About that "Brady Bunch" fanfic in The New Yorker and how I almost feel as though I am bullying The New Republic at this point.

The June 30 issue of The New Republic just popped up on its own in my iPad. I only noticed because I was in my magazine-reading app finishing reading a story called "Here's the Story," by David Gilbert in The New Yorker, which I'd been "reading" via podcast while out and about. This is a great story, by the way, and though you'll need a subscription to read it at that link, anyone can read this interview with Gilbert in which he explains something that's not necessary to liking the story: It's the story — here's the story... — of the first husband and the first wife who had to die to lay the groundwork for the merged family of Mike and Carol Brady.

With the Bradys, I think I understood the ridiculousness of the parents and the kids, the goody-two-shoes attitude... I spent a few weeks watching old episodes and reading a slew of Brady quotes to try to incorporate the language of Mike and Carol—like in the pilot, Carol asks a haggard Mike if he needs a tranquilizer. I also wanted Don Drysdale in the story, because of his appearance in the show. Longfellow, too. A vague Hawaii reference. The Sunflower Girls. All these little details that hopefully add to the heartbreak of Ted and Emma....

Since the world of the Bradys is such an artificial world, I wanted the world of Ted and Emma to be absolutely real. That was very important to me, for them to fly above the construct of the show, to take on the appearance of living, breathing souls and perhaps, for a moment, gain their humanity and transcend their non-origin origins...

Hitting the home button within that app doesn't get you back to the iPad home screen but to your whole collection of magazines, each one represented by the cover of the newest issue. That's the only reason I saw the hit piece on Scott Walker, attempting to smear him as somehow a racist — he "owes his success to a toxic strain of racial politics" — so I took a screen shot of the cover and blogged it, then came back a while later to let you know that the article — "The Unelectable Whiteness of Scott Walker/A Journey Through the Poisonous World That Produced a Republican Star," by Alec MacGillis — has nothing racial about Walker himself. (The racial material is about the demographics right-wing radio of Milwaukee.)

I noted — at 3:00 pm, yesterday — that the cover and article were not yet up on the TNR website, but I expected to see them momentarily, and even commented 2 hours later that I was surprised at the lag. It's now almost 8 a.m. the next day, and my attack on the article you can't read yet has been linked on Instapundit and Power Line. I almost feel like I'm bullying TNR... kicking it while it's snoozing. Come on, TNR.

You know, I subscribed to The New Republic because it seemed to be poised to leap forward in digital media. I wanted to witness the roll out of the new design and effect of the new editor-publisher Chris Hughes — the 30-year-old co-founder of Facebook.

How did I catch Chris Hughes, et al., flat-footed. Me, an old professor with a Blogspot blog, an iMac, and an iPad... me, reading a short story in The New Yorker about the year 1967, the year when I was 16.

UPDATE: TNR put the article up Sunday evening: here.