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Lisa Williams writes in to direct our attention to this Romenesko snippet about the ASME’s reaction to the Target controversy/non-controversy. Thanks, Lisa! She also notes that she backs up often, which I didn’t mind at all because she preceded it with “Love the blog.” That makes everything OK. The Philadelphia Inquirer mentioned the Target business in a recent story about single-issue sponsors and unorthodox ad design, too. (Admirably, the lede cites an example from the Inquirer itself.) And in the Boston Herald, David Carey speaks his mind:

“‘We’ve had people who say the New Yorker shouldn’t do things like this,” Carey, The New Yorker’s publisher, told the Herald in an interview. “I don’t agree with them. We’re a commercial business.”

My friend Heather, whose charming, articulate child I’m helping take care of in coastal Massachusetts this week, just strolled over to tell me that, speaking of sponsors, Jack White is writing a song for Coke. Indeed, he’s seriously considering it:

“They want a new ‘I’d Like To Buy The World A Coke’ and believe Jack is the only artist who can deliver them something that will be equally timeless,” the source explained.

It’s seems unlikely that White or The White Stripes will perform or even appear in any new campaign, but with the band’s traditional and authentic approach and Coca Cola’s multinational status, a commercial could raise eyebrows amongst the group’s fanbase.

In 2001 the band declined the offer of appearing in a Gap commercial, hinting that doing so would mean selling out. “The Gap wanted us to be in a commercial and we said ‘no’ and everyone said, ‘why not’? It’s almost as if, if people are willing to give you that much money, you are insulting everyone you know by turning it down,” said White at the time. “People’s opinions about selling out seem to have changed over the years.”

Commodify your dissent from the commodification of dissent! I still don’t care about the Target ads, not because I’m a slavish loyalist but because I think you’d have to be from Mars to confuse them with New Yorker content. The only real objection I had to them was that they made the ads, and hence the margins, of the magazine too visually consistent, bland even in their groovy garishness. What’s charming about New Yorker ads is their smallness and oddness, the juxtaposition of improbable animal pins and lap pools and homey hats and retirement communities and missing forks and Galapagos nature expeditions and small-publisher books and cheery newcomer websites and other stuff, all in tiny typefaces with distinctive and elegant yet unobtrusive graphics. The Target ads may be heralding that all this, like multiple-artist spots, may be a thing of the magazine’s past, but I think it would be a mistake to junk the old model altogether. Attracting larger advertisers is good, with some exceptions, but sameness of pages—even with different artists—is not The New Yorker, and I think they know that.

I don’t like to go on rampages that aren’t rampages of delirious endorsement (for Donald Antrim, Michael Apted’s UP series DVDs, The Queen’s Gambit, marzipan, etc.), because, as Satchel Paige would say, it angries up the blood. The Chicago Sun-Times‘ Lewis Lazare is on a rampage about those Target ads in the magazine recently, and that’s OK. I don’t agree with him—the ads, if mildly distracting, are clearly commercial art (Milton Glaser, for goodness’ sake!) and very unlikely to confuse readers even passingly familiar with New Yorker design and content—and some of the Sun-Times readers don’t, either. But if you want to set my blood on Whip, mention Wal-Mart as a “classy” advertiser for Vogue, an above-board alternative to the Target-and-New Yorker calumny. Lazare writes:

It’s a leap that, quite frankly, boggles our mind. And one that many consumers may look agog at. Especially coming as it does in Vogue, whose somewhat elitist image seems at the complete opposite end of the spectrum from hugely populist Wal-Mart.
Here’s the good news, though: The Wal-Mart ad insert is a stunningly classy effort. And thankfully one that couldn’t be confused with Vogue‘s editorial content.
The insert’s overarching concept is to introduce Wal-Mart as an outpost where fashion-savvy types may find items of apparel that can be mixed and matched with elements from shoppers’ existing wardrobes to create fresh, unstuffy fashion statements. Each ad page features a smartly attired real-world woman with copy explaining what’s from Wal-Mart and what’s from the photo subject’s clothes closet.

Sounds like someone here has let advertising and reality blur together like this season’s violet eyeshadows. As documented by my old friend Liza Featherstone and many others, Wal-Mart has marked its place in history not as an ethical business leader but as a defiant bastion of discrimination and shameful labor practices. That it continues to set the standard, in many ways, for both the national and international business communities is a disgrace. Neither Wal-Mart’s blitz, since women sued the company on behalf of 1.6 million of their colleagues for discrimination, of Midwestern-accented, we’re-the-good-guys ads nor hiring a more stylish ad agency make it “classy.” Remember those skeletons Tina Brown outfitted for a fashion spread back in the magazine’s uneasy ’90s? You can drape rotting bones in as much couture as you want, but they still won’t have souls. If Vogue cared about women, real-world or otherwise, it wouldn’t take advertising from a company that would be happy if they just went away. In the words of Wal-Mart Watch spokesperson Tracy Sefl,

Wal-Mart thinks educated women will be so excited about the prospect of cheap merchandise that they will forget about how Wal-Mart does business. Wal-Mart is facing the nation’s biggest class action gender discrimination suit. They must hope working women care more about clothes, shoes, and purses and less about equal pay, promotions, and fair treatment in the workplace. Moreover, we look forward to a Wal-Mart ad that declares, “Better Health Care For Our Employees is The New Black.”

Wal-Mart Stumbles Onto the Runway [Wal-Mart Watch]
Wake Up Wal-Mart [“Always high costs. Always.”]

Malcolm Gladwell, that good Canadian, is on Leonard Lopate (Kenji Jasper is guest-hosting) talking about single-payer healthcare systems. He’s making some excellent points about using incentives other than insurance for encouraging people to take better care of themselves; the collective danger, expense, and inefficiency of forcing uninsured people to use the emergency room for their basic healthcare; and about how single-payer won’t change our relationships to our doctors, just the way we pay the bills. Here’s the story he’s discussing, “The Moral-Hazard Myth: The Bad Idea Behind Our Failed Health-Care System.” But really, I don’t think Gladwell should be taken aback at Jasper’s request for predictions about the likelihood that the United States will adopt a single-payer model someday. “You’re asking me to read the future,” Gladwell is saying. Well, yes! You have Big Theories! The least you can do is have a little Faith Popcorn in your own abstract assessments. It’s the modest thing to say, of course, but I really don’t think it’s necessary.

Here’s columnist Lewis Lazare from the Chicago Sun-Times again, following up on his earlier story about last week’s all-Target-ad New Yorker:

The fallout surrounding the New Yorker‘s shocking Aug. 22 issue featuring Target as the single advertiser spread Monday to the American Society of Magazine Editors, an organization of leading magazine editors among whose responsibilities, we’ve been told, is keeping a watchful eye on the so-called sacred (but it would appear fast becoming less so) wall between advertising and editorial in the magazine industry.

Based on our experience the past several days, we would respectfully suggest… Keep seeing red.

From the rather profound The Tao of Backup, with a few typos fixed and a little extra emphasis:

The novice asked the backup master: “How often should I back up my files? It has been a month since my last backup.”

The master replied: “Just as night follows day, and Autumn follows Summer, so should backups follow work. As you work, so should you back up that work.”

The novice said: “I work each day.”

The master replied: “Then you should back up each day.”

The novice replied: “I agree, but right now I haven’t got time to make a backup, as I have too much work to do.”

Upon hearing this, the master fell silent.
…
Having defined the data to be backed up, you should perform backups in accordance with the rate at which you are creating data to be backed up.

The frequency with which you back up should be determined by

* The rate at which you are creating data.
* The cost of losing data.
* The cost of performing a backup.

It’s possible to create a mathematical model to formalize all these factors and determine an “optimal” backup strategy. However, such models will not usually reflect the true human cost of losing data. For example, if someone writes a poem or an essay, having to rewrite the poem or essay will usually be stressful to the writer, and the result may not be as special as the original. Similarly, if a potential new customer phones you, and you enter their details into a contact database, and then lose the database, there may be no way of contacting that customer ever again.
…
All these considerations mean that the best “strategy” is to back up often enough so that if you lose a random disk at a random time, the chances are that you will lose very little data indeed. This usually means daily backups, combined with disk-to-disk copies or mirroring during the day.

Send this to all your friends, with the subject line “Guess what lucky duck is getting a fantastic present from me today!” Even they get mad, they’ll still have subconsciously absorbed the words “backup” and “daily.”

Here’s a story I’ve been retelling for years that has suddenly taken on even more poignant meaning. From Adam Kirsch’s ArtForum review of James Laughlin’s memoir Byways:

In the early years especially, Laughlin’s authors were sometimes forced to cool their heels and gnash their teeth while their publisher spent time at his ski resort in Alta, Utah. (There is a painful stretch in his published correspondence with Delmore Schwartz involving a lost manuscript that finally turned up under the floorboards of an Alta mail truck.)

As I remember it, before the manuscript was rediscovered Schwartz buckled down and rewrote it and, of course—here writer-listeners shudder like campers unable to resist nightmare-baiting ghost stories—it was better than ever! First, though, he had a crippling breakdown. Do try to avoid that, won’t you?

Bryan Curtis: “Would Eustace Tilley shop at Target?” Read on.
Update: The Chicago Sun-Times makes its views on the subject pretty clear in the hed: Target, New Yorker Cross Line.
What do you think? I wonder if the magazine will do one of its rare letters pages for this one; I’m doubting it. I find the Target ads a little distractingly big and bright and, well, red, but I think people can tell the difference between advertising and editorial in this case, especially since Target has such an unmistakeable logo. I feel mildly concerned that this doesn’t bother me more, and the pages should probably all be labeled “Advertisement,” but I’m not particularly outraged. I guess the advertorial blur of my commodified-dissent upbringing has pretty well seeped into me, after all. If Target started putting text into those ads and that was ambiguous and quasi-editorial, then I’d raise the red (concentric-circled) flag. If any of you want to send in your views to be aired on Emdashes, I’ll consider them.
Here’s my shameless reproduction of the Times piece from last week, too.

I just happened on Loren Webster’s beautifully done blog and these posts about Richard Hugo. His blog’s title, “in a Dark Time,” obviously comes from the incantatory Theodore Roethke poem of the same name (which Webster admires here); as you remember, Roethke was the subject (along with James Wright) of a recent essay by Adam Kirsch, who writes: “Decades have now passed since their sadly premature deaths—Roethke’s in 1963, Wright’s in 1980—and today they need to be reintroduced to a generation of readers who are likely to know them only from a few anthology pieces.” While thoughtful and appreciative, Kirsch’s analysis of Roethke’s poetics isn’t entirely right, I think, but the piece is an excellent reintroduction to both poets and their relationship to modernism and the (masuline, deeply feeling) self. Roethke also had more boisterious fun on the page than a lot of poets—there are notable exceptions—let themselves have these days, Billy Collins or no Billy Collins (indeed, when I saw Collins read it seemed to me he was a very melancholy man). Roethke was often ferociously depressed. But his poems are pure joy and, if you haven’t read them yet, will delight you. “His best and most characteristic poems concoct a new language for the shapeless urges of the unconscious,” writes Kirsch, who later quotes Roethke (who was, endearingly, a Lit-Law major at Ann Arbor): ” ‘Believe me,’ he adjured the reader in a 1950 ‘Open Letter,’ ‘you will have no trouble if you approach these poems as a child would, naively, with your whole being awake, your faculties loose and alert.’ ” Look at Loren Webster’s Merlin falcon, too. The shapes a bright container can contain!

From today’s Times, some superstore-sized news. Stuart Elliott writes:

FOR the first time in the 80-year history of The New Yorker magazine, a single advertiser will sponsor an entire issue.

The Aug. 22 issue of The New Yorker, due out Monday, will carry 17 or 18 advertising pages, all brought to you by the Target discount store chain owned by the Target Corporation. The Target ads will even supplant the mini-ads from mail-order marketers that typically fill small spaces in the back of the magazine.

The Target ads, in the form of illustrations by more than two dozen artists like Milton Glaser, Robert Risko and Ruben Toledo, are to run only the one time in the issue. They are intended to salute New York City and the people who live – and shop – there.

Many mainstream magazines like Time and Life have published what are known as single-sponsor issues, carrying ads only from marketers like Kraft Foods and Progressive insurance. Target has been a sole sponsor before of issues of magazines, among them People.

The goal of a single-sponsor issue is the same as it is when an advertiser buys all the commercial time in an episode of a television series: attract attention by uncluttering the ad environment.

“We try to do breakthrough things in many different places,” Minda Gralnek, vice president and creative director at Target in Minneapolis, said in a telephone interview.

” ‘Expect more. Pay less’ is our mantra,” Ms. Gralnek said, quoting the Target slogan, “and this is part of ‘Expect more.’ It’s not ordinary.”

The drawings in the Target ads will feature subway motifs, street and park scenes, a dog walker, a cocktail party, even a bridge rendered as a shoe. All the ads, not surprisingly, feature the Target bull’s-eye logo in one way or another, like a giant game of ring toss with the Target targets circling a skyscraper.

“We had a list of New York icons” that might appear in the ads, Ms. Gralnek said, but in the end “these were the rules we gave the artists: the ads had to use the Target bull’s-eye and had to have New York themes.”

The artists were also asked to draw using only three colors to help the ads stand out: red and white, for the Target logo, and black.

Neither Target nor The New Yorker, part of the Condé Nast Publications division of Advance Publications, would discuss what the sponsorship cost. A look at the magazine’s rate card suggests that a retailer like Target, which has advertised steadily in The New Yorker since 2003, would pay a bit under $1.1 million for the ads. But it is unclear whether a discount retailer whose slogan is “Expect more. Pay less” would pay, uh, retail.

For those worried that The New Yorker may be blurring the line between editorial content and commercialism, executives of the magazine and Target offered reassurances that there would be no equivalent of The New Yorker mascot, Eustace Tilley, staring at a butterfly through a monocle covered with a Target bull’s-eye.

“The editorial integrity of our product is a big thing,” David Carey, vice president and publisher of The New Yorker, said in an interview at his office in Times Square.

“People often say, ‘We’d like to do something in The New Yorker that’s never been done before,’ but we have high standards,” Mr. Carey said. “There are some ads we don’t accept if they break the format of the magazine.”

So while The New Yorker will run “a few scent strips a year” and gatefold cover ads, he added, the magazine has rejected ads in formats like the Dutch door, when a front cover, split in two, unfolds to reveal an ad inside.

Target was not told in advance what the editorial contents or the cover of the issue would be, Mr. Carey said, and there is to be no editorial acknowledgement of the sponsorship. (An ad identifying the illustrators is to run in the back pages of the issue.)

The ads were designed to look different from the cartoons that decorate the pages of The New Yorker, Mr. Carey said. For example, none of the ads are to have captions.

Mr. Carey said that he informed the editor of The New Yorker, David Remnick, that the issue would have Target as its sole sponsor and that the arrangement would not affect the editorial department in any way.

Mr. Remnick, asked for a response, replied in an e-mail message, “Ads are ads, and I have no problem at all with Target’s advertising a lot, all at once, or a page at a time.”

Target and The New Yorker have been planning the issue for several months, working to find a week when the magazine could clear out all its other advertisers. The mid-August date “was an easier time to do it,” Mr. Carey said, because “if you want to own an entire issue” there are typically fewer advertisers during the dog days of summer than, say, during the holiday shopping season.

The few advertisers that had initially booked ad space in the Aug. 22 issue are being shifted to the Aug. 29 issue, Mr. Carey said.

In addition to the ads that will run on the pages of the Aug. 22 issue, there will also be a Target ad under the flaps that wrap the covers of the issues to be sold on newsstands.

The New Yorker issue joins a lengthy list of catchy marketing and promotional ploys from Target. They include opening so-called pop-up stores, which remain in business only a few weeks; decorating the outsides of office buildings with oversize Target billboards; and hiring acrobats and dancers last month to walk down the side of 30 Rockefeller Center in a “vertical fashion show.”

Many of Target’s special ads are aimed at New York City for reasons that include a desire to burnish the image of its stores among fashionistas in the garment district and burnish the image of its corporate parent on Wall Street. There are five Target stores in three New York City boroughs: the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens; so far, to contradict a famous Lorenz Hart lyric, Target does not have Manhattan (or Staten Island).

Ms. Gralnek said she was aware that some Manhattan shoppers, seeing all the Target ads in a borough that has no Target stores, have expressed frustration.

“If it does make some people want a Target more, that’s not a bad thing,” Ms. Gralnek said, adding that they could “get to the other stores” in the outer boroughs or visit the 53 Target stores in the metropolitan New York area, including Long Island and New Jersey.

True, but is there a magazine called The Long Islander, or The New Jerseyan?

Actually, no less a New Yorker than Walt Whitman founded a paper called The Long Islander in 1838, and the Long-Islander in print today recently won six New York Press Awards. Headlines from this week’s edition: “Huntington Spas: The Royal Treatment,” “Sedaka Brings Classics To Westbury,” and, aptly, “What’s in a Name”?

Pronounced the way those wry, mildly sorrowful WNYC guys always say it, like “You can click that little white trackwheel all night long, but we, your old friends whose tender voices have soothed you through the day for so many years, are still here in the studio with our chairs and microphones and cups of ordinary joe, patiently waiting, like calm-eyed golden retrievers, for you to remember that we’re still coming into work every day just like always, and when you get tired of your fancy music box, you can just turn on your radio again and we’ll be on that radio, tireless and loyal, and even, often, live.” So pop music critic and ace photogger Sasha Frere-Jones, who did such a kick-ass job with his recent Diplo and Marlboro piece, just talked to Stylus’ Mike Powell, and the esteemed Brooklyn Vegan links to it. You can listen right now; it’s a “podcast.”