Anyone following the fall-out over Charles Pellegrino’s Last Train From Hiroshima—here’s the definitive New York Times story—would do well to read Philip Meyer’s “Accountability When Books Make News,” first published in 1997 in the Media Studies Journal. (You can read it, through the largess of Google Books, right here.)

A terse tour de force, Meyer’s essay starts by outlining what keeps the mainstream media in line: its responsibility to advertisers and to the legal system. “Nothing works as inexorably as the twin forces of the desire to make money and the fear of litigation—the carrot and the stick,” Meyer observes in a nice phrase (and, it must be said, a better potential title for his essay). These factors don’t apply to books, of course—or, Meyer asks, do they? He goes on to discuss, carefully and thoughtfully, the audience, marketplace, and medium of books. He also shows how and where the media piggyback on questionable books—sometimes for the common good (demythologizing J. Edgar Hoover), sometimes not (the craven rumors about George H. W. Bush and a female aide).

None of this correlates to the Pellegrino situation in an A-to-A, B-to-B fashion. At the very least, though, it’s a useful antidote to the Kurt Anderson quote zinging around the blogosphere: “If book publishers are supposed to be the gatekeepers, tell me exactly what they’re closing the gate to.” Anderson makes you nod; Meyer makes you think.

In the spring of 2006, John Unsworth taught a graduate seminar on “Twentieth-Century American Bestsellers.” It led to one of history’s finest class projects—a browsable database of bestsellers, 337 in all. As with any bestseller lists, you’ll find a range of titles, everything from Thomas Wolfe to Tom Clancy, but each entry includes an extremely detailed description of the book’s history (these were compiled by grad students, after all); a mini-essay on its reception; images of covers, page layouts, even some ads; and much more. It is, in short, bibliophilic crack.

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.

Perhaps the extreme of ghostliness in speechmaking occurred a few years ago in Congress. One of the large lobbies had sent to various members of the House ‘background material’ and a ’suggested text’ concerning a bill under debate. At a morning session a Representative got up and read the ’suggested text’ verbatim, as his own speech. During that afternoon’s session another Representative, who had been absent that morning, got up and delivered the same speech—also as his own—despite other members’ attempts to flag him down.

Of course, “a few years ago” dates from the article’s publication—in March 27, 1949. I’m trying to show in my essay that we’ve assimilated the idea of political ghostwriting. The only question, really, is when this assimilation occurred.

At least 60% of America’s 44 presidents were members of secret societies during their ascent to power, a statistic suggesting a phenomenon greater than chance. This study examines that phenomenon, focusing specifically on three groups: Freemasons, Greek-Letter Fraternities, and Yale’s Skull & Bones. It also seeks to identify and analyze the cardinal virtues of secret societies in general, as well as the values of the three groups, in particular. . . . The conclusion suggests that secret societies not only imbue their members with unique values relevant to politics, but that such values have influenced presidential policy, foreign and domestic.

There are histories of everything from presidential physicians to presidential press conferences, so it’s hard to fault the topic. But I can sure fault the trend—and not just as someone who, every April, gets woken up by the crazy Skull & Bones ceremonies that go down in the alley next to my apartment.

Speaking of life experience: the dissertation also promises “the researcher’s own insights as a former Greek-Letter Fraternity president.” If you have access to ProQuest’s Dissertations and Theses database, you can download those insights here.

An article on Saturday about fund-raising efforts in New York by Senator Barack Obama misspelled the surname of one of President John F. Kennedy’s closest advisers, who introduced Mr. Obama at a fund-raiser. He is Theodore C. Sorensen, not Sorenson. The error also appeared in an article in The Arts on Feb. 22 about books written by candidates, including “Profiles in Courage,” which then-Senator Kennedy wrote with guidance [!!!] from Mr. Sorensen. (The Times has misspelled Mr. Sorensen’s surname more than 135 [!!!] times in headlines and articles during the 50-plus years he has been a Democratic adviser and well-known author.)

Gregg Easterbrook’s recent Tuesday Morning Quarterback column included a sampling of other great NYT corrections. I remain partial to Sorenso/en, myself.

Here’s how the review starts:

Last month, Gilbert Arenas, an NBA All-Star, wrote the following on his blog: “Since I’ve been in the NBA I’ve been in the upper class so I’ve been a Republican. If you have any type of money, you’re a Republican, period.”

You can read the rest of it here. (Note: I found it shocking how many people fawned over Zirin’s book; I’ve never felt less guilty about writing a negative review—and for a book I couldn’t wait to read.)

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.