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The style issue (Sept. 20) was pretty solid from cover to cover, with articles on Tavi (she's oddly normal), the dude behind J. Crew's success, and Mr. Dyson of vacuum cleaner fame (making things is good; your kids should be engineers; but a $400 fan may not do so well in the age of air conditioning). I meant to comment on the Mark Zuckerberg article much earlier, and it turns out the same bit I was going to quote appears in an article on him in Wired:

Sorkin said that creating Zuckerberg’s character was a challenge. He added that the college students were “the youngest people I’ve ever written about.” Sorkin, who is forty-nine, says that he knew very little about social networking, and he professes extreme dislike of the blogosphere and social media. “I’ve heard of Facebook, in the same way I’ve heard of a carburetor,” he told me. “But if I opened the hood of my car I wouldn’t know how to find it.” He called the film “The Social Network” ironically. Referring to Facebook’s creators, Sorkin said, “It’s a group of, in one way or another, socially dysfunctional people who created the world’s great social-networking site.”

This doesn't make me think about how I dislike Mark Zuckerberg (which I may or may not--he does seem like a dick, a connection that's made fairly clear by the trailer's use of Kanye West's "Power," drawing a line between two famously arrogant public figures; only I'd contribute that West is an artist, which doesn't give him the right to be a dick but does excuse it more than inventing Facebook [further sidebar: did you see that SNL performance? or both of them? Wow.]), but it does make me think about how I'm not such a big fan of Aaron Sorkin. That's probably not a fair judgment. I've seen maybe two episodes of The West Wing. I didn't really like Sports Night when it was on originally and haven't gone back to it. The stuff I have seen, movie-wise, isn't very impressive: The American President, Malice, A Few Good Men--these are not triumphs of subtle, intelligent writing. I'm not saying I don't want to see the movie. I like David Fincher okay. I'm not that picky about the movies I see. I'll watch Jesse Eisenberg in most anything. I'm just saying I don't buy that Sorkin is less of an asshole than Zuckerberg.

And speaking of Fincher, let's skip ahead to the Oct. 4 New Yorker, wherein David Denby slobbers all over him. Really, David Denby? You prefer the auteur who brought us Alien ^3 to Quentin Tarantino?

There’s no indication from his work that he has read much, or that he has lived much outside the movie world, yet he’s not, thank God, another director obsessed with the movie past, like the pop-scholastic Quentin Tarantino, whose virtuosity with camera, mood, and tone Fincher more than equals.

He then goes on to talk about Fincher's serial-killer obsession as though it's a mark of an artist, which I'm not saying it's not, but it's not really the usual example. Uggggh.