Cindi Leive, Glamour editor-in-chief, denied she could be one of the book's funhouse mirrored versions of Manhattan media fixtures. It was Leive who playing host at Da Silvano's wine bar to a mix of unnervingly relaxed gossips, writers, and flacks, which meant she invited guests to pet her fur purse — "No, I don't even know what kind of animal it is, but you don't really want to know, do you?"

Froelich, in fishnets, advised that really, "If you can eat it, wear it." She had her own arm-candy: a bouquet of tiny violet roses, compliments of (former?) gossip and one-time Gawker editor, Alex Balk.

Also in the gallery, shot by the unstoppable Nikola Tamindzic: Erica Jong, George Gurley, Sloane Crosley, David Carr, Rachel Sklar, Elizabeth Spiers, Kate Lee, and Neel Shah's hat.

Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me), Page Six's gossip columnist and Mercury in Retrograde author Paula Froelich

Cindi Leive (editor-in-chief, Glamour), author Erica Jong

Elliot Furman, former Defamer writer Molly Friedman

Glamour's Cindi Leive, Rachel Sklar of Abrams Research

Neel Shah (gossip writer for Page Six, and former Radar), Chris Wilson ("the Neel Shah of the late 90's" he explains), Steve Garbarino (the survivorman of the magazine world, now working with Playboy)

Classing it up, old-school publicist Bobby Zarem

The next generation: omg omg omg

Sloane Crosley (book publicist, author of I Was Told There'd Be Cake), Cindy Eagan (head of teen lit imprint Poppy) Caroline Waxler (writer)

Mediaite Rachel Sklar with Ron Perelman's spokeswoman Christine Taylor

Neel Shah shortly before hatting Sloane Crosley

Alex Balk (The Awl, former Radar executive editor) shows his face with Paula Froelich

A barely debauched George Gurley (New York Observer, Vanity Fair)

La Froelich's fishnets

Paula Froelich, with snappy flack Marvette Brito

Morgan Spurlock

ICM agent Kate Lee with client and Gawker founding editor Elizabeth Spiers

David Carr (star Twitterer and media columnist, New York Times)

Sara Bernstein, of HBO's documentary operation, and Jesse Angelo, New York Post managing editor, who claims to have only ever drunk-bought one domain: yourwifeisonmyblog.com

Sloane Crosley, Neel Shah's hat

Paula Froelich just wants you to go home now

The old pattern of a cute ingénue charming the pants off an aging media tycoon seemed like a dying trope. Think Anna Wintour and Si Newhouse at Condé Nast (okay, there was no evidence they actually slept together). Or Tina Brown and Auberon Waugh of Private Eye back in the U.K. (they pretty definitely did).

And along comes Floethe to revive it! Cityfile reports (and we've also heard) that Floethe and Wolff have been carrying on an affair since she was an intern at Vanity Fair, where Wolff is a contributing writer. Floethe denies it. But the whiff of scandal at an Internet news site is energizing. Online editors, by and large, have not yet grown rich and powerful enough to command the attentions of the young, ambitious, and unscrupulous. Who is this Floethe, and what makes her such a likely target of rumors of an affair?

A self-described "femme fatale." Floethe infuriated Slate readers last year by describing a 2006 trip to the Caucasian nation of Georgia, where she and her boyfriend, whom she describes only as a "travel writer," hobnobbed with President Mikheil "Misha" Saakashvili. She unabashedly stripped down to her swimwear for Sakaashvili:

The next day, Misha, accompanied by eight CIA-trained bodyguards, flew us in a vintage Soviet chopper to what looked like a Bond villain's compound on the beach. After I changed into my femme fatale bikini, an armed guard escorted me from the dacha to the beach, where Misha was riding a jet ski. I hesitated just a moment before I clung to the president for dear life (only briefly wondering whether the travel writer had traded me for access to high places).

Likes older men. Floethe insists that she and Wolff are "great friends." She certainly has a lot of great friends. The "travel writer" boyfriend whom she never names in the Slate piece is Melik Kaylan, a widely published journalist much older than her. At the time Floethe and he were going out, Kaylan was married. He helped introduce her to Wolff, who got her an internship at Vanity Fair. According to our tipster, to Kaylan's dismay, Floethe switched her affections from Kaylan to Wolff. She's also dated Lawrence Osborne, the travel writer ex of founding Gawker editor Elizabeth Spiers. And at an Interview party, she was photographed clinging to the side of English writer Adrian Dannatt (left).

Raised by a Palin voter. Floethe wrote in the Guardian before the election of her upbringing by a Republican mother:

My mother is a Republican-committee-woman type who recently moved from Buckhead in Atlanta to a gated community called Big Canoe an hour from the city in the north Georgia mountains. If she had political opinions beyond some traditional Republican bromides as well as the irksome articles and emails she forwards, I'd long ago become inured to them. To me it was just mom-ish background noise. Whatever my mother's politics, we comported ourselves like any more or less liberal (certainly for the south we were liberal), upwardly mobile family - an emphasis on culture betterment, Ivy League schools and, ultimately, an apartment for me in the East Village in Manhattan.

An ex-trust funder. In Slate two weeks ago, Floethe confessed that her trust fund was not what it once was:

My small but helpful trust fund lost 40 percent all at once, and then another 20 percent, leaving me, practically speaking, destitute. I suddenly needed something more than an Internet writing job (Internet writers need trust funds) at the exact moment when there were no jobs. Either that or a man of means.

Part of the beauty of a trust fund has been the freedom to avoid such a man, those incredibly rich but invariably dull hedge funders and private equity guys, bean counters and bureaucrats, so available in New York and urged on all single girls.

What, no mention of aging Internet entrepreneurs as an option?

(Photos via Cityfile and Guest of a Guest)

Founding Gawker editor Elizabeth Spiers suffered Flight 1549 flashbacks.

Self-crowned empress of tech media Sarah Lacy believed she was being willfully deprived of gadgets.

Guardian writer Bobbie Johnson, exiled to San Francisco, feared he'd been left alone with bunny-boiling lunatics.

Silicon Alley Insider blogger Nicholas Carlson spied on his colleagues' indiscretions. (He was so much worse at Valleywag.)

Rocketboom videoblogger Andrew Baron was mistaken for someone actually famous.

Anyone else's tweets we should keep an eye on? Send us more Twitter usernames, please.

Her idea is to “cater to the female id and the female ego….It’ll be a little less afraid of provocation than a lot of print magazines are. You can do that on the Web.” Spiers said her magazine would be less urban and would skew older than Jezebel, with which her idea is often compared.

Let's analyze: It's not a blog. It's a magazine! On the internet. It can be more provocative than a regular women's magazine. Because it's on the internet! But it's not a blog. So don't compare it to Jezebel (they will cut you over there). It will explore the id and ego of the older, more sedate woman. But it's "less urban" than Jezebel—kind of an unfortunate quote (Spiers: Caucasian. Jezebel: two top editors are not Caucasian! 'Urban': historically a stupid code word for "black." See?) that we will not take the wrong way because we believe Elizabeth Spiers is pure of heart.

So, our reading would be: a mildly trash-talking blog aimed at older suburban women. Her description: "Maxim for women." It all fits. [WWD]

[UPDATE: Jezebel leg-breaker-in-chief Anna confirms: "I will cut and field dress a bitch. U CAN QUOTE ME ON THAT." She then adds, about Spiers, "(i like her)." Then she challenges Spiers to get "edgier" than Jezebel's "10 Days in the life of a Tampon" story, at which point I got sick.]

Actually, I didn't rate any of those books. I assume the stars are the aggregate rating from other people who have read them. If I were going to rate them, they're all very good, though The Loved One is not my favorite Waugh. As for my boyfriend's book, it's excellent—five stars—as is his previous book, The Accidental Connoisseur. (See? Even people who aren't sleeping with him think so!)

Also, the Flaubert is hilarious, but a little hard to find, which probably is why no one has rated it yet.

All it took was Heath Ledger's flight to Manhattan for them to realize that? It took me years of therapy.

After the dissolution of the iconic Heath Ledger-Michelle Williams union, all that remains in brownstone-scarred Boerum Hill is a snarl of internecine quarreling between the true Brooklyn believers and those forced out of Manhattan.

"The dark secret of Brooklyn is that many of the people who are going there are going there because they can't afford Manhattan," said Douglas Rushkoff, a writer and former Park Slope resident. "There is a tension between people who are in Brooklyn for Brooklyn's sake, for the diversity and the quality of life, and people who are pushed to Brooklyn unwillingly."

Also? Elizabeth Spiers, founding editor of Gawker and, for years, a prime propagator of Manhattanism, has recently moved to Boerum Hill. Make of that what you will!

Joanne Lipman: Imperious, not quite sure how to run a magazine. But! Knows how to tell rich people what they should buy. Move her over to New York, a magazine whose only relevant section is The Strategist, your go-to guide when you need to know where to find $500 antique doorknobs. She's a natural fit. This, of course, would cause the exit of...

Adam Moss: An editor with the unique talent of turning every magazine he helms into some iteration of the late 7 Days. Whatever its faults, that title was always lively and exciting, unlike Vanity Fair, which feels a little flat these days. Send Moss to VF, where he can clean up the chaotic front of the book and still indulge his passion for stories about rich people. Sadly, the magazine would no longer require the services of...

Graydon Carter: This may sound like a counterintuitive move, but think about it: The man can't shut up about politics. Give him a perch at the New Republic and he'll be able to both fulminate his little heart out about the evil Republicans and liven up the book's incredibly soporific design. Sure, the world isn't crying out for an Annie Leibovitz photogallery of Al From, but it's miles better than the crappy illustrations the book currently offers. Unfortunately, this would result in plenty of spare time for...

Marty Peretz: Freed at last from his historic burden of being the lone voice in the media that keeps America's support of Israel strong, Peretz can bring his stilted prose and love of obscure words to Maxim, which would be a public service to the magazine's audience of mongoloids, who will be forced to use their other hand to open a dictionary. It'll be a series of monthly teachable moments! The one man who won't be around to learn anything, though, is...

Jimmy Jellinek: Let the Maxim editor take Greg Gutfeld's slot on Red Eye. Seriously, a monkey could do that job; Jimmy's at least two or three stages of evolution better than that. But what of The Gut?

Well! You know the one thing Tina Brown's Diana book was missing? A real man's appreciation of what a fox the late princess was. Greg's not afraid to be politically incorrect: We need his sharp insights concerning the tautness of Diana's thighs and the pendulousness of her cans. This book will sell like crazy! And then Greg can sit on his ass collecting royalty checks and waiting out Tina Brown's tenure at Portfolio. Everyone wins. Especially us!

Distressed Asset [TNR]

When I moved to New York after graduation, I worked for a few years in finance, almost exclusively with men, all of whom were, as far as I could tell, exclusively straight. Then I met a guy named Nick Denton, who became a close friend. Nick was gay, but I didn't realize it until the second or third time we met. To be fair, I'm not the only one to make that mistake, though certain of our friends insist that it was obvious—obvious!—from the beginning.

Nick and I started a website called Gawker.com in late 2002 and it quickly became an extremely popular media gossip blog. As the site's profile grew, there was bit of speculation online that Nick and I were a couple. And as amusing as that was, I had to admit that on some days it felt like it. I was certainly spending more time with Nick than I was with anyone I was dating and we were in each other's space constantly. It was a stimulating (ah, the conversations!) and sometimes tumultuous (oh, the arguments!) relationship and has stayed that way in one form or another since then. We've fought and made up a million times, both publicly and privately, and the third-party commentary is always the same: God, you two have such a bizarre relationship. And they're right: We do. And though I'd never admit it when we're fighting, my life would probably be far less interesting without it.