Beauty and the Beast

Although I know absolutely nothing about Tina Brown other than what I read and hear, I have a soft spot for her.  Despite the fact that every friend of mine who works in the media industry seems to have unkind things to say when her name comes up, I don't know, something about her I just find sort of compelling.  Plus I loved, in a semi-guilty way, her biography of Princess Diana (and her very glamazon book jacket photo).

She seemed to me to be one of those people who peaked extremely early in her career and for a long time after that peak was searching around for something worthwhile to do.  From the looks of it, she's found it at her (sort of) new website, The Daily Beast.  

The Daily Beast is a cross between The New York Times, The New York Post, and Vanity Fair.  There is legitimate news coverage (the "cheat sheet" serves essentially as a front page for news), and they did a nice job on covering the various aspects of the Mumbai attacks in a more in depth article here.  

Like The Post, the website covers gossip, although The Daily Beast makes it seem more high brow than it might otherwise be because the writing is good, and is done by legitimate people in the literary/cultural/news world (see "Is Adrien Grenier A Good Enough Actor To Play A Bad One?" by Toure).  

And like Vanity Fair there are features on current events ("The People's Panic", by Michael Lewis) that are generally worth a read.  Although I have to admit that I am a bit mystified by the thought process behind commissioning the article titled "A Warning From Reagon's Economist"...is anyone other than John McCain all that concerned with the Reagan years at this point?  

A nice, somewhat novel feature is The Buzz Board:  Smart People Recommend, which is essentially what it says.  Prominent people from all walks of life, from Bobbi Brown to Mort Zuckerman to Ivanka Trump to Bill Maher to Sherron Watkins to Bill Richardson, discuss books, restaurants, websites, articles, places and products that they like.  Very refreshing to see these kinds of short, informative comments from serious people rather than the ranting lunatics who seem to frequent comment boards on other websites.  

So there you go.  Hours of perfectly good work time will be wasted surfing this informative, entertaining site.