Opinions

That’s what it used to look like. (Mario Tama - GETTY IMAGES) Journalism, they tell you, never goes out of style.

People have a fundamental hankering for news. They always have. News at its most primitive level is simply an expansion of the possible subjects for gossip, and gossip has fueled our conversations ever since we first sat around fires roasting large hunks of mammoth meat.

“Garg Who Kills Most Mammoths will not make a good chief,” we said. “Urm Who Paints The Caves is worthier.”

“No,” someone said. “Urm Who Paints The Caves couldn’t spear a mammoth if his life depended on it, and I hear he’s cruel to his tame wolf-hound.”

“I hear Garg eats tame wolfhound.”

“There was a very interesting study,” someone else would chime in, “that every seven minutes conversation automatically stops because we have to listen for approaching predators.” (The person who begins most sentences in conversation with the phrase “There was a very interesting study” is a recognized type who has been around for centuries.)

The conversation would dutifully stop.

“I don’t hear any predators,” someone else would say.

We would continue chewing our meat in silence. “It’s been a while since we had a good stoning,” Zurg Who Watches Too Avidly The Noisy Talking Heads would conclude. “We should get on that.”

Remember how fun this was the first time? (Gerald Herbert - AP) The Romney campaign is now offering, as an incentive to donors, the chance to win a dinner with Donald Trump — and Mitt Romney.

A dinner with Mitt Romney is bad enough.

But there are a good number of people out there — Mitt Romney used to be one of them — who would give you $3 if you said that you would ensure that never, at any point in their lives, would they be forced to eat dinner with Donald Trump.

I am not one of those people. Today I inadvertently ate lunch with the next president of the United States, a gentleman who approached me on the street as I sat ravenously consuming a box of macaroni and cheese and informed me that he was leading in the polls with 1/3 of the American vote. All he had to do to win was live until September, he said, and the secret police would take things from there. I am not making this up.

My point is, I will eat dinner with anyone, as long as it’s dinner.

It’s not the idea of dinners with celebrities that is so novel. President Obama, in his fundraising, has gone so far as to invite you to spend the evening with him and Bill Clinton. Maybe they can do as Romney suggested and have a beef with each other.*

But the appeal of the Romney-Trump dinner is more than that. It is not just that you get to fly somewhere and enjoy a nice meal.

It sounds like a nice package. The website informs you that:

Even Abraham Lincoln is being enlisted in the hunt for vampires. (Stephen Vaughan, 20th Century Fox) This has not been a good week for vampire capitalists.

First President Obama runs an ad in which former steel workers call Bain a vampire because “they came in and sucked the life out of us.”

I got a few indignant phone calls from the vampire lobby complaining that “while it is true that this is what vampires do in some cases, in other cases, a vampire’s bite can prevent you from ever dying and give you new energy you never thought you had.” There was a meditative pause, “Of course, sometimes this immortality requires you to keep strange hours. But this is the global economy!”

“It is 4 a.m.,” I said. “How did you get this number?”

Then I heard what sounded like a heavy lid slamming.

Later I got a follow-up e-mail pointing out that this has been a rough few years for vampires. They have been portrayed in popular culture as manipulative, overprotective boyfriends with bad skin, pay-cable sex fiends and/or as Johnny Depp As He Looks In Every Film These Days.

The honeymoon is over. (Noah Kalina - AP) After last week, when the Internet was absolutely ravenous for any possible thought about Facebook anyone might have, I was hoping never to have to dwell on the Web site again. We were running out of things to say. We tugged all the insights off the back shelves and were starting to pass out things that looked sort of like thoughts but turned out later to be misperceptions.

Last week my colleague Joel Achenbach quipped that he could tell Facebook’s wave had crested because he thought it might be a good idea to buy some shares, and that was traditionally the kiss of death.

But of course we were invested in Facebook. That’s where we store all our memories. We were as invested in Facebook as you could possibly be without actually buying a share.

Even The Post played into this. Last weekend, we inquired, What does Facebook’s value say about ours?

If Facebook is a flop, what are we?

One of the reasons I wanted so badly for Facebook to succeed was that it would go a little way to justifying the bulldog’s lifetime I’ve spent on the site. It’s considerable. If I had back all the time I’d wasted on Facebook in the past few years, just think of all the YouTube videos I could have watched.

Is it a tech bubble? Tech bubbles are like baggage carousels — they sound much more fun than they actually are. In fact, ever since Lawrence Welk went off the air, bubbles have been somewhat frowned upon.

Perhaps, for Facebook the writing was on the wall.

Have you seen a study, ever, that said something like “Facebook is bringing us closer together, and people do not regret the time they spend on the popular social networking site”? No. All the recent studies about Facebook have found that a) it is implicated in divorces, b) it is linked to loneliness, depression and compulsion, and c) it is vastly annoying. That last one wasn’t a study, just an observation. Now we also have that creeping sense that it will go the way of MySpace, and all the kilograms of writing about What It Means To Like and the Tao of the Status Update will wither into dust.

The more you look at Facebook, the less it sounds like something you would want to invest in. It’s a divorce machine full of isolated, compulsive, near-strangers, all tapping away in the dark.

Gee, I’ll pass. What’s Twitter up to?

“Here is a captive audience to whom you can advertise,” Facebook says. “Once we figure out how to monetize it, it’ll be great.”

But the more you study the canonical Facebook user, the worse it gets. He is not the hip, photogenic, effervescent individual that all those status updates and images portray, but rather a sad, lonesome person best described as “the exact demographic who cries during 3 a.m. commercials for magical sponges.”

I am worried that Baz Luhrmann’s new 3D adaptation of “The Great Gatsby” may be too faithful to the book.

Ever since I heard that Baz Luhrmann was adapting “The Great Gatsby” as a movie, I secretly hoped that he would insert one major plot point, character, or theme that did not appear in the book, just to make the lives of America’s high school teachers a little bit easier. The news that the adaptation was in 3D came as a relief. All the students who wrote essays about the symbolism of the moment when Dr. T. J. Eckleburg’s eyes surged out of the sign and began rampaging through East Egg, devastating everything in their wake, would be easy to spot.

But it seems from the trailer that this may not be so.

New music is all very well, but it is pretty easy to recognize that F. Scott was not a fan of Jay-Z.

Visually speaking, it was so thoughtful of F. Scott Fitzgerald to write the sequel to “Moulin Rouge!”

But the dialogue sounds in­cred­ibly familiar, and the characters are all recognizable.