Monday Medley

What we read while maintaining NPI’s AAA credit rating…

• The riveting and detailed account of the plan to kill Osama bin Laden.

• Larry David made the cover of Rolling Stone.  The issue has several features on David, including Cheryl Hines’s take on their fictional divorce, an interview with Susie Essman, and a discussion with current Curb and former Seinfeld writers.

• Another prominent TV misanthrope, Louis C.K., was profiled in GQ.

• The most common specialty for blind mathematicians? Geometry.

• Geoff Dyer pens the book review of the week.

• How did you celebrate the tenth anniversary of one of the best comedies of last decade?

• Anthony Bourdain was on Real Time with Bill Maher, thankfully supplementing some incredibly annoying panelists. He was apparently making the rounds this week, also appearing on The Colbert Report. Political theorist Michael Sandel also recently made a Colbert Report appearance.

• Spencer and Heidi are now willing to admit some mistakes.

The Speidi Breakup

Sometimes something can seem both inevitable and impossible. Like the first successful moon landing, or the election of America’s first black president, thus is the feeling when news broke yesterday that Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montag had broken up.

On the one hand, anyone who watched The Hills or did merely a cursory overview of tabloid coverage of this relationship had to know just how dysfunctional it was. Spencer tore Heidi away from her best friend, from her sister, from her parents, from her career, etc. Basically, describing Spencer as “controlling” is a drastic understatement.

And yet the two seemed to have a symbiotic hold on each other. Whereas the annoying habit of using portmanteau names to refer to celebrity relationships—Brangelina, Bennifer, etc.—is usually just another way that modern culture shits on the English language, with Speidi it seemed like an appropriate illustration of just how inseparable they were in the public eye. Neither of them would have been significantly famous without the other. Spencer was notorious for his manipulative, God-like hold over his wife, and Heidi was infamous for her docile acceptance of what seemingly everyone else in the world recognized as nefarious manipulation by her husband.

Monday Medley

What we read while practicing torch lighting for 2012….

• John S reviewed Lauren Conrad’s latest book, the new best-seller Sweet Little Lies. Conrad went on Good Morning America to promote it. Meanwhile, her old nemesis Heidi Montag announced that she’ll pose for Playboy… again.

• Malcolm Gladwell on inebriation and the sociology of drinking. Tyler Cowen on Gladwell on drinking.

• French pop-philosopher Bernard-Henry Levi rips Immanuel Kant in new book; too bad basis for said ripping is a critique of Kant written by a non-existent philosopher who was invented by a satirist. Even if BHL had claimed it was for philanthropic concerns, Kant would not have approved of the lie.

• Leon Wieseltier on why the Internet is hurting young writers. Hey, Leon, help us out with a link! Also at The New Republic, Ruth Franklin on the fading idea of “American” fiction.

• Joe Lieberman is a flip-flopper, kind of.

• If you haven’t yet read the John Mayer Playboy interview–in which he throws out the N-word, calls Jessica Simpson “sexual napalm,” and treats masturbation with a reverence we haven’t seen since one Alexander Portnoy–here’s your chance to catch up for the watercooler. The interviewer to Mayer’s interviewee, Rob Tannenbaum penned his own reaction-to-the-reaction piece for The Daily Beast, criticizing the efforts of those like the usually reliable Stephen Marche at Esquire.

• And because we’re not entirely sure if 1988 was better than 2000 in the dunk contest, a bonus video: