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Out's liquid lunch, Lolita vs. Humbert and other marvels of media madness
By Susan Lehman
(12/24/98)

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BROWSE THE
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BY SUSAN LEHMAN

Journalist James Fallows, Harvard Law prof and author Randall Kennedy, former Council of Economic Advisors chairwoman and FOB Laura Tyson, author (and wife of Richard Holbrooke) Kati Martin, Novell CEO Eric Schmidt and others are endeavoring to make the world a better place for freelance writers and serious, iconoclastic thinkers. Together Fallows & Co. make up the board of the New America Foundation, which opens its doors tomorrow.

The fund, supported by money from Norman Lear and the Rockefellers and headed by a frighteningly energetic 30-year-old named Ted Halstead, aims to juice up current civic discourse and to provide career assistance for public intellectuals whose thinking does not fit within conventional ideological bounds. Toward this end, the fund will bestow fairly generous one-year stipends on those it deems the most challenging political thinkers of the day.

"Our guiding philosophy is heterodoxy. We want to pick the best and the brightest individuals we can find and give them the freedom to develop ideas without encumbrances," Halstead promises. "We're going to be unpredictable."

Margaret Talbot and Jonathan Chait have been named fellows and will leave the New Republic to join up, along with Harper's Washington editor Michael Lind, former U.S. News senior editor and Salon's new national correspondent Debra Dickerson, former Clinton speechwriter Eric Liu, Brookings fellow Jacob Hacker, Gregory Rodriguez (who wrote "The Emerging Latino Middle Class") and author and freelance journalist Silvana Paternostro.

What exactly will the fellows do when they report to work on Friday? "Each will be brilliant and will write a stream of articles ... They'll take advantage of the freedom of well-subsidized funding," says Halstead, explaining that one of the ways NAF will differ from most think tanks is that instead of publishing fellows' work in in-house journals that no one reads, New America fellows will publish editorials and feature stories in major newspapers and magazines. He says the $50,000 senior fellow stipends and the $25,000 paid younger fellows is probably half of what they'll need to live; he expects they'll earn the rest through article and speaking fees.

The NAF contract, under which senior fellows (Talbot, Dickerson and Lind) will serve as editors, mentors and guides to the younger fellows, will serve one of the fund's central purposes: to build a lasting intellectual community. "It's something that's missing in my generation," says Halstead.

Superagent Wylie goes international

Ever shrewd, ever ambitious literary superagent Andrew Wylie is opening shop in Madrid. Wylie, who already has a London office, says three new employees will man the Madrid outpost. "We want to look for books that are literary and have international appeal," says Wylie. "The old book-selling structure led by bookstores, the front-list, down-market fiction formula, is not appealing." Wylie explains that "what works now is literature that is sold internationally over time." Translation: Wylie is concentrating on high-end literature because the shelf life of Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges (whose estates Wylie represents) is longer than that of Judith Krantz and her ilk.

In addition to Borges and Calvino, Wylie reps roughly 295 living, breathing writers, including Salman Rushdie, Susan Sontag, Martin Amis, Saul Bellow, Hunter S. Thompson, Larry McMurtry, Philip Gourevitch and A.M. Homes.

As Wylie ventures forth into territories American agents have not explored before ("If they have," says Wylie, "they've done so with discretion that is remarkable"), his competitors wonder if Wylie can build an international business empire while handling the delicate egos of his writers.

Apparently unconcerned with such questions, Wylie is forging ahead with plans to open a Tokyo office with Orion, a Japanese literary agency.

Flynt's honcho inspires heavy breathing from the GOP

"I don't consider myself a journalist," says Hustler editor Allan MacDonell. Well, you can't fault the Hustler team for lack of honesty.

Referring to his investigations of vamoosed former Speaker-elect Bob Livingston and still-alive-and-violently-kicking Rep. Bob Barr, MacDonell says, "What we're doing is more a form of vandalism." He adds, "I enjoy it."

MacDonell, who edits Hustler and five other Flynt publications, serves as point man in Flynt's ongoing effort to out Republican leaders. He says the Flynt Report, a special Hustler publication that will include photos, video stills, transcripts of audiotapes and other evidence of sexual misconduct on the part of the congressmen and women MacDonell says have been "vocal, voluble and vociferous about impeachment," will be out at the end of January, or sometime before the Senate trial ends. (The report will also be available at www.hustler.com.) But MacDonell says he doubts Flynt will be able to resist releasing more information before the report is published.

Just what sort of revelations will Flynt be unfolding before a breathless nation? MacDonell will only say, "You haven't heard phone sex till you've heard Republican phone sex."

N E X T_ P A G E | Drudge: I'll have my crow flambéed with brandy and a '62 Yquem