From Temptation Island to American Idol to Oliver North's FNC war stories thing, whenever the Fox folks threw a little souped-up quasi-reality at the public, the viewers came flocking. And the rest of media followed suit.

But now either a corner has been turned or even reality TV has succumbed to the first bite of the plague infesting the rest of media. The Wrap reports that the Fox Reality Network announced today that it will go off the air next year.

The network has been the home for such end of civilizations classics as Paradise Hotel and The Search for the Next Elvira. For Idolographers, its AI recap show Idol Extra, which featured exclusive backstage footage was critical viewing.

Or stolid anyway.

I learned how to write cursive from the cover of Gourmet. My earliest big media memory was of the ubiquitous copies of Gourmet my mother would stack in huge towers on our living room table, until eventually they thought to sell her big blue binders so she could keep them forever, their volumes supplying our family with endless blueprints for Stuffed Mushroom Caps, Turkey Curry and Spanakopita.

Beyond my family meals however, along with Julia Child and Alice Waters, we have Gourmet to thank for the foodie revolution, thanks to which we're not all going out in suits and ties to pay 150 dollars for a plate of Chicken ala King and a baked potato with a fruit Jell-O dessert.

According to its distressingly brief Wikipedia bio, Gourmet earned its permanent place in the media galaxy by laughing in the face of America's fight against fascism in Europe and the Pacific. After debuting in 1941, going head to head against the then dominant American Cookery magazine, Gourmet made the critical decision in its infancy at the outbreak of WWII not to scale back its recipes in acknowledgement of wartime rationing, but to continue to blithely push a menu of French-inspired excess. The decision brilliantly pushed American Cookery off the block and left Gourmet to reign as the undisputed dictator of our national cuisine until very very recently.

The magazine became a beacon of non-technical literary writing about food featuring, in its earliest days, series such as the great MFK Fischer's Alphabet For Gourmets right up to David Foster Wallace's classic essay, "Consider the Lobster" published in Gourmet in 2004.

In the recent years, under the stewardship of Foodie Exemplar Ruth Reichl, critics accused the magazine of failing to find the balance between "people who want to cook" and snooty foodies who want to read a bunch of high-falutin' prose stylings. My mother ended her subscription a few years ago. With more competition from Bon Appetit and the internet, Gourmet's position declined, until the tragic conclusion today.

Below take a trip through the memories of the Gourmet we'll never know again.

Every few months it seems as though one or both of the New York City tabloids repackage this identical story — the lines are being blurred between what a straight man is and what a gay man is, blah blah blah — but this appears to be the first time that either one of them has gone all out and just flat-out declared gaydar to be dead.

The Post's Danica Lo laments:

From the sleekly coiffed power players on "Mad Men" to socialite-seducing lothario fashion designers, baseball player-branded perfume and hockey players interning at Vogue, it's getting harder to tell, on first impressions, whether a man would rather make out with you — or your brother.

In today's post-metro social consciousness, boys will still be boys — just more sensitive and stuff. A generation raised on therapy, teen flicks, reality TV and emoticons (it's hard to be butch and Twitter at the same time, you know?) has embraced the freedom of sexual ambiguity.

This maddening confusion leads Lo to the obvious(?) conclusion:

RIP, gaydar, we'll miss how you kept us from winking at the other team.

All of this leads one to wonder: what's wrong with just asking a guy if he's gay or straight? Lo mentions that doing such a thing is "awkward," but if a straight guy is comfortable with his sexuality, he won't mind being asked. In fact, he may even be flattered, and the same thing probably applies for the gays. And if the guy happens to freak out over having his sexuality questioned, then screw him, he isn't worth your time. So there, problem solved, right? Well, probably not, but it was worth a half-assed try.

Just last week, Portolio's publisher was assuring media reporters that if they didn't think the magazine was doing well, they weren't looking at the big picture. Wrong. Portfolio's April issue was the smallest magazine Conde Nast had ever published. Conde's magazine division had a uniformly bad first quarter, and Portfolio was among the worst performers.

These sort of losses were once tolerated — see Vanity Fair and The New Yorker — in print journalism's Valhalla. Privately held, Newhouse Newspapers doesn't release its financial figures, but like every other newspaper publisher it must surely be suffering and now there are signs of a cash crunch at Conde. Company president David Carey finally acknowledged the direness of the situation: "I thought we had until the end of the year," Carey said, "but it was hard for us to imagine the shape of a recovery that would put us on the path" to meet ad page numbers. "The gap between where we are today and our expectations for 18 months was too large."

Conde Nast committed an estimated $100 million to launch Portfolio, which was a big deal.
It's highly likely we'll never see another glossy magazine launch of its size again. It was the last gasp of the "Spare No Expense" model. The magazine hired the best business writers in the country, and paid them huge salaries (for relatively little output). It aimed to be the New Yorker of business, and the plan—as far as you could tell—was to bust its way into the territory of Fortune, Forbes, and Businessweek through sheer glossiness.

It never really worked. Portfolio's editor, WSJ veteran Joanne Lipman, never inspired much love amongst her staffers. By the time the second issue came out, she'd already fired her second-in-command. Other disgruntled staffers started leaving soon after. Ad pages declined immediately after the launch, and kept on declining. Lipman's editorial judgment was questionable at best.

A year ago, it was perfectly clear that Portfolio was in trouble, and that Lipman was not doing a great job. Despite widespread speculation that she'd get canned, Conde Nast's overlord, Si Newhouse, supported her to the end.

Last October, the magazine laid off 20% of its staff and cut back to ten issues per year. That was the beginning of the end. Its terrible first quarter was the middle of the end. The question was always: how long was Si Newhouse willing to subsidize a huge, money-sucking magazine investment? Historically, Conde Nast been willing to do it for decades for prestige titles. But Portfolio was a terribly timed launch—especially in retrospect—and that, along with spotty execution, killed them.

Two years. That's what $100 million gets you these days. Portfolio had plenty of great writers, and its bloggers, like Jeff Bercovici and (the recently departed) Felix Salmon were worthwhile right up to the end. But Conde Nast, it seems, is not fucking around any more.

Well, the technical term for the shut down is a "hiatus," but both of the site's editors, Cord Jefferson and Drew Grant, have been fired, Grant tells us. At least she has another gig lined up, over at the axed media types complaint haus, ASSME.org

Earlier this year Hauslaib jettisoned two other under-performing titles, Hollywood rag Mollygood and "urban" fetishist Stereohyped. The mini-empire's gay site Queerty will continue to putter along, as it's continued to attract, despite its hideous new redesign, a loyal base of underwear model fans and reactionary hissy-fit throwers.

The Beatrice itself was born many, many years ago. It was once a speakeasy, back in those ratty days of prohibition. But its current incarnation—the cokey, smokey, fuck den—sprang to life in 2006, when Paul Sevigny, the brother of actress Chloë, masterminded, along with his partners, a bar/restaurant that would return some classic bar elements to New York. Italian-food specials and jacket-and-tie nights. Old New York, Carrie Bradshaw might neighingly call it.

But, you know, instead it mostly catered to those who could slink past a velvet rope, those who, giddy with abandon because New York was rich and everyone was young all the way back in 2006, wanted to sit in its dark, low-ceiling'd recesses and chain smoke, sneaking away every so often for a quickie or a bump in the bathroom. And there was dancing. Oh was there dancing. So you could say, in some sideways measure, an aura of Old New York did surround the Bea. It was a bit dangerous, a bit wild, and it was definitely mean, in that fashionable kind of way.

And then the celebrities came. Oh boy did they come. Sometimes literally!—actor Shia LaBeouf was heard once loudly begging for sex at the club, as if it was some loud, boorish frat party for the coolest frat kids in the world.

These celebrities set the standards for smoking and held court like it was no big deal. "Here we all are, under this ceiling, just relaxing," they seemed to say. While Hud Morgan, a notorious Bea dancer, thundered a drunken tarantella across the room. Well, he was dancing, but he was also fighting.

The former Men's Voguer 'famously' exchanged fisticuffs with his media colleague Spencer Morgan at the club last year, all over a girl. And so the glitz and glamor of the club, coupled with the constant crowing by some New York-centric blogosphere blogs, began bringing negative attention. Not really just from the crackdown authorities, who meekly tried to curb the drugs and smoking, but from losers and poseurs and people who cast the seething milieu in too-bright, unfavorable light. When all-too-willing media punching bag Julia Allison is seen weeping at your club, its must-go-to days may be numbered.

The whole thing started to wind down about a year ago. People still flocked, people still danced, people threw caution to the wind and did rails in the loo. But some luster was lost. The whole thing just became too top heavy, as any hotspot is wont to do. Remember Butter? Exactly.

A club whose thesis was all about that hard-but-warm New York edge became just another stared-at phenomenon. Sure it was (and still is) sorta tough to get into, but the harder it became, the more it started to look like trying. And as we all know, trying is definitely not cool.

So then we come to that temporary end. On one hand, maybe it'll be the shot the club needs. You know, if a "Free Beatrice" party ends up coalescing in some other dark corner this week, if the place suddenly seems gutter-glittery again.

Or, more likely, it'll just continue its soft decline. You know, there's a recession on and all and New York is changing. Some small few of us might still need those dull thumps and furtive bumps, but for most the whole thing will probably soon just seem silly and indulgent and wrong, joining the embarrassing annals of the city's pop history, like leg warmers or beanies, like Ms. Allison or the short reign of Peaches Geldof. And most bitterly, like all of our money. Our long lost money.

As a former Gawker editor just said to us over IM: "the ceilings were so low it gave me a sad."

Indeed.

Apparently the Illinois Attorney General, Lisa "Candidate 2" Madigan, claimed MillerCoors was illegally marketing the "beverage" to underaged consumers, by sponsoring an air guitar champion, or something.

“These drinks are extremely dangerous in the hands of young people,” Madigan said in a statement. “They contain substantially more caffeine than coffee or soda and are marketed as a way to ‘power’ your nights by staying awake and drinking more alcohol. This is a completely inappropriate message to send to younger audiences.”

Sure, whatever. So long, shitty caffeinated malt beverages! You were not long for this recession anyway, because now there is no joy in being wasted and jittery at the same time, at 4 a.m..

We first encountered Sparks in the early 2000s, when broke-ass gutterpunks in Minneapolis suddenly began imbibing it. By the time the trend migrated to pretend-broke-ass scenesters in Brooklyn, the punks had switched back to cheap canned beer, and we'd still never tried the shit. It will be missed.

Sparks will live on as an easy, slightly obscure jokey "mid-2000s" reference point for comedy writers for years to come, beginning in 2010 or so. Someday, a future-version of The Wackness will make a point of having protagonists with orange tongues, and we'll chuckle, and people five years younger than us will be unamused. Kids today with their space-music and reasonably sized sun-goggles! They don't even remember the great commenter wars of '09!

Torfason, a playwright/actor/folk musician who was the first Icelander to publicly come out about thirty years ago, says of the wayward parliament: "They don't have our trust and they are no longer legitimate." That the singer of charming little ditties could become the face of a nation of newly desperate and (for now) hopeless anti-government rioters kind of scares the hell out of us, because if it could happen in that seemingly idyllic country, what surreal end-of-days scenarios await us? Will John Waters take up the reins of the new American hobo class, rioting against police until our government is overthrown?

As for Iceland's demise, unemployment is estimated to reach 10% by next year. It's a microcosm of a much bigger disaster, that could "put [the country] back 40 or 50 years," according to Sarah Lyall of the New York Times. There is a silver lining though! Reykjavik, with its loungey up-all-night bar scene, used to be one of Europe's most tantalizing but prohibitively expensive nightlife cities. Not anymore! These days we can go there cheap and dance in the ashes of their once gloriously idyllic Norse city, ably forgetting our looming penury back here Stateside.

Then we'll come home and leave them to their own devices. The long forever-night will set in, and there they'll stay.

A frozen reminder of a wintry paradise, lost.

The draw of TRL was never really the actual videos. It was the spectacle view of dizzying Times Square, the live-ness, the celebrity appearances, the affable and comfortably hip hosts (Carson Daly! And, um, Jesse Camp! And that girl from One Tree Hill!) It was really about the lifestyle of liking music, the thrill of just being thrilled, the ecstasy and immediacy and bittersweet fever dances of being a kid and out of school and having stumbled upon this great big infinite thing called Personality (I like this song—I am rock! You like that video—you are pop!). That celebration of the culture of music, rather than the music itself, has spilled over into the network's current top hits, like The Hills. That particular reality dollop of non-fat Cool Whip expertly employs the hit songs of tomorrow to evoke, along with the swirling cameras, a soaring and sprawling range of feelings. Like music usually is in real life, music on MTV now serves as the illustrative background to the people dating and getting made and dancing and competing and existing in the fore.

And we've TRL to blame/thank for that—for adding a bit of shape to the world as it's seen through the MTV lens. It said "here we are, set at on all sides by movies and television and pretty people and hormones, and here, in brief, is the soundtrack to accompany all of it. And you chose it."

And those huge picture windows overlooking the crowds and lights and glitz, through which we could look out and others could look in! A glass case of emotion!

!!!

Mayor Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Kelly are doing the people of New York and the people of Iraq a great service by delaying and obstructing the antiwar protest planned for February 15. The longer they delay in granting the protesters a permit, the less time the organizers have to get their turnout organized, and the smaller the crowd is likely to be. And we wouldn't want to overstate the matter, but, at some level, the smaller the crowd, the more likely that President Bush will proceed with his plans to liberate Iraq...

The protesters probably do have a claim under the right to free speech. Never mind that it's not the speech that the city is objecting to — it's the marching in the streets, blocking traffic, and requiring massive police protection.

So long as the protesters are invoking the Constitution, they might have a look at Article III. That says, "Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court."

...the New York City police could do worse, in the end, than to allow the protest and send two witnesses along for each participant, with an eye toward preserving at least the possibility of an eventual treason prosecution. Thus fully respecting not just some, but all of the constitutional principles at stake.

To those concerned about civil liberties, we'd cite the pragmatic argument made last night by, of all people, the New York Times's three-time Pulitzer-Prize winning foreign affairs columnist, Thos. Friedman. "I believe we are one more 9/11 away from the end of the open society," Mr. Friedman told an American Jewish Committee dinner honoring the chief executive of the New York Times Company, Russell Lewis.

Lipsky should be thankful Times editors respect free expression far more than his own editorial page did. And he should be doubly thankful for their short memories.

The opening of the farewell editorial sets the scene:

What a run. A newspaper founded by a company that was scheduled to be created on September 11, 2001, announces its last issue on September 29, 2008, the day of the largest one-day point drop in the history of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. It's easy to forget the boom years in between that were bracketed by the terrorist attacks and the financial crisis.

Who can forget the glorious boom years of fear, war, torture, scandal and ignorance that have led us to this miserable wheezing end of our second gilded age? Thanks, Sun!

Their official history of the paper similarly ignores the things we loved about the scrappy daily in favor of reminding us of things like their idiotic call for the privatization of the New York subways in the very first editorial (followed by one announcing that some Washington Mall hippie demonstration was part of "The War Against the Jews"). The paper's founder and brainchild continues to impress:

When the paper was launched, a reporter of the Washington Post had asked its editor, Seth Lipsky, how the Sun would be able to compete against the New York Times, which had "eighty reporters" on its metropolitan desk. The Times might have 80 reporters, he replied, but they missed the story that taxes are too high, that the reason there is an apartment shortage is rent control, and that vouchers are a movement to rescue minority children from failing schools.

Yes, the Times missed that all-important local story on how taxes are too high, much as they missed the breaking national "hippies smell" scandal. We are trying to root for you here, Seth!

But it's hard. It's oh-so-hard. It is sad to see a daily broadsheet with smart writing fail, but honestly it didn't have to. The paper "burned through an estimated $80 million in its six and a half years of operation," according to the Post (which is gloating about the failure, yes, but still). If they'd began, back in 2001, as the tiny modest paper Lipsky originally intended, and built a strong internet presence, they'd be the Politico of the Intellectual Zionist New York Right Wing right now. Do you know what we could do with $80 million???

But no. They launched their paper just as their world-view reached its peak influence (post-9/11!), not when it was still a burgeoning, growing movement. So then they were stuck with it as it failed and lost favor. They launched a newspaper—a daily broadsheet!—as the newspaper industry collapsed and the internet took off again. It's hard not to see this as yet another example of "the smartest guys in the room" coming out looking like suckers.

Situations change of course, and added to the mix has been the great debate over foreign policy and the war. We are struck with each crisis — including the one that has beset our markets, when the temptation is running strong for so many to take the statist bait, though not once did we consider asking Washington to bail out the Sun — of the importance of guiding principles.

If that bit about not asking for a bailout is a joke, it's a lousy, un-self-aware one. Their glorious market, like their generation-defining war, was built on lies and misplaced faith, sold to us by hucksters like them (but more successful ones), and the cleanup for both mistakes will take years. Good riddance. See you on the internet.

See you in hell.

[via Cityfile; photo by Nikola Tamindzic/Home of the Vain]

Dowd's style—sarcasm, cutsey nicknames, and, most importantly, countless gag-worthy pop cultural references—was, we are expected to believe, revolutionary back when she made the jump from "serious journalist" (whose legendarily/allegedly unorthodox style of story-getting was chronicled in Chris Buckley's book Thank You For Smoking and the film of the same name as the star reporter character who fucks sources) to influential columnist, back in 1995. She won the Pulitzer in 1999, and is as responsible as anyone else at a major newspaper for framing the old narrative of the 2000: unlikable wonky smug technocrat fabulist Al Gore vs. genial idiot George W. Bush.

By 2004, she'd become one of the rising liberal blogosphere's prime targets for mockery. And her style was easy to parody. (Have you ever noticed how Sex & the City might conceivably relate to politics? It writes itself!)

By the time of the inescapable publicity circus for her book Are Men Necessary in 2005 (the Observer called it "a very odd, occasionally entertaining mish-mash of politics and sex, biology and Cosmopolitan-ology, gravity and wit, insight and carelessness" which seems pretty accurate), well, we all just got sick of her. But it wasn't just the book. There were other problems!

First: "hip" writing about politics? Making pop culture funnies about candidates? Maybe revolutionary in the satire-deprived mid-90s, but then came blogs! (And also The Onion, The Daily Show, and The 9/11 Commission Report, obv.) Blogs did it funnier, faster, wittier, and hipper than Maureen could. (Seriously, her pop culture references sound strained to everyone but 80-year-old shut-ins who secretly titter while dropping their monocles at Don Imus wisecracks—which is to say, the media population of Washington DC) There was this lady named Ana Marie Cox whom this guy named Nick Denton hired to run his brand-new politics blog—she turned out to be the funny Maureen Dowd! Plus Cox wrote about assfucking.

But maybe more importantly, Dowd was fucked by her bosses. Timesselect put her column behind a paywall. Bloggers stopped linking, reading, explicating, and damning it. Dowd recognized the effect this could have on her waning influence: by some accounts she "boycotted" the extra features promised subscribers. But as the great experiment dragged on, she faded into internet obscurity, more or less. The paywall went up in 2005, after the heady Dowd-hating days of the '04 elections had ended. By the time they lifted it, two years later, no one quite remembered why they got so upset when the crazy red-haired lady called their candidate a pussy.