I like that Alex Rodriguez and Jennifer Lopez are dating because, well, of course they are dating. The only question is for how long.

If you’ve come here for the latest on the Yanks I can only point you to places like River Ave Blues where they actually know what’s going on.

Meanwhile, so off the topic, but I did a cool interview with the journalist Chip Brown this week over at Esquire Classic:

EC: You said David Maraniss was your first editor. What was it like working for him?

CB: I learned an awful lot from David. I can still hear him say something that, again, seems absurdly basic now but at the time was a revelation: Every paragraph must advance the story. Among many fine editors I’ve had, I rank him as one of the best. Another would be Will Blythe, who was the literary editor of Esquire when I was working for the magazine and encouraged me not to be afraid to throw in an occasional quote from E.M. Cioran, the great Romanian philosopher, whose wonderful screwball provocations include lines like “One always perishes by the self one assumes: to bear a name is to claim an exact mode of collapse.” And there is also Julie Grau who now has her own book imprint Spiegel & Grau. I remember Maraniss once said even if you are writing about someone who is corrupt, rotten to the core, you can’t take away their humanity. You have to kind of cradle them when you write about them. It doesn’t mean you pull a punch, but you can’t be self-righteous or snide or judgmental. That just makes you look worse.

EC: You want to let them hang themselves.

CB: If it’s a capital offense, maybe that’s right. But in a way there’s editorializing in that too — in letting the reader make the righteous judgment — only it doesn’t seem as objectionable. And it’s truer to life, not to say more decent, to make room in what you write for the frailties of your own character, or to allude to the degree that all of us are imperfect.

EC: Did Maraniss encourage you to work on having a strong point of view or moral position?

CB: Not in the sense of consciously taking up issues with a moral agenda, but yes, in the sense of having a moral sensibility. He told me to work on my coldness. He would say, “Don’t be uncharitable.” Actually that might have been advice for managing a bollixed love life, not journalism. But it carried over.

Picture by Bags