BREAKING: How To Lose Friends And Alienate People(The Trailer, Not Krucoff's Self-Help Book)

Someone (it might have been Oscar Wilde, I don't remember, which probably means it was Oscar Wilde) once said we should read novels as often as we read newspapers and newspapers as often as we read novels or something like that. Which is quite unlike the way we do things here at Young Manhattanite. This shouldn't come as a surprise, being that the dictum at YM appears to be an ever-changing variation on the motto "fuck the reader." And it sure as hell hasn't kept us from passing judgment on books we haven't read (or films we haven't seen) because at the end of the day, really, who died and made you the one to say you have to be informed to have an opinion. All that being said, we have a soft spot for Toby Young. (He left a comment on Krucoff's Conde Nast "day after" post.) The guy's shtick was pretty clear from the get-go when he first came out with How To Lose Friends And Alienate People. But the excerpts from Ben Hecht's Child of the Century left us wondering whether he might have found what he was looking for if he had only come to New York a couple of years later, before the wave broke and everyone ran off to work for New York magazine:

Scores of them return vaguely to my mind. But there is nothing vague in my memory of their combined quality. They sat, grown and abuzz, outside an adult civilization, intent on breaking windows.

All of which is just another way of saying that he couldn't have been more of a loser than you probably are. And Jeff Bridges could've used a bit more pouf in his coiffe.