WIRED Magazine

The Atlantic's press reps just sent out a release announcing the hiring of Bob Cohn as editorial director of the 151-year-old magazine's Web site. Mr. Cohn, most recently Executive Editor of Wired, will be filling the newly-created job in The Atlantic's Washington, D.C. offices.

In a statement, Atlantic editor James Bennet said:

'Bob brings to The Atlantic a superb record as an editor and writer, and a deep understanding of the relationship between print and online brands. With his stewardship, we look forward to further engaging our readers with provocative and dynamic content while inspiring the national conversation.'

According to the release, theatlantic.com had 36.8 million page views in October.

 

How do you outdo Hollywood's master of mind-bending meta plots? If you're Wired and you're profiling Synecdoche, New York writer-director Charlie Kaufman, you create a blog that reveals the process of how the story was conceived, pitched, written, and edited. The profile and the blog are written by Jason Tanz. (This comes via Kottke.org.)

Mr. Kaufman, who previously wrote Being John Malkovich, Human Nature, Adaptation, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, and The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, seems to inspire journalists to look inside—or inside-out—to match his inventiveness. Then again, some just come at him straight on or use him as an  read more »

Let's say you're a magazine editor and you need to illustrate a special issue about office life: What do you do for art? If you're the editor of Businessweek and you're compiling a special Business @ Work issue in collaboration with readers (a first, according to the magazine's Web site), you just do what New York did in April 2007 with its "Office Life" package and slap Rainn Wilson of NBC's The Office on the cover and in a spread inside. Oh, and you might as well get photographer Chris Buck to shoot him, like New York did.

To justify that cover placement, do a short interview with Mr.  read more »

As part of its 15th anniversary celebration, Wired has posted a few videos and articles in which its founders look back at what they got right and wrong in the early days of the magazine.  read more »

Last night, Al Gore mingled with muckety-mucks at Harry and Tina Brown's.

Tonight, he'll be at Town Hall with at least one of the aforementioned muckety-mucks. (That would be Laurie David, the wife of Larry David, who appears in this announcement from the Town Hall website with the alternate spelling.)

Date: (Thur) May 25 at 8 pm Event: AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH: A WIRED TOWN HALL DISCUSSION ON THE CLIMATE CRISIS Description: Al Gore in conversation with James Hansen, Laurie Davide, Lawrence Bender, moderated by WIRED contributing editor John Hockenberry. Ticket Price: $20 orchestra & $15 balcony Where to get Tickets: On sale now at The Town Hall Box Office and Ticketmaster

Producer: Wired Magazine

At what point does the movie promotion end and the run for president begin?

The Transom was, of course, entranced by today's JT Leroy semi-expose in New York magazine, even though Serena Torrey, the icy blonde vixen PR woman at New York magazine wouldn't send over advance on it last Friday, or even arrange to have the author comment on the piece. Even though, you know, we all get that email from New York mag every Friday that lists the coming week's contents and claims, "New York magazine writers and editors are available for comment." OH ARE THEY, MS. TORREY? ARE THEY REALLY?

Anyhoo.

The proof in the JT-is-a-fake pudding was a little weak at the end—what's that? You didn't get to the end of the 6000-or-so word article? Huh—but still, we couldn't believe that the sexpose didn't address Mr. Leroy's raccoon penis bone price-gouging profiteering markup in his online store. $17? Please, everyone knows you can buy some raccoon weiner for $3 bucks.

But more importantly, underlying the whole article is a fascinating unnoted sexual web. An army of literature lovers indeed! Why, The Transom is quite ready to resurrect that terrible high school idea of the sex chart (see also: the Buffy sex chart) to explicate all this.  read more »

Why, just from the characters on the first page of the story, The Transom can draw a straight line of sex partners from Dale Peck to X to Y to Z to Allen Ginsberg and Dennis Cooper and William S. Burroughs, which of course branches off to, hmm, let's call him M, to Gore Vidal to Jack Kerouac... oh, the list of randy devils goes on and on. It's even just a hop and a skip to Tab Hunter and Anthony Perkins and Rock Hudson!

—Choire Sicha