In this week’s New Haven Advocate, I’ve got an essay on Glenn Beck-as-author, disguised as a dispatch from his latest simulcast book event. Through his radio and television shows, Beck can deliver huge sales boosts to obscure political treatises and to mass-market thrillers — and this gets at what the publishing industry calls his “platform.” It’s why he sells books. But why does he write them? I come to a pretty cynical conclusion in my essay, but other explanations do exist. Still, Beck’s books don’t fit with his off-the-cuff nature. At the book event, he turned a Primanti Brothers sandwich, a Pittsburgh delicacy made up of beef, french fries, and cole slaw, into a metaphor for America’s budget crisis. This metaphor allowed Beck one of his few Obama attacks — he introduced the sandwich as “Michelle Obama’s worst nightmare” — but it also reveals how, um, adaptable he can be. It seems Beck didn’t call Primanti Brothers until six hours before the show. He ordered 300 sandwiches.

In this week’s New Haven Advocate, you’ll find my profile of Rick Moody and his new novel, The Four Fingers of Death. (Moody writes such disparate books that it’s tough to pick a best [or a worst], but I can say that The Four Fingers of Death is easily my favorite.) One thing Moody and I touched on—and one thing the blogosphere’s been bandying about—is the idea that regional lit has sort of disappeared. Moody grew up in and around New Canaan and made his name with The Ice Storm, which savaged the affluent suburb, so he brought an interesting perspective to this. Since we didn’t have room to include the material in print, I’ll post some of it here.

One of the funniest things about the film adaptation of The Ice Storm is that New Canaan’s officials didn’t read the book before agreeing to let Ang Lee shoot it in town. When they finally got around to reading Moody’s novel, the townsfolk were scandalized. The New York Times, as you might imagine, was all over this story, and Moody promised the paper that “although [The Ice Storm] was set in New Canaan, it could have been anywhere.” So I started this line of questioning by asking him if, in these calmer times, he still believed this was true. “There are plenty of suburbs in the Northeast that could have stood in,” Moody said. “The larger question is, could it be set in a different time. There were social conditions that made that story what it was, both in real life and in the time of its writing.”

Still, when Moody talked about his next move, he framed it in geographical terms.

After The Ice Storm, I had to work really hard and really fast to not be ghettoized as a surburban writer of the Northeast. In some ways, there were readers who wanted me to serve that function, a preservationist role as a fiction writer for these towns and those socioeconomic strata. But why would you want to do that as a writer? Why would you want to limit your imagination?

Moody used Updike as an example of someone who could capture a place (the Rabbit books) without allowing himself to be limited to or defined by it. Moody also suggested some economic reasons, in addition to any creative ones, for the decline of regional lit:

Nobody wants to be limited to that market. You don’t want to be the bard of Fairfield County, especially given the economic pressures of making a living and of trying to be published by a big publisher. The big publishers select certain kinds of material, and it’s really hard not to get drafted into their model of how to do this. They want the writing workshops to do what the writing workshops are doing. Especially now, the book publishers are risk averse—they want to be able to quantify what a novel’s going to do, and it’s easiest to do that if they can speak to have it having particular effects and doing particular things. That’s why genre fiction is important to them. They pay lip service to the emotional relationship that they have, as editors, to literary fiction. But it’s still easier for them if it all does a certain thing—which is affirmational, epiphanic, realistic.

I’ll admit that I don’t see a direct link between the first part of Moody’s argument and the second, though I do see some connections to his argument against “creative writing by committee.” (Note how much milder that was around the release of The Ice Storm.) Still, it’s interesting to see a case against writing regional lit come from a writer so closely associated with his home state. In fact, Moody wrote the Connecticut chapter in 2008′s State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America. It begins: “Connecticut is a state that’s hard to love, but which I love anyhow, as one often loves what wounds—if only for the familiarity.”

Over at Deadspin, I’ve got a dispatch-slash-photo gallery from last night’s LeBron James television special, which was staged in Greenwich, CT. The special generated tons of coverage in both the standard and Watching-the-Watchmen traditions, but I tried to focus on how the media manufactured and replicated its stories. You don’t need to blame anyone at this event to admit that the media ecosystem deploys its resources in a mysterious way.

If you like the story, you might also like the first thing I wrote for Deadspin—another investigation of media malpractice, this time about the story of a 9-year-old pitcher banned by his baseball league for being “too good.”

Also, the real winner in all this, to my mind, is Kobe Bryant—he’s no longer the NBA’s Iago.

In this week’s New Haven Advocate, I’ve got a long story on Squash Haven, a local nonprofit that follows the after-school orthodoxy except for one thing: its kids play squash. This focus raises some obvious questions (namely: Why turn to such an expensive and elitist sport?), and I try to touch on them in the story. Still, the people at Squash Haven are doing great work and getting great results. It’s tough to question that.

I should add that the story might seem a little fractured or jumpy since, for a lot of reasons (most of them my fault), the reporting dates back to 2008. I did go back this month to check on my group of middle schoolers, and several of them are heading to a national squash tournament. I’m sure they—and Squash Haven as a whole—will do New Haven proud.

Over at The Millions, you’ll find my “dispatch from the Borders-land,” where, basically, I ask a bunch of shoppers about their relationship to books. Lit blogs tend to take an isolated view of the literary world, and I wanted to push back against this (and also to satisfy my own curiosity). The week I did the interviews—this was back in December, and the story’s delay stems mostly from my incompetence—the New Yorker debuted another excerpt from DFW’s The Pale King. I remember being extremely excited to read the short story, then noticing that the magazine’s newsstand appendage thingy didn’t even mention Wallace. Different worlds, different priorities—and yet, among the people I talked to, fiction seems alive and well.

One caveat: I wanted this dispatch to be short and I wanted to devote most of it to the interviews, so if it seems like I’m totalizing “real” or “average” readers (or relegating them to scare quotes), that’s why. With more space, I would have liked to talk about the geographic and socioeconomic aspects to reading audiences. For example, Connecticut Goodwills tend to offer some pretty interesting books (in the last year, I’ve picked up an early edition of JFK’s Profiles in Courage and a paperback of William Vollman’s Europe Central). I don’t recall Indiana Goodwills even selling books.

This was my first radio interview, and I have to say I’m pretty happy with the lack of ums, ers, and yeahs. Of course, I also managed to say obviously 328 times in 14 minutes.

[UPDATE:] Another day (February 2), another interview—this one with Larry Rifkin on WATR 1320 AM. You can listen to an mp3 here.

In this week’s Advocate, I’ve got a story on Brian McDonald’s In the Middle of the Night, a true-crime take on the horrific Cheshire home-invasion case from a few years back. The story ended up focusing on the reaction to McDonald’s book as much as the book itself—especially when local residents started calling for the library to ban the book and launching ugly personal attacks at the head librarian. As I write in the story:

Let’s be clear: The only real villains in this mess are Komisarjevsky and Hayes, and, even three years later, it’s impossible to consider Petit’s tragedy without feeling fear, sympathy, and regret. But this tragedy occurred in and was assimilated by a culture that loves lurid details, easy-bake opinions, and petty personal concerns. And, in the reaction to McDonald’s book, you’ll find this culture’s usual suspects—duplicitous lawyers, lazy journalists, small-town politicos, quickie cash-in publishers, and a whole lot of people who’d rather react than read.

One thing I couldn’t work into the story was more on McDonald’s own career, which is fascinating. He described himself to me as “a reluctant true-crime writer” who took on In the Middle of the Night (and a previous entry in St. Martin’s True Crime Library series) ”simply because I needed the work.” But McDonald’s far from a hack. He’s written three other books, including My Father’s Gun, a well-reviewed memoir about his family’s three-generation history with the NYPD. And I’d argue that, other than its poor pacing and organization, In the Middle of the Night also demonstrates his talents—as I say in the story, it’s a solid entry in the true-crime canon.

Of course, the only way you’d know that is if you actually read McDonald’s book.

Good news about the media is rare, and, when it occurs, it’s tempting to just nod and slowly back away. That’s basically what happened when Michael Schroeder rescued several small-town Connecticut newspapers in 2008. The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and other national organs jumped on his last-second bid. Since then, though, no one’s checked in to see how he’s changed the papers—or if he’s got a realistic chance at turning them around.

My new cover story at the New Haven Advocate tries to remedy that. James Smith, Schroeder’s top editor, gave me free reign in his newsroom at the New Britain Herald (“I like cooperating with the free press,” he said), and I spent a couple of days talking to reporters and readers, in addition to Smith and Schroeder.

In the last few years, Connecticut newspapers have lost local readers at a much faster clip than the rest of the country, so the state of the Herald might offer some clues for other areas. Of course, everything’s shifting quickly—that link, to a Hartford Business Journal story from 2007, names the big papers as hot buys and the small ones as toxic assets. At the very least, though, Schroeder’s Herald offers a chance to study a smaller paper, instead of the NYT- and WSJ-level stuff that dominates so much of the metamedia discourse.

Here’s some context I couldn’t work into the story.

• As I mention in the story, New Britain newspaper readers split between the Herald and the Hartford Courant. No one’s more excited that 2009 is coming to a close than the Courant. In the last year, America’s oldest continually published newspaper lost its top two editors, its Washington bureau, its top local political reporter, and, in the most public embarrassment, George Gombossy, the consumer columnist who says he lost his job for writing stories critical of Courant advertisers. Not surprisingly, the Courant‘s also lost more than 20,000 subscribers in that same period—including one New Britain man who told me about the time Gombossy helped him get his money back from a local Best Buy.
• If you’re interested in the sordid history of the Journal-Register Company, which, from 1995 to 2008, owned and tortured the Herald, start with this great American Journalism Review story. This Philadelphia CityPaper story outlines the JRC’s nasty reaction to that story;  this Forbes feature is also worth reading. As I mention in my story, the JRC promised to make only “minimal changes” when they bought the Herald—then laid off a dozen people in their first week.

We all avoid mall kiosks, and we also ignore them. If they pop up in print, it’s generally in a cornball book of get-rich schemes, right next to collecting baseball cards and selling water purifiers. In my new story at Slate’s The Big Money, though, I try to show that kiosks and their employees face more obstacles—and deserve more respect—than you might think.

Too bad I can’t say the same for baseball cards. In the Connecticut mall where I reported this story, the only sports memorabilia store was in the process of closing down (“9 days left”).

Over at Deadspin, I’ve got a dispatch from this year’s Harvard-Yale game. It’s the 126th time the two have met, and, in both pretension and pageantry, it lives up to your expectations. One of my favorite details from this story was the dust-up over an (allegedly) politically incorrect T-shirt created by Yale students. The administration ended up pushing this anodyne design on the students—but not on too many, judging from the small number I saw at the tailgate.

I’ll include some more photos at the end of this post, but, first, here are a few things I couldn’t fit in. (I should also mention the many helpful books on Ivy League sports—and the fact that, with only two days to turn this story around, I had to skim most of them for the football sections. If the Matt Maloney era at Penn taught us anything, though, it’s that Ivy football is not alone.)

• Speaking of books: near the end of my story, I mention The Only Game That Matters, a humbly titled history of Harvard-Yale football. Even with its hyper-literate potential audience, this book sold only 3,200 copies (Nielsen Book Scan) and is now out of print—another example of the Harvard-Yale rivalry producing more hype than results. I will point out that, in my copy, checked out from Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library, someone had enthusiastically underlined and starred a passage about how Harvard and Yale’s history predates the United States’. Another passage getting the underline-star treatment? “Beating Harvard was, is, and always will be the yardstick by which joy is measured in New Haven.” This, of course, is complete baloney.
• One person I talked to while working on the story was Jim Fuller, who covers the Yale football beat for the New Haven Register (and runs a nice blog on the same subject). In 2009, the Ivy League replaced its annual media day with a conference call, and Jim argued that this decision will further diminish the League’s relevance. Last year, when a victory over Yale would have given Brown a share of the Ivy title, the Bears’ coach didn’t even come out for interviews because no local media showed up. One other metamedia note: I found it fascinating how many of these odes to the Ivy League mentioned the success former players were having on Wall Street. We’ll have to see how the post-populist coverage of The Game evolves.
• Let me also draw your attention to “Yale and Athletics” [.pdf], a 1980 address delivered by Yale president A. Bartlett Giamatti. Giamatti—professor of English, commissioner of baseball, and father of Paul—offers a knee-buckling display of erudition. Citing everything from a decade-by-decade comparison of Yale varsity sports’ winning percentage to a long passage from John Henry Newman, Giamatti lays out college athletics’ twinned heritage from the Greeks and nineteenth-century English educators. He also offers some refreshing transparency: “We need always to recall that the production of revenue is as much a part of the picture of Yale athletics as the provision of services and opportunities.”
• From Bartlett to some quotations overheard at this year’s tailgate: “I was just last weekend at the Stanford-USC game. It’s been a big eight days for me!”; “Man up! It’s Harvard-Yale. Man up!”; “Look, it’s Jeremy Shockey” [This was a Harvard frat guy calling out a Yale frat guy, and I have to say: Yale students struck me as about 30 percent more grating, though this might have been some kind of home-field advantage].

Deadspin ran its own Harvard-Yale gallery, but here are a few I snapped myself. If nothing else, they’ll serve as a reminder that The Game attracts more than just doltish undergrads.

[But doltish undergrads are the most fun, aren't they?]