The Hollywood Reporter, Esq. has seen Conan O’Brien’s contract with NBC – and it did include a statement that the Tonight Show begins at 11:35pm.

Thomas Frank’s excellent quarterly magazine returns with its 18th issue in 22 years.

Why now? And why with the Cleveland Plain Dealer? I don’t know – but this is the first interview with the Calvin & Hobbes creator that I have seen since the definitive Honk piece in 1987.

Hello, Twitters, MagCultists, Guardians, and Journoforumers:

UPDATE 3 Shouldn’t you be following me on Twitter?

UPDATE 2 BBC London requested – and has now been given – my copy of the London Weekly because they couldn’t find one anywhere.

UPDATE 1 Some people have requested a better picture of the masthead. (I’m one of those people to whom the masthead is not the logo but the staff box.) My iPhone won’t take a good enough picture, so here is what it says.

News Editor: Gary Smith, Managing Editor, thelondonweekly.co.uk: Dominic Gardener, Deputy Managing Editor, Alan Mills, Assistant Managing Editors: Lisa Ferguson, Neil Harris, Steve Campbell, Editors-at-large:tess Riley, Ken Broker, STAFF Writers: Janet Libberman, Andrew Price, Jeremy Jones, CRITICS: Simon Adams, Leah Fogerty, Clark Collins.

Disclaimer: The London Weekly is published once weekly by Global Publishing Group (GPG) and distributed Fridays & Saturdays. GPG does not assume any responsibility for all materials published in the paper. However, all material remain copyright to GPG. All views expressed are not necessary the views of the Editor or Publisher. For full t/c, go to: www.thelondonweekly.co.uk. Keep London tidy by taking your London Weekly with you when you leave the train, bus, or tube.

I left off email addresses, which you can find on the website, however, there are no phone numbers or street addresses listed in the paper.

ORIGINAL POST Picked up a copy of the first edition of the London Weekly from a binman outside Holburn station. Here are the iPhone shots:

The US Supreme Court last week recognised that corporations have ‘free speech’ like natural persons and thus could not be barred from influencing elections through advertising. The argument, of course, is that corporations may have access to much more capital to use in advertising than the average, old-style, human-type person.

However, Douglas Rushkoff illustrates in this essay that this merely ‘makes law out of what is already happening.’

Rushkoff:

While corporations have enjoyed the benefits of personhood for over a century, they don’t suffer the main pitfalls: chiefly, death—but also despair, fatigue, and the need to feed their kids. They could outrun or at least outlast any effort to curb their influence. That’s how the railroads got to trample States’ rights to their own land, how GE got out of cleaning the Hudson River, and so on. They just wait, make a little progress, and then wait some more.

Although I share the unease with giving corporations free speech – what’s next, giving them the vote? – I can’t help but be reminded of Stanley Fish’s view in There is no such thing as free speech.

Fish, a Milton scholar, describes the poet’s Aeropagita.

Stanley:

Much of the Areopagitica is a celebration of toleration in matters of expression, for reasons that have now become more familiar to us: the more information the better able are we to choose wisely; the more information the better are we able to exercise our intellects so that they become more refined and perceptive. Another part of Milton’s argument is that when something is suppressed it does not go away. It just takes on a romantic underground life and flourishes rather than being brought to the light of day where it might be refuted. All of these are today familiar arguments and components of free speech rhetoric.

But here is the killer:

Stanley:

About three quarters of the way through the tract Milton says, “Now you understand of course”, and the tone in his prose suggests that he assumes that most of his readers have always understood this, “that when I speak of toleration and free expression I don’t mean Catholics. Them we extirpate”.

So, for those os us that cherish free speech but not, of course, for corporations: we mean not tolerated Popery.

If you work in a newsroom and continue to do this, you have no excuse.

The New Yorker has posted every story they published by Salinger from 1946 to 1965.

This sandwich has no mayonaise, a 1945 short story in Esquire.

The very satisfying NY Times obituary

A smiling photo.