If you are a reader of Roger Ebert’s Journal then you won’t learn a lot from this Esquire profile, but it’s still a good read. Sad, in parts, but also uplifting. I’d like to find online copies of the Esquire profiles (Paul Newman, Groucho Marx, Hugh Hefner’s daughter) from the 60s mentioned here.

I’d noticed that some of the sentences in the Jay-Z article I linked earlier were wack, but you have to see them all collected by Slate to see how crazy the article is. Also, the article is written by Lisa Taddeo who wrote the crazy made up story of Heath Ledger’s last day. I missed that.
See also, Zach Barron.

Esquire says Jay-Z’s realy talent lies in his ability to authentically relate to whomever needs relating to.

This coexisting as two things at once — luxury yet cheap, exclusive yet accessible, edgy yet mainstream — is Jay-Z in a nutshell: the gangster from the hood and the CEO in the boardroom. It is how Jay-Z has transformed himself from just another rapper with a gat to a celebrity-mogul-angel who hums advice into the loving ears of sitting governors and presidents…A big part of being authentic is being open and large enough to keep your tailbone at the dinner table and your eyes on the television in the next room, unapologetic and charming in your duality. ‘Yes, I’m watching the game, but God I love your lamb!’

Via Esquire, a letter Jackie Kennedy wrote to LBJ 3 days after the Kennedy assassination. If you needed an example of the lost art of letter writing, this would be it. Jackie O is charming and devastated. This isn’t your 3 sentence thank you note for a wedding gift.

Via this Esquire weekly links collection from a couple weeks ago, these two remarkable finds:

shesjack is 16.

And I don’t think Lyric is much older.

Youth today, huh?

Chuck Klosterman has a new book coming out today, Eating the Dinosaur. Here are a couple interviews, from the Wall St Journal and the Washington Post. As a bonus, here’s a review he did about a baseball book.

Mad Men Season 3 starts on Sunday and I am…excited. Here’s a round up of some of what’s been said about the show in the last couple weeks.

-Like cocktails? Here’s a Mad Men Cocktail Guide.

-Lots here from Vanity Fair, including a word on their obsession with set design:

A scene-setting anecdote everyone in the Mad Men orbit tells is how Weiner came onto the set one day and focused on some pieces of fruit he said were too large and shiny and perfectly formed; produce in the early 60s—period produce—wasn’t pumped up. Get smaller, dumpier fruit, he ordered. (Depending on who was telling me the story, from cast members to network executives, the offending produce morphed from apples to oranges to bananas, but Amy Wells, the set decorator, said definitively: it was apples.)

-HuffPo’s take.

-The New Yorker on advertising Mad Men:

The theme of season three is change. “We wanted our key art to be more high-concept,” Schupack explained, unveiling the new poster, which hits this week: Draper is sitting in his office, looking nonchalant, as water rises up to his knees.

-From Esquire, Christina Hendricks and some other female players.

-Story about the real life person Don Draper is based on.

In the 1960s, Draper Daniels was something of a legendary character in American advertising. As the creative head of Leo Burnett in Chicago in the 1950s, he had fathered the Marlboro Man campaign, among others, and become known as one of the top idea men in the business. He was also a bit of a maverick.

-Playboy is getting Madmenized for the next couple weeks.

-Interview and podcast with Jon Hamm.

-Talking with the Mad Men costume designer:

Bryant mixes original creations with vintage pieces for the principal cast’s wardrobe, which is designed from scratch, starting with sketches. Her use of kaleidoscope colors, sparkling jewelry, brilliant prints and florals can be deliciously distracting.

-New York Magazine got into the act with a profile of Christina Hendricks

Which is kind of the point of Mad Men. Bad is sexy. And then just very, very bad. The show lures you in with a glittering surface, but just below is a hothouse of homophobia, racism, anti-Semitism, sexism, and a more general and crushing sense of isolation.

and Pete Campbell whom everyone hates except Matt Weiner apparently:

“I went to an all-boys school, and Pete’s like the kids I went to school with. He could have been Holden Caulfield’s roommate, who borrowed his coat and didn’t bring it back.”

and a handy Guide to the First Two Seasons.

-Finally here’s the Wall St Journal on the story, which seems to be getting a lot of play this year, of the writing staff that is mostly female:

The story centers on Don Draper and his shadowy past, but a key part of the series, the writers say, is its complicated female characters. “It’s less skewed than it appears,” says consulting producer Maria Jacquemetton.

I had no idea Larry David was in the new Woody Allen movie. That just seems so weird. I wonder if Woody didn’t feel like acting this time around so he had Larry stand in? Are there any other performers like this that seem almost exactly the same? To a certain extent Al Pacino and Andy Garcia are like this. Except Garcia hasn’t done anything notable in years and Pacino’s have only been notable for their awfulness.
Whatever Works comes out June 19

This short story from David Foster Wallace is perfect for those of you who’d like to read more of DFW’s work, but never will because it’s too long. It clocks in at just around 1100 words, half of which seem to be, but aren’t, in the last sentence.

And here’s a bonus Stephen King story called Rest Stop that I haven’t gotten to yet.

What Went Wrong is a new short story by Tim O’Brien, the sequel to July ‘69, and appears in his new book, July, July.