According to a nifty piece in the Times, Julie and Julia won't be making Mastering the Art of French Cooking a bestseller in France anytime soon. Indeed, most people haven't even heard of a woman who's widely regarded here as, in Meryl Streep's words, "one of the best ambassadors of France ... since Lafayette!" Says one French cookbook author, "Julia Child's cuisine is academic and bourgeois...It shows that in America, the cliché of beef, baguette and canard farci remains." One can only imagine the scorn they'd feel for "Julie"'s cutesy antics.

But very few Americans still regard Mastering the Art as their French bible, right? It's a relic as much of the time it came out in America as of France - a definitive treasure trove of classics, but too rich and fussy for modern tastes. But that doesn't mean it wasn't incredibly important - and not just to Ameirca's palette. As much as a cooking primer, Julia Child's book was the beginning of our enduring national girl-crush on France - which that nation has always treated like a cheerleader rebuffing a nerd, scornful and entitled but secretly flattered. In a way, it's sort of embarrassing to think of France seeing the movie, watching that crush play out. It's like they're reading out diary! Can't Julia play it a little cooler, make her infatuation and our clumsy advances just a little less obvious?

A ‘French Chef' Whose Appeal Doesn't Translate [NY Times]

It's risky territory, as there's a fine line between crushing and actual jealousy. And Shafrir acknowledges that the cultivation of a girl crush isn't always simple. She writes,

[A]s we grow older, finding women to look up to becomes, like everything else, a trickier minefield to navigate. As a journalist in New York City, I've found that media is an especially fraught industry for these kinds of relationships. Looking for a formal "mentor" seems forced; worshiping someone from afar, creepy; deciding one of your friends or co-workers is really cool and doing everything she does, single white female-y. And frenemies and backstabbers lurk behind every door. The intern you thought was interested in learning the ropes from you is actually just interested in taking your job.

However, the bulk of her article turns out to be, not a Lucinda Rosenfeld-style envy-fest, but a sweet exploration of women's admiration for other women. She quotes attorney Jasmine Moy, who says, a girl crush is "pretty much any woman who is funny and smart and talented and successful and pretty. Crushes are the things you get if you're not the 'I'm jealous, therefore I hate them' kind of person." Several women she interviews report crushes on author/illustrator Luann Shapton. Shapton is an art director at The New York Times, a novelist, an Elle columnist, and the co-owner, with her fiance, of "a beautifully restored farmhouse in North Salem, N.Y." There are plenty of ingredients for haterade here, but Shafrir's interviewees offer only love. "She just seems to have a really lovely life," says one Shapton admirer.

Shapton, for her part, is gracious in crush-dom. She says,

I've received a few emails from younger women which is nice, but weird since I certainly don't feel like I have anything figured out. If they ask for career advice, I try to explain that I didn't really plan a career-I was able to make up my jobs along the way, and I advise them to do the same. I didn't ever decide on a single course of action. But that basically makes you-for a long time-broke, obscure, somewhat unreliable and scattered. Trying to answer the question 'What do you do?' would give me hives.

It wouldn't be that hard to make fun of this, to imagine Shapton lounging around her farmhouse, saying "oh, this old thing?" But one of the great canards of armchair sociology is the idea that women don't help each other, that the glass ceiling stays in place because women are busy catfighting each other beneath it. So it's nice to read about women being nice, and not fake-nice either, but actually sincerely in awe of and respectful of one another.

If I had to pick a celebrity girl crush, it would probably be Zadie Smith — fantastically successful young novelist, married to another successful young novelist, beautiful, likes Fawlty Towers, and once toured with They Might Be Giants. But one of my biggest girl crushes was not on a celebrity — it was on a girl who transferred to my college when I was a senior. She had complicated, impressive hair, dressed like a visitor from a more awesome universe, had her own website, published a zine as a teenager, wrote fiction, took photos, and after graduation moved into an apartment with her boyfriend (now husband), where they read Eliot to one another and covered the walls with art by their friends. I was sure she was too cool to ever be friends with me. Years later, after we'd already become close, she confessed she had thought the same thing about me. Now we both have our own websites, and although I think she still has better hair, I get to give her advice about teaching and making clam pasta. Sometimes the best girl crushes go both ways.

Fantasy Girl Crushes [Daily Beast]

Even though it may feel like we've seen a lot of Michelle Obama, she hasn't done any hard-hitting interviews, with say, Wolf Blitzer. And spouses of past Democratic nominees — Teresa Heinz Kerry, Tipper Gore, Hillary Rodham Clinton — all spent more time campaigning in the fall than Michelle Obama has, according to the Times. But one has to wonder: Was Michelle Obama's strong black working woman image softened into a "just a mommy" role, in order for the American public to find her more likeable, and her husband more electable? And did it work?

New To Campaigning, But No Longer A Novice [NY Times]

Target Women: Sarah Palin [Current]

If you aren't an obsessive MSNBC watcher, you might not know, but Rachel's the new Golden Girl of political prognositication. She's cute but not dumb, intelligent but not intimidating and she manages to not only hold her own on a male-dominated network (on male-dominated shows) but to best the boys. With the death of Tim Russert and the excommunication of Tucker Carlson, there's an opening for a new anchor and Rachel seems likely to get the slot.

What is sort of interesting  and something Rachel has never tried to hide  is that she's a lesbian. That little tidbit of information is left until the last hundred words or so of the Times' profile, even as her open (and thankfully unabashed) sexual orientation has caused some to question whether she can be successful as a news network anchor. Listen, MSNBC honchos: if Rachel can cause me to question my lifetime commitment to men with her intelligence, wit and composure under fire, I think even my sometimes-conservative grandma can get on board.

Now in Living Rooms, the Host Apparent [NY Times]

[Los Angeles, March 25. Image via Splash.]

[New York, March 20. Images via Splash.]

[New York, May 30; Image via Splash]
Fashion Scoops: Digging For Gold... Final Unveiling... Head Start [WWD]
Related: Kate Winslet For L'Oreal; Models Done With Makeup? [Fashionista]

Earlier: Girl Crush: Katherine Heigl

[Image via Splash]

Just as the cable network's Soledad O'Brien makes waking up early a whole lot easier, Hill helps us wind down after a long evening of preparatory blogging watching Law & Order reruns, thanks to her brief but memorable cameos on Anderson Cooper 360.

Although a full-fledged anchor on Headline News, Hill's role on 360 is basically that of interstitial news-reader. Night after night, however, Hill manages to upstage her Vanity Fair-covered, silver-foxed, Nawlins'-defending "It Boy" with a series of well-timed facial expressions, off-the-cuff jokes and generally unflappable, smart-as-a-whip demeanor.

Hill is also a bit of a tech geek (love!) having come to CNN via Tech TV, where she served as co-anchor and correspondent for the network's Tech Live daily news show; before that, she was a PA for PC Week's "PC Week Radio" (So she's not a Mac girl. Sue her!).

Most laudably, Hill has had to put up with Headline News' insufferable sleazeball Glenn Beck, who most recently creeped out news junkies by hitting on a female reporter for US Weekly. Last May, Hill had to endure a number of icky come-ons from the former drug addict, including comments that Hill was "looking hot in leather" and the following, taken from an exchange between the two from May 10:

BECK: All right. Time now to go "Straight to the Hill"  Erica Hill, the anchor of Prime News tonight. Hello, Erica.

HILL: Hello, there.

BECK: How are you?

HILL: I'm doing well. How are you this Wednesday?

BECK: I'm doing pretty good. I'm doing pretty good. I will tell you that it's a little embarrassing, sitting there, watching your program at night with my wife. And she says, "Look at the way that Erica is looking at you." And I say, "I know, honey."

HILL: Don't try to drag me in to this one, my friend. I am nothing but professional.

Too bad, we think. Beck could use a new asshole.

Erica Hill [CNN]
Beckwatch, Day 3: Beck Continued Sexually Suggestive Comments Towards Anchor Hill... [MediaMatters]
Glenn Beck Would Like To See You Naked [Gawker]

We are gay for Maria Bartiromo. Always have been. Even after she took that corporate jet to Shanghai and left all those poor bankers there so she could fly back with Todd alone. Even after we heard that someone else heard in Davos  haha, yeah, we actually know someone who goes to Davos!  that she was prego with Todd's baby. Even before we read what a great kisser she was as Jordached Catholic schoolgirl in Dyker Heights. And so it is with only the faintest twinge of our usual moral uprightness that we bid good fucking riddance to Jonathan Steinberg, the schlumpy spawn of some famous corporate raider from the eightiees that became Mr. Bartiromo in 2000. Steinberg apparently got so wracked with suspicion that his wife was cheating on him that he hired a detective. Who apparently had a January 23 issue of the Wall Street Journal couriered over pronto to Oblivious H!.

Why can't we summon the sympathy we ought for Jonathan Steinberg? Because if he really paid attention to Maria he might have noticed her distance before the the ethics officials of a fucking Wall Street investment bank fired her lover for screwing her? Because the ignorance of his vast fortune blinded him to the salient fact that his wife was not only hotter but more ambitious than him? Or because she, um, elevates the average IQ of a women-on-TV pool that now has to accomodate eight whole members of the Bad Girls Club?

Yeah, or it could be that she's just really super pretty. (Who do you think does her eyes??)

Just Asking [New York Post via Gawker]

The Maria-Todd Citi Saga [WSJ]