When You Can’t Trust Your Eyes

David Laskin is almost embarrassed to admit that just about the only thing he watches on TV is the Weather Channel. “My wife thinks I’m slightly cracked,” he says.

As this week’s blizzard hammered the East Coast, the former New Yorker, 42, was glued to the media coverage at his home in balmy Seattle. As if this weren’t enough luck, Laskin has an impeccably timed book that seeks to explain the country’s calamitous weather and how it has shaped the national character. In “Braving the Elements: The Stormy History of American Weather,” newly published by Doubleday, Laskin describes weather as “the classic example of chaos at work” and details the increasingly complex efforts to forecast conditions with greater accuracy.

In addition, Laskin offers his own engaging views about how the mass media have heightened our interest in weather during the past two decades. “Television has had an incalculable impact on our national experience of weather,” he writes. “For millions of people, television weather is weather. They want to know what’s happening outside their houses right now as they watch, one weathercaster told me, and they’d rather get it from the screen than look out the window or go out and put their faces in it.”

The Weather Channel (“It makes you feel as if there is nothing going on in the world but weather”) was once dismissed as a cable-TV joke, but now is watched in nearly 200,000 households at any given time.

As a result of this media attention, Laskin says people hold forecasters to a higher standard of performance than is expected of many branches of government. Consumers of weather information leave their homes expecting to experience the weather conditions described in the latest forecast, not the conditions as they actually find them.

“There is a long history of fury over weather forecasts,” Laskin says. “It’s like, ‘They are telling the future, so they’d better be right.’ The forecasters have taken over a shamanistic, a priestlike function, but we don’t revere them as we do priests.”

*

Look Who’s Talking: The glitz and gloss of the Conde Nast magazines have long obscured their questionable financial health. For years, executives at competing publications have been quick to note that the great buzz generated by articles in Vanity Fair, for example, did not necessarily mean the magazine was making money. If anything, it has been widely assumed in publishing circles that huge earnings at Glamour and Vogue allowed Conde Nast Chairman S.I. Newhouse Jr., whose family owns the privately held magazine company, to withstand losses among the 12 other titles.

Last week, the veil of secrecy was lifted by the Wall Street Journal--with the unexpected assistance of the mysterious Newhouse himself. In a Page One story, he acknowledged that Conde Nast lost money in the fiscal year that ended Jan. 31, 1994--as much as $20 million, according to the paper’s sources. Nine of its 14 magazines were showing red ink, including Vanity Fair, GQ, Self, Conde Nast Traveler and Bon Appetit. (The New Yorker, owned by Newhouse but operated outside the Conde Nast group, also has been posting losses.)

But, Newhouse said, Conde Nast’s profitability “was very good” in the year ending Jan. 31, 1995--about $20 million to $25 million on revenue of about $900 million, the Wall Street Journal reported. Newhouse said only Details and Allure were still losing money in 1995.

The apparent turnaround is attributed to a variety of factors, such as more aggressive marketing, the implementation of editorial budgets (an innovation, believe it or not) and the curtailment of extravagant excess in the Conde Nast culture. Under company president Steven T. Florio, who last week became chief operating officer, there is no more free car service for low-level assistants and no more free meals for many of those who routinely rang up a Manhattan caterer (and sometimes ordered take-home food along with lunch).

*

On the Racks: It certainly appears that Robert James Waller’s most recent novel, “Puerto Vallarta Squeeze,” has stirred far less affection among readers than his previous books, “The Bridges of Madison County” and “Slow Waltz in Cedar Bend.”

In a special promotion, Warner Books is urging booksellers to slash the retail price of the $18.95 title to one “in the neighborhood of $9.50.” Warner plans to issue retailers a credit for each copy sold at the steeper-than-usual discount.

Consumers also should find big markdowns on actor Kelsey Grammer’s autobiography (“So Far,” Dutton) and Luciano Pavarotti’s “Pavarotti,” from Random House. These publishers are also offering credits to booksellers that cut the retail prices to stimulate sales. The practice typically suggests that supplies of the books far exceed demand.

*

Afterwords: Calvin Trillin, the journalist and humorist, will continue as a staff writer with the New Yorker while adding a weekly column that will appear in Time starting next month. Trillin had been a Time correspondent before joining the New Yorker in 1963. . . .

Newsweek has announced that David Hume Kennerly, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer who also served as the White House photographer during Gerald R. Ford’s administration, has joined the newsweekly to shoot the 1996 presidential campaign and the forthcoming Olympics. Kennerly is the first photographer to be listed among Newsweek’s contributing editors. . . .

Exit Susan Lyne, who leaves the editor in chief’s position at Premiere to rejoin the movie business as the Walt Disney Co.’s New York-based executive vice president of acquisition, development and new business. Enter Christopher Connelly, who had been executive editor of the movie mag, as her successor. . . .

Look for Hollywood revelations from book publishers in the months ahead. Simon & Schuster has scheduled a June release for “Hit and Run: How Jon Peters and Peter Guber Took Sony for a Ride in Hollywood,” written by Nancy Griffin and Kim Masters, two journalists well-versed in the movie biz. St. Martin’s Press plans an August publication for “A Prime-Time Life,” the autobiography of veteran TV producer Aaron Spelling, the man behind “Melrose Place,” “Beverly Hills, 90210” and dozens of other shows.