This week, as part of a massive round of layoffs at Paramount, the entire MTV News department got switched off for good. It's difficult to remember in today's world of infinite and narrowly-targeted news outlets, but for Generation X and millennials, MTV News was the place to get informed on music, fashion, sex, and even politics. It brought a youthful curiosity to the big subjects, and the analytical eye of the expert to the fluffier stuff. It was one of a kind, and like so much of what happened at MTV, it was made up as it went along. Doug Herzog started the whole thing nearly forty years ago. Since his time as MTV's first News Director, he's gone on to run Comedy Central, Fox, and USA Network, among others, and he's just wrapped a fascinating podcast called BASIC!, in which he charts the history of basic cable. I caught up with Doug just after the news of MTV's demise broke. |
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To shoot, to sip, or to mix—with a few celebrity-backed brands in there for good measure. |
| In a new documentary, It Ain't Over, Yogi's adorable persona obscures his greatness as a player—and impact on the game. |
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A New York civil jury actually sent CNN a lifeboat on Tuesday, and CNN instead chose to swim away toward deeper water and the far horizon. Nobody sensible could have complained if CNN had bagged the idea of Wednesday night's El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago performance piece, saying, "Look, we still think this would be a piece of great American journalism, but giving someone a chance to shine in front of a carefully constructed audience 24 hours after 12 of his fellow citizens declared him a sexual predator requires a serious re-think on our part. Maybe in late August, assuming there aren't three criminal indictments by then." |
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Solid, striped, and everything in between. |
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"Then how about this—" someone challenges Sally Milz, Curtis Sittenfeld's protagonist in Romantic Comedy, "can you define cheese for me? Because I still haven't figured out, after two decades, where the line is between cheese and emotional extravagance that's acceptable. What makes a song or a movie or a moment in real life land on one side or the other?" What a question for Sally, who's spent years dramatizing—and yes, also deriding—pop culture as a veteran writer on a fictional iteration of Saturday Night Live (The Night Owls, or TNO). What a question for Sittenfeld, whose impressively varied collection of work bestrides both sides of the literary/commercial fiction binary—that oft-contested dichotomy that skeptics feel shouldn't exist, doesn't exist, or isn't well-defined enough to establish its existence one way or the other. What is literary fiction? What is commercial fiction? Are they actually different? |
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