Wired's Boobs Cover, James Frey's Onerous Terms and Facebook's Defense

The web may be dead, but boobs will live forever as magazine cover fodder, even for -- or maybe especially at -- geek bible Wired. Readers of its latest issue will be greeted with a high-quality closeup of anonymous cleavage and the coverline "100% Natural," a tease to a piece on breast tissue engineering. This isn't the first time Wired's gone the cheesecake route, and it is the last straw for blogger Cindy Royal. Ms. Royal voiced her annoyance with a string of cover girls who, to her mind, are there more for the way they look than for what they've achieved: Julia Allison, Uma Thurman, Pam from "The Office" and so on. Not one to have his knockers knocked, Wired Editor Chris Anderson showed up in the comments with a calm, reasoned discussion of his cover approach. One problem, he said, is "not enough high-profile women in the tech industry who are recognizable to sell a cover." But it's not just about women and Wired: Speaking of challenged integrity, James Frey has reemerged with the news that it's a bright, shiny morning for... onerous contracts for the aspiring writers of young adult fiction whom Mr. Frey hopes to help make it big. New York magazine's Suzanne Mozes dropped a long piece on Full Fathom Five, the fabulist's new company, which isn't shy about getting the terms it wants: Some writers were happy enough to sign. "It's a crappy deal but a great opportunity," one writer told Ms. Mozes. Which about sums up media in the 21st Century. Back in the land of the earnest and the well-meaning, The Atlantic's excellent tech writer Alexis Madrigal mounted a lovely defense of Facebook and the connections forged there. Written in response to a New York Review of Books piece by novelist Zadie Smith in which she expressed her alienation from social networking, Mr. Madrigal's meditation takes the often banal goings-on and makes them sound transcendent, as here in the very personal kicker, about her long-distance relationship and its tradition of trading photos: But I didn't. I thought about the hands that took the photo, fingers and the fingernails, then wrists and arms running up to shoulders and along the ridge there to the face hiding under a bonnet of curly locks. I saw her looking at farm animals and thinking of a home. That particular pile of bits wasn't just a pile of bits. It was like bones, an intimation of a body and a place, a body in place. A story. Our messages carry with them the smudges and swipes, the tap-taptaps we use to make meanings. For transport, they are flattened and virtualized. Then it is up to us -- as an act of imagination -- to reinflate them. This relationship predates, well, everything. Last week, we explored the Washington Post's "Dancing Bears" debacle. In the interest of telling the full story, we'll now end with a more successful video effort from the newspaper. This promotion for the Post's iPad app -- which itself looks strong -- is a tongue-in-cheek little gem, the highlight of which is the ancient Ben Bradlee teaching Bob Woodward how to use the device.

Wired's Boobs Cover, James Frey's Onerous Terms and Facebook's Defense

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