UPDATE: Official response from Esquire's PR firm, Dan Klores Communications:

Hi Hamilton,
I saw your post on our December issue. I just wanted to note that the address label is in fact peelable, and if it gets stuck, there is an additional cover marker on page 8.
Just letting you know in case you want to correct your post.

There is no "peel" in the word "FUTURE."

Going forward, Perseus will provide "editorial, sales and digital services to current and future titles from Weinstein Books," and the companies will jointly develop book ideas. Harvey Weinstein says that'll be a snap:

Weinstein said he expects to use his contacts to bring in leading authors as well as political and cultural figures to the joint venture. "I can open my Rolodex," he said.

Well, gosh, opening your Rolodex! That's a great idea. We wonder why it didn't occur to him before he had to partner with an actual book publisher in order to make the business work.

Of course, our cynicism is misplaced: Harvey assures us that everything is looking up at what the New York Times, in our favorite new phrase, calls his "miniature entertainment conglomerate":

In an interview, Harvey Weinstein described his film company's finances as "getting healthier every second."

Indeed, as the Weinsteins retreat from all their ill-advised ventures, their finances get healthier. Pretty soon they'll exit the movie business entirely and achieve peak fitness.

Zucker, the bullet-headed upward-failer who's managed to infuriate and exasperate his many critics into sputtering fits of rage simply by never, ever getting fired despite an incontrovertible record of deserving to get fired, will stay under any new ownership, according to "three people with knowledge of the situation." We're confident that those three people are Zucker, his wife, and his cousin, because expert care and feeding of the press is one way Zucker has managed to never, ever get fired.

To celebrate the news of his continued survival, here's a handy list of Zucker's brushes with death (real and metaphorical), and how he survived them all, unfairly (except for the brushes with real death, which we're glad he survived).

Harvard Law School
Zucker gained fame as the youngest executive producer of the Today Show ever—he took the helm at age 26 in 1992. How'd he land that gig? By failing to get into Harvard Law School. After Harvard rejected him, he took a job as a researcher at NBC Sports, met Katie Couric, and was running Today six years later.

NBC Nightly News
Zucker was undeniably successful at Today, if by "successful" you mean "good at turning it into a show where bands played rock music outside and you could look at Katie Couric's gams." He was so good at it, in fact, that in 1993 NBC News also put him in charge of the NBC Nightly News With Tom Brokaw, a job he excelled at for the precisely five weeks it took him to fail at it and go back to just producing Today. Tom Brokaw called him "Doogie."

Now With Tom Brokaw and Katie Couric
Now was Zucker's brainchild—an hour-long primetime newsmagazine in the vein of 60 Minutes, 20/20, and Dateline NBC, which already existed on NBC in 1993, when Zucker launched Now. It lasted one year, because it sucked. Dateline is still around.

Good Morning Miami
After getting promoted to president of NBC Entertainment in 2000, Zucker was moved out to Hollywood with the explicit job of a) keeping Friends on the air for as long as he could and b) coming up with a successor sitcom for Thursday nights after it did, inevitably, go off the air. Zucker kept Friends going until the 2003-04 season, but his first bid for a successor was Good Morning Miami, a show about a nebbishy young morning-show executive producer in Miami—Zucker's hometown. Good thing Mark Feuerstein, who played the main character, had a full head of hair. Otherwise the show could have been misinterpreted as egomaniacal self-glorification. It sucked and was canceled.

Coupling
With the Friends franchise fast disappearing, Zucker put his faith in an exciting young upstart producer named Ben Silverman to keep NBC on top Thurday nights. In 2003, Silverman adapted the British hit Coupling for American audiences. It was going to be awesome, Zucker told television critics. It lasted one month, because it sucked, and Zucker later admitted to those self-same television critics that he "knew from the first taping it was in trouble." Stephen Moffat, the creator of the British version, had this to say when asked why Coupling sucked: "I can answer it with three letters: N, B, C.... The network fucked it up because they intervened endlessly. If you really want a job to work, don't get Jeff Zucker's team to come help you with it because they're not funny. All right? There you go."

Joey
By 2004, Zucker was promoted to running the NBC Television Group, and brought in Kevin Reilly to shepherd primetime on the network, but not before deciding that Joey was a really great idea for keeping that Friends magic going. It was not.

Ben Silverman
Zucker fired Reilly in 2007, and hired Ben Silverman, the genius behind Coupling. Silverman lasted two years of clubbing and combating rumors that he does drugs all the time and can't make morning meetings because he's hung over before getting fired a few months ago.

Losing $1 billion
The collective impact of the aforementioned decisions is that when Zucker took the reins at NBC, it was the number one network among 18-to-49-year-olds and home—or inheritor—of brands like Seinfeld, Cheers, and Friends. By 2005, it was dead last. In the 2004-05 season, NBC raked in an astonishing $1 billion less in ad revenue than the season prior.

Land of the Lost et. al.
Under Zucker's ultimate leadership, Universal Pictures is in the midst of a prolonged box-office slump marked by expensive non-starters like Land of the Lost (cost $100 million, made $62 million worldwide), Funny People (cost $75 million, made $60 million), State of Play, Frost/Nixon, etc. Zucker ordered Universal honcho Ron Meyer to shake up the executive ranks last month, but the studio has a lot of expensive movies still in the pipeline.

Lying to Nikki Finke
Perhaps worst of all, Zucker lied to Nikki Finke. When she heard rumors last summer that Silverman was on his way out at NBC, Zucker assured her through a spokesperson that nothing could be further from the truth: "Ben is here to stay for the foreseeable future. No changes afoot." And we all know that lying to Nikki Finke gives you cancer.

Cancer
Which is nothing to Jeff Zucker! He's survived two bouts of colon cancer. The man will not be moved.

There is probably nothing more enjoyable on the internet today than to contrast the movie I saw with the reviews of said movie by the only other people in America who saw it: the hardcore Tucker Max fans who frequent his message boards. Never let it be said that we don't provide space for differing opinions.

1. "The comedic value isn't what sets the movie apart to me, it's the fact that it actually has a soul. When I walked out of the theater I wasn't really thinking about how funny it was, I was thinking about friendships I've had in the past that I screwed up or have lost - it made me introspective."

2. "Much in the same way 'fratire' became a new genre, Tucker made this movie from a completely different mold. And, he deserves to be evaluated on that basis."

3. "Tucker and Nils could make 10 sequels to IHTSBIH and they'd still be funny so long as the dialogue didn't repeat. Because that's where the humor was derived: the fucking English language. Crazy concept, right?"

4. "I think you infused the right amount of slapstick, physical comedy (the shit scene, Dan pissing on the cops) into the movie. I like it when you can laugh at two very different levels of humor in the same flick."

5. "I've seen Tucker on camera many times, but it was weird to see him in a movie about him...with him not playing...him. And was it me or was he overacting that role like a motherfucker in the background of those scenes? Haha, nah, you were good dude."

6. "Expected more laugh out loud moments in the movie, but that was mostly from my high expectations. I rarely laugh out loud in movies, but I remember I did during the shit scene and the scene with Drew strangling Lara. A few of the one liners like 'You smell like you got buttfucked by a garbage truck.'"

7. "Take Drew. Not a single person who's criticized the Drew/Lara relationship has mentioned a characteristic of his other than that he "hates women," a fact that shows a deep misunderstanding of the character and relationship. Drew is bitter because he's fucking hurting. He is a very deeply moral character. He clearly puts a lot of weight on trust: he won't lie for his friends because Dan's fiancée trusts him and he will not undermine that. To not have that same trust reciprocated in a relationship as involved as the one he just got out of is fucking devastating.
To give someone your all, to buy them his and hers chairs to play video games in, to so let them into your life, only to catch them sucking off a fucking rapper on your couch? The damage that does to his emotional health is so palpable it's ridiculous. Some of the shots of Jesse reacting to Lara and the kid back at their house are priceless. Bradford does such a good job letting that pain and longing simmer. Chills."

8. "I loved the fact that even though I didn't find it funny, I was only bored during one scene."

9. "We've been so conditioned to see people dodging wrenches to practice dodging a ball, Asian gangsters in car trunks, and Jason Biggs sliding to home plate with a pie that when we see flaming Dr. Peppers we probably expected someone or something to catch fire for some cheap laugh. Instead we heard "So who's the slutty one?" said to a bachelorette party. The line – like the entire tone of the movie – is in your face and that artistic choice is so different the combination is unsettling to some people, but funny to nearly everyone."

10. "In a few years, when critics look at the IHTSBIH franchise as a whole, they're going to be eating a lot of crow. Not because they wrote bad reviews (this movie, like every other movie, has its flaws), but because they failed to miss the "experience" aspect all together. In the same way that George Lucas generated long-term success for Star Wars with cutting-edge movie-making technology, IHTSBIH will ultimately succeed as a franchise and a brand because it completely redefined what it means to "experience" a movie. That's why it's unfair to compare this to any other film. It isn't like them."

Trump has a very particular business model: Get a reputation for being a wildly successful business mogul even though you are, in fact, a failure at business; capitalize on the reputation itself—instead of your purported mogul skills—to make a living. Donald probably makes more off books and TV shows and Learning Annex courses than he ever did off his crumbling real estate empire, and that's okay. It works for him.

And it can work for Gordon Ramsay! His own little empire of fancy restaurants has been collapsing ever since this little economic meltdown stopped hedge fundies from using their little expense accounts to buy, you know, food sold by Gordon Ramsay & Co. After a rapid expansion during the boom years, he's now closing restaurants during slow hours, cutting back on staff and expensive menu items and fancy dining room trimmings, and using "more economical ingredients." And look—according to the WSJ, his business model is evolving in quite a familiar direction!

Mr. Ramsay generates about £10 million in annual revenue from television, publishing and endorsement contracts. That includes as much as $250,000 a show for the U.S. versions of "Hell's Kitchen" and "Kitchen Nightmares," which both air on Fox, a unit of News Corp., which owns The Wall Street Journal. Mr. Ramsay has poured about £12 million of his media earnings into his restaurant empire...

[Now], Rather than paying rent, Mr. Ramsay receives fees for licensing the Ramsay name, provides key personnel and advises on menus.

Licensing: that's where the smart money is. And though Gordon Ramsay and Donald Trump are both asshole, Ramsay is a lovable asshole. Big difference.

This new made-up designation supersedes our earlier proclamation that Gordon Ramsay was the "John McCain of Food.".
[Pic: Getty]

They paid Kenya Mejia $1,800 to say "I love you, Jake Minor!" in her actual graduation speech, the idea being that she would say she was inspired to call out her crush by seeing the same thing done in this movie, I Love You, Beth Cooper. Then the video of this would "go viral," supposedly. Let us count the ways in which this plan failed.

1. The movie bombed. "Even Ms. Mejia hasn't seen it." Return-on-investment fail.

2. The Fox-produced-but-supposedly-just-amateur YouTube video the company posted of the stunt barely has over 2,000 hits. Why would anyone care? They would not. Viral fail.

3. The school district is pissed. Education fail

4. This "Jake Minor" character that Kenya called out as her crush is not even her boyfriend. Although her boyfriend supposedly "endorsed it," hopefully for a hefty cut of the check. Furthermore, Jake Minor has a girlfriend of his own. His assessment of Kenya: "She's pretty quiet." Love connection fail.

Let us never try this again.

[WSJ]

The ultimate in speakeasy mystification takes place at PDT (Please Don't Tell) on St. Marks Place in the East Village. Patrons have to enter through Crif Dogs, the hip hot dog place, then step into a phone booth and identify themselves by speaking into the receiver. A buzzer opens a secret door, revealing a strange, twilight world where artisanal cocktails are consumed under the watchful eyes of a stuffed jackelope and raccoon, and a bear wearing a bowler hat.

If you're cool enough to drink there, this is totally old news. Now you have to find a new, more secret place. If you're only learning about it now, it's just another painful reminder that you are unfit to drink anywhere worth writing about. Either way, just give up.
[NYT. Pic via]

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.THE HEF is reportedly floating his Playboy Enterprises empire for sale, for a bargain-basement price of $300 million. That's way more than the company's actually worth—porn is free, nowadays—but THE HEF needs all the extra cash to continue paying his concubines until he collapses. Seriously, that's why he's asking for so much.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Michael Kinsley says that the new Newsweek redesign hasn't changed the fact that the magazine is a waste of time, which is true, and that Time is also a waste of time, which is true, but that Time is a waste of time mostly because they canned Michael Kinsley, which is false. The Historical Jesus is not mentioned.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.All those projects that are hacked-to-the-bone online relaunches of local news outlets by refugees from folded newspapers? Those are all going to fail. We're calling it now. Sorry.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Ha, the San Diego paper sold recently, astoundingly, to a private equity firm. A big investor in that firm is the pension fund of LA police officers. Now the pension fund demands that the paper fire its editorial writers because they hate cops or something. It will only take a few more incidents like this for the acquisition of the San Diego paper to go down as the last great failed newspaper acquisition. It has a good chance!

If you're wondering what Yahoo Video is, don't blame yourself. Yahoo's video site, the descendant of the foolhardy $5.7 billion acquisition of Mark Cuban's Broadcast.com in 2000, is a grab-bag of funny cat videos, sports and news clips, and third-rate Web originals.

Yahoo Video has struggled to compete with YouTube's reputation as an all-in-one destination and Hulu's clearly curated collection of primetime entertainment. Its prehistoric video technology and Dallas operations center, a legacy of the Broadcast.com deal, has meant that it costs Yahoo more to serve up a video than Google. It hasn't helped that the video group has had a revolving door of leadership. Onetime Yahoo Music chief Ian Rogers ran it briefly before leaving for a startup last year, handing it over to Yahoo Media chief Scott Moore, who promptly split for Microsoft.

Yahoo has also shuttered Jumpcut, its user-generated video site, in favor of Flickr, which now hosts what it calls "long photos" — mostly personal clips taken on digital cameras. Cuban, the founder of Broadcast.com, predicted that most videos on the Internet would be home movies. Shame he didn't tell Yahoo that before he sold it a $5.7 billion bag of goods.

Update: A tipster at Yahoo points out that Broadcast.com wasn't the only bad investment Yahoo made in video. More recently, its $200 million purchase of Maven Networks went sour:

I'm not sure if any tech news blogs have carried this info but there has been a significant shift in Yahoo! video strategy. For the past month or so, and last week in particular the entire Y! video product management team and key engineers have either moved on, resigned, or let go. For a long time the team has been pushing the management to take on a more "Hulu-like" or premium content approach but with portfolio rationalization and internal politics, the key guys pushing for this change have been moved out. Last year Yahoo! spent almost $200 M purchasing white label publishing company - Maven, that strategy is also out of the door, video is now in a sad state in Yahoo! abandoned and in maintainence mode. The sad part is that folks currently leading the video charge and the ones with poor vision, execution capability, and responsible for putting the company $200M in the hole! Yahoo! continues to amaze me. Hulu, YouTube, and others will now be leaders in video monetization.

Micorosft's music player has always been an also-ran, a late-to-market entry which mimicked the iPod but offered no new features consumers found compelling. Interviewed at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Ballmer backed into an admission of failure:

In digital music, meanwhile, Mr Ballmer seemed all but ready to throw in the towel on the Zune mobile device, which has failed to gain ground on Apple’s iPod. But he suggested that the focus of competition in digital media was moving onto ground that Microsoft understands well: software.

He said that, with the market for dedicated portable media players in decline, the future lay in more “general purpose” devices – such as Apple’s iPhone and touch.

Asked if Microsoft would counter with a “Zune Phone”, Mr Ballmer said: “You should not anticipate that.”

Great advice, Steve! As if anyone — aside from the media, which loves a good fight — was ever anticipating more Zune products. Even Steven Smith, the fellow who infamously tattooed himself with three Zune logos, has switched to an iPod.

So what has Microsoft "learned" in its "long journey"? Well, it's back to making software, largely for cell phones, which other manufacturers will then deliver to consumer — the model it knows so well from PCs. But that's also the same finger-pointing business model which led it to abject failure in the music-player market before it started a crash program to create the Zune. And a recent glitch which rendered a popular Zune model dead on New Year's hardly furthers the notion of Microsoft being strong in software.

How funny that Microsoft executives think its technical strategy is what needs to change, when the real problem is that the Microsoft brand is far too stodgy to succeed in an image-driven business like music. That's the kind of cluelessness that leads to one failed campaign after another — like a wannabe politician who just can't grasp the idea that no one wants to vote for him.

In an interview with Bloomberg TV, Blodget explains why he voted for Spitzer in his run for governor of New York, even though he "disagreed" with the "conclusions" of Spitzer's investigation of the dotcom stock bubble. (Before he found fame as a call girl fan, Spitzer led a series of prosecutiuons against Wall Street abuses, which ended up with Blodget barred from working on Wall Street.) What Blodget said on TV:

The world needs people with that amount of chutzpah to come in and take on everybody. And so, I actually got to the point where I voted for him for Governor because I wanted to see what would happen when you took that personality and that force for change into Albany.

Blodget talks about his "respect" for Spitzer. Which is already a marked difference from what he wrote in his Silicon Alley Insider blog two weeks ago:

A year or so after the Martha Stewart trial, Eliot dropped by a Slate event before launching his run for governor. I met him in the buffet line.

ME (napkin roll in hand, flustered to suddenly find myself in the presence of my Destroyer): Hi, Eliot, Henry Blodget, good to meet you. You made my life a bit rough there for a while!

ELIOT: (3,000-watt smile): That's my job!

(Yes, he was charming. And I respected a lot of what he had done. I even voted for the bastard.)

So which is it, Henry? Do you respect Spitzer, like you told Bloomberg? Or is he your "Destroyer" and a "bastard"? Remember, Spitzer landed you in a heap of trouble the last time for just this kind of doubletalk.

The narrative arc of disgrace used to be a traditional three-parter: The fall, the repentance, the glorious return. But our fast-forward culture lacks the patience for that. We've forgotten about the Biblical years of wandering in the desert in favor of the three-day resurrection. So much easier to step right back into the spotlight. It's not a comeback — it's an encore.

If anything, Stewart's five-month stint in the big house after she was convicted of lying to prosecutors about a stock sale made the ice queen of entertaining vastly more approachable. Hey, Martha's a little bit gangster! Now lets make some badass cupcakes. I hear she got the frosting recipe from a cellmate.

Henry Blodget, a former Merrill Lynch analyst, became famous for predicting Amazon.com's soaring rise in stock price during the dotcom boom. But he was barred from the securities industry for life after lawsuits turned up emails showing him privately bashing the same stocks he was recommending. And yet he's still dispensing stock tips at his startup, Silicon Alley Insider. If anything, he has more credibility as a blogger than he ever did as a Wall Street analyst. (And how did he launch his comeback? Covering the Martha Stewart trial for Slate!)

And Eliot Spitzer went from governor of New York, a rising star of the Democratic Party, to Ashley Dupré's Client 9, brought down by an investigation into prostitution rings, to boring punchline — all within six months. He's still a schlub who shows up at Slate parties, god help him. (Now, he at least has the excuse of being a columnist for the online publication. Along with Blodget.)

What this means for the less-famous: Nothing's really a setback. Did your startup go under? Give speeches about how much you've learned about business. Went bankrupt? Raise money for a brand new hedge fund? Laid off? Glory in your life as a free agent (until you get another steady job). The only risk you take when you fail is not being epic.

The Greatest Depression has been marked by its swiftness and ubiquity; in a hyperglobalized economy, it struck everywhere at once. We're all disgraced now! Why would we ever hold a little thing like failure against someone?

(Photo of Blodget via BusinessWeek; Spitzer via Us Versus Them)

There are a few different strategies. Some, like failed failure WaMu, use humor, along the lines of "We've dragged our dessicated carcass to a safe place now. LOL!"

Others are going for the old "reassure you despite all evidence to the contrary" tactic:

In advertising, many financial institutions are racing to reassure consumers with soothing messages — that focus on important “S” words: strength, safety, stability, security.

“There is a safe and smart place to put your money,” ads for Commerce Bank tell newspaper readers.

Simultaneously, some institutions are continuing to communicate as if the recent upheavals had not happened. Ads for Discover Financial Services, for instance, try to coax consumers to sign up for yet another credit card, offering enticements like free balance transfers.

Ha, well I guess that's appropriate. The truth is advertising is just a buffet of bad options right now for banks. They can laugh it off and look stupid. They can try to reassure you and look like liars. Or they can try the "straight talk" approach and scare you even worse than you already are.

Or they can do what the FDIC did and hire scary blond Suze Orman. Which is the worst option of all. [NYT]

WELL I GUESS THEY'VE LEARNED THEIR LESSON.
[Excellent catch by Misterstarfish]

C.F.: No, absolutely not, and it wasn't $12 then. It was twice that. [These days Hewlett is trading at around $43.] You know, I knew what was coming at Hewlett-Packard. My choices and my leadership had been completely validated by what happened from the moment I left. And by the way, the best legacy of a leader is what happens after they go. That's how you know the kind of foundation they put in place. So I still root for them. I'm very proud of them. I have a lot of friends there, and I'm extraordinarily pleased.

Hah. The new culture of responsibility—happily accepting responsibility for how well things went once you finally left.

Anyways Carly loves John McCain because even though he understands fuck-all about fiscal policy he's NEVER ASKED FOR AN EARMARK EVER. Also because she maybe wants a cabinet position?

From the paper:

Moby, who began playing just after 5pm this evening, started off with well known tracks, such as 'Honey', 'Natural Blues' and 'Why does my heart feel so bad', but soon began to run out of material because he, and singer Joy Malcolm had not rehearsed.

He continued: "It was good. we did not announce anything and I did not even tell any of my friends in the UK, so it was very impromptu.
"We ran out of actual singles, so we started improvising and playing the Blues. Joy started making up lyrics - she's fearless."

Stuck in the subway, and I've run out of all my hits I said, I'm stuck in the subway, and I've run out of all my hits Hasn't been this bleak down here, oh baby, since the London Blitz. I'm too old to cry and I'm too young to carry on. I said, I'm too old to cry and I'm way to young to carry on (don't you know, baby girl?) I live in New York City, but wooo (Falsetto) I grew up in Darrien.