An improv group decides that members of an unknown band playing their first New York gig ought to think they're a smash hit. So they study the band's music and then crowd the performance, pretending to be hard-core fans.

That ought to be funny. Check it out this weekend on your local radio.

Mind Games | This American Life

The grand ballroom at the Pierre Hotel in New York is an unlikely place to hear people talk about going "clubbin'," particularly when they're a bunch of Wall Street types wearing expensive suits.

But that was the hot topic of conversation at the 18th annual private-equity conference sponsored by the trade magazine Buyouts in early March -- a gathering that some describe as "the Davos of private equity."

In this context, "clubbin'" referred to a particular kind of leveraged buyout, in which rival firms team up to take large public companies private. The transactions typically involve obscene sums of money and grab big headlines, such as last year's $15-billion leveraged buyout of Hertz rental cars by Clayton Dubilier & Rice, the Carlyle Group, and Merrill Lynch Global Private Equity.

And although "clubbin'" is a relatively new phenomenon, the consensus at the conference was that this party is just getting started.

"It's definitely here to stay," said panelist Alan Holt, Carlyle's co-head of U.S. buyouts.

Going clubbin'

Savanna Samson, star of "The New Devil in Miss Jones," has gone further than simply slapping a steamy label on some cheesy chardonnay. Her Italian red wine has received a score of 90 to 91 out of 100 by wine guru Robert Parker.

Porn star's wine passion gets plaudits

When O’Reilly’s day has passed, though, he certainly will have left a lasting stamp on cable news, which is increasingly a medium of outsize, super-opinionated franchise personalities. It is hard to remember, without taking a minute to think about it, who delivers the morning and evening news on the cable networks, or who the main reporters are. Cable is not a medium for providing information, and it is not going to become one anytime soon. Cable is the world that Bill O’Reilly made. National politics will change long before that does.

Bill O'Reilly's Baroque Period

This week in the magazine, Jon Lee Anderson writes about President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, of Liberia, the first democratically elected female head of state in Africa. Here, with Amy Davidson, Anderson discusses Johnson Sirleaf, her country’s civil war, and his time as a boy there.

After the Warlords

“Inside Man” needs to be seen. The more it sags as a thriller, the more it jabs and jangles as a study of racial abrasion.

“Grand Illusion” offered the ennobling suggestion that national divisions were delusory, and that our common humanity can throw bridges across any social gulf. To which Lee would reply, Nice idea. Go tell it to the guy who just had his turban pulled off by the cops.

Inside Man | The New Yorker

In modern-day Baghdad, the carnage takes a different, less organized form, but the state of affairs is truly apocalyptic. The few Western journalists left in Baghdad these days have armed cars to follow them to intervene in case of kidnapping attempts. The violence is so intense that it is impossible for Westerners to walk the streets—regular Iraqis are afraid to have them in their shops or be seen talking with them in public. I do not plan on returning to Iraq, partly because I have found it impossible to do much real reporting in such an atmosphere of corrosive fear. Meanwhile, Iraqis live with all of this and worse every day. Journalists who have left and maintain contact from the outside by phone watch their former colleagues come unhinged as each day brings more suicide bombings and their less well-publicized corollary: US air raids. A low-level civil war is already under way between the Sunni and Shiites. Where is it all headed?

The Walrus Magazine | Dispatches from the Void

Robotic Feral Public Authoring links together two branches of research for community fun and action. Hobbyist robotics and public authoring (knowledge mapping and sharing) both enable people to use emerging technologies in dynamic and exciting new ways. Brought together they open up whole vistas of possibilities for exploring our local environments with electronic sensors to detect all kinds of phenomena and map them using online tools.

Proboscis | Social Tapestries | Feral Robots

Three years after America invaded, Iraq is as violent as ever

Iraq | Murder is certain | Economist.com

The inventor of the Flash Mob tells all.

My Crowd