Darren Aronofsky

"My personal theory is that she’s something that they can’t grasp," CBS News commentator-turned-McCain advisor Nicolle Wallace tells Felix Gillette of Sarah Palin. "They don’t know how to process her. She is beautiful, accomplished, successful, pro-gun and pro-life. They’ve never seen all those things in one package. She totally disorients many in the liberal media, especially a lot of the women."

John Koblin reports that Moneyball author Michael Lewis will be leaving Portfolio and The New York Times Magazine for an exclusive gig at Vanity Fair. "In the pantheon of great narrative journalists, Michael Lewis is pretty much at the top," says VF editor Graydon Carter. Plus: Times Metro Section’s Big Flatbush Wake

Who will write the great non-fiction account of this election, wonders Leon Neyfakh. "[A]re these not extraordinary times? Even the skeptics seem to agree that this election has been one of the most captivating and unpredictable in history..."

Plus: Drop.io... Buffalo Guys... Darren Aronofsky.

Darren Aronofsky was a serious young man, a nature boy. He grew up in Manhattan Beach, Brooklyn, where the beaches were beautiful but cluttered with trash. His interest in the environment took him to Alaska to study the behavior of seals.

“There was a moment, we were kayaking around,” he said of the trip with the School for Field Studies, a charity on whose board he now sits. “I was eating a candy bar and I dropped the wrapper in the water and it went under. And I realized that that thing was going into this pristine environment that I was in and there was no way of ever taking back what I had just done.  read more »

So far, everyone we know at this year’s Toronto Film Festival has been kvetching about how many movies there are to see, how many places in that Canadian city there are to roam (and how annoying all that Canadian niceness gets after a few days!), and the madness surrounding anything Brad Pitt (for Rex Reed’s full Toronto report, check back on Wednesday). However, something is getting done, as Variety reported today the first major sale of the festival: US rights to Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler (which just won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival) sold to Fox Searchlight for about $4 million dollars. The movie, which stars Mickey Rourke (!) as a down-and-out wrestler, screened last night, and the bidding took place at the Four Seasons Hotel. According to Variety, other bidders included Lionsgate, Overture, Weinstein and Co. and Sony Pictures. Go, Oscar buzz, go!