Steve Jobs may not be back to work yet, but Fake Steve is.
Fake Steve Jobs (aka Newsweek columnist Dan Lyons) has started blogging again.
Over the weekend, Fake Steve made a series of off-color jokes about Steve Jobs’ recent liver transplant. The posts are classic Fake Steve — sick, tasteless and LOL funny.
Unfortunately, it may not last.
However, Lyons said he might not keep it up.
“Still premature,” said Lyons in an email. “I just can’t resist the liver stuff. Lots of reasons to not do it. For one thing, I’m starting a tech blog for NewsWeek in a few weeks, and won’t have time to do both.”
The new blog will be called Techtonic Shifts.
Lyons launched the hugely popular Secret Diary of Steve Jobs in 2006 and managed to write it anonymously for almost a year before being outed by the New York Times. He parlayed the blog into a book Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs, and later, a new job as a writer for NewsWeek (He was an editor for Forbes while writing as FSJ).
Even the real Steve Jobs admitted to being a fan. “I have read a few of the Fake Steve Jobs things recently and I think they’re pretty funny,” Jobs said at the D: All Things Digital technology conference.
But in July 2008, Lyons discontinued the blog after seeing how sick Jobs had become. “I saw how he looked at WWDC and it was like having the wind knocked out of me. I just couldn’t carry on,” he told Ars Technica. In the meantime, Lyons has continued to blog on his own site, the Real Dan Lyons, but it hasn’t achieved the same success as Secret Diary.
Leander Kahney is the editor and publisher of Cult of Mac.
Leander is a longtime technology reporter and the author of six acclaimed books about Apple, including two New York Times bestsellers: Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products and Inside Steve’s Brain, a biography of Steve Jobs.
He’s also written a top-selling biography of Apple CEO Tim Cook and authored Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod, which both won prestigious design awards. Most recently, he was co-author of Cult of Mac, 2nd Edition.
Leander has been reporting about Apple and technology for nearly 30 years.
Before founding Cult of Mac as an independent publication, Leander was news editor at Wired.com, where he was responsible for the day-to-day running of the Wired.com website. He headed up a team of six section editors, a dozen reporters and a large pool of freelancers. Together the team produced a daily digest of stories about the impact of science and technology, and won several awards, including several Webby Awards, 2X Knight-Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism and the 2010 MIN (Magazine Industry Newsletter) award for best blog, among others.
Before being promoted to news editor, Leander was Wired.com’s senior reporter, primarily covering Apple. During that time, Leander published a ton of scoops, including the first in-depth report about the development of the iPod. Leander attended almost every keynote speech and special product launch presented by Steve Jobs, including the historic launches of the iPhone and iPad. He also reported from almost every Macworld Expo in the late ’90s and early ‘2000s, including, sadly, the last shows in Boston, San Francisco and Tokyo. His reporting for Wired.com formed the basis of the first Cult of Mac book, and subsequently this website.
Before joining Wired, Leander was a senior reporter at the legendary MacWeek, the storied and long-running weekly that documented Apple and its community in the 1980s and ’90s.
Leander has written for Wired magazine (including the Issue 16.04 cover story about Steve Jobs’ leadership at Apple, entitled Evil/Genius), Scientific American, The Guardian, The Observer, The San Francisco Chronicle and many other publications.
Leander has a postgrad diploma in artificial intelligence from the University of Aberdeen, and a BSc (Hons) in experimental psychology from the University of Sussex.
He has a diploma in journalism from the UK’s National Council for the Training of Journalists.
Leander lives in San Francisco, California, and is married with four children. He’s an avid biker and has ridden in many long-distance bike events, including California’s legendary Death Ride.
You can find out more about Leander on LinkedIn and Facebook. You can follow him on X at @lkahney or Instagram.
