Keeping up with the Winklevii: Where the Kardashians and the Twins Meet

Because Freud worked in a pre-Kardashian epoch -- sad for him! -- he probably never thought to come up with an Eros or Thanatos to explain the lust for fameball wealth, a drive or itch that would explain the need to get married on TV only to get divorced everywhere a few months later or, if you're the Winklevoss twins, to maintain a long legal battle even after your initial lawsuit is settled and its zombie version dismissed. This week a Vanity Fair profile of Mark Zuckerberg's most genetically-interesting bete noires conspired with the Kim-Kris split to remind us that the drive itself is the thing. The ownership agita suffered by a pair of already-rich, WASP-handsome Harvard rowers in Facebook's infant days was compelling enough to catalyze the plot of an acclaimed movie, grabbing the pair an unusual role in culture that 's led them to become pistachio pitchmen and who knows what else. To Dana Vachon, a novelist and keeper of a great-but-difficult Twitter feed, the Winklevii drop hints of global expansion and promise to ramble onward in their quest for "justice," by which they mean the bigger chunk of Facebook they feel they would own if it weren't for some inept lawyering. On a spur-of -the-moment road trip to Mexico, Mr. Vachon and the twins pause for beer and a soccer game, brushing the locals with whatever passes for fame these days: The Mexican soccer team defeated America 4-2, a victory sweetened by the presence of a compound American marvel, Harvard-pedigreed, Hollywood-certified, flesh-made-celluloid, celluloid-made-flesh. They signed autographs, received party invitations, and posed for iPhone pictures with locals who examined the photos as soon as they got their phones back, finger-zooming in and out with awe of self, child-like, fleetingly possessed of the primitive wonder which ascribes photography directly to magic, and once inspired fear of Xerox machines, and keeps the millions wondering why they can't stop staring at a Web site whose greatest debt will always be to Pavlov. If accounts of the sexual-harrassment charges against Herman Cain felt a bit gossipy, that 's OK, argues Gawker's John Cook, so long as those exercises in she-said, she-said reportage don't pop up on news outlets that otherwise position themselves above such coverage. A clean line of reasoning! You can be "the gold standard of newsgathering and reporting throughout the world," as the AP self-righteously claims to be as it dismisses bloggers as pajama-clad parasites, or you can report that some lady thinks Cain is a sex creep for unspecified reasons. You can't do both. Claude Brodesser-Akner, a former Ad Age writer, had a nice one on New York magazine's Vulture blog, explaining a highly unusual -- and highly likely to fail -- Hollywood deal: Sony's purchase of the rights to adapt the very popular video game "Assassin's Creed": Besides explaining why we might feel a quickened pulse while watching home run or a hail mary, Le Anne Schreiber's Grantland piece about mirror neurons also gives us good scientific reason to mute Joe Buck and Tim McCarver once and for all: "Absolutely," Iacoboni said. "We actually have some data on that . Being analytical almost shuts down your motor cortex, doesn't let you simulate in full what you are watching. I shut the sound off while watching tennis." What better way to celebrate the Groupon IPO than with a properly snarky flowchart from The New York Observer's BetaBeat? Find out whether you should have invested here.

Keeping up with the Winklevii: Where the Kardashians and the Twins Meet

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