How to do a real (fake) interview

Hadley Freeman makes the case for standardizing the practice of faking interviews with celebrities (as apparently happened when a Cosmopolitan journalist interviewed Scarlett Johansson herself):

For all their narcissism, celebrities, by and large, hate doing interviews and journalists, for all their hack-like nature, hate doing them too. The former are expected to discuss issues that they might not even mention to their shrink, let alone a total stranger, while the latter has to sit there with a straight face while the celebrity says things like, “Working on this $100m movie/record/TV series really helped me grow as a person, y’know?” Celebrities go through this farrago to keep up their “exposure”. Meanwhile, magazines believe that a month without Anne Hathaway on the cover is a month half-lived.

So fake interviews look like a smashing solution: the celebrity gets the coverage, the magazine gets the story and embarrassment is spared all round. Just jigsaw together phrases like “it’s my family and friends that keep me grounded”, and “I feel very lucky”, the likes of which are all in the Cosmo piece, and you’re good to go. Seeing as the photo on the cover has been unrecognisably airbrushed, why not apply the same fakery to the interview?

Well, isn’t that why they invented E!?  All the benefits of the interview, without the actual interview.

(image from flickr user MK Media Productions under a Creative Commons license)

In case you were wondering how conservatives were going to try to exploit the Blagojevich scandal…

…this is how: paint Democrats as the new party of the incorrigibly corrupt and scandal-ridden (never mind who the Grand “old” party of scandal “was”…), attack House leadership (do they really need another phony spike on which to impale Nancy Pelosi?) for its supervision of such turpitude, and (naturally) smear liberalism as the province of deviants and dandies.

I would fear this strategy — as I remain convinced that Mark Foley, Duke Cunningham, Jack Abramoff et al. did more to bring down Republicans in 2006 than Iraq or any other factor — except for two redeeming points: one, at least the recent spate of scandals (if you can even call the downfalls of relative apostasies like Blagojevich and William Jefferson a “spate”) is occurring immediately after an election, instead of before.  And second…we can always count on the GOP to serve up some nice ethical violations in the next couple years.

Atomic sex

Writing an article about the obsessively intricate details of the exact measurements and functionalities of an atomic bomb from over 60 years ago is, it seems, a prime facie example of something that is not really very interesting to anyone outside of the singularly dedicated group of atomic enthusiasts that apparently exists.  But that’s why you add sex to the mix:

Now that's a sexy bomb.

In the standard historical accounts, the way that the bomb’s gun mechanism worked was by shooting a cylindrical “male” uranium projectile into a concave, stationary uranium target. This act of atomic coitus created a mass sufficient to produce a critical reaction…

The source of the error, Coster-Mullen recognized, was an assumption that every (male) researcher who studied the subject had made about the relation between projectile and target. These scholars had apparently been unable to conceive of an arrangement other than a “missionary position” bomb, in which a solid male projectile penetrated a vessel-like female target. But Coster-Mullen realized that a female-superior arrangement—in which a hollow projectile slammed down on top of a stationary cylinder of highly enriched uranium—yielded the correct size and mass.

I think it’s safe to say that once you use the phrase “atomic coitus,” readers might pay a little more attention.

(image of the — evidently female — atomic bomb “Little Boy” that was dropped over Hiroshima, from flickr user cormac 70 under a Creative Commonse license)