Writer and radio host Kurt Andersen has, at long last, discovered The Wire, approximately 40 years after everyone else. Luckily his job does not involve being abreast of media or culture, or this would be embarrassing.

Michael Turk, "eCampaign Director" for Bush-Cheney 04, made an abortion joke. Quick, someone make an equally funny comeback involving Congressional pages!

Oprah taught Page Six's Neel Shah the definition of real media power: when you can get the Black Eyed Peas to cut a custom version of their song for your phone-hold music.

In addition to having to cope with looming holiday layoffs, Electronic Arts staffers have been asked to please keep Veronica Belmont physically awake at all times.

You heard Engadget's Joshua Topolsky right, ladies: His cable BRINGS IT. Get freaky with the coaxial!

Did you witness the media elite tweet something indiscreet? Please email us your favorite tweets - or send us more Twitter usernames.

As you can see from above, there's quite a bit of distance between the Studio 360 host, his wife, editor and author Anne Kreamer, and Michelle Obama, who was speaking at the National Design Awards. Andersen's context, via Facebook:

It was the National Design Awards; I did not remove my jacket, but I was the only person in seeruscker; more mesmerized than bored, especially when, moments before this picture, the First Lady slowly brushed her hand across my shoulder as she made her way to the podium. (Also: I stole a paper towel with White House insignia from the bathroom.)

We'd more expect the OHMIGOD YOU GUYZ! MICHELLE OBAMA TOUCHED MY SEERSUCKERED SHOULDER LOOK ON FACEBOOK EEEEEEEE!!! reaction from, say, teenagers, or starstruck bloggers, but the typically cool-headed Andersen?

It's probably worth noting that the Full Contact Michelle's had this affect on other crusty old white people, though I doubt the Queen tried to rifle through Michelle's purse for a few tissues - she's not as nimble as the quick-witted Andersen, who probably used to be impervious to calling this kind of attention to himself before. Then again, he wasn't always this nice to First Ladies, as evidenced by this old Spy cover from back in the day.

Full context, though?

His kids are impressed. Okay: cute.

Radio host Kurt Andersen was practically seduced by the First Lady.

The table manners of the Chicago Tribune's Bill Daley offended someone.

The Huffington Post's Matthew Palevsky filed some citizen journalism about his flight.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Micki Maynard would like you to know her New York Times podcast is badass.

Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post explained DC's bewildering lingo to the plebes.

Did you witness the media elite tweet something indiscreet? Please email us your favorite tweets - or send us more Twitter usernames.

We haven't read Andersen's new book, called Reset, but we got a preview in his essay for Time a few months ago arguing that the economic mess that has one in eight Americans behind on their mortgage payments or in foreclosure is actually a good thing because it could herald a "rediscovery of the common good."

Rushkoff makes a similar, if larger, argument in Life, Inc., which makes the case that "the current financial crisis is actually an opportunity to reverse [the] 600-year-old trend" toward corporate domination of the minutiae of our lives.

Awesome. The 33 million people currently relying on food stamps [pdf]—up 18% from a year ago—will no doubt feel better about their plight with the knowledge that they can now fight back against "the branding of the self" that Rushkoff bemoans in our corporate culture. Or that "the meltdown and resulting reset might jar the culture" out of the tendency in "art and design and entertainment" toward "compulsively reviving styles and remixing the greatest hits of the past," which has always bugged Andersen.

This lemons-to-lemonade theorizing is inevitable and ultimately harmless. And both Rushkoff and Andersen are right that stupidity and navel-gazing and gluttony and complacency got us into this mess, and that it would be a good thing to not be stupid and navel-gazing and complacent. But we're getting tired of hearing cultural and economic evangelizing about the upside of the fact that people literally can't afford to eat from well-heeled, comfortable intellectuals whose book parties probably cost more than the median income in a lot of the decimated towns across this country whose misfortunes they are fetishizing as some kind of return to bedrock values. Andersen writes:

It's time to ratchet back our wild and crazy grasshopper side and get in touch with our inner ant, to be more artisan-enterpriser and less prospector-speculator, more heroic Greatest Generation and less self-indulgent baby boomer, to return from Oz to Kansas, to become fully reality-based again.... Yes, we must start spending again, and we will. But we've all known people who, having survived the 1930s, never lost their Depression habits of frugality. And so it will be again.

The reason people never lost their Depression habits of frugality is that they saw people starving on the streets, and they were terrified beyond reason that it might happen again. It's true that people learn valuable moral lessons from hardship, but those lessons don't make the hardship a good thing. People learn awful truths in war. That doesn't mean we should have more of them for educational purposes, or that they have an upside.

The problem with this finally-we're-getting-back-to-what-matters analysis is that the most severely hurt victims of this economy never got away from what matters. They were too busy working. Kurt Andersen and his friends might have lost touch with work or nature or reality, but they are going to be just fine, and can afford to look at their lean times as a spiritual journey. Again from Andersen:

[E]ven after the economy recovers, deciding to forgo that third car or fifth TV or imperial master bathroom or marginally cooler laptop will come more naturally.

Fifth TV? Yes, the recession could be a turning point for idiots who had five TVs. They might learn that they don't need five TVs. But Andersen may be surprised to learn that there are vast numbers of people for whom buying the marginally cooler laptop never came naturally, because they couldn't afford it. What lessons do they have to learn from the economic collapse?

Rushkoff's beef goes back to the Renaissance and the development of central currency; he thinks that by not having jobs we can "reconnect to our towns, to the value we can create, and mostly, to one another." It's a back-to-the-land-style argument, a call to rid ourselves of the abstractions of the postmodern economy and focus on the actual economic life in our neighborhoods. He was on the Colbert Report last night:

We can stop outsourcing our investment to Wall Street, stop outsourcing to banks and start investing in people we know, businesses that we start ourselves rather than faux businesses on the Forbes 400.

Again, quite reasonable. But coming from someone who describes himself as a "media theorist by trade," it's hard to swallow. We wonder how Rushkoff would make a living if we all stopped buying books from corporations and started investing in our friendly neighborhood media theorist. Probably about as well as the 16 percent or so of the population that doesn't have a job right now, or is underemployed, or has given up looking for a job because they're too busy reconnecting to one another and not eating.

New York's Jessica Coen knew how Michael Jackson would have wanted to be remembered.

ABC News' Jake Tapper, the White House correspondent, was basically just watching Michael Jackson videos all day Friday.

Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow blamed Americans for killing Michael Jackson by not paying enough attention to him, and thus never learning that they were paying way too much attention to him.

This would be Kurt Andersen's moment, if only he'd pursued his morbid dream.

BlackBook's Tricia Romano made her own fun.

Did you witness the media elite tweet something indiscreet? Please email us your favorite tweets - or send us more Twitter usernames.

The lesbians just love Kurt Andersen, according to Kurt Andersen.

The Associated Press is still mad as hell at the internet, and isn't going to take it any more, but in the meantime Lauren McCullough would like the internet to please send free content kthxbai.

Joining the day's crowdsourcing trend, the New York Times' Brian Stelter asked for fact-checking help.

Ryan Block of gdgt found some slipping standards at a Steve Jobs-less Apple.

The Times' Jennifer 8. Lee found an ethical issue with her coworker's choice of Twitter application.

Did you witness the media elite tweet something indiscreet? Please email us your favorite tweets - or send us more Twitter usernames.

The deal slinging Barry Diller's attempt at reaching for some of that Daily Candy scrilla, Very Short List, was officially finished around Thursday night, we hear. Brief history: Diller, pissed on missing out on some of that email-blast money that he thought would be a shoo-in for solid ad sales with Daily Candy, decided to form a literal, cultured, once-a-day mailer for high-minded consumers to read. Diller, ever fond of his media buddies, got Spy-founder Kurt Andersen to jump on board. And it was highly enjoyable!

But then they didn't make any money off of it, and had to find an easy mark to unload it on. Enter New York Observer boy wonder Jared Kushner, stage left. Cut to: Thursday night. Six full-time VSL employees are given notice to pack their boxes, and get their shit out, as Friday would be their last day. After a messy, messy ordeal. A (now former) IAC employee writes in:

Timeline: We get a bunch of emails Thursday morning. At 10AM, the GM said he might have news (at 6PM, that news would finally be delivered). Someone else said that the deal had already gone through, and that it was finally over. And yet someone else said that we still had assignments for the next week, so it would stretch for another week. And then we heard that the person who was supposed to take over at the NYO had been fired the week before in their bloodbath. So nobody knew anything. Thursday night, the news came through. Our last day was Friday, after SIX WEEKS of being told we were going to be laid off. The worst part: some of us were on the phone with the NYO's people on Friday, trying to teach them how to do our jobs.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.

Very Short List recently won a Webby Award! :)

But now Observer staffers - who're probably a little overworked since a grip of their most able colleagues were fired - are going to be running Very Short List. :( So who knows what's actually going to happen to the mailer, or what the Observer plans on turning it into.

Most people familiar with the deal are pretty shocked by it, and by how easily Kushner was rolled on this one. The fact that the young mogul thinks he can make money off of VSL where Diller - with all of his resources - didn't is pretty incredible, and rather audacious. Lesser so is the fact that Kushner just fired a stable of some of the most able writers in New York, possibly capable of turning the Observer's web presence into a viable product. Right before acquiring VSL, something - again - actually proven not to make money.

Among other problems IAC had with Very Short List: the only people who have time to look at some bullshit emailer telling them what to read are broke writers like me, who don't have the money to spend on advertisers' products. Besides which, I already know what book I'm buying next week, because I have the time to figure it out. The high-minded, high-income consumers VSL originally set out to target are actually out there earning money, and are too busy to look at an email telling them how to spend it (besides which, they can typically suss that kind of thing out for themselves). So instead VSL had to depend on a niche audience, and at last count, that was only 200,000.

No telling how many people are going to hit that "unsubscribe" link over the next few mornings as VSL does (or doesn't) begin to hit their in boxes, quality control of the thing in check, or otherwise. For that matter, The Observer's daily mailer, too.

Update: Just found out that Sara Vilkomerson, a onetime VSL editor, will be working on the product at the Observer, where she already is. She'll be working on it there on top of her current responsibilities for no additional pay. And an email, sent to 30 or so VSL staffers, stringers, etc. that went out today:

Dear Team VSL:

Needless to say, this has been an intensely bittersweet week. Last Monday we picked up our Webby, which was the sweetest part, and testament to how inspired your work has been. Tomorrow, The New York Observer is taking over majority control and day-to-day management of VSL from IAC. Unfortunately, as part of the transition, they will not be taking any of VSL's existing staff. But as this extraordinary team disperses, we wanted to tell you how incredibly grateful we are for everyone's great work and dedication to this project. We are very proud of it, and aware of just how hard everyone has worked.

We're also pleased that Very Short List will endure — and sincerely hopeful that it can maintain the remarkable standard of excellence established by all of you, so that our 200,000 subscribers will continue being uniquely surprised and enlightened and entertained every weekday.

Thank you. And let's raise a glass together soon — date and place TBD.

Kurt Andersen, Gary Foodim, Michael Jackson, Emily Oberman and Bonny SIegler

Very Short List was, from the beginning, an act of hubris. In 2007, Diller failed to buy Daily Candy, losing out to former AOL executive Bob Pittman. So the IAC chairman decided to round up some buddies and start and shopping list of his own. If Dany Levy could make a mint, why couldn't they?

Besides, VSL would be highbrow where Daily Candy was mass market, targeting a "smart set" of billionaires looking for a shortcut to cultural literacy. Diller is said to have seeded the list with own rich friends, but the early results were unimpressive, at least from a media standpoint: The list reportedly had collected just 20,000 subscribers.

By last year it was up to 100,000 subscribers; now it's 200,000. No matter: It's widely believed a dud, with no real revenues to speak of. Diller needs to dispense with VSL. Which means he needs, as P.T. Barnum would put it, a sucker. Luckily, he may have found one.

A quick sketch of the characters in this shakedown:

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Barry Diller - The wily old ringleader. A consummate dealmaker who got the better of his evil master John "Darth Vader" Malone in a court fight over IAC. VSL was once his favorite toy; he once told a reporter, ""Without Very Short List, I would be much diminished." But he's moved on. He's putting $18 million into the Daily Beast, his new favorite toy.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser. Michael Jackson, the legman. A highflying television executive in Britain, Jackson has been vexed by the failure of VSL.A sale would help Jackson save face. After all, he co-founded VSL and has overseen it at IAC.

Yes, VSL has 200,000 email addresses. But one source tells us only 40,000 of readers open a typical mailing. And Jackson would appear to have fallen out with Diller, losing his title as IAC's president of programming right around the time Tine Brown came on board for the Beast. We hear his remaining portfolio at IAC consists entirely of VSL.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Kurt Andersen, the pretty girl (a.k.a. the bait). Like Diller and Jackson, Andersen was also a founder and also wants to save face. But he has a unique asset: His experience as a founder and writer at places like Spy, New York, the New Yorker and Inside.com help make VSL — or at least a meeting with VSL — attractive to prospective rubesinvestors or buyers.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Jared Kushner, The Mark. The 28-year-old media mogul came into possession of the New York Observer just as the newspaper industry entered its death throes. He's rumored to be in talks with Diller about a joint venture.

While Kushner is likely impressed with VSL's 200,000 subscribers, he should ask IAC for specifics about the list's "open rate" — the number of subscribers who actually read it. Then, if he still wants to buy after learning only a fifth of readers do so, he should ask about those frequent ads from the blog Design Observer. Run, we hear, by Andersen's friends, the site is unlikely paying much, if anything, for the spots.

It might just be too late: Observer scuttlebutt has it that the "joint partnership" would amount to the newspapers' remaining staff writing the VSL. In that case, chalk another one up for Diller, an operator no more ruthless than his New York peers would expect him to be.

(Michael R. Jackson pic via Cityfile; top Diller pick by Esther Dyson on Flickr.)

MSNBC's Courtney Hazlett dreamed of doing lazy Nexis searches from the beach.

Engadget blogger Nilay Patel got abused by Microsoft, instead of the other way around.

Kurt Andersen dined out in L.A.

Music journalist Touré did nothing to decrease the amount of violence in the world.

Wired's Danny Dumas overestimated the difficulty of getting mentioned in Gawker.

Did you witness the media elite tweet something indiscreet? Please email us your favorite tweets — or send us more Twitter usernames.

For now, I take my cues from two guys I know (yes, they're guys, but I think their experience is relevant). In the 1980s, they founded a magazine and were the toast of the town. Since then, one has gone on to a succession of high-profile editing jobs and the other, dismissed from his one big-deal magazine job, has created a brand for himself. One, let's call him G., is on paper the more successful, in that he collects corporate paychecks and gets a lot of press. The other, K., whom I adore, has had what my late father would call a spotty career and others would call an entrepreneurial one: He has started and sold an Internet venture, written two novels and countless magazine columns, edited books, originated a popular radio show and traveled the world. He also gets a lot of press.

Ha, kind of funny that she won't just go ahead and use their real names, when they are so clearly Graydon Carter and Kurt Andersen. Respectively.

Which one do I more admire: the highly-paid miner in someone else's gold mine, or the guy who makes his own rules? Dear reader, I think you know me well enough to know the answer.

It's K., of course...and this is useful information for me to have.

So Sara Nelson would rather be the guy who's jumped around to a series of high-profile elite media jobs while remaining always, primarily a writer, rather than the guy who is now primarily a restaurateur who dabbles in anti-Bush pamphleteering. Shit, so would we! Unfortunately these days you have to be satisfied if you can reinvent yourself as a "gainfully employed person in any field," so being picky does not tend to pay off.

We hope that Graydon Carter's hair in no way influenced this decision.
[More]

Preternaturally hunky Curbed editor Ben Leventhal, ordered by ex-girlfriend Julia Allison to suggest a dinner spot, told her to Google the keywords "sugar daddy restaurants."


ABC newsman George Stephanopoulos felt compelled to clarify after reporting that his White House lunch with the president included "leeks and pot."

Spy cofounder Kurt Andersen's job was amazing today and yours wasn't.

New Yorker writer Susan Orlean caught the flu.

Funnyman John Hodgman announced his hate of the word "meh," and stirred up a fuss among the obstinantly nonchalant.

Faux-British Technology Review editor-in-chief Jason Pontin contemplated his surroundings.

Yahoo Tech Ticker anchor Aaron Task consulted with the ladies.

NBC-employed Los Angeles fameball Shira Lazar fondled her Shift key.

Former Spy editor Kurt Andersen was haunted by his past.

Online-video talent agent George Ruiz was excited about his afternoon meetings today.

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

Spy cofounder Kurt Andersen couldn't believe it had all happened..

Software entrepreneur and technopontificator Mitch Kapor, once a candidate to be Obama's CTO, apologized for suggesting the all-new president looked old.

Boing Boing blogger Xeni Jardin hated capitalism.

Air America radio hostess Ana Marie Cox looked for politically amiable shelter.

And evil genius turned Beltway pundit Karl Rove fled town altogether .

Anyone else's tweets we should keep an eye on? Send us their username.

Andersen will spend the spring being a professional "visionary" at the Los Angeles Art Center College of Design, where he'll presumably see the future by drawing heavily on his experience conceiving snark as a love child named Spy with Graydon Carter in the 80s, co-founding once-vaguely-exciting Inside.com in the 90s, and writing columns for various large, important magazines over the years.

Andersen also has a Twitter to keep him busy, and his show on NPR about media (Studio 360). And he'll continue to write for New York enough to use the magazine as a calling card.

" Kurt contributed a great piece to our 'Reasons to Love New York' issue," New York's publicist told Fashion Week Daily, "and he'll continue to write for us as his schedule permits. Everyone here's a big fan of his."

Adds FWD: "Interestingly, in an interview with former New York Press editor Russ Smith posted yesterday on the Web site Splice Today, Andersen allows himself to be identified as a New York columnist."

Andersen cofounded Spy with the amusing-looking Graydon Carter, where they invented making fun of celebrities and the media, and then they both sold out, except Kurt still has cred because he just writes a column for New York, he doesn't edit a glossy celebrity magazine.

Now Kurt has finally joined such luminaries of modern thought as Jim Cramer and Shaq (that is the best Twitter ever, btw) in the field of 140-character updates on politics, world news, and what you are watching on TV (Andersen is watching You Don't Mess With the Zohan).

Now it's only a matter of time before this media legend "@'s" you, future superstars of making fun of celebrities!

From left: Geoff Reiss, Gina Duclayan, Kristen Rayner, Daniel Carter, Christiaan Kuypers, Nicki Gostin, Marion Rosenfeld, Paul Donald, Damon Torres.

Think of how easy it might have been to understand Arianna Huffington's bloggy animus toward Tim Russert if there were a book out chronicling all the sordid details of their decade-and-a-half-long secret feud. (There is.) Every gossip-mongering gadabout should know the full backstory on every spat, falling out, and long-running mutual antagonism in media. Below are the volumes no shelf should be without.

1. The Operator: David Geffen Builds, Buys, and Sells the New Hollywood, by Tom King

The Gist: A gay Polish-Ukrainian Jew from Borough Park moves to Hollywood and enters the mail room at the William Morris Agency. After forging a letter suggesting he had a college degree when in fact he did not, Geffen rises through the ranks to become an agent, then leaves WMA and founds Asylum Records and produces albums by Jackson Browne, Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan. Asylum is sold to Warner Communications, and Geffen becomes Vice Chairman of Warner film studios. He then retires and un-retires after a minor but erroneous health scare, founds Geffen Records, courts John Lennon and Yoko Ono (see below), produces Cats, Risky Business (see below), co-founds Dreamworks SKG, produces Saving Private Ryan, backs Bill Clinton, gives lots of money to AIDS research, falls out with Bill Clinton over one of the sleazeballs he didn't pardon, and now backs Barack Obama. Along the way Geffen throws many temper tantrums and raises his voice to the point where even Steven Spielberg asks him politely to lower it. He also shows a remarkable ability for betraying the confidences of good friends and business associates in order to charm potential clients he’s just met. The night Lennon was shot, Geffen was in bed with a male prostitute and loves to boast about it.

The Pull-Quote: “’What about my music?’ [Yoko Ono] asked. ‘Well, I’ve never heard any of your records.’ ‘Really,’ Ono said. ‘That doesn’t sound like a very good reason for me to make a deal with you.’ ‘I’m a big fan of John’s, and I have a great deal of respect for the two of you, and we do a very good job. We’re a good record company.’ ‘What do you mean you’re a good record company?’ Ono fired back. ‘You haven’t put out a record yet!’”

The Takeaway: A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Be enlightened and progressive on your own time, but cunning and ruthless on corporate time. Respect for others’ privacy won't make you rich and powerful. Endear yourself to those you want to impress by gossiping about people you know behind their backs. It'll smack of such poor judgment that would-be clients will assume you're either crazy or brilliant, and guess what? You are.

2. Tina and Harry Come to America: Tina Brown, Harry Evans, and the Uses of Power, by Judy Bachrach

The Gist: Gifted writer Tina Brown makes her fellow students feel small at Oxford, dates a host of famous men (including Auberon Waugh, who washes frantically after sex, Martin Amis, whom she adores, and Dudley Moore, whom she does not), deflects charges of arrivisme, and becomes editor of UK tabloid Tatler at age 25. She meets Harold Evans, then married and famously editing the The Times of London and The Sunday Times, which names her Most Promising Female Journalist. Brown and Evans marry in 1981, then move to New York three years later, whereupon Brown revives the moribund Vanity Fair by turning it into the must-read glossy on celebrity doings and the leisure class. She hires true crime reporter Dominick Dunne, photographer Helmut Newton and inaugurates a new wave of magazine journalism, operating under the assumption that "intellectuals should be read and not seen." Meanwhile, Tina and Harry are now East Coast socialites whose fiercely guarded life together aspires to shape headlines, not become them. (Their best friend is British libel law.) Brown takes over The New Yorker in 1992 and remakes that antiquated smart sheet, too, acquiring Malcolm Gladwell, Anthony Lane and David Remnick, who later replaces her as editor-in-chief. On a manuscript submitted by Yiddish Nobel laureate, Brown writes, "Beef it up, Singer," which more or less encapsulates her style of feared-but-respected-or-hated tenure. She founds Talk magazine in 1999, which folds after just two years, an over-sensationalized failure from which this unauthorized biography derives all of its rise-and-fall schadenfraude. (Bachrach is a contributing editor at the new VF, edited by Brown’s archnemesis Graydon Carter.)

The Pull-Quote: "We live in a time when infamy sells.... There is no honor, no reticence, no loyalty." Spoken by Maureen Dowd on Brown's New Yorker reign, and quoted by author to make a clichéd point.

The Takeaway: Develop a nose for future A-listers. Sleep with as many as you can all the while adopting an “amused” air about them. Overpaying the talent means you can bully them into submission, so don't be cowed by easily tossed around phrases like "national institution" or "greatest living writer." Fuck 'em if they can't take a kill-fee. Oh, and marry old men.

3. How To Lose Friends and Alienate People, by Toby Young

The Gist: Son of highbrow sociologist Michael Young, who coined the term "meritocracy," Toby Young devotes his life to testing how much strain that already weakened concept can take. He writes for the British Times, gets fired from the British Times. He founds celebrated Modern Review, which traffics in "low culture for highbrows," then shuts it down, much to the dismay of everyone else involved. Young moves to New York in the early 90's, gets hired by Graydon Carter as a contributing editor (read: sinecurist) at Vanity Fair, then proceeds overlong tenure as a piece of gum stuck to the bottom of Graydon Carter’s shoe (this is G.C.’s description of him, not ours). Young cracks dud jokes to celebrities, refers to doormen who won't let him into parties he'd end up hating anyway as "clipboard Nazis," does blow while on assignment, asks Nathan Lane if he's gay, gets fired from Vanity Fair. Now back in London (this isn't in the book), Young edits The Spectator, a conservative weekly, and boasts of his "negative charisma," probably as a way to boost paperback sales. HTLFAAP, much like Young himself, has been up and down the wicket of sadomasochistic success. A film adaptation is said to be in post-production, starring Simon Pegg and Kirsten Dunst.

The Pull-Quote: “Cool Britannia was a cry of independence, a howl of protest against the all-enveloping cultural hegemony of the United States, yet, paradoxically, it didn’t really mean anything—it hadn’t really happened—until it was noticed by the American media. That explained the schizophrenic attitude of people like Damien Hirst, Keith Allen and Alex James: they wanted to assert their indifference to the attentions of glossy, New York magazines, and yet they wanted to be photographed striking this insouciant pose in Vanity Fair. Like rebellious schoolchildren, their protest wouldn’t have counted unless it was registered by the authorities. Unfortunately, in this scenario I was cast as the toothless substitute teacher.”

The Takeaway: The memoir is a good object lesson in what not to do if you want to hang onto a job or a masthead listing, or cast the impression that deep down you really had high expectations for the world of glamour-besotted New York media. Also, it pays to be obnoxious in a way that only you find ironic.

4. Spy: The Funny Years, by Kurt Andersen, Graydon Carter, George Kalogerakis

The Gist: In 1986, Graydon Carter and Kurt Andersen found the future of piss-taking journalism in the form of Spy magazine. Épater le bourgeoisie never had it so good, or so the editors – now all dressed up and fixtures of the very culture they once lampooned – are the first ones to remind you. Spy pioneers satire as a clever agglomeration of facts, and specializes in the infographic, the listicle (just like this one!) and the blurb cloud. It attempts to decipher just who, exactly, is on the New Yorker’s indecipherable masthead. It follows Anthony Haden-Guest into the dank reaches of his own nightlife. It refines hatred of Donald Trump into an art form. Features include the Liz Smith Tote Board, Separated at Birth, and Logrolling in Our Time, without which everything from The Onion to Conan O’Brien’s pre-interview fooling would be unimaginable. The self-conscious prose style is a cocktail of H.L. Mencken, A.J. Liebling and Wolcott Gibbs, and its been swigged by every glossy editor in search of a readership ever since. Once G.C. leaves, it all goes to shit. Like Studio 54, the new owners can’t make it work, ergo the justified hubris of the book’s title.

The Pull-Quote: “How easy is it to steal the sour cream?” – in a chart surveying the various Manhattan cafeteria chains.

The Gist: You need only ask yourself if you read Radar to determine whether there’s any pedagogic value to be mined from Spy.

5. Bright Lights, Big City, by Jay McInerney

The Gist: Nameless 24 year-old fact-checker for elite New York glossy (a thinly veiled New Yorker) moonlights as an aspiring novelist, or wants us to believe he moonlights as that while he’s busy Hoovering coke by the suitcaseful and partying through the vertiginous 80’s club scene with a yuppie twat called Tad Allagash. Tad calls the narrator, who writes annoyingly in the second person, “Coach.” His mother has recently passed away, so we’re shin-kicked into wondering if a life of artifice and glitz is simply an emollient for real pain. Behind the hatred there lies a plundering desire for love. Or something.

The Pull-Quote: “Just now you want to stay at the surface of things, and Tad is a figure skater who never considers the sharks under the ice. You have friends who actually care about you and speak the language of the inner self. You have avoided them of late. Your soul is as disheveled as your apartment, and until you clean up a little you don't want to invite anyone inside.”

The Takeaway: Once Tina Brown takes over Coach’s magazine, he’s fired. Sort your soul out before you move to the metropolis of infinite distractions, otherwise you, too, will wind up a shiftless anonymity with withdrawal symptoms. (Your apartment can still be a mess, however.)

6. The Devil Wears Prada, by Lauren Weisberger

The Gist: Recent Brown graduate Andrea Sacks wants to write for the New Yorker (sigh) and blankets the media world with her resume hoping to get a dues-paying job somewhere that will eventually allow her to become Larissa MacFarquhar. Whoops. She gets hired by fashion bible Runway’s bitch supreme Miranda Priestly (Anna Wintour, not even thinly veiled) as her junior personal assistant. Next thing Andrea knows, she’s chasing down lattes at Starbucks and sirloins at Smith and Wollensky instead of learning about ledes and nut grafs. Not what she had in mind but she loves the clothes and even develops a knack for being a second-string slave to a subhuman narcissist. Unlike in the film, Andrea doesn’t quit – she gets fired for saying “Fuck you, Miranda. Fuck you.” Ballsy, sure, but she does get to keep some of the Dolce and even snags an interview for a real writing position at another magazine in the same building. (N.B. Author Weisberger was Wintour’s personal assistant, so this novel is a bildungsroman, which is a word Andrea learned at Brown but seldom got to use after graduation.)

The Pull-Quote: “Fuck you, Miranda. Fuck you.”

The Takeaway: How many bright young girls have come to New York hoping to fill these Cinderella slippers, only to discover that not only is Wintour not hiring, but she’s honed her filter for confessional opportunists more interested in publishing advances than making sure her Apple Fritter is extra flaky. If you want to be a bona fide reporter, save yourself the aggro and dashed hopes and apply for an internship at the New York Sun your junior year. Also, while it’s true that some ball-breaking editors respond well to self-assertiveness, telling your boss “Fuck you” isn’t the wisest career decision.

7. Monster: Living Off the Big Screen, by John Gregory Dunne

The Gist: The story of Dunne and wife Joan Didion's attempt to transform the life of anchorwoman Jessica Savitch, who died in a car wreck after more or less proving on air in 1983, during a broadcast of NBC News Digest, that she was a drug addict. Instead of a sadder version of Network, the screenplay transforms into the Disneyfied Up Close and Personal, which makes absolutely no mention of Savitch and which even Robert Redford doesn't remember filming.

The Pull-Quote: “The purpose of such a meet-and-greet is to allow the executive to size up the supplicant. [Disney studio chairman Jeffrey] Katzenberg had not read Golden Girl, but he was aware of the less savory details of Jessica Savitch’s life. He liked the ugly-duckling idea; it was the kind of narrative he wanted, and he was also responsive to the television background against which it would be played. He did have reservations, and here I quote Joan’s notes of that first meeting: ‘Wants to know what is going to happen in this picture that will make the audience walk out feeling uplifted, good about something and good about themselves.’”

The Takeaway: Dunne is witty and disarming, especially when he quotes Jack Warner's definition of screenwriters: "schmucks with Underwoods." Interestingly, the "monster" in question is not the industry or any particular studio executive, but rather the money that governs all, including Dunne.

8. You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again, by Julia Phillips

The Gist: Scandal-sponge Jewish producer reveals the vast corruption, drugs and sexual indiscretions that motor the movie industry. Phillips gets fired by Steven Spielberg on the set of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, accuses Goldie Hawn of body odor, and, on the night she becomes the first woman to win a "Best Picture" Oscar for The Sting, downs three valiums, one upper, one and a half drinks, two joints and a dash of cocaine. The book is a sprayfire indictment of practically everyone Phillips ever met in Hollywood, and it got her banned from Morton's.

The Pull-Quote: "They were really a rogues' gallery of nerds. Marty [Scorsese] was tiny and asthmatic, Steven [Spielberg] had the soft, flabby look of a typical Twinkies kid, and Brian [De Palma] never took his safari jacket off."

The Takeaway: Sour grapes ferment the best, although it's not as if anyone still believes in some West Coast Arcadia where dazzling moving pictures are made. Still, you'll hardly do better for the brutally honest story of a show biz prodigy that had to burn everything before she flamed out.

9. Autumn of the Moguls: My Misadventures With the Titans, Poseurs, and Money Guys Who Mastered and Messed Up Big Media, by Michael Wolff

The Gist: Following up on Burn-Rate (1998), which was about Wolff’s bust foray into the world of online startups, this is the nasty-minded sequel by the former New York media writer who wants badly to be the next Murdoch but can’t and decides to just insult everybody he ever envied instead—especially Fox News President Roger Ailes. Most of the stuff in here consists of Wolff's recycled columns, but it's all in one place and no true mogul ever wasted his time searching through web archives. Harvey Weinstein is obese and grotesque. The media business is "collapsing” like communism. Some of Wolff's axioms should be true even if they aren’t: “The larger and higher-profile the company, the bigger the nutcase who runs it.”

The Pull-Quote: “This was the meta thing. Meta gave both irony and gravitas to what we did. The delicious incongruity between our superficiality and our importance. The joie de vivre of self-referentialism. The stupendous, intoxicating power of being able to create the world we lived in."

Bonus Pull-Quote: “So, as I arrived for my speech, I was thinking of my relationship to the absent but always present [Fox News head Roger] Ailes. He was the greatest, but the Antichrist too.”

The Takeaway: Still fun. Like Young’s book, AOTM is a serviceable monument to failure dressed up as critical thinking. Though most of the wisdom you could just as easily cull by lunching at Michael's. Wolff went on to try and match-make the sale of his old haunt New York (he's now at Vanity Fair) to Mort Zuckerman, who in the event lost out to hedge fund wizard Bruce Wasserstein. That means more meanness is forthcoming in what promises to be the Dance to the Music of Time of inferiority complexes.