Let it not be said that I don’t read the wires! From Reuters:

Former New Yorker editor Tina Brown said on Wednesday she had signed a deal to write a book about Diana, Princess of Wales, and her impact on the British monarchy and media.

“Diana hit the royal family like a meteor and destabilized it,” Brown told Reuters.

She declined to comment on reports the deal with Random House was worth $2 million but said the book would be published in 2007 to coincide with the 10th anniversary of the princess’s death in a car crash in Paris.

“It gives me a chance in a way to recall Diana, who I did know and I covered over a number of years,” said Brown, a former editor of the London society magazine Tatler, recalling a lunch with the princess a few months before she died.

Diana’s death in August 1997 was followed by an unprecedented outpouring of grief in Britain and a backlash against the royal family, which was accused of being aloof and out of touch.

A string of books have already been written about the princess, most of them crammed with personal details about her unhappy marriage to Prince Charles.

Brown brushed off suggestions that the world did not need another book about Diana, particularly one written by somebody based in New York.

“I feel I’m coming at it from a different angle. I’m not writing it as an inside royal journalist,” she said.

“I’m writing as much about the press and the impact of Diana, as about Diana. I want to write about the impact of celebrity on royalty so a lot of my book will also be cultural commentary. It’s not going to be a straight biography.”

Brown became a media celebrity when she moved from Britain to New York, taking over as editor at Vanity Fair and then The New Yorker. But her star waned after she left The New Yorker in 1998 to start Talk magazine with Miramax co-founder Harvey Weinstein. The magazine folded in 2002.

She turned to a cable television talk show in May 2003 and has said she plans to cover the marriage of Prince Charles and his longtime lover Camilla Parker Bowles in April for NBC’s “Today Show.”

Let it also not be said that I didn’t appreciate Diana, and not just as kitsch, either; half my family is from Canada, where my mother grew up memorizing long lists of kings. I stayed up late to watch the royal wedding as a wee thing, and fell asleep to CNN many years later to be awoken by the sounds of her death. I stayed up then, too, mesmerized by the 24/7 gibberish that followed: “Diana was a great contributor…she made a difference…well, she was a pioneer in hat-wearing.” That’s basically a quote; I wrote it down. Then, I’m afraid, the Elton John song—already hanging way over the edge of bad taste as it was, but a poignant enough picture the first time (young Elton, yearning; poor Marilyn, burning) that I forgave him—ended it all. I couldn’t think of her as separate from those murderous chords.

Still, when I see a picture of her with that perfectly feathered hair that I could quite achieve (only my much-missed aunt Pam could top her for ’80s glamour), I am sad. I’m sorry she can’t work on landmines anymore, though might-as-well-be-royal Heather Mills seems to be doing a decent enough job, considering (although, according to my de-miner source, plenty in the activist community aren’t fans). Any lingering concern for William and Harry disappeared entirely with one of those articles about drinking and girls (they’re obviously fine). As for Camilla, who cares? Though I admired a pair of parrot brooches she wore in a picture I saw in the Sun. Forget our flaccid counterparts—now that’s a fun newspaper!

On the other hand, one can still get choked up at the very idea of a leader, even a pretend one, who could say this—as Charles did recently to the, um, Royal Albatross Centre in New Zealand, after tossing off a few sentences in Maori:

I find it incredible that we live in a world which is so comprehensively industrialised that we can allow the kind of intensive fishing methods that slaughter countless thousands of dolphins and porpoises, let alone all sorts of other species which have no means of escape, and that cause untold damage to fragile ecosystems on the floor of the oceans…. Do you not feel the sheer unmentionable waste of it all to be so obscene?

Well, yes, Your Highness, we do. As for the ocean, get back on your throne and fix it!

Former New Yorker Editor Brown Signs Diana Book Deal [Reuters]
Royal Wedding Day Schedule for Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth [Paul Rudnick, New Yorker]
Tina Brown: Diana, Still Full of Surprises [WaPo, sign in]
A New Yorker to Di for [Salon]
HRH visits the Royal Albatross Centre near Dunedin, New Zealand [The Prince of Wales, official site]
Princess Diana – Premonitions, Dreams, Spirit Return and Conspiracy Theories [Psychics.co.uk network; prepare yourself]

Jon Friedman talked to David Remnick about lots of things we care about. For instance:

“I’m not a great fan of nostalgia,” Remnick says thoughtfully in his quiet but emphatic way. “If you want those things, you can find them in a library.”

I heard say something very similar about nostalgia when I met him a few months ago as we stood in front of a lounge TV watching the Red Sox game after an A.J. Liebling event. (I wish Liebling could know there were still A.J. Liebling events! There wasn’t nearly enough cheese to have pleased him, though.) A very old man approached him, his very old wife encouraging him to speak up. The old man had original copies of letters E.B. White had written to his father and wanted to know if they the magazine might be interested in printing them. Remnick was deeply civil but not interested. He said much the same thing about how the magazine isn’t a dancing graveyard but a living forest. (At least that was the gist of it.) As he told Friedman, “You don’t want to sit in a museum of your own magazine. You want to be about finding the next great thing.” Nevertheless, it’s quite clear that as long as Remnick is at the helm the tipsy specters will never lie down and be good for long; there are too many “P.K.”s in the movie listings for that, and speaking of E.B. “Andy” White, there’s a tall Dagwood sandwich of a memoir-essay about him by his stepson Roger Angell this week. Nostalgia is what it used to be, it seems, and for that I’m grateful.

Friedman also reports major news: There will be a DVD of the magazine’s first 80 years available soon. Do I have enough takeout menus? Yes, I have them right here. As if that weren’t enough excitement,

Remnick is looking forward to boosting the magazine’s “sense of ambition” by publishing a number of three-part series. In fact, Remnick hints at the kind of writing we may soon be seeing in his magazine’s pages. The book he’d love to read, he says, would be a “nonfiction ‘Vanity Fair’ of Washington, D.C.”

Well, fiction types, you know your project now.

I’ll be away from modems—even dial-up!—all weekend under several feet of snow, but look for me on Sunday night. The double issue should keep you busy till then.

The New Yorker Looks Ahead at 80 [MarketWatch]
Personal History: Andy [New Yorker]
David Remnick and Roger Angell at the 2003 New Yorker Festival [New Yorker, audio Q&A]
Reporting It All: A.J. Liebling at One Hundred [David Remnick, New Yorker]

Breaking news! I say, breaking news! “Letter From Washington” is back, this time in the hands of Jeff Goldberg—who, says Remnick (looking very fetching with his copper bat sculpture), will write in about once a month:

THE New Yorker, on the brink of celebrating its 80th anniversary and profits last year believed to have topped $10 million, is reopening an office in Washington, D.C…. Jeff Goldberg, a New Yorker writer who is finishing up a book on the Middle East for Knopf, is currently scouting locations for the new D.C. office.

“I expect [Goldberg] will have a place in a few weeks,” said New Yorker Editor in Chief David Remnick, “How long can it take? It’s not New York,” he quipped.

Maybe Wonkette and Washingtonienne can give him some neighborhood-culture tips. The best part of the story, though, is this throwaway line: “Seymour Hersh will keep his dusty old office by himself in a separate location.” Good God—the man is already writing about torture. Can’t you give him an Aeron chair and some Pledge?

Good luck, Jeff. Let’s be careful out there.

Remnick’s Capitol “Letter” [NY Post]
Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz responds to a question from Jeffrey Goldberg of the New Yorker Magazine [DoD]

Categories: Hersh