In the latest issue of Fast Company, there’s a profile of Alex Bogusky, the advertising genius behind some of your favorite viral campaigns of the last campaign. Bogusky, not surprisingly, didn’t like the the profile and annotated the article on his Posterous. This is the one of the better uses of the internet, publicly responding to exactly what you don’t like in an article. On the other hand, I can’t tell if the original article or the response makes me want to throw up more. The profile makes Bogusky come off as something of a douche, and the annotations makes him come off as a defensive douche. Maybe he’s nice in person.

James Wolcott profiles Alec Baldwin. It’s a good read, but nothing new, though I’m interested because Baldwin’s career is so interesting. He’s absolutely killing TV right now on 30 Rock, after killing Saturday Night Live all those years. He’s been great in a couple good movies (as Wolcott notes), but doesn’t have a big role in an important movie. How will we think about him in 20 years?

Oh, by the way, he’s talking about retiring after 30 Rock…

So perhaps the smoke signals he’s sending up about retiring aren’t a bluff. But I can’t help but think that if he gets the chance to work with Meryl Streep again he won’t say no. That would be like turning down dessert, and he’s a cat who can’t resist cream.

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.

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.

Looking forward to listening to this interview with Kottke about curating the web and this one of Mighty Mighty Bosstones singer Dicky Barrett on Adam Carolla’s podcast. For what it’s worth, Dicky Barrett remains the only entertainer to whom I have sent fan mail, and he wrote back, too. This happened about 18 or 19 years ago.

Today’s Sunday Globe Magazine has a 5,000 word profile of Jerry ‘RemDawg’ Remy. Interesting to read that his bubbly, fun loving on-air persona is so far from how he is when not doing game analysis. In the off-season, he stays out of the public eye completely “preferring to sit alone in his den, in front of his 70-inch flat screen, and smoke his Marlboro Reds”.

There are some other tidibits including Remy quit smoking this year, his side business makes about a million dollars a year, and he hates giving speeches. Remy was soundly criticized for promoting The Remy Report a couple years ago, but toned it down drastically last year.

This profile was definitely not written for a sports fan and features many apparent contradictions, but it will give you a quick sketch of the man.

(Via Twitter)

I read Elizabeth Kolbert’s profile of Van Jones in the New Yorker a couple months ago and was struck by what he’s doing tying the environment to the war on poverty. A couple weeks ago, the Obama administration tapped him to be the ‘green’ jobs adviser.

The profile of Jones is interesting on a couple points, Jones changed his name from Anthony to Van to create a new persona, his ability to speak to different audiences (“That was my street rap, you get to hear my élite rap later on”), and his single-minded approach to recognizing his goal.

I’m not looking for the points of difference. I’m looking for the points of commonality. I’ve trained my mind so that people can say twenty-seven things that might be objectionable, but as soon as they say one, that twenty-eighth thing, that’s in the right direction, that’s where I’m going to go in the conversation. I think that’s really important in a country as diverse as ours, to listen. So this guy, he says, I don’t want this, I don’t want that. But he says, I want everybody to be included. Well, that’s all I need. Dayenu.

The aspect I found most fascinating about Jones is how everything he says sounds like a sound bite (in a good way). I imagine this comes from his appreciation of Ronald Regan’s speaking ability.

Ronald Reagan I admire greatly. You look at what he gets away with in a speech—unbelievable. He’s able to take fairly complex prose and convey it in such a natural and conversational way that the beauty of the language and the power of the language are there, but you stay comfortable. That’s very hard to do.

I’m not the first to say this, but I know I won’t be the last. Van Jones is going to be a very big deal very soon. Mark it.

He’s great, I just don’t know how long he’ll last, and there’s whispers he’s hurting already this year.

I don’t know if it was a coincidence, but Monday’s Big Picture about Somali pirates works relatively well to illustrate William Langewiesche’s Vanity Fair article about… Somali pirates.

Two lengthy excerpts from the interesting article:

If you added up the assets already available, or soon to be, the display of French power was impressive indeed. And it was arrayed against what? A band of barefoot natives, Fuzzy Wuzzies in rags, hip-firing their Kalashnikovs with poor aim, and worshipping some filthy G.P.S. as if it had fallen from the sky. They should have surrendered days before, even to the Canadians…They were not particularly bellicose or arrogant, but they refused to be impressed when they should have been. A warship coming at you is supposed to present an intimidating sight…It raised disturbing questions about the relevance of governments and the exercise of power. More specifically, a suspicion crept in that these pirates knew exactly what they were doing, and that they understood the forces at play with more sophistication than had been assumed. Fuzzy Wuzzies they were, but until Paris decided it could accept casualties among the Ponant’s crew, they had stymied the French national will.

Today, almost one year later, Somali pirates continue to ignore the increasingly urgent displays of national power. One of the ironies of the concern being shown is that the shippers being provided with naval protection are the very same people who for years have made a mockery of the nation-state idea. They know that whatever pirate tolls they pay will always pale in comparison with the taxes that would be imposed if global law and order ever actually prevailed. But there is little danger of that. In its place a convoy system has been instituted for crossing the Gulf of Aden. CMA CGM has ordered its cargo ships to use it when practical… Because of an increase in crew pay, insurance, and other piracy-related costs, the company has imposed a $23 surcharge on every standard-size container that it takes through—amounting to a quarter-million dollars for each trip by the largest ships. Given the margins built in, and despite the need for the occasional payout, this means that CMA CGM, its insurers, and its crews are profiting from Somali piracy.

The pirates are professional and don’t typically harm the crews they capture because they know that the ship owners will pay a ransom, covered by insurance companies (AIG in this case) as opposed to allowing the military to mount an attack. This is especially so because everyone is profiting from the current arrangement.

Intrigue. Ingenuity. Stupidity. Double-crossings.