Canceled last year in light of budget cuts, this year's soiree will be at posh Sixth Avenue restaurant Aureole, where a foie gras torchon appetizer will set you back $23 and the lobster tails are served with a side of pork belly. But don't take my word for it. Just ask the culinary institution Condé Nast shuttered this year, Gourmet, which reviewed Aureole in June:

At the bar, where big windows look out to 42nd Street, people crowd in to air-kiss and clink glasses after work as they snack on pastrami pork belly sliders and fluke sashimi.... Crisp, tiny fried oysters come with a puddle of kimchi gelée and a fluff of lemon powder. Ravioli hide a rich purée of artichokes; it is hard to have any restraint. Entrées tend to be hunks of gorgeous protein like Copper River salmon, aged rib-eye steaks, lamb snuggled up to accompaniments like quinoa, preserved lemons, black garlic, and pickled ramps.... At $84 per person, it's my bet that the real money here will be made on the more casual lunch menu... [Emphasis added]

It may not be the Four Seasons (the venue of choice for the old Condé's holiday shindigs) but the free drinks should get them just as drunk, especially since there are fewer people to share with, now.

Despite Dismal Year, Condé Nast Revives Holiday Hurrah [NYO]
Restaurants Now: Aureole, Browntrout, Burma Superstar [Gourmet]

According to Keith Kelly, Lucky publisher Gina Sanders—married to Steven Newhouse, of the formerly declasse newspaper Newhouses—convinced Si of the necessity of hiring Michael Sheehan, who's coached presidents and aided AIG and JP Morgan. Who knows what Sheehan will do, besides pull in a hefty salary.

You know who is probably sadder about the end of the Conde Christmas Lunch than any of the Conde editors? Keith Kelly. No one's ever enjoyed analyzing a seating chart more than Kelly.

This is the second year in a row of no Xmas Lunch. Instead, Si will host a cocktail party, at night, which sounds more fun, to us, but we are not Graydon Carter, so what do we know?

The WSJ reports:

The evening's top price went to Alberto Giacometti's 1950 bronze of a toppling man, "L'Homme Qui Chavire," which an Eastern European collector bidding over the telephone got for $19.3 million, well over its $12 million high estimate.

Macroeconomic win! Bring back Gourmet!

CityFile reports that Newhouse paid $20 million for this fancy spindly-looking sculpture, "L'Homme Qui Chavire" by Alberto Giacometti, and now he's selling it at Sotheby's, where it's estimated to go for about half that. This, after he tried and failed to sell it at $20 million and $16 million.

Regular Americans know this move as "Desperately taking shit to the pawn shop, to pay the bills."

Conde Nast! Glamor!
[Cityfile]

Newhouse confirms to us that she was laid off today, as first reported in a tweet from Britten Leigh Heft. Newhouse writes she's one of two people she's aware of being let go from the sales/promotion side of the magazine. The decision, she said, was based on seniority: "The two newest people in our department were let go."

That sounds like admirably fair treatment for the wife of Jesse Newhouse, whose father is a Newhouse newspaper executive, whose grandfather was an early partner in building the Advance Publications empire that owns Self parent Condé Nast and who is the son of a cousin of Advance CEO Si Newhouse Jr.

When Newhouse was hired, it arched our eyebrows along with, we were told at the time, those of some people within Self. Condé had already been through several rounds of layoffs when Newhouse was hired. Her discharge could stand as proof that nepotism is a weak force, at best, in the Newhouse empire. Newhouse did come into the promtoions job after running her own events and promotion company, after all. But it could also be a sign of how desperate the company's magazines are to cut costs.

After all, today also brings word of still more cutbacks in a seemingly never-ending stream for Condé Nast: a tipster tells us Vanity Fair is laying off six people from the business side, including one ad director, two sales positions and three people from creative services, including one "very senior level" person. We called a Condé Nast spokeswoman for comment and are waiting to hear back.

Newhouse, meanwhile, isn't eyeing an immediate return to the family business. She writes:

For the moment, I feel it's best to return to running my own company, 007 Events, which I haven't allowed to lapse. Should there be an opening at some time in the future at Condé Nast where my experience in event planning and promotions would be valuable again, I would definitely consider returning. It was a great experience to work with such a dedicated and hardworking group.

A dignified exit, then. Newhouse-ian, even.

Welcome to TrulyMadlyDating.com. British Vogue gave it a shoutout in a clever little advertorial plug yesterday:

TRULYMADLYDATING.COM is Conde Nast International's first dating site, supported by GLAMOUR.COM and GQ.COM, and created to unite glamorous girls with fashion-conscious GQ-reading boys to create matches made in style heaven.

So! Conde Nast setting up Conde Nast fans with Conde Nast fans. And we are nothing if not Conde Nast fans. Some people think there may be a problem with this:

Trying to set up Glamour readers and GQ readers seems like a pretty clever idea. One Fashionista editor, Abby Gardner however, is worried that most of the people in said "style heaven" are gay, so setting them up with a site that seems geared towards heteros will be hard. She also wonders why Condé thinks that entering the online dating business is a good idea: "I simply don't understand this use of resources or what on earth it has to do with your core business. If someone else can explain it to me, please do."

Not being an expert in this field, I can't exactly provide a cost-benefit analysis of how much TRULYMADLYDATING.COM is going to assist the beleaguered media corporation on behalf of the people who still work there that would like to keep their jobs, thank you very much. But! I am a consumer. And as a consumer, I can provide you with a review of my experience on the site! For a site that more or less serves as an advert for the properties it's associated with, it's pretty expensive!

6 months : £9.99/month Invoiced in one payment of £59.94 Save 50% on the normal 1 month rate!

It's filled with lots of Canadian people. Of course it's filled with Canadians. Can't really verify them, can you? [Ed. We have yet to try.]

Since Si's busy these days, we decided we'd test it out on his behalf. This profile basically took about two hours to fill out, and the email confirmation landed squarely in my SPAM box.

Decent, right? Si's assistants, feel free to help me fill in the brackets. Because, as of right now, it's a little lonely out here.

We'll be keeping you updated on our friend-finding progress for Si. Place your bets, ladies and germs. Hopefully, the field will get a little thicker as time goes on. In the mean time, I'm gonna have to give Conde's latest launch a little bit of a downward-titled thumb. It's a pain in the ass to use, it costs money, and it made me feel lonely (on behalf of Si). Also, its competition is the Gentile-friendly J-Date. Enough said.

Fashion Week Daily got their hands on some or part of the guestlist for the premiere and published some of the names of the invitees. They include: Grace Coddington, Andre Leon Talley, Sienna Miller, Oscar de la Renta, Sean Combs, Tory Burch, Frederic Fekkai, Carolina and Reinaldo Herrera, Tommy Hilfiger, Melania and Donald Trump, Alexa Chung, Marc Jacobs, Donna Karan, Zac Posen and, of course, Si Newhouse.

The film, which is said to be highlighted by the behind the scenes head-butting between Wintour and Vogue creative director Grace Coddington, is set to be released for viewing by the commoners on August 28th.

In a great piece titled "The Gilded Age of Conde Nast is Over," The Observer's John Koblin reveals a slew of shocking goings-on at Conde that almost makes the purging of the company's receptionists pale in comparison. Below are a few of the choice cuts, starting with the horrifying revelation that Graydon is now being forced to lunch with the peasantry in the Frank Gehry-designed space pictured above.

"I saw Graydon in the cafeteria this week!" said one business-side insider, last Friday. "In all my years here, I've never seen him in my life there. He was behind me in the line at checkout with his little swipe card! He was milling around uncomfortably with the commoners."

Now obviously, if the Conde overlords are being forced to sacrifice some of their luxuries, you just know that the underlings are getting screwed, and they are. On that subject, two words people: tap water.

"When I started, there was this little refrigerator, and it was stocked with amazing drinks!" said one ad-sales source. "Pellegrino, Orangina, Red Bull. And like the water wasn't Poland Spring, it was like Fiji. I remember when I started working here, I emailed everyone I know and I was like, ‘I have to tell you about the drinks!'"

But then in December, a few months after Condé Nast ordered publishers and editors to cut 5 percent from their budgets, the drink supply emptied out. That Fiji water turned into Poland Spring. Worse, instead of the fridge, the water bottles were stowed in a warm closet.

And then: "I just found out today that we are on our last batch of Poland Spring," said the source. "We won't have any more after this. We have to start drinking tap water."

Tap water! At Conde Nast! Are you kidding me?! Among the article's other cutback revelations: no more expensed lunches at Nobu, no more take-out from Balthazar, no more free spa treatments, no more fresh flower deliveries to the offices of top editors — the list goes on and on.

But perhaps the most surprising (Or maybe not) detail in Koblin's piece is the revelation that Conde Nast's claim about there are no untouchables within the company is complete bullshit. The New Yorker is the one sacred cow not to be meddled with.

Two well-placed sources said that Condé Nast's chairman, Si Newhouse, reached out to (Editor David) Remnick shortly after the McKinsey announcement was made and told him not to worry about anything-the magazine would be just fine, and neither McKinsey nor company executives would be mucking with his editorial costs.

Go read this piece, if only because, as Choire Sicha pointed out on his Twitter, the story's punchline is among the best you'll ever read.

In December, Leibovitz borrowed $24 million from Art Capital Group, which makes its money by loaning artists cash and taking the rights to their work as collateral. When the artists fail to pay up, as artists often will, Art Capital sells the art to recoup. The loan isn't due until next month, but last week, Art Capital preemptively sued Leibovitz, claiming she was refusing to cooperate with the sale of her collection of photographs and homes in Greenwich Village and Rhinebeck, N.Y. The only way she will possibly be able to pay back the $24 million, Art Capital says, is by selling her homes and her catalog of photographs.

But the Art Capital deal wasn't so much a loan as a debt consolidation. Leibovitz has taken out nearly a dozen loans on her homes in the last 15 years, according to mortgage documents on file at the New York City Department of Finance, and the deal with Art Capital consolidated them all under one handy debtor. According to a December 2008 mortgage document dated the same day as the loan from Art Capital to Leibovitz, Art Capital took over $15.5 million worth of various mortgages on Leibovitz's Greenwich Village and upstate New York homes. It was that $15.5 million worth of debt, one imagines, that drove Leibovitz into the arms of Art Capital.

Which is why it's stunning to discover that she owed half of it to Condé Nast, which pays Leibovitz a reported $2 million a year to take pictures. One of the well-known perks of being a star talent at Condé Nast is low-interest mortgages guaranteed by the magazine giant's owner, Si Newhouse. According to this 2006 New York Observer story, more than "twenty Condé Nast executives, editors and even a couple of writers" have been loaned money to purchase homes by the company.

In Leibovitz's case, two of the loans she has taken out over the years were from a company called Rhinebeck Properties LLC which, according to this document that handed over Leibovitz's debt to Art Capital, is based at Condé Nast's famous 4 Times Square address. The document is signed by John Bellando, Condé Nast's chief operating officer. Another person who's benefited from a Rhinebeck Properties mortgage is Condé Nast editorial director Tom Wallace.

Rhinebeck Properties held two mortgages on Leibovitz's homes: A December 2006 mortgage for $2.5 million on her Greenwich Village townhouses, and a November 2006 loan of $4.7 million on her home in Rhinebeck, N.Y. All told, when Leibovitz did her deal with Art Capital late last year, she owed Condé Nast a total of $6.9 million—nearly half of her $15.5 million in outstanding debts.

All of this raises some questions: If the debt on Leibovitz's homes amounted to $15.5 million when she went to Art Capital, why did she seek $24 million from them? She's been sued by creditors, but the amounts—$700,000 or so—are no where near the $8.5 million cushion Leibovitz sought from the deal. And given her $2 million salary, she presumably wouldn't need it to live on.

And why was she driven to desperation if half of her money problems—or the ones we know about—came from money she owed to the people who celebrated her and paid her $2 million a year? Was Uncle Si—who's been listening to the advice of McKinsey consultants of late—calling in his generous loans? The smaller of the Rhinebeck loans carried a forgiving 5.4% interest rate. And it's hard to imagine they'd be hounding her for missed payments. Leibovitz owed about $8.6 million to other, not so cozy creditors. That's not a problem we'd like to have, but for someone in her position, it seems like the sort of financial problem that could be managed short of putting everything you own in hock.

There are more unanswered questions. Art Capital seems to think it is the sole lienholder for all of Leibovitz's properties, but we can't find a document showing that Condé Nast assigned the $4.7 million mortgage on her Rhinebeck home to them. And it's unclear from the documents whether, when it assigned over the smaller mortgage to Art Capital, Condé Nast was actually paid the balance or simply forgave the loan.

We contacted Leibovitz's spokesman for comment, and he referred us to a statement from Leibovitz calling the claims in Art Capital's lawsuit "false and untrue." A spokeswoman for Condé Nast didn't return a phone call, and a spokesperson for Art Capital had no immediate comment.

Pic, of Newhouse and Leibovitz at this year's National Magazine Awards, via ASME.

Here's the text of a Missed Connection ad currently on Craigslist:

I just saw you in the elevator of the Conde Nast building. You got on at the 12th floor and I was already in the elevator. We looked at each other and smiled. I think you are so pretty I just had to post this right away (I doubt you'll see it though). You have black hair, dark brown eyes (almost black), a black shirt, and a black and white skirt. If you see this, please write me.

The run-in happened yesterday morning, so surely some of you Conde Nasters out there must know something about the young lady (a Voguette possibly?) involved here. Help us, help you! Feel free to send any info/updates to us. Let's make this happen people!

Elevator of Conde Nast Building [Craigslist]
pic via

Age: 30

Residence: The tony Los Angeles neighborhood of Bel Air.

Childhood: Born in New York, Penske went to high school in the Detroit suburbs, where he made the All-American Lacrosse team.

Family wealth: Father Roger Penske, a race car driver, owns Penske Corporation, which owns auto dealerships, leases trucks and makes various auto parts.

Love life: Has dated actresses Lara Flynn Boyle, Gina Gershon, Jordana Brewster (left) and Devon Aoki (with Penske, top of this post)

Personality: Says an associate, "He comes across as hugely elegant, massively sophisticated then as you get to know him, you see this slightly skeevy side, heavy drinker likes to party."

Business: Penske's Mail.com Media Corporation took a $35 million investment from Steve Rattner's Quadrangle Group in September; but we hear he's been having trouble finding properties to buy.

Sites: MMC runs Mail.com, an also-ran email portal whose heyday was in the 1990s; OnCars.com; our former Defamer colleagues' Movieline.com, celebrity news site HollywoodLife (he shut down HollywoodLife the magazine earlier this year) and now Finke's Deadline Hollywood Daily. It also provides private-label sites to large organizations like sports teams and universities.

Dragon fetish: Penske also runs Dragon Books, a vanity boutique book store he runs a little Bel Air shopping center. Its placeholder website has been under "redesign" for more than two years. Then there's the Luczo Dragon Racing team, which he co-owns with the chairman of hard-drive maker Seagate Technologies.

Flops: Started Firefly Mobile, selling cell phones for kids, in 2002; by 2006 the company needed a restart.

So how much did he pay for Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood?: Seven figures, supposedly. PaidContent's Rafat Ali reports that his company had been in talks with Finke at a lower number. We heard from Finke's editor at the LA Weekly, Jill Stewart, that Finke was talking as if she was looking at "so much money" while she pondered the deal. Seven-figures sounds mighty high for DHD, but if Penske was having trouble making deals, maybe he was willing to overpay.

Aspirations: Penske is said desperately seeking entree to the fashion world, part of a broader quest for elegance. The same associate:

He wants to be a modern day Si Newhouse, he wants to have a glamourous publishing company.

We hope, then, he reconsiders the name Mail.com Media Corp. as the name of his flagship.

Steve Fishman has a long article in this week's New York magazine about how Si Newhouse's Conde Nast empire is dealing with its own decline:

As the economy has fallen apart over the past eighteen months, first gradually then all at once, Condé Nast's biggest problem has been the newspaper empire that Sam created. Last year, the Newhouses' Newark Star-Ledger, one of their biggest papers, may have lost as much as $40 million. No one in the family believes the newspaper business is coming back. The family's cable business, Bright House Networks, with enterprises in several states, still tosses off tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars, keeping the Advance, which houses all of the family's businesses, afloat, and the company is virtually debt-free; the family has always hated to borrow. But resources are now spread thinner. The company no longer has the luxury of pumping cash into a struggling title. "The family needed to save money," Townsend explained to one executive after one magazine closed. Without profit, there's no "distributable cash" for the family. So far this year, Condé Nast is in the red, though the closings and cuts should drive money to the bottom line. The belief around the building is that next year, if the economy recovers, Condé Nast will again turn profitable.

It's been clear for some time that Advance Publications' newspaper profits have dried up. But the reality that a mundane cable company is the last lifeline for all of Conde's glamor is pretty stark. Fishman's article is also the first solid evidence that the Newhouse family's own need for cash could be the driving force behind its newfound reluctance to subsidize money-losing magazines like Portfolio. [Graydon Carter's assertions that this is still a Golden Age for magazine is his least accurate statement since "irony is dead." Also: The New York Times Co. suspended its dividend recently, leaving the Sulzberger family without steady cash flow, as well. Similarities!]

I sat next to Steve Fishman at the National Magazine Awards while he was still working on this story (nice guy!). He spent most of the time peering over the balcony at Si Newhouse and his assorted editors, seated just below us, which turned out to be the scene that closes his article. One silver lining for Anna Wintour, David Remnick, Graydon Carter, and Si himself: after the money and the Conde luxury dries up, the fascination of the media will live on. If that ever disappears, the end is truly near.

[New York. Pic via]

While Morley Safer's profile was, in its totality, quite interesting, as its vexing and somewhat mystery-shrouded subject tends to be, what may be even more interesting is what the profile made didn't mention:

• Wintour's contract with Vogue is set to expire soon and that she and Conde Nast have a long history of using the media to gain advantages during tough contract negotiations.
• Longstanding rumors of S.I. Newhouse's desire to replace Wintour with French Vogue editor Carine Roitfeld.
• The overall decline in financial health over at Conde Nast, which recently reported a 26% drop in ad pages in its first quarter and shuttered Portfolio, its perpetually struggling $100 million business magazine.
  
  But to her credit, Wintour did look like 200,000 bucks.
  
  
  

  
  Anna Wintour on 60 Minutes [CBS News]
  
  

The Condé Nast business magazine would have the inside dirt on Rupert Murdoch's man-eating wife Wendi. Infighting at Gucci. CIA informants inside American corporations. And maybe something servicey on private jets.

The Observer:

The make-believe stories were the perfect intersection of business with everything else, as Ms. Lipman liked to say. That is, business was never enough of a topic on its own for a story.

Imagining those stories is, of course, easier than delivering them. But it's not clear Lipman was particularly imaginative in the first place: The Observer's sources (like some others) blame the magazine's downfall in large part on the editor's lack of strong vision for the title, beyond "fancy Condé Nast business thing." (Lipman countered she was consistently aiming to be contrarian.)

At least she knew enough to reject titles like Liquid, Advance and The File. To bad all the other, more promising bits in the prototype, from the stories to the non-concept cover, were thrown out along with them.

The fear is palpable in Brown's Daily Beast column about Portfolio. If Condé Nast is giving up on a big project like Portfolio, she asks, how will it nurture visionary, money-losing editors like... well, like Tina Brown? Has Si Newhouse, steadfast chairman of the magazine group, and longtime Brown benefactor, lost his stamina — his manhood?

The fact that [Newhouse] elected to close [Portfolio]... suggests a worrying element of panic engulfing the steadfast publisher I worked for so comfortably for 17 years at Tatler, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker...

Until now, he was always the media emperor who could live and do as he chose... Let's hope this pitiless economy doesn't force him to cap his noble career by performing a lobotomy.

The closure no doubt has Brown fretting over the $18 million her upstart Web venture the Daily Beast will cost Barry Diller's IAC through fall 2011. No worries, Tina: Diller still has the sort swagger old Si threw off in the early days of Portfolio. Though for good measure, you might to whisper for him your line about a money-losing publication being a mogul's "sexiest calling card." You know how much he loves being fabulous and sexy.

Stephanie Newhouse is set to join Condé's Self magazine in a managerial role Monday, we hear.

How did she go from hawking her services on a modeling website to snagging a magazine management gig the middle of a media depression?

It would appear it helped that the wannabe flack married correctly. In 2007, as Stephanie Bond, she wed Jesse Newhouse, son of Mark Newhouse, a newspaper executive in the family publishing empire and cousin to Si Newhouse Jr. Mark's father was Norman Newhouse, Si Newhouse Sr.'s brother and partner in building Advance Publications.

All this makes Stephanie Newhouse, let's see, cousin-once-removed-in-law to Condé Chairman Si Newhouse Jr. — the wife of his cousin's son.

It also makes her very fortunate. She's been hired despite major cutbacks in the family business. Condé Nast effectively ended Men's Vogue last October, laid off 15 employees from Portfolio.com soon thereafter, is said to be in the midst cutting around 20 ad sellers, let go an untold number of workers at Wired.com and Ars Technica this past week and just fired a bunch of receptionists.

Stephanie Newhouse managed to get hired even in the wake of those cuts and amid an ongoing effort to slash costs 10 percent companywide. This sort of nepotism is to be expected. Her husband's grandfather Norman graduate from college into a job at a newspaper owned by his brother Si, more than a decade his senior. As an editor during the Great Depression, he had to manage through a major advertising drought, just as Stephanie Newhouse is about to do (reportedly).

That can be uncomfortable. Watching more senior, less-connected coworkers lose their jobs could stir empathy and remorse even in a high-society fixture like Stephanie Newhouse. But Uncle Si seems to have arranged things so it won't come to that: Self is getting through the downturn better than any other Condé Nast title, earning its publisher a company prize for 2008 performance.

Self no doubt owes its success to being written by and for upper-crust women of privilege; women who have managed to ride out the global economic meltdown better than most other consumers.

Women, that is, like Stephanie Newhouse.

(Pics: Park Avenue Peerage (top), Patrick McMullan via New York Social Diary (bottom))

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 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)

• The sheriff in Columbia, South Carolina said he would investigate the possibility of criminal charges against Michael Phelps in connection with that bong-smoking picture of the Olympic champion. Because otherwise who knows how many Columbia children the athlete will turn into degenerates. [People]
• Si Newhouse might close Allure, even though the beauty magazine loses way less than Portfolio. (Disclaimer: Pretty much all magazines ever lose way less than Portfolio.) [P6]
• Madonna introduced that young Brazilian model to her kids in order to make Alex Rodriguez jealous, and to ruin theher children's chances of ever living normal, healthy lives. It's all working! [Gatecrasher]
• How do you make your fashion show both cheaper and more coveted? Cut the capacity by more than half. Marc Jacobs is a genius. [Gatecrasher]
• Britney Spears has been having panic attacks during which she locks herself away in various rooms. [Sun]
• The Post asked Sean Combs why he refused to be randomly searched by police officers while going about his daily business. Don't take it personally, Sean, the Post is constantly asking everyone why they can't just let the police have their way with them. [P6]
• Angelina Jolie hasn't gotten around to watching all the movies she made. She got paid for them, but not enough to suffer through a viewing. I mean, seriously. [Sun]
• Hit by the recession, Ugly Betty had to sell her unused West Coast home. Well, try to sell. Ha. [Scoop]

Si Newhouse, the big boss of Conde's parent company, has always been perceived as having a limitless pile of money to subsidize unprofitable magazines. He doesn't. The company has been in belt-tightening mode for more than a year now, and the weak publications are getting killed with little compunction. The days of unending cash flow into fancy, money-losing magazines being used as vanity brands are over. The fundamental problem, as David Carr notes:

Donald Newhouse, 78, who oversees the newspapers, and Si Newhouse, 80, who runs the magazines, each have been appraised at $8 billion by Forbes. But people who know the pair say that given their age, they are concerned about making sure they hand over a company that is healthy and profitable.

The company has traditionally used its newspapers to mint money that was then lavished on the magazines — “Don makes it and Si spends it,” as the saying went

But now newspapers no longer make money! So there is no money to be lavished upon anything. Everybody has to pitch in and cut back! At the New Yorker—Conde's best magazine and one of its worst at pulling in ads, currently—millionaire editor David Remnick and his reporters were staying with friends in DC for the inauguration, rather than hotels. To save money, like normals! (They're also extending the New Yorker Festival to ten days this year, which should bring in some extra cash).

That's kind of nice and inspiring. Less inspiring is Vanity Fair, which is actually re-using a 2007 Obama cover photo for its latest cover. That is just incredibly cheap, for one of America's most prestigious magazines. Yea, they surely had access issues. But come on. They could have gotten any number of celebrities to pose for their cover. If Obama is the only man that can sell magazines now, VF's entire model is fucked anyhow. Annie Leibovitz is giving way to Photoshopped stock pictures. Not good.

But at least they're cutting costs. The one not getting with the program: Portfolio editor Joanne Lipman, who reportedly demanded to fly to Davos first class. Some things never change.
(We mean Joanne Lipman screwing up.) [Pic via]