Conde Nast Dish with Joan Didion and Meghan Daum

Okay, pull your chairs up close to the screen and grab a handful of unsalted popcorn while Daddy Corsair reads to you from the latest Black Book interview with everyones favorite intellectual rail-thin porcelain doll-looking literati Joan Didion and Meghan Daum in Black Book.

They dish on Conde Nast. Meghan goes first:

"I was mistaken for a messenger one time, walking into 350 Madison Avenue I was so bedraggled and poorly dressed. They stopped me at the desk and told me to take the freight elevator and I said, 'I'm an assistant.' I'm really curious to talk to you about this, because that was '92 and it was the closest I felt I came to a glamourous literary job. I knew nothing about fashion. I had no interest in it -- I pronounced Versace as Versayce -- but its interesting how the fashion world is intrinsically linked to being a writer for women. It's so interesting because it ties in to this idea that a long time ago that the Seven Sisters College embodied a sensibility that was directly parallel to the culture of Conde Nast and that somehow, throughout time, both cultures have been perverted by various social forces."

Didion: Yeah, the people in charge of Conde Nast saw themselves in loco parentis, really. They had all these young children who came to work for them, and they took care of them in a sense.

Black Book: What would you attribute to the change in that culture?

Meghan: Maybe cocaine (both laugh)