Last week I had the pleasure of meeting Will Leitch, erstwhile prime mover of the very funny and wildly popular Deadspin blog, once and eternally the target of Buzz Bissinger‘s bizarre and overbearing anti-sports blog blast on Bob Costas‘s HBO show, and now Contributing Editor to New York magazine, where he lends his elegant stylings mostly but not exclusively to sports topics. We talked at the blonde piney and micro beery Downtown Bar and Grill on Court Street in beautifully gentrified Bourem Hill, which looks vastly more prosperous since I last stomped its sidewalks some decades ago. A very pleasant afternoon indeed.

Simon Doonan had a wonderful article in Slate last week about his experience designing the installation for the auction of Marilyn Monroe‘s effects for Christie’s in 1999. Doonan says the process of cataloging her belongings took months, but “Right away, I discovered that Marilyn was shockingly and unimaginably slender. She was sort of like Kate Moss but fleshier on top. Didn’t see that coming, did you? When it came to finding mannequins to fit her dresses, I simply couldn’t. M.M.’s drag was too small for the average window dummy.” Doonan says he developed alternate ways to show Monroe’s famous dresses, with the lone exception of the famous Jean Louis number Marilyn wore for JFK’s birthday, for which a custom Lucite mannequin was made. Says Doonan, “When you look at Marilyn on-screen and . . .realize that the busty, ample gal brimming over Tony Curtis in Some Like It Hot is literally one-third your size, you have every right to become suicidal.”

Doonan’s second great observation was that Monroe was not materialistic. “Marilyn Monroe. . .owned diddly-squat. . . . There were no Renoirs or Picassos. Her knickknacks were pedestrian. Her cookware was greasy. Her spatulas were bent. Even her Golden Globe was broken. The majority of her clothing showed surprising wear and tear. She had worn it all repeatedly and there just wasn’t that much of it. Her jewelry? With the exception of her DiMaggio wedding ring it was a bunch of paste danglers and costume crap. Shoes? Yes, there were several pairs of black suede Ferragamo stilettos with worn heels. But Marilyn—brace yourself for another shocker—was more into books than shoes. Her poignant desire to cultivate her mind and give herself an education resulted in an extensive library of first editions.”

I love that!

In one of those bits of harmonic convergence that we used to call coincidence, on the same day I read Doonan’s article, I read that Eve Arnold had died. The brilliant photographer had created many stunning images of celebrities and nobodies alike, but she was perhaps best known for her pictures of Monroe. You can see why.

The peerless Ronald Searle has died in his sleep in France at the age of 91. Best known for a manically gothic style that invigorated his illustrations of the frantically anarchic schoolgirls of St. Trinian’s, the grinning, lustful oenophiles in The Illustrated Winespeak, the Molesworth series, The Rake’s Progress, The Adventures of Baron Muchausen, and his prolific magazine work, Searle’s subjects always seemed to be on the verge of exploding off the page. It was, in a phrase, a lively and comic style, which seems somewhat ironic, given that during World War II, Searle spent three years suffering as a prisoner of the Japanese Imperial Army. Captured during the fall of Singapore in 1942, Searle was among 3270 men selected to work on the Burma-Siam railway, the experience which provided the real-life basis for TheBridge on the River Kwai. “My friends and I, we all signed up together,” he told an interviewer. “We had grown up together, we went to school together … Basically all the people we loved and knew and grew up with simply became fertiliser for the nearest bamboo.” Underfed and undernourished, suffering from tropical diseases and other infections, and subjected to harsh labor and sadistic brutality, Searle not only survived, but he bore witness to the horrific experience with a group
of sketches of his comrades and captors. The miracle is that both the artist and his works survived; the double miracle is that the artist managed to return with a joie de vivre and a comic zest that constituted a triumph of his spirit. I would like to have known him.

Testifying before Parliament today, Paul McMullan, a former deputy features editor at Rupert Murdoch’s now-defunct News of the World tabloid, admitted that he and his colleagues hacked into people’s phones, paid police officers for tips, conducted surveillance operations in unmarked vans outside people’s homes, stole confidential documents, rifled through celebrity garbage cans and posed as “Brad the teenage rent boy” in propositioning a priest. “Phone hacking was a `school yard trick,” he absolved himself. “In 21 years of invading people’s privacy I’ve never actually come across anyone who’s been doing any good. Privacy is the space bad people need to do bad things in. Privacy is for paedos; fundamentally nobody else needs it.”

This, of course, is the same excuse law enforcement officials have used for 24-hour CCTV coverage, national identity cards, DNA data bases, and other forms of surveillance: “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.” But we do all have things to hide, and not all of them rise to level of criminality. Burping, farting, scratching our nether regions, picking our noses, pleasuring ourselves, making rude remarks, cracking thoughtless jokes, drinking milk straight out the carton–well, that would be an inventory of my morning that I wouldn’t care to see immortalized on the world wide web. And there are other activities–lighting up a doobie, stepping out on the missus–that may be immoral or illegal, but really aren’t any business of the public. It’s not the kind of information that the authorities should be accumulating, and it certainly isn’t what journalists should be gathering either.

I’m not about to go all Columbia School of Journalism all over McMullan, but as someone who, as an editor of Spy was party to going through the trash cans of celebrities, and to playing pranks on the rich and powerful that involved identity misrepresentation, I think I’m in a pretty good position to tell McMullan where to get off. Privacy is not the space bad people need to do bad things. Privacy is the space people need to avoid judgmentalism, and it is not up to us who needs it and why. Pedophiles are not entitled to privacy for the obvious reason that they are perpetrating a crime; privacy is a non-factor once another party has been injured. McMullan, of course, and his ilk do not spend very much of their time capturing pedophiles, and spend a far greater portion tracking philandering footballers and amorous starlets and kinky executives. When Lindsay Lohan and Mel Gibson sprawl their problems on the sidewalk, it seems to me that they are fair game for journalists. But journalists are not the Mutaween, self-appointed enforcers of morality and the law. We don’t get to pursue and harass, and we certainly don’t get to lap the police in being able to probable without probable cause and warrants. That’s just not our job; it’s just not the way we do things. It’s kind of refreshing that McMullan spoke up for himself so unapologetically before the lawmakers, but I am happy to say that if he ever came into any of the publications where I worked and proposed using his usual news gathering techniques , I’m certain we would have unapologetically kicked his ass into the street.

The great reporter and columnist Tom Wicker of The New York Times, died on Friday at the age of 85. In a long and distinguished career, he stood out for his clear thinking, probity, and ethical courage. The defining moment of his career was his performance covering the assassination of John F. Kennedy, which was described beautifully by Gay Talese in The Kingdom and The Power, his amazing book about The New York Times. On the scene in Dallas, Wicker “scribbled his observations and facts across the back of a mimeographed itinerary of Kennedy’s two-day tour of Texas,” wrote Talese. “It was a remarkable achievement in reporting and writing, in collecting facts out of confusion, in reconstructing the most deranged day in his life, the despair and bitterness and disbelief, and then getting on a telephone to New York and dictating the story in a voice that only rarely cracked with emotion.” To read Wicker’s report, click here. Talk about grace under pressure.

Thanks to the Millennium Art Academy High School in the Bronx for inviting me to speak at the Career Day event on Wednesday. My co=presenter Kathleen Cushman spoke about being a writer. Thanks very much to my old friends and new friends of friends who donated magazines to be distributed to the students attending the session: Bob Love of The Week; Belinda Luscombe of Time; Jess Cagle of Entertainment Weekly; Matt DeMazza and Ken Derry of Yankees Magazine; Ryan D’Agostino and Lauren Drucker of Hearst magazines; and Frank Rich and Lauren Starke of New York magazine.

The most discouraging story of the work is a report in The Economist of the progress scientists have made in using machines to read minds. According to a report in the Public Library of Science, scientists at the University of Minnesota have found that by taping electrodes to the scalp, a volunteer can pilot a virtual helicopter through a virtual three-dimensional sky, merely by thinking. Additionally, an article in Current Biology details how researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich have made progress in using machines to read dreams. Finally, as reported in Current Biology, scientists at Berkeley detail how they have been able to actually read what is going through a person’s head.

No kidding: the had volunteers sit in fMRI machines while watching film trailers, and recorded images off the visual cortex, and then looked for correlations between those images and the trailers. They then fed 5000 hours of clips from YouTube into the computer, and asked it to predict what the matching fMRI pattern would look like. “Having done that, they each endured a further two hours in the machine, watching a new set of trailers. The computer looked at the reactions of their visual cortices and picked, for each clip, the 100 bits of YouTube footage whose corresponding hypothetical fMRI pattern best matched the real one. It then melded these clips together to produce an estimate of what the real clip looked like. As the pictures above show, the result was often a recognisable simulacrum of the original. It also moved (watch at gallantlab.org) in the same way as the clip it was based on.” (I dunno, call me a skeptic, but the image of Steve Martin as Inspector Clouseau is not really a recognizable simulacrum of the other other, at least not as much as would, say, a picture of a baggy faced Leonoid Brezhnev, minus his hedgerow of eyebrows, wearing a black Megadeath T-shirt.)

Finally, researchers at Princeton University, have been sort of able to tell what people have been thinking about. Using brain scans taken during an experiment in 2008 in which subjects were asked to imagine objects that they had just seen in pictures, the scientists applied pattern-detection algorithms to try and re-identify the objects. “Dr Pereira divided the data in two. He used half to generate his hypothesis and half to test it. Though his could not distinguish exactly which objects the volunteers had seen, they managed a task that was only slightly less demanding. They could work out what type of object something was. In other words, they could not distinguish a carrot from a stick of celery, but could say that it was a vegetable.”

Impressed? Yeah, I guess, although I’m none too excited. I know that this is research will break through all kinds of barriers, and that before long we will further liberate the intellect of geniuses like Steven Hawking and read into the minds of coma victims and probably talk to our dogs. ( I mean really talk, like the way we seldom do with people.) But I for one don’t much want everyone to be able to read my mind. As Bob Dylan said, “If my thought-dreams could be seen, they’d probably put my head in a guillotine.” Or in my case, just scoff. But think about all the nasty, inappropriate, seditious, selfish, ugly thoughts that pass through your head in a day, the 5000 times a year men not always appropriately think about sex, the number of times we nod our heads when our bosses take an uninformed interest in our projects or bite our tongues when our spouses talk about–oh, take your pick. Sometimes I feel that the only reliable amusement left to me are my own thoughts. I would not want to lose that.

Plus there’s the public angle. More and more, we are being scanned by CCTV cameras, erected to prevent terrorism, successful mostly in catching indiscreet teens and furtive petty criminals. But the scanners are becoming more sophisticated: they can overhear speech, perform facial recognition, and spot postures and gaits consistent with someone hiding something beneath their clothing. How long before a scanner can be mounted on a street corner or in Grand Central Station, put there putatively to find terrorists thinking about bombing, and instead having to wade through millions of musings involving lust, envy, self-pity.

Halt the research now.

I absolutely love this photo of Hilary Clinton, taken by Diana Walker for Time magazine. Clinton was on a C-17, on her way to meet with rebel leaders in Tripoli. Despite her stated refusals, I think it’s likely she will be Barack Obama‘s running mate in the 2012 election. She not only will help him win the election; she is the steely backbone he has seemed to lack in his confrontations with the Republicans in Congress.

The morning after Steve Jobs died, I watched a usual Morning Joe panel step far outside its sweet spot and try to eulogize Jobs’ impact. Joe Nocera was pretty effective, mostly because he had paid close attention to Jobs and Apple, and Willie Geist was at least in touch with the culture. But Joe, Mika, Pat Buchanan, Ed Rendell and Mike Barnicle were grabbing onto thoughts like shipwreck victims seeking driftwood. In no particular order, Jobs was a great inventor, a great businessman, a great designer, an innovator, demanding, our Edison, our Ford, and ultimately, a great American. Not of these answers were particularly insightful, none were wrong, none added to our sum of knowledge about the man.

I wish these people had stuck to their area of expertise. Will Jobs end up changing politics? Ford did: the rise of a middle class, the creation of the car-enabled suburb. Edison did: we now have a politics shaped and controlled by mass electronic media. Surely Jobs has already had an impact, with instant information in the palm of your hand. But there are other changes. What will it mean when there is no privacy, for example, no privacy, when you can find anyone anywhere by tracking their phones? What will it mean for political compromise, when everyone has become accustomed to being able to review an infinite number of choices, and to be able to have their selection, any time, any where? (My kids’ idea of deferred gratification is watching something on DVR.) What will it mean for political discourse when people will not be able to sit at a table and have a conversation without simultaneously talking with friends on the phone and on line?

I also wish one of the politicos at the Morning Joe table had brought up the topic that usual dominates their conversation: taxes. Because here’s a question I have: do you think Steve Jobs ever factored in the marginal tax rate when he was i-plotting his business decisions? Because I don’t; I think he was motivated by the love of what he was doing. I mean, if you listen to Perry and Palin and Cantor and all the usual Republican mouthpieces, you hear them say that if you raise the marginal tax rates, it will kill people’s incentive to start businesses and invest in new products and so on. Because I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that Steve Jobs–great inventor, great businessman, great innovator, great American–just wanted to do stuff he thought was cool. Do you think for an instant he ever said, “You know, this i-Pad is just sensational, and the i-phone is just going to rock the universe. Thank God the marginal tax rate isn’t three points hire, because otherwise, I just couldn’t be bothered.” I’m sure that as tax rates rise, the cost does diminish the incentive to work and to invest, but for the most part, people choose their work because they are excited about the activity and the challenge and the self-satisfaction.