Monday, January 27, 2014

Media-Whore D'Oeuvres


"If you’re a French politician, consider an affair French President Francois Hollande’s popularity rose from 24 percent to 26 percent after reports of his alleged affair with a young actress hit newsstands. The largest share of the increase came from women aged 25-34 and 50-64.


(Poll commissioned by Le Nouvel Observateur, via London Evening Standard)" (Politico)


"A week after Ezra Klein officially broke up with the Washington Post, he announced on Sunday night that he's founding a news site at Vox Media, home of SB Nation, The Verge, Eater, Curbed, Racked, and Polygon. The site is currently being referred to as 'Project X,' but despite the mysterious name, Klein has plenty to say about his vision for the project. In a post on The Verge, Klein says that in the past, journalists were forced to focus only on the day's events due to space limitations in newspapers, and this outdated thinking has transferred over to online journalism. 'Today, we are better than ever at telling people what's happening, but not nearly good enough at giving them the crucial contextual information necessary to understand what's happened,' he writes. 'Our mission is to create a site that's as good at explaining the world as it is at reporting on it.'" (NYMag)



"I got an email inquiring about Lady Sarah Churchill and a book she was working on when she died fifteen years ago this year. NYSD readers may recall that Sarah was a friend who at an important moment in my life as a writer, made a big difference. Looking through the archives, I found a couple of Diaries that I’d written about her, after her death. After re-reading them, so much came back to mind. In 1978, I’d decided to move my life to Los Angeles and embark on a life as a writer professionally. I’d sold a small business I had in Westchester and packed up my belongings and with my dog and five cats, moved West. A couple of weeks before my departure, some friends of mine gave me a going away present in the form of a 'reading' by Dezia Restivo here in New York who is a numerologist and reads the Tarot. I knew nothing about either talents except what everyone knows: the future is in their hands, or head. Dezia is an English lady with a sunny and gregarious personality, and she likes people. So she read my cards and did my numbers. As she looked at the  cards spread out before her, referring to the move I was about to make, she said: 'You’re going to meet a woman who is royalty, or like royalty. And she is wearing rose colored glasses and has houses on three oceans ...' Well, that sounded pretty exotic, or more like an opening for an adventure novel and not the life of this New England boy. But Dezia was right. About six months later, now living in Los Angeles, I met Sarah. That first night, she was in a reception line, a tall, imposing presence, blonde and well coiffed wearing rose colored glasses. She was not 'royal,' she had presence we imagine a royal might have (and rarely do, just like the rest of us). More than the tint of her glasses, they gave her that European woman appearance which suggests mystery somewhere in there. It so happened, that at that moment in her life she did indeed have three houses – Greece, Jamaica, and Los Angeles – all of which overlooked an ocean." (NYSD)

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