Nerve Insider : will doig

New on Nerve, 4.28.08: New York’s Finest, Q&A with “The Wire” writer Richard Price

Nicole Ankowski — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 23:01:00 GMT

I admit: I was incredibly jealous when Nerve editor Will Doig told me he was going to interview Richard Price. I just recently discovered the joys of HBO’s The Wire (I know, I’m only a few years’ behind the times) and to sit and speak with one of the geniuses behind the scripts sounded like a dream come true…

As Will writes, “Richard Price's books appeal, in large part, because the author behind them has achieved near-mythical status for being the genuine article: he grew up in a housing project, hangs out with his characters (cops, thugs, undocumented immigrants), and, above all, writes more realistic dialogue than virtually any other novelist working today.

“His latest novel, Lush Life, takes place on Manhattan's gentrifying Lower East Side. In this small physical space, where rich hipsters, bodega owners and kids from the projects uneasily coexist, two homicide detectives slog through sludge-like bureaucracy and amnesiac eyewitnesses as they try to solve a murder. The book, however, feels more like an anthropological study of downtown New York than a police procedural, the story of a neighborhood changing so fast you can see it in the time-lapse feed of its own surveillance cameras. Price spoke to Nerve about mingling with the folks he portrays in his novels, and the strange popular nostalgia for the city's darker days."

I thought your portrayal of the Lower East Side hipster scene was surprisingly nonjudgmental.
Actually, I caught a lot of flack for the way I treated the quote-unquote hipsters. I was kind of surprised. Then I looked back on it, and I think I got too absorbed in the self-centeredness of some of these people. I mean, my kids are that age and part of that movement, that subculture. With my books, everybody tends to think everything I write is journalistically true, and it's not. If I had a chance to rewrite the book, I don't know if I'd undo that. This is how I'd experienced some people.

Read the entire interview here.

Lessons from The Biggest Loser Season Finale, by Will Doig

Nicole Ankowski — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 20:07:00 GMT

There are a few lessons one can take from last night’s season finale of The Biggest Loser.
1. It’s possible for a woman to win this show, even though men are predisposed to quicker weight loss.
2. It’s possible for some people to lose 50 pounds and still look basically the same.
3. Live TV – especially live TV starring people who have no professional TV training – is awesome.

Ali, the former competitive swimmer who’d let herself go, won the final weigh-in and, for this, a quarter of a million dollars. She’d lost 112 pounds and looked as diesel as an angry Mac truck. The other two finalists were Roger, a former football player from Alabama, and Kelly, a shy working-class woman from Florida. I was rooting for Kelly, because she’s older and divorced. She’s also had three miscarriages and talked a lot about how she’d always been huge and asexual and how now, at 38, she finally felt like a girl for the first time in her life.

It’s this kind of shit that gets me sobbing like a mental patient. I’m getting misty just writing this. Which is the entire point of The Biggest Loser – it’s the anti-reality show. There’s no sniping or backstabbing. Everyone adores each other. Grown men bawl and hug and say, “I love you, man” over and over again. Parents talk about how they want to set a better example for their children.

And then, little by little, everyone gets thinner. Not thin, per se, and you do feel a little bit weird when the girl who dropped a buck twenty still has a butt the size of the Great Pumpkin. But in general, everyone loses enough weight that you feel good about it. Last night, they brought back all the contestants who’d been eliminated over the past few months. Most of them had kept losing weight after the show ended, and they did little video vignettes for each of them, showing them continuing to work toward their goals by eating salad and running on treadmills in their bedrooms. Somehow this led to more crying. Curtis had needed to get his weight below 239 to qualify for health insurance, and he did. Bernie has a thin girlfriend and had wanted to become more attractive for her, and he was. In fact, Bernie looked hot in his fly little purple shirt and tie. Also hot: Jackie, who’d gone from still-sorta-chunky when she left the show a couple months ago to MILF-who’s-well-aware-of-it last night.

Which is one of the craziest things about watching The Biggest Loser from beginning to end: people who you found physically repulsive at the beginning are sexy by the end, and you feel superficial for not having found them sexy the whole time. It’s like being the bad guy in a John Hughes movie, the one who shuns the girl because she’s not pretty or popular enough, but then at the end, after her transformation, asks her to the prom and she laughs in his face.

At the final weigh in, you kind of figured Ali was going to win because Alison Sweeney had at this point reiterated approximately eighty times that if Ali won, she’d be the first female Biggest Loser ever. After all that buildup, to have Roger win would have felt disappointing, and we basically knew it wasn’t going to be Kelly, because while Kelly looked good, Ali looked ready to run to Athens with an urgent message for the king. She seriously looked a bit scary, like she’d kick your ass just because at 122 pounds, she can. That would have been a cool ending: Roger and Ali duking it out. But there was no duking. There was only confetti, and hugs, and crying, and a message for the kids: being skinny gets you nowhere, but getting fat and then skinny gets you a quarter mil. Food for thought while you gnaw on that Pixy Stix.

— Will Doig

Check It: Brett Graham and His Fruit Mystery

Nicole Ankowski — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 19:16:00 GMT

Who is Brett Graham? What is the “Fruit Mystery” game, and why did he have to make it for his “parents/the police and the Zoo”? What the hell am I talking about?

You really need to see this….

Do you have extra minutes to enrich your life? (Is using the word “enrich” a little too strong in this case? Probably.) But for shits and giggles you really need to visit Brett Graham’s website. Check out the list of things he likes, things he doesn’t like, and why. And, most def, play the “Fruit Mystery” game, which he describes as:

“Here is the game I had to make for my parents / the police and the Zoo. ‘Fruit Mystery’. It cost me once thousand dollars to make.”

I’m not sure if this is real; an elaborate, brilliant hoax; or just pure poetry. But I think you’ll want to pay a visit to Brett Graham’s most intriguing world.

THINGS DO I LIKE THEM? HOW MUCH DO I LIKE THEM?

TERMITE YES THEY EAT HOUSES 7/10

WATEMELLONS NO 3/10

REMOTE CONTROL CAR YES DON'T RAM MY FEET 7/10

PRISON YES 7/10

FLUERESCENT PAINT YES NOLVETY VALUE IS 7/10

KIWI SFRUIT NO LIKE A LITTLE ANIMAL 1

DRY CLEANING NO DON'T REALLY UNDERSTAND HOW IT WORKS 3/`10

AMERICANS NO SMELL LIKE CHEESE 4/10

TREES YES THEY DRINK WAYER AND MAKE AIR

And yes, if you love him as much as I do, you can hire him for “consultancy / photographer (weddings, party-dj/funereals, etc.) / web desing.”

Thanks to Will Doig (and his brother) for the link.
Brett – if you’re out there – we want to talk to you!

New on Nerve, 4.2.08: Yesterday’s Paper

Nicole Ankowski — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 20:02:00 GMT

Every few years, I’ve noticed, we get slammed with some article or other about how we’re moving into a kind of post-literate society, where books become obsolete and we’re all going to get our learning in capsule form or whatever. But I love my books, and I’m not giving them up without a fight. I grew up a bookish little one, preferring to spend my days devouring The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe rather than play house or whatever the other kids were up to. Since then, I’ve worked as a librarian, a conservator, a writer, and a book artist (printing and binding books by hand). Even working here at Nerve has caused me considerable anxiety, as it’s meant swapping my ink and paper comforts for the cold, tech-y embrace of the internets. Imagine my abject horror when Nerve editor Will Doig passed along a book called The Solitary Vice: Against Reading. I’m pretty sure I gasped audibly.

So I sat down with author Mikita Brottman for a quick Q&A about the hidden dangers of books, the joys of tabloids, and librarian sex appeal.

People assume that if you're not actually sitting with a book in your lap, you're not really reading. Whereas most of what people are doing online is reading. Sending text messages or sitting with a magazine or a comic is reading. There are all kinds of reading, and I think book-boostering campaigns are a reaction against these things that compete for our attention. People feel anxious about the demise of reading, but those anxieties are groundless, and perhaps rooted in snobbery.

Read more…

New on Nerve, 3.25.08: Crowd Control

Nicole Ankowski — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 17:09:00 GMT

Being born in 1984, my childhood seemed to develop right alongside the rise of the personal computer, along with the ever-elusive World Wide Web. I was in fourth grade when, unbeknownst to my parents, I first signed on to AOL 1.0 and began chatting with sleazy perverts inquiring about my bra size. I thought it was spectacular. Almost 15 years later, they may have developed parental controls to try and prevent nine year olds from being asked their bra size, but the internet is far from being controlled…

Nerve sat down for a compelling Q&A with Clay Shirky, whose new book Here Comes Everybody explores the twisted dichotomy of good and evil that cyberspace continues to inflict on our society, and what that may mean for the future of media, social change and politics….

I realized that everything I've been talking about all these years — how much easier it is for groups to get things done — all of that is the same thing that's allowing the Pro-Ana girls to thrive. Because now, society doesn't get to say which groups get to form or not, and who gets to talk to each other, because it's easy and free. That's a big, big social change, and one that, it seems to me, we're manifestly unready to take on.

Read the entire interview here.

— Alexandra Godfrey

New on Nerve, 3.24.08: You Look Scrabulous

Nicole Ankowski — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 15:12:00 GMT

Are you a Scrabulous addict? (Or have you not yet plated the online tête-à-tête version of Scrabble?). Will Doig dives deep into the world of S.E.X.Y. Scrabulous, and uncovers new rules for the old game:

There are two types of Scrabulous come-ons: the fizzy, giggly, coquettish flirtations Jack, Annie and Shaina are talking about, and the kind Alicia (who becomes so horny she has to touch herself) is talking about. And the kind that Barry is seeking. His open table solicited "bi married men" to challenge him to a game, and in response to my request for an interview, he'd only persistently ask, "How big is your c*ck?" He continued to press me for details about my personal dimensions and what I might like to do with him if we were in the same room, even while continuing the game at hand, laying down words like "thermal" and "bisque."

Wanna play? Check out the entire article here.

About Last Night: Lit 'n' Porn at the Sienese Shredder Issue Release Party

Nicole Ankowski — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 22:42:00 GMT

“Like a child looking through The Joy of Sex for the first time” — Emily Farris [photo courtesy Daniel Krieger]

We love literature and we love smut…so naturally we had to check out the Sienese Shredder’s release party last night, as they found a way to combine both in their second annual issue. The journal “brings together poetry, critical writing, visual arts, unpublished rarities, oddball ephemera” and, you know, a bit o’ porn.

Nerve editor Will Doig got his culture on, and met photographer Susan Unterberg (far right) who showed him her photographs of human thumbs that look like penises, and goldfish mouths that look like vaginas.

Will was the only one there not wearing glasses, except for Nerve's Scanner blogger Emily Farris, who (full disclosure) organized the party. Other artsy attendees included painter and filmmaker Alfred Leslie, writer/director Whit Stillman (Metropolitan, The Last Days of Disco), editor-in-chief of Art in America Elizabeth Baker, poet/painter Sarah Plimpton, and a ton of other really smart people who probably give good cocktail-hour conversation.

But we really liked the human-thumb penis pics. Though we’ve never seen vaginas like these. And you hopefully haven't seen a penis like that second photo:

[thumb/fish/penis/vagina photos courtesy Susan Unterberg and Sienese Shredder]

New on Nerve, 3.14.08: In Plain View, Photography by Jackson Eaton

Nicole Ankowski — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 14:44:00 GMT

It's always nice to see a guy rocking the funny underpants. Increasingly, purveyors of popular apparel for the modern man have started carrying weird undies, a welcome end to the fascist white-and-powder-blue Fruit of the Loom regime. And she's not doing so bad herself — turquoise thigh-highs spread-eagled on a hamper never go out of style, no matter what the season. But what we love most about photographer Jackson Eaton's photographs is the feeling of subtle chaos, a sense that something ridiculous just occurred, and will occur again before long. It makes us wonder whether something as unpredictably lovely might occur in our own lives. We'd better change into our best unmentionables, just in case. — Will Doig

New on Nerve, 2.25.08: Recession Fears

Nicole Ankowski — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 17:47:00 GMT

When I was growing up, my parents had a friend named Gary, a jeweler from Denver. Gary was almost totally bald, and he would visit us in Massachusetts once a year. He would constantly make jokes about his bald head to amuse my brother and me, making a big show of applying sunscreen to his scalp before we went to the beach. He'd have us rub it for luck, and once even let us draw a face up there with a Sharpie.

Today, if you're a balding man with some disposable income, you have to make a choice: Will I be like Gary, admirably self-deprecating and at ease with the completely natural aging process occurring on top of my head? Or will I be desperately vain and narcissistic and try to halt the loss? This essay is about how I chose the latter path and, most of the time, feel pretty damn lame about it.

The worst thing about going bald is not that it indicates aging, or a decline in sexual virility or anything as silly and New Age as that. It's that it's part of the Big Competition. High salary? Add four points. Lame job? Minus one. Big dick? Add two. Going bald? Minus three. Today, the center-front of my hairline remains intact, but the two sides have been ebbing like a beach approaching low tide for nearly a decade.

Read the rest here.

— Will Doig

IM This: Science Fair Pictures To Get You Through the Afternoon

Nicole Ankowski — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 21:19:00 GMT

Sometimes my fellow Nerve writers instant message me pictures of their (adorable) dogs, links to blogs dedicated entirely to pretty girls drinking tea, or frightening scientific news (there are actually bugs that dive-bomb your eyeballs; beware!). But sometimes, just sometimes, they IM pure, nostalgic, comic gold: check out these hilarious, painful, and presumably oh-so-real pictures from children’s science fairs.

[Thanks to Gawker and Will Doig for the afternoon fun.]

Check out more awkward joy after the jump…

Check out all the kids right here.

Scanner's Stories of Love and Hate: A Pre-Valentine's Day Reading of Sorts

Nicole Ankowski — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 20:32:00 GMT

Scanner Emily (yes, the literary goddess/casserole maven who’s also venturing into burlesque) reminds us about tomorrow night’s fab reading:

Hey New Yorkers, don't forget to join your Scanner bloggers and special guests (see below) for a pre-Valentine's Day reading and after-party at Rififi Tuesday night.

Scanner's Stories of Love and Hate: A Pre-Valentine's Day Reading of Sorts
Featuring Nerve.com's Scanner Bloggers and Special Guests
Tuesday, February 12, 8 p.m.
Rififi, 332 East 11th Street, NYC
$5

Featuring Bobby Tisdale, Emily Farris, Will Doig, Sarah Hepola, Katie Halper, Bryan Christian, Brian Fairbanks and Nicole Ankowski. We promise chocolates, red hots and maybe you'll laugh so hard you'll pee your pants. Or cry. Or neither and then you can eat chocolate and scowl. Then stick around for the after party.

New on Nerve, 11.19.2007: Q&A with NPR host and author Peter Sagal

Sarah — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 15:00:00 GMT

Peter Sagal is the last person you would expect to be an expert on being bad. According to Will Doig, Sagal, host of the NPR news-quiz Wait, Wait...Don't Tell Me, sounds like “a precise, well-informed newspaper reader with an enviable vocabulary who doesn't do much of anything wrong.” Nonetheless Sagal has written a book called The Book of Vice: Very Naughty Things and How to Do Them. Will Doig spoke to him about traveling to the dark side.

If you listen to Wait, Wait, reading this piece will be particularly fun because you can imagine exactly how Segal sounds when he says things like “I had this, if you will, body of knowledge about the porn industry that I found interesting, and it left me, if you will, wanting more.”

In the interview Sagal confirms that he wrote the original screenplay that became aforementioned film. The following anecdote, however, was not included:

"Now this part is all third-hand, but my understanding is that Harvey Weinstein owned the rights to Dirty Dancing 2. People had tried to make this sequel for years, but always had failed for obvious reasons. Why would you want to see those characters together again? The whole appeal is that these people will never see each other again. But Harvey Weinstein said, "It's been so many years, make the sequel somehow." And somebody said to [Bender], "That script you have about Cuba, it's got some romance, it's got some dancing. Cuba's hot right now. Why don't you rewrite it into Dirty Dancing 2?" It was rewritten extensively.

If you've ever seen it, there's no reason you give a shit, but they recapitulated the plot of Dirty Dancing. And in fact, on IMDB.com, you'll see that I share the credit with a woman whose name I don't remember, and the reason I don't remember it is because it's a pseudonym for Eleanor Bergstein, who wrote Dirty Dancing, which was a heartfelt, autobiographical tale that she of course was very proud of. Eleanor Bergstein looked at [Havana Nights] and said, "I want nothing to do with this." So she used a pseudonym."

The penname was Kate Gunzinger, which is also the name of the lead character of It’s My Turn, a romantic comedy from 1980 starring Michael Douglas and Jill Clayburgh, leading us to wonder, what would your romantic comedy pseudonym be?

In Memory of Norman Mailer

Sarah — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 17:57:00 GMT

Norman Mailer passed away this weekend. To remember him we've reposted an interview from with Mailer and his son John from March, 2006. Read an excerpt below, or go here for the full text.

Isn't that boredom [that comes from marriage] antithetical to sexual passion?
Of course. But that's also part of it. When you're driving a car that has five hundred horsepower, you need some kind of brakes. All right, that's a crude image [laughs]. All I'm getting at is that very often, highly sexed people get married in order to have an outlet. [pause] Let me see, I can say something better than that. What a way to end up, huh? You could hang yourself with a sentence like that. [long pause, throat clearing] People, whether highly sexed or not, often need a machine like a relationship, something like an accelerator and a brake. Marriage allows you to do that very well. It's the soft machine of society.

New on Nerve 11.12.2007: Tom Perrotta discusses his new book, “The Abstinence Teacher”

Sarah — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 15:43:00 GMT

Will Doig has a great Q&A with Tom Perrotta today. They discuss Perrotta’s latest novel, The Abstinence Teacher in which an atheist sex-ed teacher clashes with the Christian fundamentalist minority in her suburban community. Below is an excerpt from the interview.

Perrotta: Every now and then, I meet a couple who met in high school who have been married twenty-five years, and clearly they're still in love. They've experienced their entire sexual lives together.

Nerve: I feel about that the same way I feel about people who spend their whole lives living in the tiny town they grew up in. It's sort of romantic and fanciful, but horrifying at the same time.

Perrotta: I agree. One of the things that struck me about this whole abstinence thing is the total fear of experience. Even something as simple as getting your heart broken. I've had my heart broken two or three times, and it's taught me a few things about relationships. It makes you smarter. It makes you kinder to other people. There are all sorts of ways to talk about getting your heart broken that aren't the end of the world. But if you go to an abstinence rally, the metaphor they love is: "Your heart is this pure thing, and every time somebody comes, they rip a chunk out of it! They take a chainsaw to it, and then you have this jagged, awful thing that doesn't look like a sweet Valentine heart anymore. Is that the way you want to go through life? With a damaged heart?"

"The second you don't look like Sam Riley anymore, the easier it is to convince yourself you're Ian Curtis."

Sarah — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 15:22:00 GMT

Will Doig interviews Sam Riley, who plays Ian Curtis in the New Joy Division biopic, Control . According to Will, Riley "has a great voice, and not just cause he's british. It's a nice smoky baritone. and his cadence was great. For instance, when he talked about Deborah and that whole part about portraying a man in front of that man's widow, he got very quiet and contemplative."

What was it like meeting the widow of the man you were portraying?
I was embarrassed, to be honest. I think we both thought it was fairly surreal. I was in their house, I had to sleep upstairs, I was wearing his clothes, and I'd be walking around their house and I'd bump into Debbie, and I almost wanted to say sorry.

Sorry for portraying Ian?
Yeah. For being an imposter or something. [Playing Ian in front of her] was like saying something about someone when they're standing right behind you - it was that kind of feeling. I could see she was nervous, but she was lovely.

Visit the film's official site.

Watch a video of Joy Division performing "Love Will Tear Us Apart."

“He's not weird for the sake of being weird; he's just weird because he's weird.”

Sarah — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 19:00:00 GMT

Two terrific pieces from the film issue that I missed while I was out:

This is a great, long interview with Joseph Lanza, whose book Phallic Frenzy “spends as many pages describing [Ken] Russell's onscreen pageantry as its symbolic underpinnings: exaggerated phallic imagery, abrasive anti-religious scenes, nude male wrestling, incontinence, rape and forced enemas.”

Says Lanza, “Some people will look at the book and say, "Phallic Frenzy? This must be pornography." Well, it's about penises, but it's often about how terrifying they can be, and what the penis might have represented to Ken Russell at various times of his life.”

In Will Doig’s charming piece, “Hollywood Square,” Will talks about his love for mediocre Hollywood comedies. Many of them feature John Candy. None of them are good date movies.

“Made in America is not a film you want anyone to know you've seen, least of all a philosophy major from the University of Maryland whom you're trying to have sex with. I knew, even as I was walking the box to the Blockbuster counter, that I was torpedoing the date. I could have rented a Cassavetes or a Schlesinger, but I couldn't stop myself. I was going to make him watch this, dammit.”

New on Nerve, 9.27.07: "Baby, it's Dumpsville, population you."

Sarah — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 15:43:00 GMT

Our favorite piece of advice came from Matthew, 26, who gave a few phrases to avoid when breaking up with someone:

"It's not you, it's me."
"Baby, it's Dumpsville, population you."
"The force was not with us."
"There's not enough space in this universe, real or made-up, for both of us."

TMI: Will's L Face

Sarah — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 16:59:00 GMT

This here is Will Doig, associate editor, losing at slots in Atlantic City. Will has never made this face in the office.

New on Nerve, 9.19.07: Weirdo Laureate, an interview with George Saunders

Sarah — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 15:30:00 GMT

Today Will Doig interviews George Saunders. According to Will’s introduction, “it's with no small amount of fanfare than The Braindead Megaphone, Saunders' first collection of nonfiction, arrives on the scene. Happily, his incisive wit survived the transition intact. The book opens with the titular essay, a commentary on the twenty-four-hour news cycle in which Saunders manages a fresh take on a topic that's been rehashed a million times before. Other stories depict the insane concentration of wealth in Dubai and the total minimalism of a Nepalese boy who's been meditating under a tree for six months. But the central theme of media coverage — its ridiculous relentlessness, its relentless ridiculousness — recurs as an amplified squawk that gives the collection its name.”

“I honestly wasn't super familiar with his work,” Will told us. “I'd read some of his magazine articles, but to prepare for the interview I had to go out and buy three of his books and read all three in a week. (For the record, I loved them). I basically just wanted to get him talking about media, since that's what his new collection of essays is largely about, and I'm really into TV news (though not because I think it's good).

He talked really fast, and went off on lots of tangents. He's a professor at Syracuse, so I could see him being one of those professors who's all exuberant and hyper and tells lots of stories. About halfway through the interview he apologized for acting so crazy and said he'd had "like, seven pots of coffee." This was a late-afternoon interview, so that seemed reasonable.”

Here's something that didn't make it in the piece.

Will: “It’s mostly me babbling incoherently, but I guess what I kind of like about it is that I’m trying to get Saunders to go off on some big media theory by positing my own grand, rambling, complex theory about cable news, and then in the end he's like, ‘dude, just relax and enjoy.’”

WD: Just to bring it back to news, and to media for a second, I mean, it’s sort of amazing to watch a movie like Broadcast News, have you ever seen Broadcast News? With Holly Hunter?

GS: Yeah. Is that, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not—“

WD: No, that’s Network.

GS: I haven’t seen Broadcast News

WD: Okay, basically it’s about, you know, this TV news station, it’s similar to Network and William Hurt ends up getting this TV anchor job because he’s better looking than Albert Brooks even though Albert Brooks is the better reporter. The movie has all sorts of little concerns like that, about the state of television media, that today just seem totally prosaic, because you’re like, ‘Of course the pretty person gets the anchor job.’ Like, I mean, would there be any question about that today? So I think, I don’t know, it’s interesting that like uh, I guess, like um, I’m sorry, I’m kind of, I’m not getting to the point—

GS: Oh believe me, I have no grounds on which to criticize—

WD: Like I remember when CNN got in trouble because a couple years ago they put this ad on for Paula Zahn’s show, and there was the sound of a zipper unzipping and there was a voiceover that said something like, “What other morning show is Brilliant, Super-Smart and Sexy?” Other that just the idea of advertising as news program as "brilliant and super-smart," which i love, um, I mean, I guess, is it weird, or is it bad, that basically it’s like Aryan Nation out there on cable news? it’s like all blonde women. With blue eyes. Is it bad that they’re doing this, or does it not matter do you think? Cause I figure if it gets people to watch news, not the dumb news, but like actually get information, maybe having pretty people as anchors isn’t such a bad idea. You know?

GS: Yeah, you know I really don’t have much opinion about it, except sort of to say…You know, this idea that you’re describing is actually funny. This special race of Aryan, beautiful people who are smart enough to have gotten that far. You know, they might come off a little vapid, but to be, you know, even in that rank, you’ve got to be pretty sharp. Got through journalism school and all. Honestly, like 95% of my personality just sits back and kind of enjoys it.

Full interview here.

New on Nerve, 9.11.07: Nerve Editors Give Great Oral

Sarah — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 15:00:00 GMT

From an oral history of Nerve, interviews with current Nerve editors

"Working at Nerve is like being perpetually two drinks into a really, really fun night on the town." - Ada Calhoun, Consulting Editor, Editor-in-Chief of Babble