Man bites lap dogs!

Of course the temptation then is to find out ways that you can up the traffic. I'm not going to follow the Wonkette model ...

No anal sex jokes?

I respect what she does, but I don't need to work in those references.

But you're also different because you're an established writer, and most bloggers aren't. In fact, a lot of blogs really posture on that point, about being on the outside.

A lot of it is the outsider thing. It depends on the blog. Some places have a fake populist thing. There was someone who got stuck recently -- was it Douglas Rushkoff? He was complaining about blog ads, and he was saying something like, "In rave culture they didn't have ads," or something like that. I've seen a few bloggers and none of them look like ravers to me. If Josh Marshall wants to take out ads on his site, I don't think you could say Josh Marshall betrayed the "rave culture." I wouldn't have blog ads on my site, but I don't have any problems with that.

What I think is so fantastic [about blogs] is that there is so much more talent and braininess out in the country than you would know from just reading magazines. Frankly, if you go to a newsstand and read most magazines you're reading the same damn people that you've read for 20 years.

And they tend to live within 10 blocks of each other.

Ten blocks of each other! And they've all worked in the same jobs. Or they all went to Harvard together. God, it's like you could do a connecting map of Harvard -- from the Washington Monthly to the New Republic to this to that ...

You call it the Hair Club for Men in the book.

[Laughter.]

But hasn't that clique taken the biggest hit from blogs? That whole Harvard Crimson-Washington Monthly-New Republic brain trust?

Yeah, I think it probably has. Although, see, they find their own way to keep it going. There is certainly a way that they all link to [New Republic alum and Slate blogger] Mickey Kaus. I love all the references to "my friend Mickey," you know, "I have to agree with my friend Mickey." But the great thing is, they carry, to me, no more sway in blogland than Atrios.

And we didn't, until recently, even know who he was!

He does terrific stuff. He's figured out a really smart way to do it. He doesn't always tell you what he's posting about. He'll simply post a headline and it will say something like "Oh no, not this" and then you have to click and find out where it is. It's a very clever thing where you don't have to pontificate each time.

Have you received feedback on your blog from other bloggers?

I noticed, in looking at the track-back system, there was a lot of indignation that I put "Fahrenheit 9/11" on my Hit Parade for movies. Michael Moore is the great divider in the blog world. I know, for example, that Jeff Jarvis, who was very generous in giving me technical advice, and announcing that I was doing a blog, he got a lot of flak from his readers. People saying things like, "I am hurt!" "I feel betrayed!"

And it overlapped with the sense of "Well, you Manhattan magazine types, you all cover for each other!" If people only knew -- this doesn't apply to Jeff Jarvis -- how nervous and anxious people in the magazine world are these days. They've been nervous and anxious for three years now.

About?

About the ad recession, about where magazines are going, about how formulaic magazines are, that even if you get a good job at a lot of magazines you're just doing junk. The days of triumphalism, when there were big magazine parties with lots of money being thrown around, those days are gone.

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