From there, we got picked up by BoingBoing and Metafilter. I e-mailed the URL to a former co-worker in San Francisco that afternoon. He said he'd already gotten it from another friend in California, who had gotten the link from a guy in Austin, Texas. When I checked the stats that night, we had almost 50,000 visitors.

By May, they had 7.5 million hits.

It's a fascinating story about how and why web ideas travel, how certain quirky little sites become overnight phenoms.

I learned a lot. And laughed my ass off the whole way. I think you'll like it.

The sex sites take on Bush

Fri, 24 Jun 2005 16:46:29 GMT

Well. Sex and . . . romance, perhaps.

So I logged onto gay.com yesterday morning--and here's the disclaimer: gay.com includes a lot more than just a place to meet guys for "dates," but that seems to be its main role in life, or at least among my demo.

So I log on and nearly all the pictures are replaced with one of those big red roadsign signals for NO!--a red circle with a diagonal slash through it--followed by the text: "ADULT PHOTOS TEMPORARILY UNAVAILABLE DUE TO THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION."

Hmmmmmm.

They have a lengthy manifesto here, but I'll provide the opening for all of you too lazy to click:

CENSORED! BY US GOVERNMENT!
Changes to our photo policy mandated by the Bush Administration
Always on the lookout for hot guys and ways to keep people from having fun, the US Dept. of Justice is taking a break from prosecuting terrorists to do something they think is more important: restricting your right to view and share photos online.

All member photos identified as adult on our site are temporarily unavailable for public view, due to the sudden, and unconstitutional, decision by the US Dept. of Justice to place new restrictions on all web sites around the world that do business in the US (I guess nobody ever told them the internet is borderless). Gay.com thinks your adult photos should be sexy, secure, and legally protected, so we've joined with other companies to seek an injunction against this ruling. We're doing everything possible to minimize its impact on you.

They say just adult photos, but at first it was nearly all photos. They gradually added more and more back throughout the day--but just the "clean" ones.

Update:

Well, the battle seems to be over. Hard to tell whether they came to a sudden agreement, or it was all a publicity stunt. (A well-intentioned and very necessary stunt perhaps, but . . .)

Here's the new message:

Legal victory over government censorship!
Gay.com is back to normal — hot, fun and uncensored!

We bent over backwards to defend your right to view and share photos of guys bending over. Adult photos and Video Chat on our site are once again available for public viewing by consenting adults — thanks to an agreement that stops the U.S. Dept. of Justice from expanding restrictions on online content. The current agreement only protects plaintiffs and sites that belong to the Free Speech Coalition, of which Gay.com is a member.
There are many other web sites and companies that are NOT PROTECTED under this agreement.
We've won this battle, but the war's not over. We have joined with other companies to continue the legal fight and overturn the restrictions altogether. Since the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals has already found these restrictions (18 U.S.C. §2257, for all you legal queens) to be unconstitutional, we're confident that freedom and hot gay sex will ultimately prevail over the forces of censorship and oppression. After all, the guys at the Dept. of Justice need dates, too.
To find out what you can do to help, see below.

For my readers, you'll have to follow the link for the rest.

And I have a feeling Radar is going to have something about it soon. Check with them later today.

The instead-ed page

Fri, 17 Jun 2005 05:38:37 GMT

Timothy Noah has a great, overdue idea in Slate, today.

Virtually every paper in America added an "op-ed" page over the past 30 years, short for "opposite the editorial page." Noah suggests it should have replaced the editorial page. No one reads those stupid things, and for good reason:

. . . editorials typically lack sufficient length to marshal evidence and lay out a satisfactory argument. Instead, they tend toward either timidity, at one extreme, or posturing, at the other. Almost every editorial I've ever read in my life has fallen into one of two categories: boring or irresponsible.

So just let the stupid things go, and run special editorials a few times a year when they're really needed, like recommendations for school board no one really wants to research themselves.

The journalist, my hero and the murderer

Wed, 15 Jun 2005 06:03:33 GMT

I had to stop reading the cover story Salon just posted after the first page.

Nothing lacking in the material, or Andrew O'Hehir's treatment of it, quite the reverse.

It's past 11, so the bookstores here are closed, but first thing in the morning, I'm hopping on my bike to snag a copy of Michael Finkel's book True Story.

The subhead of the Salon story capsulizes it expertly:

A disgraced New York Times reporter learns his identity has been stolen by an all-American hunk who killed his wife and three children. The result is the most unlikely "True Story" you'll ever read.

And then there's the starred Pub Weekly review:

In 2001, Finkel fabricated portions of an article he wrote for the New York Times Magazine. Caught and fired, he retreated to his Montana home, only to learn that a recently arrested suspected mass murderer had adopted his identity while on the run in Mexico. In this astute and hypnotically absorbing memoir, Finkel recounts his subsequent relationship with the accused, Christian Longo, and recreates not only Longo's crimes and coverups but also his own. In doing so, he offers a startling meditation on truth and deceit and the ease with which we can slip from one to the other. The narrative consists of three expertly interwoven strands. One details the decision by Finkel, under severe pressure, to lie within the Times article—ironic since the piece aimed to debunk falsehoods about rampant slavery in Africa's chocolate trade—and explores the personal consequences (loss of credibility, ensuing despair) of that decision. The second, longer strand traces Longo's life, marked by incessant lying and petty cheating, and the events leading up to the slayings of his wife and children. The third narrative strand covers Finkel's increasingly involved ties to Longo, as the two share confidences (and also lies of omission and commission) via meetings, phone calls and hundreds of pages of letters, leading up to Longo's trial and a final flurry of deceit by which Longo attempts to offload his guilt. Many will compare this mea culpa to those of Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass, but where those disgraced journalists led readers into halls of mirrors, Finkel's creation is all windows. There are, notably, no excuses offered, only explanations, and there's no fuzzy boundary between truth and deceit: a lie is a lie. Because of Finkel's past transgression, it's understandable that some will question if all that's here is true; only Finkel can know for sure, but there's a burning sincerity (and beautifully modulated writing) on every page, sufficient to convince most that this brilliant blend of true-crime and memoir does live up to its bald title.

The key for me was "a burning sincerity (and beautifully modulated writing) on every page."

Which brings me to my strange connection to this man.

I've never met him or spoken to him. But when the scandal broke, I was stunned. He had just recently been christened my hero. Writing hero.

I will confess here that a glorious afternoon in Novemeber 2001 was the day I discovered The New York Times Magazine was not the piece of crap I had always assumed it must be. Here were the two key facts previously at my disposal:

1) Most of the so-called magazines inserted in Sunday newspapers are something of a joke, or at least they were when I was getting started in journalism, and I'd never gone back to see if any of that had changed.

2) As great as the reporting can be in the Times, the writing tends toward the flat, dry and artless.

So I assumed the magazine was even worse.

But then I had a story to sell and my agent assured me the Times magazine under Adam Moss ranked near the top of the heap, so I pitched it to them and they weren't quite ready to bite, but interested. So I went to the Denver library, piled up a stack of recent issues and began the dreadful task of wading through some of the stories.

My dread ended almost immediately. The writing was crisp, lively and engaging. Nearly every story. But one leapt out so far above the others, I photocopied it, tucked it into my bag and cleared a special place for it on my writing desk. From the opening line, I was transported. Every time I felt lost or drained of inspiration, I flipped through it and smiled. And remembered how great it felt to inhale wondrous writing. And every time, I found my voice again, because he reminded me what I was looking for.

He hadn't exactly knocked Nabokov off my pedestal, but he was alive and young, and traveling the world writing exactly the sort of stories I wanted to cover exactly the way I would like to be writing them, for a publication I would love to see them appear in.

The piece was sitting just a few inches from my fingertips as I sat at the computer five months later, April 14, 2002, and typed in nytimes.com to check out Frank Rich's column. The editor's note caught my eye first. The story ''Is Youssouf Malé a Slave?'' had been something of a fraud--a composite character presented as an individual. And Michael Finkel, my new hero, had been fired.

I was mad at him for awhile. For all the obvious reasons, and for depriving me of my hero and of fresh examples to inspire me. Of a career to inspire me, to aspire to. For doing it to himself. He might have become one of the great writers of our day. How could he sabotage himself like that? And why?

I talked to several journo friends about it, and they were equally baffled. I think one of them interviewed him and wrote about it, and remained baffled, though now I can't remember who.

But I was also afraid. That places like the Times magazine would be warier of trusting unproven writers like me. That the public would trust us even less than they did now. And just this odd sense of fear, that somehow I could be someday drawn into the same temptation. When a role model reveals corruption, what does that say about the person who chose him? Just bad luck, probably, but the scary little fears that I was somehow tainted or infected by the association stuck with me more than a year.

I still think about him from time to time. And that no matter what he did or why he did it, he was still an amazing writer. I figured we hadn't heard the last of him. He would probably have to give up journalism, but that would hopefully just force him into a novel, and we might soon be wading through the next Sheltering Sky.

So now this. I actually heard about the story on a plane nearly two weeks ago, but too busy to follow up till I got back to Denver this week. I could have sworn it was written up in the Vanity Fair with Angelina Jolie on the cover, but couldn't find it in there the past two days.

Kinda glad now. Read just enough tonight to know it was time to stop reading and get the book. I'll let you know how it turns out.

Update:

Got the book as planned, engrossed from the first page. He's intercutting two stories at first, and each time he cuts away from one I can hardly bear it. That's good. Very good.

Deep Throat, finally

Tue, 31 May 2005 18:47:24 GMT

Apparently it was the FBI guy. (W. Mark Felt, the #2 guy at the FBI then. Now 91.) No confirmation yet, though.

Interesting. Woodward and Berstein were heros of mine in high school, and I was the mystery drove me crazy for years.

Ahhhhh, but then I read a few more Woodward books and learned the dangers of taking yourself of not understanding your limits. And slowly, ever so slowly developed a little patience. Been waiting 30 years for this secret, though.

Can't wait to hear the rest of the story. Like did Deep Throat really move the flower pot around on his apartment balcony as a signal, or did they do something similar, but fabricate that detail to deflect suspicion from him? It will be a very interesting discussion if details were changed. Interesting and annoying. Journos can be such nitwits.

Update:

Slate has posted an archive of their bouts of speculation on the identity. A lot of speculation. Very interesting to catch a glimpse of how it played out. And at least one of the pieces cites the "definitive" Deep Throat piece as an Atlantic story way back in 1992 where James Mann correctly deduced it had to be an FBI guy.

Slate's Timothy Noah repeatedly cited Felt as the most probable source. And guess who else got it right? Richard Nixon. That according to this 1999 Slate piece highlighting Mann's theory.

But perhaps the most interesting aspect of the 30-year secret is that Berstein's kid blurted it out at summer camp in 1991. The indiscretion held for eleven years, until the kid, then 19, told The Hartford Courant, and the story was picked up by the AP.

The Bersteins' explanation has always been that their boy got the story from his mother, Nora Ephron, who was merely guessing. (Good account of that who episode here. A few more eyebrows were raised when Bob Woodward made a trip to see Felt shortly afterward. Some speculated that he was there to see if it was time to give up the secret. Looks like they were right.)

Second Update:

You can read the Vanity Fair piece here.

'A poised, creamy insincerity'

Tue, 26 Apr 2005 19:53:09 GMT

Hehehe.

OK, guess who that line is referring to--in the Times of all places; yes, occasionally you can find real wit, even there, even outside Frank Rich and the Sunday Arts page.

Diane Sawyer. Nailed her.

It's a really interesting piece about the Today Show's gradual ratings decline, and the network's misread of the same.

I was particularly interested because believe it or not, I'm a big fan of Katie Couric. And Diane Sawyer gives me the shivers, so I was all the more puzzled by the shift.

Some good insights, and author Alessandra Stanley goes easy on my girl Katie, but it was the penultimate paragraph that made the whole read worthwhile:

NBC executives seem to think that viewers have grown bored with "Today" and want more gimmicks and pizazz. But if that were true, they wouldn't be switching to ABC. Ms. Sawyer's appeal on "Good Morning America" is not that she is new and exciting, but that she is a consistently smooth, even restful, presence. Her golden good looks never change, and she handles interviews and chatter with her genial co-host Charles Gibson with a poised, creamy insincerity that never varies or falters.

A little unfinished business on Bowling and Columbine

Sun, 17 Apr 2005 03:52:38 GMT

So I've been getting a lot of emails since Red Lake happened. About Columbine, naturally. Lots and lots of people out there still hungry for information, so it seems like a good moment to finally put one to rest:

Bowling for Columbine. Never happened.

The whole disarming image of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold blissfully bowling away five hours before the massacre as if nothing was about to happen? Fascinating piece of fiction. Yet another in an endless stream of Columbine myths.

Let me begin by confessing. I did my share in helping create that myth, publishing this story on Salon the night after the massacre.

Sorry.

You can't imagine how sorry.

It's not like I made it up, of course. That's what the kids in Clement Park told us that morning. One of so very many mistaken ideas they unintentionally fed to us. I had not yet learned how bad eyewitness testimony is in general, or how much worse it gets under duress. I had no idea Columbine witnesses would still be swearing six years later that they saw a third shooter, just to name one preposterous example, despite the surveillance videos, 911 audiotapes, the killers' journals and videos and the hundreds of other witnesses and overwhelming evidence of every imaginable stripe.

Probably only took one faulty memory in one kid--or even a rumor of a bowling mate's memory--to spread the bowling story up and down the park. It was a great story. The perfect little telling detail that captured the obscene coldness of the killers. The odd incongruity that led Moore to employ it as his title was not lost on the kids in the park that first morning after. I had no idea how fast the witnesses had been tainted in this tragedy.

It was one of many early mistakes I made, though I'm far less queasy about that imaginary factoid than the title of the piece that contained it: "Outsiders, even among the outsiders." The whole outcast thing, God, how I wish we could take that one back.

But the bowling. Much simpler. And just as enduring. With all those sites out there slamming Michael Moore for all the alleged inaccuracies on that movie, you'd think they would start with the howler than he got the title wrong. Conveniently emblematic for his critics, don't you think?

Various Columbine detectives had told me various times that they knew the bowling was another minor mistake, but years after the fact when the movie came out, they could never recall exactly where to find the evidence. But as I've poured through police records in the library the last several months working on my book, I happened to stumble across it.

And you can call it up on your PC right now to see with your own eyes.

Click here, for the Boulder Daily Camera's scans of the entire 11,000 pages of evidence released in one big dump several years back. Scroll down to page 20 of that pdf (page 10120 of the entire release) for the beginning of the "bowling" section. It runs to page 34.

Investigator Glenn Moore (yes, same last name, oddly, though I'm sure no relation) of the Golden Police Department, issued a report on his interviews with Kristine Macauley, the teacher of the bowling class in question. At first she was unsure about seeing the two boys, and could not get to her records, which were still locked in the school/crime-scene. Eventually, the actual paper score sheets were faxed over by the bowling alley, and confirmed what nearly all the witnesses had told police: Dylan and Eric were not there that day.

When a kid was missing from the class, average scores were entered for them and circled, which is how the teacher kept attendance. Zip down to page 31 of that pdf to see the circles with your own eyes (top left corner of the page). We're just going to have to take the cops' word for it that Eric averaged only 108 and Dylan 115.

Glenn Moore summarizes his final conclusion on page 33: "The score sheet, as well as the teacher, indicated HARRIS, KLEBOLD AND MORRIS were absent on April 20, 1999."

And just for good measure, we've got Dylan's own hand-written schedule for the morning of the attack. You can see a clean scan of his daytimer scrawl here (scroll down about 3/4 of the way), but the Jeffco cops were nice enough to transcribe it for us:

5:00 Get-up

6:00 meet at KS

7:00 go to Reb’s house

7:15 he leaves to fill propane

I leave to fill gas

8:30 Meet back at his house

9:00 made d. bag set up car

9:30 practice gearups

Chill

10:30 set up 4 things

11: go to school

11:10 set up duffel bags

11:12 wait near cars, gear up

11:16 HAHAHA

Note the lack of bowling in that schedule.

(FYI: KS is King Soopers, one of the big supermarket chains in the region. Reb is Eric. The duffel bags held the two big propane bombs that were intended as the heart of the attack, and would have killed over 600 people instantly if the killers had figured out how to wire them properly.)

Of course they might have deviated from the schedule, but they had the final details worked out pretty cold, much of it down to the minute in another schedule. (Until it all went wrong when the bombs failed--the goofballs apparently had no Plan B. Thank God.)

A bowling deviation would have blown a huge hole in that schedule. The class ran from 6-7:15, and Bellevue Lanes is probably a good half hour drive from Dylan's house. That's more than two hours, total. Doubtful.

Put that together with the teacher's testimony once she had her attendance records, the testimony of nearly all the other witnesses, and the physical evidence documenting their absence . . . Just how much evidence does Michael Moore--or anyone else--require?

---

After setting all that down, I was a little curious as to how he defended the title. I had read his responses a few times--most notably in an ugly exchange with Roger Ebert--but wanted to freshen my memory.

From his website:

Finally, I've even been asked about whether the two killers were at bowling class on the morning of the shootings. Well, that's what their teacher told the investigators, and that's what was corroborated by several eyewitness reports of students to the police, the FBI, and the District Attorney's office. I'll tell you who wasn't there -- me! That's why in the film I pose it as a question:

"So did Dylan and Eric show up that morning and bowl two games before moving on to shoot up the school? And did they just chuck the balls down the lane? Did this mean something?"

Wow. He really can stand there with a straight face--presumably--and argue that he can go to the extreme length of actually using the supposed incident in the title of his film, and not leave the public with the distinct impression that it actually happened. No, he's just raising it as a question.

Huh. I don't recall the question mark in the title of the film.

But it gets really revolting from there. He actually cites the same police report I do on his website. Just selectively. He scanned in just the first page, where the teacher is not sure, and wants to check her records, and draws in a big arrow to the place where she says she thought she recalled seeing them the killers in the parking lot. Of course he omits the part a few pages later where it's finally settled.

Wow. That's just kind of despicable. If he got to the police report that clears the whole thing up, he obviously knows he got it wrong. It happens. Admit it. But to pull one or two lines out of context and try to scam the public into thinking that's the full story? Shameless.

And his bit about the DA's office? I have no idea where he got that one. The DA wasn't handling the investigation, mind you, and I've talk to most of the top people at the investigative agencies that were, and every one of them told me the story was ridiculous. Hard to believe he doesn't know that as well.

---

{Note to readers perplexed by how I can be so freaking obsessive about a subject six years old: First off, if I'm so obsessive, what are you still reading it for? Second, I'm writing a book on it. I need to get obsessive. And I have a lot of readers who are, too. We come here to obsess about it together. Feel free to skip past it and read more about Survivor.}

Metaphor abuse

Wed, 06 Apr 2005 19:41:14 GMT

Watching Charlie Rose over lunch.

Just put my finger on what chafes me so badly about Thomas Friedman. (OK, one of many gross things he does, but a biggie.)

The metaphors. Tom, enough! One metaphor to explain another. Then hammers the same one over and over: "It's like pouring cement down your oil well." And always delivered with his patented smugness.

Particularly irksome from him, because they're such a manifestation of the characteristic I knew bugged the crap out of me, his incredibly pedantic condescension.

Putting everything in terms the little people can understand.

And completely missing the mark in the process. Concrete in my oil well? Lexus and an olive tree? These are touchstones in my daily life I can relate to?

Sure, I can run through the mental process of envisioning that concrete down the oil well, but I have to run through the mental process. And all I get is a mental response, the exact same effect he produced with the explanation pre-metaphor.

I got it Tom, when you explained how China attacking Taiwan could lead to companies like Dell pulling production out of The People's Republic. A good metaphor could have transformed that purely rational conclusion into an emotional response. It could have made it resonate by mapping it onto a profound experience I had already had, transferred the gravity and power of that experience onto the principle he was attempting to illustrate.

Instead, I was left cold with an oil/cement scenario further removed from my experience than the example he was trying to breath life into.

Huh. That's it. I am pretty familiar with wars already. Lived through several. Studied hundreds more. Felt the shudder when the bombing starts, vividly aware the world was about to change, mystified about how. Lived through the consequences.

The original scenario he assumed I couldn't quite comprehend was pretty real. It's the metaphor he picked to explain it that baffles me. (Carefully selected and repeated and repeated; you can bet it's in the book as many times as he repeated it on the show.) Is that something they actually do when it's time to close up a well forever, or was it supposed to serves as an example of a crazy thing one would never do?

The idea that this would resonate with my personal experience . . . Is ludicrous enough to convince me this poor sap has no idea that that's what metaphors are for.

Don't get me wrong. The guy seems to have a great mind for understanding how certain foreign entanglements work. (At least he has when I can bear to read or listen to him.) If only he could figure out how to communicate them.

Or quit trying so hard?

. . . as read by children

Fri, 14 Jan 2005 04:27:01 GMT

Have you seen the occasional segment on The Daily Show, of Great Moments in Punditry (something like that), as read by children?

Take a transcript of two or three talking idiots making asses of themselves on one of those shouter shows like Hardball (or this week, Meet The Press--nearly as insipid), and have little kids read it, each taking a different part.

There is no way I can express what it's like to see and hear it, but it is one of the most brilliant things you'll ever witness.

I think maybe it's because you realize as you're listening to it, that no eight-year-old would ever act that immature. Seriously. It sounds so preposterous coming out of their mouths. They haven't learned how to be such jackasses yet.

Puts it all into perspective.

Now then. When are we coming up with a new word for journalist, which we can start applying to actual journalists? Who's working on that?

God, the magazine

Sat, 08 Jan 2005 21:56:29 GMT

Heeheehee. Sounds kind of funny when you put it that way, but it actually looks to be a really interesting publication.

How come nobody thought of this before? What a great name for a magazine.

It's the brainschild of my friend Wendy Zoba, who I met covering Columbine--initially as adversaries, but she turned out to be such a wonderful person, how could we avoid becoming friends? She was one of my first Evangelical Christian friends, and I do believe I was her first gay friend, although perhaps I should check on that.

I stopped being her gay friend and she stopped being my evangelical friend a long time ago, though. Now we're just friends. She brightens me up when I hear her voice. She cares about what happens to me. I care about her. I appreciate her wisdom, and her concern, and I admire all the painful struggles she has continued to endure.

We come from different worlds in some ways, and you would think it might be hard to see past that, but it's really effortless. She's a wonderful human being, who is also thoughtful, passionate and driven. She believes she landed here on earth with a purpose, and has spent her life running around the planet trying to find it, but it has never come easy, and she's still searching and probably will be for life.

Just like me. Turns out most of the fundamentals of who we are and how we strive to spend our lives matches up very closely. (Including our attraction to men. Or if you want to look at it the other way, I'm drawn to my same sex, she's drawn to her opposite--big deal.)

When she first told me she wanted to create something called God Magazine, I thought it was a wonderful idea--for her and for the world she would be bringing it to. I assumed it would be strictly a Christian Magazine--she is best known as a senior editor for Christianity Today Magazine, as well as author of many books--but was pleased to see she had a wider vision than that.

The goal she has in mind is incredibly ambitious: The quest to know God (better). Jew, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Zoroastrian, unaffiliated . . . anybody out there searching for a better understanding of the being that created them. Rather than fight amongst ourselves over what to call him or even the particulars of our his messages, this magazine is aimed at anyone out there just ready to make a go of it.

(If you're interested in a particular message, there are already plenty of Christian, Muslim, and yes, even Zoroastrian magazines out there today. When I worked in Kuwait, my Zoroastrian boss subscribed to a Parsi Monthly or something like that.) God Magazine hopes to engage anyone interested in why we're here, what we're up to, what we're supposed to be doing with this strange little planet.

Huh. Sounds a lot like my goal. Me, I drove myself nuts trying to get to the bottom of Him, and I finally figured out that's not the route He put me here to travel. Looks more like I'm down here to explore us: human beings seem to be my assigned task, but all roads circle back to the same place eventually, don't they?

Wendy and I are pretty much after the same mystery in a different way. She's taking it head-on, and I really admire her for that. The purpose of the magazine is to explore anyone who is out there searching. However they're searching. Whether or not they know what they're searching for.

That makes me smile. So many people I know, myself included, were chased away from God by too many people trying to hit us over the head with Him. And with some really warped conceptions of what the guy is all about.

It scares some people to even admit you believe in God. That's a problem.

Not a problem with Him, more a problem with the people who have represented themselves as speaking for him. He's had some really ghastly marketing done in his name. Personally, I had to let go of the Catholic Church completely for at least a decade before I could even think of re-establishing a relationship with the guy. (I think of him as a guy. It helps to picture something specific.)

I'm drifting, I know. This is kind of hard for me to write about. Kind of personal. Let me tell you a few things about Wendy, though. Why I think this will be such a wonderful magazine. She asked me a couple years ago if I believed in God, and I said yes, most of the time. 80/20, probably. Up from 60/40 just a few years before. But I had a lot of doubts. Some days I didn't believe at all. Didn't really know how to. Sometimes it was just there. I was really embarassed to admit that. Had a hard time admitting that to anyone, especially a true believer.

"Of course you do," she said. "Everybody has doubts." Really? "Of course." Oh. Duh.

The doubts pretty much drifted away after that. Slowly. But steadily. Surprisingly. One of those many moments in life somebody slapped me into remembering that I was not expected to be perfect.

And liberated into doing better in the process. The doubts were driving me nuts. Making it tough to face him. How do you look a guy in the eye when you know he knows you're not convinced he's even out there? Talking to someone like Wendy can help a great deal. When she reassures you he's expecting a few imperfections. He'll forgive you. Just keep talking.

Good advice. For dealing with anybody you're having a little trouble with. Just keep talking. You'll figure it out.

So, I just amble along. I have my little chats, though I still worry occassionally that I'm doing that the wrong way too, but I try just not to focus on my improper technique.

I'm just paraphrasing her quotes up there from memory, by the way, and I'm going to butcher this one even worse, but the most amazing stream of words just rolled off her tongue one day recently, about all of us broken down people just searching for a way to make some sense of this wide world.

Refreshing. I don't need no God Magazine telling me they've got it all figured out and here's how I should be living my life. Man, I've been working my butt off to get it right already. You think you've got it figured out? Look at your miserable life. Now a magazine from people ready to admit they're as messed up as the rest of us, just doing their best to make sense of things and engaging us in the conversation along with them? Interesting. I can embrace that.

It made me all the happier when she asked me to contribute, when she said how badly she wanted to include voices from traditionally liberal or lefty publications or outlets. God is not a Republican. Or a Democrat. This country has gotten ourselves into one big mess by starting to concieve ourselves that way.

Most of the people I know are liberal, and the vast majority of them believe in God. All we've done with all this polarizing is shut them out of the conversation. And make them feel ostracized, driven them away. Driven me away, for much of my life.

I don't know how this magazine will turn out. First issue is due out this month. But I'm very excited about the possibilities.

Excited enough that I agreed to be included on the masthead, and I've got an adapted version of my New York Times piece on the Barbie collectors in the first issue. (And in an odd stroke of timing, I finally got around to composing this moster of a message on the week that my piece is featured on the front page of the website: GodMagazine.net)

Check it out. Sign up. Consider being a benefactor. This is going to be one amazing magazine, one day. Be there from the start.