Shelby Foote, the Southern historian best remembered for his wise and empathetic tales that animated Ken Burns’ landmark PBS series on the Civil War, died on Monday night at age 88.

Foote spoke with me by telephone from his home in Memphis in 1991, when I was writing a story on the controversy over Confederate symbols in public places. You know how I was able to reach him? His number was listed in the Memphis phone book; I called and he picked up on the first ring.

“Have you ever thought about getting an unlisted number?” I asked.

“Oh, I think about it, sometimes,” he replied in his soft drawl. I could almost see him scratching his snowy beard as he said it.

I think Foote became a media darling, beloved by the public, primarily because of his honesty — together with his understanding of people’s flaws, and his ability to put these flaws in their proper context.

When I asked him what he thought about calls to topple a famous statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest in Memphis, Foote said: “Forrest was known throughout the South for his kindness to slaves… Lincoln wanted to send blacks back to Africa; should we take his statue down, too?”

Forrest, a Confederate general, was recruited after the war to be the first leader of the Ku Klux Klan. He’s buried at Forrest Park, where the statue stands. And the controversy rages even today; here’s a recent piece in the Memphis Flyer.

In fact, they’ve become a lot like the supposed big, mean corporations they take such pleasure in criticizing. Read this story about a deal between Clear Channel Communications and New Times, which owns the Dallas Observer among many other weeklies.

It’s for the Arlington Pediatric Center (Virginia, not Texas), and, appropriately enough, I found it on a Canadian blog called Ads That Suck.

The new Page 6 blog is content theft, not an act of heroism as the thieves claim. Via B.L. Ochman.

When Tom Cruise broke from publicist Pat Kingsley in March 2004, few predicted that it would lead to Cruise becoming an outspoken anti-psychiatry zealot — who appears to be in need of a psychiatrist.

But Slate did post a fascinating post-mortem on the Tom-Pat relationship in April 2004. Lots of good background, although the writer, Adam Sternbergh, comes to a conclusion he probably now regrets:

Kingsley elevated the flack from media caddie to professional storyteller — she was, in effect, narrating the story of Tom Cruise, highlighting certain plot lines while burying unflattering details. But flacks can no longer control the story line — nor is it, in our far more permissive age, as important for them to.

Celebrities like (Colin) Farrell or Britney Spears can only hope to keep their heads above water while body-surfing from scandal to scandal. They may even realize that it’s important to give us things to talk about.

Well, maybe in MOST cases, Adam…but not this one.