Of course, we’d be loath to admit it in this day and age, but ask any soul-baring 40-year-old single heterosexual woman what she most longs for in life, and she probably won’t tell you it’s a better career or a smaller waistline or a bigger apartment. Most likely, she’ll say that what she really wants is a husband (and, by extension, a child).

[snip]

My advice is this: Settle!

What stands out from the article isn’t the fact that author Lori Gottlieb herself hasn’t settled (she’s a 40-something who, along with a friend, decided to have a baby with donor sperm “in fits of self-empowerment” — surely the best reason to have a baby). Or her attempt at ironically defusing the shock and vitriol she just knew her taboo-busting article would provoke (“Oh, I know—I’m guessing there are single 30-year-old women reading this right now who will be writing letters to the editor to say that the women I know aren’t widely representative, that I’ve been co-opted by the cult of the feminist backlash, and basically, that I have no idea what I’m talking about.”) Or her repeated undermining of her case for settling.

No, the most notable aspect of the story is that Gottlieb is dispensing romantic advice even though she seems to be the kind of person who believes that life is like a romantic comedy. Or rather, that romantic comedies are true to life, and that adults should draw their lessons about life and love from TV and the movies.

First we get this penetrating analysis of Friends and Sex and the City:

[W]hile Rachel and her supposed soul mate, Ross, finally get together (for the umpteenth time) in the finale of Friends, do we feel confident that she’ll be happier with Ross than she would have been had she settled down with Barry, the orthodontist, 10 years earlier? She and Ross have passion but have never had long-term stability, and the fireworks she experiences with him but not with Barry might actually turn out to be a liability, given how many times their relationship has already gone up in flames. It’s equally questionable whether Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw, who cheated on her kindhearted and generous boyfriend, Aidan, only to end up with the more exciting but self-absorbed Mr. Big, will be better off in the framework of marriage and family.

Um, does she know that Ross, Rachel, Carrie, and Big are fictional characters? Immature, spoiled fictional characters. Who ultimately end up together for the sake of dramatic television, because the audience will smile even though they (the mature, living-in-the-real-world parts of the audience, anyway) recognize that the pairings would be bad if the characters were real-life people, which they aren’t.

It gets better. Gottlieb writes:

In my formative years, romance was John Cusack and Ione Skye in Say Anything. But when I think about marriage nowadays, my role models are the television characters Will and Grace, who, though Will was gay and his relationship with Grace was platonic, were one of the most romantic couples I can think of.

Wow. Okay, I’ll play this game too. In my formative years, romance was Ben Affleck and Joey Lauren Adams in Chasing Amy (it was truth, maaan — aside from the confused-lesbian plot and Jay and Silent Bob). But when I think about marriage nowadays, my role models aren’t fictional sitcom characters. They’re real people whose mature, real-life marriages I admire.

I could understand a pop culture reference here and there; it’s easier to invoke Friends than to explain a real couple you know. But the way she repeatedly raises these examples — later we get, “Remember the movie Broadcast News? Holly Hunter’s dilemma — the choice between passion and friendship — is exactly the one many women over 30 are faced with.” — as though they’re relevant to romantic advice, is just weird.

As are her ideas of what real, non-sitcom marriage should be and what settling means in that context. Take this passage:

Don’t worry about passion or intense connection. Don’t nix a guy based on his annoying habit of yelling “Bravo!” in movie theaters. Overlook his halitosis or abysmal sense of aesthetics.

Sure, if you define “passion and intensity” as “high-drama, frequently argumentative, immature sitcom love,” then you shouldn’t worry about that. But notice her default assumption is that yelling “Bravo” in a theater is annoying, and that an abysmal sense of aesthetics is bad (I grant her the halitosis one). Whereas a more, shall we say, realistic view of people would allow that these could be among the many idiosyncrasies that make each of us different and potentially appealing to the person who views those quirks as sweet and quirky, not as by-default annoying. (Has Gottlieb never read Carolyn Hax?) She continues along these lines in a later section, where she describes how settlers should reconsider what they (meaning she) previously considered “deal-breakers”:

Some guys aren’t worldly, but they’d make great dads. Or you walk into a room and start talking to this person who is 5’4″ and has an unfortunate nose, but he “gets” you. My long-married friend Renée offered this dating advice to me in an e-mail:

I would say even if he’s not the love of your life, make sure he’s someone you respect intellectually, makes you laugh, appreciates you … I bet there are plenty of these men in the older, overweight, and bald category (which they all eventually become anyway).

She wasn’t joking.

Wait, so there’s more to love than looks? Is she trying to say that a book’s inside words and pages may not be identical in spirit and appearance to the binding and jacket? (If only there were a pithier way of saying that!) This is all so unexpected and confusing!

The truth, of course, is that “someone you respect intellectually, makes you laugh, appreciates you,” who also yells “Bravo” in a movie theater and has an abysmal sense of aesthetics, sounds like a pretty good foundation for the interesting love of someone’s life. But I never saw a sitcom that had a couple like that, so what do I know, anyway.

After the season’s first episode aired, Simon responded to Slate’s TV Club discussion of the show by saying: “The Wire’s depiction of the multitude of problems facing newspapers and high-end journalism will either stand or fall on what happens on screen, not on the back-hallway debate over the past histories, opinions passions or peculiarities of those who create it.” Well, he’s had his on-screen say. And all it did was nearly ruin one of the best shows on TV and prove that David Simon has either no clue or simply nothing interesting to say about the very real, very serious problems facing newspapers in 2008.

Earlier in the season, I wrote of Season 5′s Baltimore Sun storyline: “So far his ‘multitude of problems’ are a) Too many Stephen Glasses, b) Pompous idiot editors too dim to see the clearly telegraphed Stephen Glasses and disinterested in getting at the root of social problems, and at a distant third c) Corporate cost-cutting. That is all.” Six episodes later, that’s still The Wire’s diagnosis. And one moment from the finale crystallizes both the storyline’s unreality and Simon’s apparent cluelessness.

In the closing montage, we see plagiarist Scott Templeton on stage at Columbia University receiving a Pulitzer Prize along with his two evil editors. This plot development is absurd because, as Ann Friedman writes at the American Prospect,

it seemed completely unrealistic that, presented with the evidence, the higher-ups at the paper would turn their heads and ignore Templeton’s plagiarism. Their defense of Templeton made sense up until this last episode — until Gus presumably laid out all the evidence. But even with a Pulitzer on the line, I find it pretty unbelievable that they would just let it all stand.

And because, as David Plotz writes at Slate:

No editor would willfully ignore evidence of a reporter manufacturing stories the way The Wire‘s Sun editors do. It would never be worth it. The New York Times and Washington Post would trade any number of Pulitzers to wipe the stains of Jayson Blair and Janet Cooke from their histories.

And because, as Andrew Johnston writes at The House Next Door, the show’s Pulitzer moment means that

every single person we’ve met who’s on Gus’ side and who has doubts about Templeton—including the Metro, Regional Affairs and State editors, who are all at least Gus’ equal on the masthead and some of whom may be above him on the food chain—every single one of them is a wuss who’s so scared of losing his or her job that they’re willing to let Gus take the fall.

For a show that’s supposedly so realistic, this is plain bad storytelling. But as an indictment of modern newspapers, it’s even worse — because it shows just how little Simon grasps the implications of the Internet.

In the real world of 2008, Templeton simply could not have gotten away with his lies — let alone won a Pulitzer. Plotz writes at Slate, “As we’ve seen this week with the pair of faked memoirs, fabulists get caught.” If the Sun plot were taking place in a real-life newsroom today and evil editors ignored a city editor’s warnings about a possible plagiarist in their ranks, he wouldn’t just take his lumps and demotion to the copy desk in silence. He would e-mail Romenesko, or Jack Shafer (who has just written two columns flagging instances of a reporter’s plagiarism), or Howard Kurtz, or the Pulitzer committee (who would surely take any warnings seriously after the Janet Cooke fiasco). To take a recent real-life example, a week and a half ago blogger Nancy Nall Derringer discovered a White House official had plagiarized a Dartmouth Review essay in a column for an Indiana paper. The official resigned within 12 hours — after the post got picked up on other blogs and other sleuths discovered more plagiarism.

But just as Simon doesn’t seem to grasp that the Internet is the root of newspapers’ non-fictional problems, he doesn’t grasp that the Internet also would have prevented his plagiarist from getting away with it for so long. This is newspapers’ challenge in a nutshell: the Internet has broken their monopoly on distribution, so anyone can be a journalist now and bring down a White House plagiarist, and readers don’t need the physical paper to get the news. This may be bad for newspapers, but it’s great for journalism. More people than ever are reading smart, important journalism because of the Internet, and more shoddy journalism and plagiarism is flagged — even as the Web makes it harder for newspapers to survive in the form they’ve taken for decades.

None of this has anything to do with the newspaper industry depicted in The Wire.

Now, Simon of course argues that the newsroom story does have a deeper point. In a long interview with the Star-Ledger’s Alan Sepinwall, Simon says:

The main theme is not the fabulist and what he is perpetrating. That’s the overt plot. The main theme is that, with the exception of the bookends — at the beginning, the excellent effort at adversarial journalism that begins the piece in episode one and the genuine piece of narrative journalism that concludes it, with Bubbles — it’s a newspaper that is so eviscerated, so worn, so devoid of veterans, so consumed by the wrong things, and so denied the ability to replenish itself that it singularly misses every single story in the season.

If that’s the case — if the gutting of a paper is truly the focus — why does the Templeton story take up 90 percent of the Sun plot while the big missed stories — the deaths of Prop Joe and Omar — are 10-second mentions that only close watchers or recap-readers would catch? Simon also cites Clay Davis’ prosecution as an overlooked story, which fair enough; that’s explicitly presented as a case where staffing cuts led them to miss the story. But Davis has presumably been in office for years — plenty of time for a previously non-gutted newsroom to have done some investigative reporting on the state senator. If the reporters in the fictional equivalent of Simon’s day had done the kind of reporting he implies was done back in the real-life day, even an eventually short-staffed newsroom would have found a way to keep an eye on the biggest political crook in the state (wait, I forgot — the fictional Sun only has five reporters).

In the Star-Ledger interview, Simon goes on to dig himself a deeper hole:

What I’m loving, it makes me warm all over, is that a lot of the obsession of journalists in the evaluating … (isn’t that theme) but whether Whiting is as big an a–hole as Valchek, “Is Gus more of a hero than Colvin?,” “Do they have to put suspenders on that guy?,” “I can’t believe any editor would say that,” “Why would Alma drive all the way over there?” I’m loving it. It’s this onanistic, self-obsessed world of journalism — which is the problem.

Right, that’s definitely journalism’s biggest problem these days: onanistic, self-obsessed navel-gazers like David Simon. To the extent that people have noted some of these minor things, it’s because they are the details that betray Simon’s failure. The fictional editors do speak in journalistic cliches. Alma would have just checked the Sun’s Web site — or logged into the Sun’s computer system at home — instead of driving to the plant to see how her story got played. Again, for a show obsessed with realism, these are tellingly unrealistic details. Simon is ignoring the many extensive, smart critiques of his journalism plotline, just as he’s ignoring the many relevant critiques of real journalism.

Simon gives one brief nod to the Internet in the interview:

This was a story about a newspaper that now — on some fundamental basis — fails to cover its city substantively, and guess what — between out-of-town ownership, carpetbagging editors, the emphasis on impact journalism or Prize-culture journalism and, of course, the economic preamble that is the arrival of the internet and the resulting loss of revenue and staff, there are a f–k of a lot of newspapers that are failing to cover their cities substantively.

Never mind that the Internet, to my recollection, is mentioned exactly zero times on the show. It’s also worth repeating that his model for the show’s “carpetbagging editors” are the universally (except by David Simon) respected John Carroll and Bill Marimow.

One last point: It’s fashionable these days to bash journalism awards, though Simon certainly goes further than most in blaming prize-grubbing for newspapers’ problems. But have a look at some recent Pulitzer winners. In 2007, the Wall Street Journal won for “its creative and comprehensive probe into backdated stock options for business executives that triggered investigations, the ouster of top officials and widespread change in corporate America.” The Birmingham News of Alabama won for exposing “cronyism and corruption in the state’s two-year college system, resulting in the dismissal of the chancellor and other corrective action.” The Boston Globe won for “revelations that President Bush often used ‘signing statements’ to assert his controversial right to bypass provisions of new laws.” In 2006, the Washington Post won for its investigations “of Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff that exposed congressional corruption and produced reform efforts” and for its “persistent, painstaking reports on secret ‘black site’ prisons and other controversial features of the government’s counterterrorism campaign.” The New York Times won for its “carefully sourced stories on secret domestic eavesdropping that stirred a national debate on the boundary line between fighting terrorism and protecting civil liberty.” The New Orleans Times-Picayune and Sun Herald of Mississippi won for their coverage of Hurricane Katrina. This year, the Washington Post is sure to win for its exposes of Walter Reed Medical Center’s shameful treatment of wounded veterans.

Do these sound like empty “prize-culture” stories to you? They don’t to me. They damn sure are “impact journalism,” though I’m not sure why that’s a pejorative in David Simon’s eyes. Would he be happier if the Post hadn’t written the Abramoff and black sites stories for fear of prize grubbing? If the Times-Picayune hadn’t risked its journalists’ sanity by serving as a lifeline to readers and simply continuing to function after Katrina? If veterans were still routinely housed in mildew-filled rooms because Anne Hull and Dana Priest didn’t write their stories? Yes, plenty of deserving stories don’t win awards. Yes, some less-than-earth-shattering feature stories have probably won Pulitzers. Yes, some resources are probably wasted on occasional journalistic equivalents of movie Oscar moments. But for Simon to imply that Templeton’s plagiarized homeless fluff could actually fly amid these winning entries today is an insult to the many great journalists who aren’t backing down in the face of the industry’s problems.

I’m the last person to peddle false journalism nostalgia. These great Pulitzer winners aren’t going to save newspapers. But I, like many others, am actually trying to do something about it. So to the long list of the industry’s real problems, I would add: supposed champions of journalism who use once-in-a-lifetime cultural megaphones to bitch about 15-year-old personal grudges.

Anyway, Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody joined these esteemed ranks when she totally refused to wear designer Stuart Weitzman’s diamond-studded shoes on the Oscars red carpet Sunday. See, she found out they cost like a million dollars — and there are people starving in Haiti, maaaan. I totally believe her when she writes things like this on her MySpace blog:

I must have somehow missed the part where my shoes cost a MILLION FUCKING DOLLARS and my “choice” of footwear would be publicized nationwide. I honestly thought they were just sparkly shoes. Mr. Weitzman did mention that the diamonds were real when I tried them on, but I’m not Nancy Rockman, Expert Gemologist. I didn’t, you know, bust out my miniature spyglass and assess the potential worth of my kicks.

She just thought that they were sparkly shoes, people! How could she possibly have known that Weitzman makes a special pair of shoes for one rising star every year?! Doesn’t every actress wear zirconia-encrusted shoes on the red carpet? It’s not like Weitzman told her how expensive the shoes were, right? Oh, he did? Okay, well at least she wouldn’t participate in any other over-extravagant red carpet traditions, right? Uh — wearing a Dior dress doesn’t count, does it? Surely those sparkly things at the neckline were just zirconia! And anyway, why would she have agreed to wear the shoes when she’s doing everything possible to stay out of the public eye? According to her blog,

I would never consent to a lame publicity stunt at a time when I already want to hide.

Really, folks, just leave her alone! She doesn’t want to talk anymore about how she was just a li’l stripper-turned-blogger-turned-screenwriter before Juno, or about her book, or her Entertainment Weekly column. She’s way too real and punk for any of that kind of self-promotion.

Just leave her alone and let her wear her Dior and act like she’s Avril Lavigne’s punker/realer big sister in peace. And then read her blog about it.

It’s not the ridiculous cost that bugs me, or the fact that Saatchi, Saatchi, and the Other Advertising Bigshots Whose Names Nobody Knows try so hard to make such an impression. It’s not even that newspeople recycle the same stories every year (Hey, look how much the ads cost this year! And hey, remember that 1984 Mac ad? And hey hey — the ads just ain’t what they used to be. Etc.), or that they’re giving loads of free advertising to a bunch of advertisements.

What’s really frustrating is this whole tradition/charade continues as though ads mean anything anymore. Not that ads can’t boost sales and drive traffic and eyeballs to desired places (not like that, you dirty devil). But in terms of cultural impact, commercials haven’t been more than a blip for a long time.

What’s the last ad campaign that became a cultural touchstone, inspired a widely used catch phrase, or that had any kind of cultural effect beyond a bunch of one-off chuckles? The Budweiser “Wassup” campaign comes to mind (I still semi-ironically try to revive that one). Ipod and iTunes ads, maybe, but that kind of impact is hardly what people are talking about when they imagine the “water-cooler” possibilities of Super Bowl ads (and please note the quote marks; I hate the “water-cooler” cliche even more than I hate Super Bowl ad hype).

I’m not anti-adverts. If it were up to me, American schoolkids would have to say “Set it — and forget it!” at the end of the morning Pledge of Allegiance. I like to add a whispered “From Calvin Klein” to half of my spoken sentences. But the idea that this would actually happen — that advertising is still so powerful in the Ironic Age that once a year it can shape the culture by multiple-$2.7 million fiat (fiats?) — doesn’t hold up.

UPDATE: Dan Hopper makes a similar point at Best Week Ever. My favorite part (though mostly unrelated to his main point):

This isn’t to say that this year’s ads weren’t garbage. Those parodies of “The Godfather” and “Rocky” were pretty topical, weren’t they? Why don’t we spoof “Duck Soup” while we’re at it? What about “The Great Train Robbery”? Or some of Thomas Edison’s wax cylinder recordings? And why stop at references to “Dick in a Box” and “Night At The Roxbury” when we could have the Church Lady hocking Dr. Pepper or Chevy Chase’s Gerald Ford impression talking about Careerbuilder.com? Tons of untapped potential here, execs.