Wednesday evening, Gawker Media hosted a party at Soho House in honor of the soon-to-be-released film version of How To Lose Friends and Alienate People, Toby Young’s memoir of his misadventures as a contributing editor at Vanity Fair in the late '90s. Half of the crowd kept referring to the celebration as a book party, despite the fact that the book in question had been released over six years ago. Indeed, the film did seem to take a backseat, as the room was full of media types eager to speak with Mr. Young, who did not arrive until late.

However, our first conversation was with a different type.  read more »

What happened to NBC, wonders Felix Gillette. "In recent days, MSNBC’s president, Mr. Griffin, has told a number of reporters that the change was not made as a result of outside pressure. Still, some TV insiders continue to play the MSNBC parlor game, speculating about how and why the McCain camp appeared to have succeeded in budging MSNBC where Hillary and her democratic supporters had failed."

Cheers! John Koblin reports that The New York Times will celebrate its own coverage of the Beijing Olympics with "Champagne and egg rolls to reward the 'stunning' coverage The Times produced on the Web, and in the newspaper..."

Publishers are clambering to put together books on Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, reports Leon Neyfakh. Plus: After David Carr, Bill Clegg.

PLUS: Femocracy '08... What Has Happened to the Toronto Film Festival?... Ira Silverberg

Just ran into local hero David Carr on his way to the New York Times’ filing center. He said he has spent his day so far not in the Xcel Center but outdoors, reporting on the protests. The big question there, he said, was whether the local anarchists who organized the march were going to overcome their natural inclination towards mild-mannered politesse, a.k.a Minnesota Nice.

“I got pulled over this morning for doing 60 in a 30 zone,” he said, by way of illustration of the phenomenon. “He apologized and let me go. He said, ‘I’m sorry I had to pull you over, I know you're busy, but you were really hauling the mail, and I had to tell you to slow down.'”

The bus line that is shipping reporters from the media tents outside the Pepsi Center to Invesco Field is getting awfully long, but it's moving fast. David Carr, who was right behind Lynn Sweet, and directly ahead of Newsweek's Andrew Romano, was on line for only about five minutes before he got onto the bus. Mr. Carr was smoking a Camel and thrilled that his new book, The Night of the Gun, would land at #11 on The New York Times' nonfiction best-seller list this Sunday. But, he added, it was only a matter of time before he was going to get kicked from the list once Labor Day hit and an avalanche of campaign books flood the market.  read more »

David Carr must be one busy man this month. In an interview with Salon's Andrew O'Herir, Mr. Carr, The New York Times media columnist and author of the recently released book, The Night of Gun, says that he "got 1,200 e-mails when an excerpt of the book ran in The New York Times Magazine, and a lot of them were from people seeking recovery."

We know from Jennifer Senior's profile of Mr. Carr in this week's New York magazine that he probably felt compelled to answer them all since:

When he recently wrote a media column slamming Fox News, he got 450 e-mails, and he answered each and every one.  read more »

Jennifer Senior profiles her former colleague David Carr in this week's New York. In a welcome curveball, she focuses not on his recovery from drug addiction but on his transformation from misogynistic creep to loving husband and father, which she argues was "the real redemptive story in David's life, even if it's a less dramatic one than kicking a coke habit."

The main revelation in the piece is that for all his honesty, there was a lot of stuff Mr. Carr couldn't bring himself to cover in the book, or removed from the final version at the urging of friends. A lot of this material apparently concerned the "busy" and reckless sex life that he led as an addict: "People said, 'There's enough sort of misogyny and objectification without this kind of fratty stuff.  read more »

Leon Neyfakh reads David Carr's The Night of the Gun and concludes that the book "turns the traditional memoir on its head, assuming as it does that its author knows nothing about his own life and must research it as though it were someone else’s. The book practically interrogates itself, questioning its own right to exist even as Mr. Carr vigilantly gathers string on the dark and druggy life he led into his 30s."

Josh Benson and Felix Gillette examine, "The McCain campaign’s response to the quantifiable imbalance in volume-of-coverage—a function, depending on whom you ask, of the fact that the press loves the Barack Obama story or that John McCain is the Republican nominee for president—has been a petulant cry of foul for the kind of infraction gentlemen are supposed to ignore.  read more »

It’s not immediately clear when you get to the end of NYT columnist David Carr’s new book, The Night of the Gun, whether you’ve just seen the memoir redeemed or irrevocably dismantled. A work of traditional reportage motivated by the fashionable and unnerving notion that it’s impossible to really know anything for sure, Mr. Carr’s book—which arrives in bookstores next week—turns the traditional memoir on its head, assuming as it does that its author knows nothing about his own life and must research it as though it were someone else’s. The book practically interrogates itself, questioning its own right to exist even as Mr.  read more »

The Night of the Gun: A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of his Life—His Own
By David Carr
Simon and Schuster, 400 pages, $26

For most of us, David Carr is the goofy-looking Midwesterner most often seen unrolling a red carpet with his foot on NYTimes.com during Oscar season. He calls himself the Carpet Bagger. He has a blog and a column, too. In his gravelly twang he explains the ins and outs of Hollywood like some sort of benevolent avuncular muppety Richard Attenborough. With his slightly lost-looking pale blue eyes, his open vowels and his dorkiness, David Carr—like David Pogue, the Times technology writer fond of starring in his own iPhone musicals—brought hope to us slightly off writers.  read more »

New York Times columnist David Carr’s forthcoming addiction memoir The Night of the Gun, the carefully reported—that is, not vaguely remembered and pieced together—tour de force that was excerpted on the cover of The New York Times Magazine this past weekend, features lots and lots of minor characters. Dealers, cops, girlfriends, pals, fellow junkies—they all pass in and out, some staying in Mr. Carr’s bumpy orbit for years and others sticking around only as long as they needed to.

One of these minor characters is a guy named “DonJack,” who comes up a couple of times over the course of the book but never really comes to life.  read more »