Can you play golf without leaving New York, and not the silly CEO-on-the-carpet kind, either? Longtime New Yorker great David Owen says you can, in Golf Digest. Owen, as I've said before, is grievously underrated, and I'll keep saying it till the situation improves. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel interviews David Remnick:

"I haven't written a proper book-length book since I started editing the magazine," he says. "(Writing) is what I can do given time. Mostly what interests me - and not incidentally the capacity to have a greater impact - is the magazine. And I cannot let (my) writing detract from the magazine one iota. If I'm thinking of writing something for the magazine and another writer comes along with another idea, I bail out."
...
He doesn't plan to monkey with the magazine's current mix. Despite the technology-driven changes in reading habits, he believes readers remain thirsty for The New Yorker's signature 3,000-word or longer pieces, and he owns up to taking them home to edit in the quiet of late evenings. He'll gallop on so happily about his job and the magazine - "a gift"- that you begin to think: Oh, my, he needs to sit around downing margaritas some days.

But Remnick protests he has a life. He's become ruthlessly efficient as he's gotten older, he says. He watches mindless TV but he also does not forget his priorities: "I only do three things. Devoted father and husband. The New Yorker. And once in a while I write these pieces."

And from Media Buyer Planner:

HBO will be the sole sponsor of the June 16 issue of The Week, Mediapost reports. All the ads will be part of a single photo spread featuring the stars of HBO's drama Deadwood, which kicked off its third season of 12 episodes yesterday. The move will probably renew the branded editorial content debate raised when The New Yorker devoted all the advertising in its Aug. 22, 2004 edition to retail marketer Target. Cont'd.

As you know, I thought the controversy was absurd, though I prefer many-sponsored issues from an aesthetic point of view. Also, renegade reporters/substancers and sudden celebrities Iraq reporters Jeff Neumann and Ray LeMoine have been making friends: "'These people put it in perspective that Jeff and I were unique characters over there,' LeMoine said of the encounter with, among others, John Lee Anderson [no h in Jon, though], a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. 'Somebody else just realized that our story was one of the best stories to come out of Iraq.' "


Finally, the ascendant prince of British podcasting, Brian Luff, has hit the even bigger time: a story in The Independent (and every other paper in England) about his downloadable novel, Sex on Legs, which is making audiobook history for not having been a physical book first. Can the Olympic 100 meters be run in zero seconds? Download the novel and find out. It's suspensefully perverse! No, it's perversely suspenseful. Both, really.