Sure. Sure he did. The story is not online, so we don't know how long it is or what form it takes but it does explain why Levi was at Monkey Bar. Because now he's a Vanity Fair contributor! Si will probably lend him money to buy some real estate in Wasilla.

Which is kind of a shame! The old "Vintage Contemporaries" cover was as much of an awesome time capsule as Jay McInerney's book is. It's perfect! The oddly colored illustration of an anonymous guy in a trench coat wandering toward The Odeon with the Twin Towers in the background, those bold colors and the justified text makes it look like an '80s video game, which is perfect for a novel that reads like a text-based RPG in which YOU are a DISSATISFIED FACT CHECKER SEEKING SOLACE IN DRUGS AND EMPTY HEDONISM.

But now it is 2009, and, weirdly, the Twin Towers are gone but The Odeon is not. And so, a new cover. This one just looks like the opening credits of Saturday Night Live.

The cover is a before/after spread, tied to a story about how Simpson has "already peeled off 10 pounds in 10 days" (last time around, Us had her losing "20 pounds in two months"). Their "Before!" picture is from a couple weeks after Simpson's infamous chili cookoff pics surfaced and ex-boyfriend Tony Romo took her to the Waverly Inn for Valentine's Day:

Click for larger images

Now, OK! hasn't laid eyes on the allegedly svelte Jessica Simpson, that's just what "sources" told them. So to illustrate Simpon's purported weight loss, it went to the photo archives and found a picture of her jogging on the set of Major Movie Star in September 2007, more than a year before, we'd point out, the picture labeled with the big "BEFORE!" caption:

It would appear the cash-bleeding celebrity weekly really is done paying for fresh art.

Park Sloper and Gawker hobby horse Steven Johnson delivers that depressing punchline at the end of his Twitter cover story, out tomorrow:

It was the Japanese who would destroy us in the '80s; now it's China and India. But what actually happened to American innovation during that period? We came up with America Online, Netscape, Amazon, Google, Blogger, Wikipedia, Craigslist, TiVo, Netflix, eBay, the iPod and iPhone, Xbox, Facebook and Twitter itself. Sure, we didn't build the Prius or the Wii, but if you measure global innovation in terms of actual lifestyle-changing hit products and not just grad students, the U.S. has been lapping the field for the past 20 years.

That's right: America might not make actual things any more, but at least we've learned to occupy our time talking endlessly and unprofitably to one another, in an entirely massless location, about which other entirely massless things deserve our time and/or increasingly worthless borrowed dollars.

It's a sort of self-eating economy only slightly more sophisticated than the financial services orgy of the prior 10 years, which ended disastrously. We just can't stop doing this sort of thing. Yay?

This is what I ultimately find most inspiring about the Twitter phenomenon. We are living through the worst economic crisis in generations, with apocalyptic headlines threatening the end of capitalism as we know it, and yet in the middle of this chaos, the engineers at Twitter headquarters are scrambling to keep the servers up, application developers are releasing their latest builds, and ordinary users are figuring out all the ingenious ways to put these tools to use. There's a kind of resilience here that is worth savoring.

That's the sort of sweeping, certain conclusion sure to please Time's Economist- loving editor Rick Stengel. How's it doing on the media platform of the future, though? Time's James Poniewozik reports:

Ad Age found that putting Michelle Obama on the cover has been a mixed bag in terms of newsstand sales. As you can see from our fancy graphic, some covers did give a big sales boost, while others tanked. The lessons:

• Having a black readership helps: Essence and Ebony, win; New York mag (NILLAS), lose.
• Having an old audience hurts: Newsweek, Ladies Home Journal, More—all these magazines are read by over-the-hill people who have already passed the point when they would be excited by "glamor." Their desire is for soothing consistency. Give them Laura Bush.
• Think of a good cover line, if it's not too much trouble: Just look at the LHJ cover. They got the freaking first couple on there, and the biggest eye-grabber is "Save money at the gas pump." Maybe play up that photo?
• Pray: If the Obamas aren't going to save the magazine industry, what is?

One might call Lipman's tastes erratic. The business magazine editor, said to find business journalism uninteresting, is known around the office for spiking piles and piles of copy, enough even to prompt comparisons to Tina Brown in her fussy Condé Nast heyday.

From the outside, Lipman's impulsiveness is apparent in her curious cover choices. After the outbreak of the worst economic crisis in 70 years, she put a picture of clothier Dov Charney on the front of Portfolio. Next month, amid talk of bank nationalization and CEO immolation, the magazine's cover will feature Sarah Palin.

From inside the publication comes a tragic story involving a cover that never was: Barack Obama, shot by photo legend Annie Leibovitz at Lipman's behest, for the December-January cover. Worried that everyone else would put the president-elect on the cover, Lipman is said to have killed the portrait after it was taken.

So instead of what was believed to be exclusive work from star photographer Leibovitz, of the newly-elected president, timed exquisitely to front-run the inaugural buzz, Portfolio ended up with a concept image of a dead bull on Wall Street; clever, but severely tardy for a meltdown that shifted into overdrive nearly a full financial quarter earlier.

"Clever, but severely tardy" could also be used to summarize much of what has ended up inside the magazine — and to describe whatever Condé Nast chairman Si Newhouse will inevitably have to have done to Portfolio in Lipman's wake.

"Lay Lady Lay, it ain't," the Sun writes.

No. More like "Jet Pilot."

That's easily Lipman's worst call since fronting with American Apparel founder Dov Charney in the first Portfolio following the economic meltdown — greeting the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression with a story about a t-shirt vendor.

Staff tried to warn Lipman about the Palin cover, according to Women's Wear Daily, just as they did before she disastrously published stale scuttlebutt about a Nixon-era scandal last January. Lipman, defiantly ignorant of business news, was no more compliant this time around.

As with November's Charney issue, April's Portfolio will ignore an historic fulcrum in American finance, when anti-Wall Street populism is at an all-time high and calls for wholesale bank nationalization are gaining real ground (establishment figures like former IMF man Stephen Johnson having come to concur with once-fringe economists like Nouriel Roubini).

Sure, famed Nixon campaign-chronicler Joe McGinniss is penning the Palin piece, and there's some sort of vague business angle involving oil, but come on: Even Lipman's heretofore steadfast boss Si Newhouse has to be able to see how out of touch his business magazine now looks. Even if the glamour-mag publisher wasn't much concerned with finance six months ago, the imploding advertising market ensures he's up to speed now. And he'll be wondering why Lipman isn't.

[The last one is trashy, we know.]

All quotes from George Lois—the man who designed all of Esquire's greatest covers—about Esquire's recent, blinking, plastic "cover of the future." That's unfortunate, Esquire, you must be very disappointed at being PWND!!1! Watch the Lois interview with Ad Age here. He's cranky about other things too.

[via MagCulture]

Leon Spinks is good at spitting between his teeth.

Stop poking Al Unser, lady!

George Foster is always ready to sneak up from behind and hit you with a bat.

Occasionally, basketball players will pull each others' shorts down, just for fun.

You don't want to meet Nancy Lopez in a dark alley.

"Boo Japan"

"Fishing Fills The Hole In My Heart"

"The Evergreen Blooms"

"Six Is The Perfect Number To Express This Trend"

"Print Will Never, Ever Die"

"Cocktails: You're Doing It Rong"

"Not A Conflict Of Interest"