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 the Media Studies Journal in 1997. (You can read it 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 why 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-A, B-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.

I’m not sure why Malcolm Gladwell‘s fourth book, What the Dog Saw, which collects 19 of his New Yorker essays, has been the one to incite a riot of review-essays.

Were the first three books not successful enough? Was something in Gladwell’s methodology not previously clear? Were his best and worst traits not yet delineated? …more

Tim Monich has five times as many IMDB credits as Jason Schwartzman, but we know for whom Brooklyn tolls.

This week’s New Yorker profile of Monich won’t change that, of course, but it does offer a riveting look at the world of Hollywood dialect coaches. …more

On Friday night, and in preparation for Where the Wild Things Are, I rewatched Spike Jonze’s first feature, Being John Malkovitch.

What struck me was not the film’s final childlike shots or how Christopher Walken and those expensive, “absurdly heavy” monster suits are anticipated by its puppet shows, but something else–namely how goddamn much John Cusack looked like David Foster Wallace. …more

I tried to show some restraint. But it is now 11:59pm Eastern time, and The Rumpus, an ostensibly bookish website, still has not marked, observed, or otherwise commented on today’s release of The Lost Symbol, the new book by Dan Brown. This deserves a post simply as a cultural phenomenon, and it appears that I’ll have to be the one to do it. …more

Reading Jeremy’s post on Andrew Keen and starving artists, I couldn’t help but think of Joel Barlow (1754-1812). Barlow was a poet, one of the Connecticut Wits, to be precise, so my mental leap probably owes more to the fact that I was reading Barlow right before I clicked over to The Rumpus than to anything else.

Still, there is a connection. In 1783, Barlow wrote a letter to Elias Boudinot, the president of the Continental Congress: “As we have few Gentlemen of fortune sufficient to enable them to spend a whole life in study, or enduce others to do it by their patronage, it is more necessary, in this country than in any other, that the rights of authors be secured by law.” …more

“An ideal, awesome job,”—that’s how Sam Anderson, at several points in our conversation, describes his position as book critic for New York Magazine. …more

The latest issue of the Oxford American includes their annual “Best of the South” package, but it’s also got an essay on the struggles of freelancing, a subject that knows no geographical bounds.

For almost 20 years, Thomas Swick edited his newspaper’s travel section, freelancing a couple of books along the way. After getting laid off, Swick decided to write full time, and he packs the essay with reflections on this transition. For example: “Writing is one of the few trades in which the older you get, the harder the actual business of it becomes (especially in a culture that glorifies youth).”

Despite this anxiety, Swick’s best moments come on technology—and they’re not of the “these damn kids and their computers won’t get off my lawn” variety. Here’s my favorite passage: …more

The tale of a long-lost account of one of America’s most notorious criminals, a struggling ad man, and the contributing editor at Playboy who brought the story to light. …more