“It’s not just black girls. It’s ethnic girls in general: Brazilian girls, Hispanic. You really don’t see a lot of Asians either. A lot of designers think that if every girl on the runway looks exactly alike, then people will come to the shows and buy the clothes because they won’t be focusing on the models….It’s not even just runway either... us ethnic girls should be getting a lot of the covers too! I would love to be on half of the campaigns these [white] girls are booking, all looking exactly alike. It’s not right. It’s not fair.”

[Page Six Magazine]

"There are perks to this job. We [the Gossip Girl cast] were all thrown into this situation with a lot of attention on us, and you get a lot of free clothes and shit but that’s no reason not to stay grounded. What am I really doing, baby? Saving the world? Nah, I’m on television.”

On the stylish Chuck Bass wardrobe:

"Chuck is an iconic character and the clothes are iconic. I think I rock the look well. My style has always been good. Top notch, baby. I like the glamorous indie rock look, like the Libertines. But you know, without the heroin needle sticking out of my arm."

On partying:

"If I want to go out and drink and throw a glass in the street, I’ll do it. As long as the reason is that I want to have fun and not that I want to create some sort of tension around me. Then I’d be a dick. But I’m not."

On warm weather:

"I love going out in the summer. The girls wear their nice dresses. Did that sound sleazy? It really did, didn’t it? Put it like this: Everyone comes out looking gorgeous in summer. We are a more beautiful species in the summer. No doubt Chuck Bass would say 'cheers' to that, baby."

Page Six Magazine

Diane von Furstenberg, Nicole Miller (3 mentions), Coke, Marquee, Tiffany, Cain, Budwieser, Skype, Chanel, Tenjune, Matsuri, Pink Elephant (3 mentions), Pastis, Cipriani, Le Bilboquet, Mediterraneo, 1 Oak, Hotel Gansevoort, Matsuri, Lazaro

See if you can figure out which is the name of her dog!

And see, see how happy the last page is, rid of all those pointless proper nouns? Awwwwwwwwwww, puke.

I Was Jilted Like A Real-Life Carrie Bradshaw [Page Six Magazine]
Related: Buy This Harvard-Free Keith Gessen Book And Win The Culture War! [Gawker]
Earlier: Will Sex & The City Make You A Communist?

Anyway, Jeremy is a 28-year-old University of Michigan grad who claims he makes $300,000 a year hosting such events as "Rich Guys & Hot Girls" — for which interested gentlemen submitted W-2s and women submitted five pictures. He claims his defining influence was the movie National Lampoon's Van Wilder. He drives a Segway. And he has an alterego, Richard Nouveau, who he claims is a "mockery of the white upper class." A mockery, eh? See if you can tell the Nouveau quotes from Jeremy's own, below!

1. "Society has taught us to not publicly acknowledge the obvious. Women want money in a man, men want beauty in a woman—this is a factual force of nature."

2. "It's sad and disgusting and it's superficial. [But] the only victims are the poor and the ugly."

3. "This genetic cleansing is how the wealthy stays beautiful."

4. "There are no more powerful things in our culture than wealth and sex. It's a female's best asset and a male's best asset."

5. "I started sleeping with a girl on the student council — not the most attractive girl, but she had an incredible libido."

6. "I lifted my dating embargo on Orientals. (I've decided to overlook the constant squinting.)"

7. "I'm here for the eye candy."

8. "I'm not looking for anything long-term, I don't think you'll find anything too high-caliber in fashion."

Confession: I added a quote from a 27-year-old investment banking intern attending Fashion Meets Finance, just for fun. Do you see the point? You wouldn't date a dude who said any one of these things, except maybe #7 in the context of escorting a nephew to a Magic The Gathering convention or something. Because nothing is more depressing than listening to the stillborn attempts at humor of people whose percentile in the ranks of relative social/educational/cultural/financial privilege is rivaled only by the score they got in "How Unexamined A Life Can I Lead." Well, nothing except the thoughts of a 20-year-old handbag designing attendee of "Fashion Meets Finance":

"You might ge a nice dinner out of it, so why not?"

(Click to enlarge.)

On how fashion is stupid, even though Linda Evangelista adamantly seems to believe it is not.

Modeling is just showing up and putting on clothes. I was beaten up in school and had paint poured over my head. I was tall and gawky and lost. I didn't know the language very well—that made me a target...I may not have loved it, but I'm not stupid. What other job could I have pursued where I could make $10,000 a day with no education? By the time I was working on Estee I had this problem where I would get physically ill before work every day. I would feel like I was going to vomit, and then I would call in sick and suddenly feel fine. That'w when I knew there was something psychosomatic going on. I hated it...I showed up to work on time and that was my orte. I wasn't interested in fashion like the Holy Trinity — Naomi Campbell, Christy Turlington and Linda Evangelista. They thought modeling was an art form. When you watch Linda work, you can feel like her bones are cracking — it's almost alien. I never thought matching my handbag to my shoes was all that important.

On how you should spend more time with your husband and kids but never own up to that publicly!

I never fear three-way love situations. Every party had a hand in it. I feel perfectly fine about being a homewrecker, especially since I've ended up being married to him twice as long as he was married to her. Making each other a number-one priority. So we don't have glorious careers, but we have a glorious marriage. I think it's so sad when women say, 'Oh, I've been spending my last few years being a mom.' It's like, you were someone before you had children, and you aer sure as hell going to need to be someone afterward. Being a mother is something I do daily, like showering or eating. It's not my career.

On her abortive attempt to Dance with the Stars!

I was the first to be sent home. I sat in my hotel room in LA and ate caramels for a week, until my family had to drag me out of bed. I should have guessed: I look like a giraffe on crack when I try to dance.

"I'm thinner at the top than the bottom, so I love a strapless dress or a big bubble skirt where you don't see my thighs. I'd love to wear jeans, but i don't feel comfortable...Of course, I want a boy. You always want that for your husband, to keep the family name. But Chihuahuas are girly dogs. My husband is so not girly and he loves them. He's so amazing with our little girl dog. I think he'd be a great girl dad...In the [Park Avenue Diet, a book to which she contributed] I talk about not having preconceived notions of people — of making them into two-dimensional characters. I'll pose in a picture, I'l have blonde curls and this girly look. But I'm a normal girl. I'm insecure."

Things I've Learned From Women Who've Dumped Me

You'd think, based on the title of the anthology Things I've Learned From Women Who've Dumped Me, that the men who've contributed essays to it have learned something from women who've dumped them. Well, some of them have! Actually, as I flip through the book again now, I can only find one essay that has a thoughtful take-away that might help someone who finds him or herself in a similar situation. It's by Ok Go singer Damian Kulash, Jr. and it's called "A Dog Is No Reason To Stay Together," but an apter title might be, "Don't fool yourself into thinking you can make a long-distance relationship work, especially if you are in a band that has just recently become successful." Damian examines his relationship with former live-in love Amanda with sober maturity. "It was love - love like you see in movies. Except in movies, relationships don't change, or grow, or slowly fall apart. They either last forever or end mercifully fast with a thrown plate and a jump cut." That sentence is exactly as good as this anthology gets.

Things with Amanda didn't last forever, but Damian's bio notes that he's now married with two dogs. Actually, almost all of the men in this anthology are married, and Damian is one of the few who don't make a big deal about it in their stories. You know that thing Neal Pollack (oh, he's in here!) does where he's like "I'm married, did I mention that I'm married, I can't be that bad of a guy because someone married me, okay?" That's a recurring theme here.

Most of these guys are comedians or comedy writers or memoirists of the "I'm a lovable loser, haha" variety - Andy Richter, Nick Hornby, A.J. Jacobs, Will Forte, and a slew of former Onion and SNL writers are represented (Chuck Klosterman, where are you?) They often begin their essays, especially when writing about high-school or college-era rejections, by marveling that any woman has ever found them attractive. "God bless arty girls and booze!" Andy Richter writes of the factors that finally enabled his college-fatty self to get laid. "During the course of the evening - aided no doubt by generous portions of cheap beer - I tricked her into liking me," is how Will Forte describes meeting his first serious girlfriend. Whenever men write about getting laid despite being outwardly undesirable, I immediately get suspicious. It's so The Game, you know? It just seems like a weird kind of inverse bragging, especially when they talk about how attractive the girls they somehow managed to bone were, especially when said girls' attractiveness is the only thing about said girls that seems to merit mentioning. Okay, boys, we get it. Even before you were semifamous for being smart and funny, you could still get some. Probably you were smart and funny even then! Um, good job!

The only thing less appealing than false modesty is outright bragging, and there's some of that here too. In 'Things More Majestic And Terrible Than You Could Ever Imagine,' Onion writer Todd Hanson catalogues a litany of women who've dumped him that reads more like a sexual highlights reel. On a list entitled 'Things positive," he writes, "Sex with two heavily tattooed punk-rock drummer chicks whose breasts bounce hypnotically as they hammer away onstage is pretty much as amazing as you'd imagined. I cannot emphasize this point enough." Wow, Todd. Two.

But bragging is still more appealing than vengeful muckraking, and there are a couple of essays in this anthology that have to be filed under that heading. These are essays that seem designed with a single reader in mind - the girl who will glimpse this book on the 'new nonfiction' or maybe even the 'Valentine's Day' table, see her exboyfriend's name on the cover, and open it up to the essay about what a terrible person she is. Damian Kulash's admission that he misses his ex-dog far more than he misses his ex-girlfriend pales in comparison to Andy Selsberg's essay 'A Grudge Can Be Art." Andy details his affair with a nineteen year old aspiring actress eleven years his junior. To be fair, he doesn't seem to be taking any pains to portray himself as anything like a decent or mature person - he acknowledges that continuing to hate a woman with whom he spent less than forty-eight hours ("and that includes being asleep together") for fucking his roommates is pretty ridiculous.

But his parting shot is still kind of stunning in its naked vindictiveness: "I do know where I'll see her eventually: on a reality show. She is genetically and socially engineered to tear through one of those setups like an erotic tornado." There's no way the intervening years could've changed this girl, of course. After all, they haven't changed Andy! Some boys will never learn.

*Full disclosure: the "guy" is the fiance of my best friend and former Jezebel contributor "Heather" and he is not a jerk at all; in fact he is much better and nicer than I ever imagined he would be when he brutally ass-raped the first piece of mine he edited back in the day (;-) Ben!) so that fits right in with my thesis. Also, sorry Emily, for writing this. It needed to be done. That was some fucked Up ish. And readers, sorry for all the "meta." It's Friday. That is my only excuse.

But hey, remember? She's not really an heiress or a model — yet! She's getting there. Explains the story: "Enterprising Brooke uses Photo Booth on her iBook to take pictures of herself, in order to critique her own technique." (Hey, we've done that!)"I can see my different expressions and how I look from different angles...If I want to look flirty, I think of my boyfriend" — a college lacrosse player! — "If I want to look sad, I think of my dog, Chip, who we had put to sleep last year." Aw. She's now signed to Major Model Management — a real thing! I Googled! — and we'll surely be seeing more of her (or like, ha ha, less of her) in the coming months. And I can't think of a more worthy candidate for the newest spot in that ever-expanding room of the collective pop cultural psyche we reserve for talentless blonde dilettantes from moneyed suburbs, can you? Her name is Brooke Bogart!

PARADE
'Parade' is always fun mainly for its reader-generated content, which is to say, the awesome questions posed to Walter Scott's "Personality Parade" and Marilyn Vos Savant's "Ask Marilyn." (Examples: "Dear PARADE, I've been a fan of ER's Mekhi Phifer for over a decade — ever since his breakout role in Spike Lee's Clockers. Is he married?" Dear Stephanie H. of Milwaukee: If you've been such a devoted fan for so long, why had you never Googled this information before? Do they not have Google in Milwaukee? Because if you had maybe Googled this information, say, seven years into your fandom, you might have found out before his relationship status became "engaged." Or "Dear PARADE, As I was studying one evening, I began to wonder how they get the graphite into a pencil." Dear Jennifer R. of Minneapolis, might we suggest Ritalin for that problem? Dear PARADE, John Travolta has spoken out about global warming. How does he reconcile that with the fact that he owns and flies two jets? Dear Michelle Levick of Ventnor N.J., the fact that you know that John Travolta not only owns and flies two jets but has also "spoken out" on global warming leads me to believe you might have also happened upon the fact that John Travolta also believes that an evil god named Xenu once ruled over a Galactic Confederacy that he decided to nuke 75 million years ago, and the radioactive spiritual residue is why they need Scientology to make them "clear." So like, "reconciling"... are you still following? B+
What you can learn from them: Um, obviously that you need a column like "Walter Scott's 'Personality Parade'", only written by someone unafraid to sling actual dirt...like say, someone at Page Six?

New York Times
The "Sunday Styles" section runs some story about a popular teacher at Horace Mann, oh who cares, Bob Morris's last column exhorts regular people to start sending proper thank-you notes so as to take the practice back from the social climbers who have co-opted the practice for their own sick and vulgar self-interest, and a piece purporting to be a "trend" piece on a drinking club called the "Secret Science Club" that meets unsecretly in a Brooklyn bar to do high-school level science projects. "Academia and academic pursuits have never been so aspirational," says a marketer predictably. Anyway, fun! But worthless without pics of some kids splattering their deep-Vs with the yellow fat of dissected frog...Or hmmm, maybe not...
Then the Magazine expounds for approximately 90,000 words on the "Sleep-Industrial Complex." Like your page 32 story "Sleepless in the City," we learn that Americans are obsessed with insomnia and spend $4.5 billion a year on sleep aids. But whereas the "angle" of your story is best described in the words of Laura Baran — "I felt like I was on coke" — the New York Times Magazine goes deep, back to the whole concept of the 8-hour sleep and how it really explains America. After all, people didn't always get eight uninterrupted hours...some tribes in some tribal nation like to sleep in shifts with all their limbs intertwined and that works for them... and studies in the fifties showed that people slept no better on a mattress than a carpeted piece of plywood...but see, in America we like to sleep better because we think it makes us work better. How American of us! So anyway, where did that whole eight-hour sleep idea first come from? And if it's such a creation of the sleep-industrial complex, could they maybe re-program Ambien so that you only needed, say, five and a half hours of sleep to use it? And is there anything really wrong with drinking yourself to sleep? These questions are not really answered. C+
What you can learn from them: Um, Bob Morris is out of a job maybe? So you can get rid of Lydia Hearst.

Wall Street Journal
The weekend "Pursuits" section tries to answer that age-old question, "How can yoga really be exercise?" Because your heart rate only reaches about half the level it would if you were walking, in other words "as much as you'd expend scratching yourself." A review of Steve Martin's new memoir says his real estate agent dad was such an asshole he actually wrote a negative review of his son's inaugural SNL appearance for a Realtor newsletter. A succinct review of Tom Brokaw's new book on the sixties, which is called something that is not "The Worst Generation." A piece on how all the big retail chains are going to be trying to get you to mindlessly purchase "accessories" to go with your holiday gifts, like skins for Guitar Hero guitars and something called bra jewelry." Obligatory holiday recipes. B
What you can learn from them: The stories in "Pursuits" seem more concise and information-packed than Times stories. They ask questions that seem obvious that aren't, without acting like they were so brilliant to think of that obvious-seeming-but-not-really obvious question. But it's not exactly the sort of section that makes you want to do like you would the moist turkey carcass they fetishistically describe in the lead Thanksgiving leftovers story and dive the fuck in.

Washington Post
In the Style section, Robin Givhan reflects on the unlikely death of Donda West, noting that black people account for a mere 6% of cosmetic surgeries performed every year in the country and that, as celebrity moms go, Donda was not exactly Dina Lohan. "Her death makes one marvel at the way in which popular culture pushes, pushes people toward an ideal. And then tut-tuts when they take the bait." Anthony Bourdain credits the Chinese with every "food worth eating" and Gene Simmons talks about how women don't understand superheroes. The magazine's popular "Date Lab" blind-date column features a really cringe-inducing back-and-forth between a mechanic and a Senate staffer who have wildly different notions of how the night went. (Him: "That kiss was the highlight of the evening!" Her: "It wasn't something I wanted to do.") B+
What you can learn from them: The Post is really forthright and in touch with its readers, which is how they get people like the "Date Lab" pairs once a week to be so painfully honest, I guess. Or maybe she was just like, "you know, I probably won't see that mechanic guy ever again, soooo."

I really don't know how I feel about [a woman in the White House]. I see the positive parts of it. But, you know, I think there's something incredible about a First Lady. That, to me, is a woman in the White House. It's sort of like being parents to the United States, and she takes on the role of mother and confidante and care-giver. Standing behind every powerful man, there's a powerful woman...I don't want to say no, because that doesn't sound very open-mined. But do I want it to be Hillary? No, I don't think so.

Also, we learn Angie is married to a former football player with whom she likes to vacation in Las Vegas, was discovered by David Hasselhoff — "please don't make it sound cheesy, because that's not what it was" — wears silk pajamas that are lined in cashmere, took the stage during the Republican National Convention, loves to shop, would like to have another child but is "waiting on God," has a four-year-old daughter with a pet gecko that totally grosses her out although she is "confident that at any point she will be into Christian Louboutin instead of the lizard," and credits her high school cheerleading coach with instilling in her the confidence to realize she was "not a complete idiot."

Just because I'm friendly, and I like to guffaw when I laugh, and have a cold beer and hang out with my husband and my girlfriends, doesn't mean that I'm not just as intelligent as someone from, let's say, Manhattan.

Anyway, the writer, Amy Spencer, mysteriously fails to mention Fred Thompson, which could be because she, too, is just as intelligent as someone "from Manhattan," or more likely, because she asked Angie about the election and Angie was like, "huh? Oh no I was planning on endorsing Pat Tillman..."

But her gimpy hand isn't her only handicap. Mandie — once a victim of grade school bullying, who even had a pair of her Guess? jeans flushed down the toilet — "draws no through line between being bullied as a child and the almost reflexive tendency she has to belittle others—what she calls 'constructive criticism.'" Which, actually, we love because it makes it so much more fun and guiltless to hate her. Ooh, and Jezebel got a shout out in the piece, too!

Her tendency to grimace, sneer and eye-roll led to many unappealing facial expressions freee-ramed on Web sites like Jezebel, whose editors dubbed her "C—t Face."

But our favorite quote of the whole damn thing came from Mandie's Kabbalah teacher Ruth Rosenberg, who didn't watch the show. "I don't think Mandie is that [way]. And if she is, she shouldn't be."

Which reminds me of the story that comes directly afterward, "Priced Out Of New York," on the types of young "creative professionals" who would, in any other section of the country, probably be tempted right now to walk away from one of those subprime mortgages, given the way the real estate market has snapped, but thankfully, because it's New York, they couldn't in a million years conceive of a mortgage, and so now they're homeless because their landlord raised the rent 19% in a single year. Ummm, maybe not the right crowd to try and sell on the virtues of getting canned?

Which is all a probs-oversnarky way of saying: you still need to pick an audience. Personally I'm with the latter camp getting evicted from their apartments, because it's a fairly real danger to me, and having also gotten fired I can tell you that twentysomethings living in imminent danger of getting priced out of Bushwick may be all too susceptible to your soft pitches for cute brunch places and stiletto ankle boots — nice selection of accessibly-priced shoes on page 38, btw! — but convincing them that losing their only revenue stream with two weeks to find a new one is a totally awesome life experience is a not something you can do lightly. As someone who's been there I can attest that it's an interesting, life-changing experience to be fired, but it's not one I ever could have approached thinking, "If Tina Brown and Paula Zahn and Marc Jacobs and Kate Moss can do it, there's no reason I can't!" (Your readers, to be sure, could be on stronger drugs than mine.)

Moving on, there's a feature about Emily Listfield, the old Redbook "Sex & The Single Mom" blogger I'd been curious about ever since an incident in which her commenters went apeshit after she left her middle schooler at home so she could sneak out to have a cocktail with an emotionally unavailable sex buddy. Turns out Emily's husband disappeared a few years ago after they had separated, which happened after he had become one of those alcoholics who drinks beer from a Starbucks cup in the morning. He probably drowned in Florida, but their daughter wrote a diary full of alternate theories as to what might have happened to him: "Maybe he was hit by a car and is lying on the side of the road in gooey bits." To make it all more fucked up, she's torn between mourning the guy and seething that he'd been staying with an ex-girlfriend when he disappeared, and that, beyond that, the dumbass ex-girlfriend had waited four days to alert the authorities. It's some heavy shit, all the way to the point at which she brings up that age-old mystery, "Can you ever really know another person?"

It's probably the best story, "material"-wise, you've had thus far, but it's either too long or too short to be quite powerful enough, and it's laden with cutesy little local details to make it more "New York"-y, when really it probably should have either been isolated from the New York theme altogether — the Washington Post used to do this on Sundays with a little "human condition" section called "Life Is Short: Autobiography As Haiku" — or pushed into a more New York centric format, the obvious one being, how does this place make it harder or easier to feel as though you really know another person, and engaging along the way with all the things that have become become such common props — therapy, introspection, blogging, memoir-writing — in our struggles to deal with stuff.

It seems like most of your non-feature pages are occupied by seasonal shoes, with a two-page exception that addresses the subject of clutches, which are those obscenely-priced wallet-sized purses that have no straps and are basically made for someone like me to lose, so I have to admit I didn't read them that closely. But I LOVED your feature on the legendary day H&M debuted its Stella McCartney collection, "the Antietam of mass-market sales." This was a really good idea that could have been made brilliant if you'd tracked down five or six women who were there and cobbled together an "oral history" of that sale and the countless frenzied high-design/discount store collaboration debuts that have occurred since, with a little context as to how and why to shop them.

And on a final note, I would speak to your cover story on Jennifer Esposito, only I don't really know who she is. Which is to say, I know, like about her marriage and that movie and some show and crap but I don't really care, which is to say, I don't really feel bad that I don't care and the story didn't make me feel like I should have felt bad. The same went for Samaire Armstrong, incidentally. I guess this is the time of you magazine life during which publicists are granted favors that will be returned with bigger celebrities later on, but no magazine should really be playing that game until it's clear what they are, and that's not quite clear for you yet, and you don't even have to sell newsstand copies, so you might take a week or two of every months as an opportunity to do a theme cover or a news cover. Experiment! It's not like this isn't the third or fourth time Page Six Magazine has launched!

Yours,

Moe

And the 27-year-old who knew she was about to get engaged, so she booked an appointment for liposuction to get rid of a small bulge around her hips. "She had monitored her boyfriend's e-mail and knew approximately when he would ask her and that he planned to capture it on video," says Dr. Rappaport. "She wanted to look her best."

Other great quotes from Doctors Patricia Wexler (the first) and Alan Matarasso (the second two)

• "It was easier to do a little lipo than fix the dress."
  
• "A healthy person with localized areas of fat can have surgery at 8 a.m. and go out to dinner that night."
  
• One woman wanted her forearms done and another wanted the fat on her feet and toes removed. But you can't get more than a couple of grams of fat out of a foot."

Okay, so: the gist of Emily's story, for which she agreed to be semi-"soulfully" photographed, was: "I have a love-hate relationship with drugs," the most harmless subgenre of the reliable "Addiction" narrative. Specifically, Emily had the kind of drug problem-ish common to many creative urban precocious types who derive motivation, solace, inspiration etc. from some illicit substance on which he/she eventually becomes paranoid that he/she is hopelessly dependent, especially if he/she has achieved some sort of sudden success he/she is constantly wondering whether or not he/she actually deserves, and then, in a related development, wonders if the drug deserves some/all of the credit, or alternatively whether the drug is the only thing from keeping everything from falling apart all at once, like some pin in a grenade or some other, less-overused cliche; you see where I'm going. (Or wait, you probably don't.) Anyway, put simply: it's hard to say where the internal monologue stops and the actual problem begins, and the only problem with that is, lack of jail stints, prostitution, occasions of bone-chilling, gut-churning debasement etc.

This particular piece gets written a lot, I think because a lot of people abuse substances, especially when they are writers, because writers were generally dorks in high school. But the problem is that most people who were dorks in high school were too sheltered to have a huge number of other real problems in the world outside the self-loathing, insecure recesses of their brains, which is why if they really want to be writers they should spend more time talking to other people, which is to say "who are not self-obsessed substance-abusing writers." (And before I say another word: "Guilty — DUH!")

THAT SAID, you have something special with this story, which is to say that it is about weed, which is a little exotic in this town because it usually involves a carbohydrate chaser. And what a magical drug it sounds like! The way Emily and her band of overachieving potheads tell it, weed both enabled them to concentrate AND relax; focus on neuroscience homework AND feel "brain dead." Who are they buying this shit from? I wanted to learn more. But I was confused. And this, you see, is where any hack editor could tell you, words like "neurons" and "receptors" and maybe "lobe" come in. What is the drug doing to her brain? Could a doctor maybe have given her some words to make me at least feel a little bit enlightened? Marijuana isn't supposed to be physically addictive the way coke and alcohol and heroin and all the usual non-munchie-inducing New York drugs of choice do, so why exactly do people smoke so goddamn much of it? I want to feel that and smell that and watch movies on the couch with that a little more. Or fuck, maybe I should just buy some.

Similar problems beset the cover story on Kissing Jessica Stein writer Jennifer Westfeldt: the language is vague, the anecdotes are broad and hazy, and she doesn't seem like much more than a cliche to me: the fabulous female writer who moves to LA to do something in Hollywood because it blah blah pays better. But the cover line doesn't approach "They Need Weed To Succeed" (lol!); it's... "Jennifer Westfeldt Brings Smart To The Big Screen"... and that would be why she's shooting a come-hither glance in a sequined purple cocktail dress and there are approximately nineteen wardrobe changes in the accompanying photo shoot? So she has a new movie out — a second in a 15-year career or whatever — give me a decent subhead! "Woody Allen's got nothing" on her? Um, really? Do you mean, in terms of having pretty hair and a vagina?

And on a final copy editing note: the sentence at the beginning of the fashion feature on hedge fund types who buy their suits in London, "The sub-prime market is down, but so is buying off-the-rack clothes for many of the monied bosses who work on Wall Street," makes no sense, and if that's your attempt to feel the pain of all the Wall Street guys losing their shirt in this wretched market — yeah, it just hit a new high so save your pity for the sub-prime people losing their houses right now. Which reminds me: do you intend on featuring middle-class people in your magazine? I know everyone who reads Page Six is like, a trust fund kid or whatever, but there is such a thing as voyeurism.

Do you watch their new TV show? On Saturday's episode they featured a segment on American Pie MILF-fucker Eddie Kaye Thomas. A videographer had asked him what he'd been up to, and he got all bashful and "aw, nothin" about it, and so after reminding the world that Eddie was a distinguished actor with a pretty impressive IMDB resume, TMZ pulled up clips of worthless celebrities' responses to the same question, ending with Paris. "And the only thing she's working on his her next cold sore!" LOL!

This is the same TMZ whose founder the same Paris depicted lovingly in her most famous work of art.

Anyway, Frontline it is not, but TMZ TV entertains me because the people working there are not afraid to remind the world they did not go to college for this. Neither did you guys! And to be quite frank, neither did I. But hey, you have this audience and group of people you're supposed to care about; do it for them!

In its second issue — which I found to be a solid improvement over the first — Page Six seemed to be a magazine aimed at twentysomething girls who find themselves working in Manhattan and suddenly needing to read Page Six. But why? They don't quite know. In some corner of their brains they are probably asking themselves: Who the fuck is Tinsley Mortimer, anyway? What do all those vapid publicists meditate about in their yoga classes? What exactly is the difference between a run-of-the-mill spawn of a wealthy high-profile family and a socialite? I went to this "Misshapes" thing once and it was empty, so why does the press keep telling me it's cool? Why do all these big givers spend so much money buying new clothes for charity events when they could so much more efficiently just give the money away? Just how delusional are they, really? Your "Socializer" columnist Kelly Killoren Bensimon yaks on and on about how training for a marathon will somehow help cure cancer — does she really not see how that's a little absurd? And by the way: marathons: what's up with them? They make your nipples bleed. Wouldn't a simple three or four miles every other day suffice? And what is it with investment bankers always training for marathons? Why is overcompensating on your tax bracket never enough? Seriously, what ever happened to reading in your spare time? Which brings me back to: you have these readers; don't waste their time with something less enriching and fulfilling than a fucking spin class. You landed Lydia Hearst for your cover! Whose last name isn't technically Hearst...Which brings me to:

• A little rule: unless a hit man busts in and shoots someone or something, don't begin a profile with a scene in which your subject is sitting in a restaurant ordering/eating food. It just doesn't convey much about "why I should give a shit about this person" because it's too busy conveying "Yes, I really ate a meal in the presence of a FAMOUS MODEL" and that is annoying. And on that note:
• If the most interesting thing about your profile subject is their eating disorder, they are probably not worth profiling.
• All rules have exceptions and so for your purposes think of this as the "Rachel Zoe May Be An Exception" rule.
• There's a story about the new urbane, Just Like Us brand of swingers. None of whom are photographed. Because if you actually saw them, you might confuse them for the seedy, flabby, sadomasochism brand of swingers you already knew about? Or because none of them would agree to be shot? I bet you could have found someone to agree to a photo shoot. Or shot them artfully so as to disguise their identities or some shit, not that I know shit about photography. Anyway, the money quote is at the end, where the swinger runs into her boyfriend on a date with another woman, and she acts like it's fine, but she feels like she's been kicked in the stomach. Been there! Think maybe hers was maybe just a more intense version of the pang we all feel when, after years of building up heartbreak immunities and coping mechanisms and self-preservational instincts, we are reminded that, oh shit, we are still vulnerable? That maybe should have been your "angle." I know, I know, who died and made me ombudswoman?
• Which brings me to: meetings. In my experience, meetings are critical, because at every magazine I have ever worked for there was some dude — it was always a dude — who would just say over and over again, "So, how can you really advance the story?" and "What's your peg" and "Maybe you should talk to X" and most of all "I feel like I've read that before." I have never worked for a women's magazine, but my sense is that this dude does not work at them, or else "Is _______ making you fat?" might have jumped the shark as a concept by now. Anyway, this dude is a twerp, but your stories are always the better for arguing with him.
• Whatever, fuck dudes. You've got me! (You must feel sooooo privileged)
• Okay, so moving on: "Model Turned Boyfriend" on page 12 is cute. And so delightfully service-y you could even make the text smaller! New York does it, and I bet your readers have wayyyy better vision.
• Pretty clothes: this is the best thing about the mag so far. And I hate looking at pretty clothes! But when they're not being modeled by despicable celebrities and Lucky editors' friends, they turn out to be kind of fun to look at. I also love that the cutest subject of "Block Watch" spent probably $70 on her entire ensemble, and half of that was black Chuck Taylors.
• Gym Rage: I get this. Working out makes me a total bitch. No, I mean even worse. And I've never read anything about it.
• "10 Hospitality hotties NYC" — fun! Especially STK waiter Edwin Thomas: "Sometimes patrons make it known that what they want for dessert isn't always on the menu." More of that! And so symbolic! Ladies, make Edwin your AIM avatar and be inspired every time you look at his chiseled face! You're trying to give the guests something not on the menu. Make it chocolate!!!
• (Oh yes I did.)