I was talking with a incredibly smart lawyer yesterday, trying to draft a statement about what I’ll lightly call a potential shitstorm. I wrote something and he sent back what I’ve found to be the standard legal response to these issues – the it’s our policy not to comment on these matters but we dispute their validity. It was the only way to play it, he said, because a different response would encourage tabloid press. The more we give the more it will turn it into a feeding frenzy.

A tabloid cycle is propelled by news organizations scrambling for facts. The New York Post has this, the Times has that and they go back and forth battling for exclusives. To keep going they need someone’s cooperation, be it with quotes or facts or accusations. They are stuck in this box, in other words, and the best response makes that box as small as possible. You kill the story by depriving it of air.

That ends with the internet because the web works on a different set of economic assumptions. The main one being that information scarcity is not longer a limiting factor. What a Gawker reporter writes is in no way boxed in by what he doesn’t know. In fact, its in precisely in those grey areas that he is free to write and speculate as he pleases and where the best material comes from.

Obama understood this the way I am starting to understand this. We’re coming upon a world where the feeding frenzy is no longer over bits of information but over the lack of it. The worst thing that can happen in this model is that you leave things open to speculation.

What I think this means is that you won’t be able to kill a story the old way anymore. “No comment” gives the story life instead of taking it away. The new way will be to flood the market with facts and information, to root out grey areas and get the target off your back by taking the fun out of it.

I’ve been getting a few emails about what happened to the “What I’m Reading” posts since I haven’t done one in a while. The format just wasn’t working for me and I felt like it wasn’t the best way to do it. I also tried messing around with Amazon reviews but I couldn’t get into it.

What would you guys think of a reading newsletter? I’m still fleshing the idea out in my head but I think it could work as an email sent out every one or two weeks with a list of interesting books I’ve been reading and short reviews. I try to make connections between books or ideas or at the very least use one book to turn me on to another one. This could be a much better way to do that.

I’d like to know if this something people would subscribe to. I have all these really cool, obscure books that I’ve discovered over the last six months that I want to recommend and talk about but a blog is just not the right way to do it. People should be able to email me back and we could talk about them and we can work through the books together. Or if you’re already doing this with someone else, send it to me because I’d like to sign up myself.

The painter Titian was a workhorse. As a teenager, he apprenticed for Giorgione, who taught him to paint by way of imitating his works. Titian, in other words, learned to paint by counterfeiting. He learned well, we know, because every now and then, a Giorgione piece is discovered to have been a Titian all along.

The next part of Titian’s career – decades of his life – are marked by what seem like tedious, low level hustling. There is hardly a person in Italy whose portrait he didn’t paint. He didn’t just do nobles and kings but their families and friends. Charles V, alone, he painted at least five times. For years he had the standing right to paint the Doge of Venice, and did successive portraits of multiple reigns. Often, he worked not by the patronage system, but on contract. Doing so much a pop, churning out paintings like a machine.

Vasari remarked that near Titian’s death, his style seems to change from a deliberate, painstaking technique to a loose, bold, even coarse series of brush strokes. Yet, from up close and afar, the works are still perfect – maybe better than what he did in his youth. Thinking that this was the key to his success, his imitators have tried to copy the style to mediocre and sloppy results. What they missed, Vasari realized, was that Titian’s comfort concealed the labor beneath the work; it hid the years spent in repetitious portrait painting, of working on the wage system, of learning every variety of face and light and committing it deep into his intuitive memory.

I guess what I mean to say is that we’re often like Titian’s imitators. We perceive a freedom and ease that simply does not exist. In fact, it not only doesn’t exist, but it obscures an effort we haven’t even begun to conceive. I remember when I first left school, I would see people come and go into the office while I was stuck with a schedule and a desk. It felt like they were free and I was in chains. Like, what it must feel to come and go as you please. To feel so secure in your position.

Now I have all that and I realize I was chasing a ghost. I don’t suddenly feel less constrained, I feel more. I’d seen the physical manifestations, what time they came in or where they answered the phone, and tricked myself into thinking that once you got there it all came easy. And of course, it doesn’t, it gets harder.

But if you can rid yourself of the pressure, you can at least start to understand that each one of theses phases has a purpose, purposes that are critically reliant on the phase that came before it. And appreciate it instead of struggling with resentment or dissatisfaction.