New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000.

Summary from Publisher:

Only yesterday boys and girls spoke of embracing and kissing (necking) as getting to first base. Second base was deep kissing, plus groping and fondling this and that. Third base was oral sex. Home plate was going all the way. That was yesterday. Here in the year 2000 we can forget about necking. Today’s girls and boys have never heard of anything that dainty. Today first base is deep kissing, now known as tonsil hockey, plus groping and fondling this and that. Second base is oral sex. Third base is going all the way. Home plate is being introduced by name.

And how rarely our hooked-up boys and girls are introduced by name!–as Tom Wolfe has discovered from a survey of girls’ Filofax diaries, to cite but one of Hooking Up’s displays of his famed reporting prowess. Wolfe ranges from coast to coast chronicling everything from the sexual manners and mores of teenagers . . . to fundamental changes in the way human beings now regard themselves, thanks to the hot new fields of genetics and neuroscience . . . to the inner workings of television’s magazine-show sting operations.

Printed here in its entirety is “Ambush at Fort Bragg,” a novella about sting TV in which Wolfe prefigured with eerie accuracy three cases of scandal and betrayal that would soon explode in the press. A second piece of fiction, “U. R. Here,” the story of a New York artist who triumphs precisely because of his total lack of talent, gives us a case history preparing us for Wolfe’s forecast (“My Three Stooges,” “The Invisible Artist”) of radical changes about to sweep the arts in America.

Table of Contents:

Hooking Up: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the Second Millennium: An American’s World

THE HUMAN BEAST
Two Young Men Who Went West
Digibabble, Fairy Dust, and the Human Anthill
Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died

VITA ROBUSTA, ARS ANOREXICA
In the Land of the Rococo Marxists
The Invisible Artist
The Great Relearning
My Three Stooges

AMBUSH AT FORT BRAGG: A NOVELLA
Ambush at Fort Bragg
PART ONE – I, IRV
PART TWO – THE IMPORTANCE OF LOLA THONG
PART THREE – GUILTY! GUILTY! GUILTY!
PART FOUR – THE ONE WITH THE BALLS

THE NEW YORKER AFFAIR
Foreword: Murderous Gutter Journalism
Tiny Mummies! The True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street’s Land of the Walking Dead!
Lost in the Whichy Thickets: The New Yorker
Afterward: High in the Saddle

Online:
TomWolfe.com (excerpt)
Scribd
Google Books