Of course, we must all be careful not to become to thigh-quivery tonight, lest the lovely Nigella Lawson mistake us for the perfect panna cotta and consume us whole. We wouldn't want that to happen now, would we? Although if it did, more than one of us would probably die happy, judging from several of last week's comments.

As for this happy little live blog: It will get underway at 10 Eastern (when the show starts on Bravo) in the comments section below this post, where any and all readers are welcome to join in the fray. And the fray should be a fun one, if it's anything like last week's was. Here are a few highlights:

• For several commenters, the sight of Nigella and Padma getting room-serviced in bed was a real high point of the season.
• The Prius commercial reminded youngmarblegiant of "Gail and her love of acid."
• Toby Young uttered several pre-scripted gambling-themed quips, but hasn't managed to work the word "craps" into one of them yet. Perhaps he's saving that for the finals?
• Dot came up with a new product idea: The Snuggie Oven Mitt, which protects one's entire body when cooking drunk.
• We were relieved to see the last of Robin, who blamed her demise on an inability to "play it safe"—an apparent euphemism for "cook good food."

There were also many, many funny comments among the 1,000-plus posted over the course of the evening—and I read every one, because that's the kind of devoted live-blog host I am (and also because I have no life). Click here to read a few of my favorites. But before you do, take a gander at this list of things to watch for as we live-blog tonight:

• The chefs will participate in the Bocuse d'Or, which tonight's episode description brags is an "elite cooking competition." I guess that means the cooking competition we've all been watching for the past 10 weeks is more of the chopped-liver variety.
• The guest-judge will be Thomas Keller, who founded the famous French Laundry restaurant in California. He also founded a laundry in France called "The California Restaurant," although few people know this (probably because I just made it up).
• Jen will make turducken, which sounds unwise. Can any food whose name contains the word "turd" be a good thing?

I guess we'll find out soon, my quivery-thighed courtesans. Allez-nous to the live-blog boudoir!

[Image via the NYPL Digital Gallery]

I am conflicted no longer: The man's just an idiot. I reached this conclusion last week around the time he stated that Jennifer's meal "was like the difference between a shaved armpit and a hairy armpit." Apparently, he meant this as a compliment—Jen's tasty dish made him think of hairy armpits, a connotation he found so funny and apt, he just had to share it with the rest of us. Because, as I said, he's an idiot. So forgive me for having considered the possibility that Young could redeem himself this season. As my dear mother is fond of saying: "Once an unfunny twat, always an unfunny twat!"

Ok, my mother never actually said that. But it's still probably true.

Hey, here's another thing that's probably true—if you join our Top Chef live blog tonight, you will have fun. Just turn on Bravo at 10 Eastern and start posting witty observations in the comments section below. (For a sampling of the wittiest from last week, click here.) Highlights from our last live-blog-apalooza included the following:

• I couldn't think who chef Charlie Palmer reminded me of, until commenter unclevanya pointed out looks like Frank Nelson, the actor who'd say "yeeeesss?" on old episodes of The Jack Benny Show and I Love Lucy (Click here and compare)!
• Having dined at Jen's 10 Arts in Philly, ms_priestypants posted a review of the meal—which was surprisingly lukewarm. The review that is; not the meal.
• Beardo, who has a pig tattoo, won the pork-themed elimination challenge. What's more, Eli, the quickfire winner, has an Alexia Crunchy Snacks tattoo! Weird, huh?
• We dubbed Ash "Top Bottom" because he's always in the bottom three (among other reasons). He was then promptly eliminated, which always seems to happen just when we come up with a good nickname.

As for tonight, well—I'm psyched. I've watched the previews, and it appears to have all the makings of an episode so good that even the crudest of body-hair-related quips from Toby Young couldn't' spoil it.

First, there's a quickfire "blindfold relay race" thing that looks like a truly fascinating challenge. Also, this is the "restaurant wars" ep, which is always entertaining. Also-also, Robin and Bryan will be on the same team and get all up in each other's faces! Robin should just create her own show called Everybody Hates Robin. She's like Project Runway's Wendy Pepper—but with cancer!

Finally-also, the guest judge will be the always-likeable Rick Moonen, who probably could have won Top Chef Masters last spring if he hadn't blown his chances by plating his quickfire dish too late. Hopefully, he won't blow tonight's judging assignment by eating too slowly.

Yes sir, this should be a good one. So get ready to boot up, drink up and whip out the witticisms! But nothing about food and body hair, please. That's not witty.

The object of my conflict is Toby Young, who (judging from Bravo's preview teasing) is set to return as a judge tonight. As veterans of this live blog know, Toby was the object of a fair amount of commenter heckling last season, since many of us found him to be annoying and his jokes to be lame and pre-scripted-sounding. So I was ready write something catty about him this week. But then Gawker surprised me by posting this "Report from inside the Emmys" yesterday, penned by none other than Toby Young (who is introduced in the post as a "friend of Gawker"!). And the piece is actually (I think) rather charming and funny.

So now I don't know what to think: Is Toby on the road to redemption? Should we actually start to—gulp—like him, especially if he's less grating this season and drops the dumb jokes? This "Toby question" is something I suggest we discuss tonight during tonight's Top Chef live blog.

"What's a Top Chef live blog" I hear some of you ask? Why, it's a place were Gawker readers convene and comment on the broadcast as it happens (starting at 10 Eastern on Bravo). Why not join us? It's always fun! Take last week's edition (from which I've posted a few of my favorite comments here). A few highlights from that one follow:

• We learned that Ash was once animal psychologist. I wonder how many bears have been on his couch?
• After Jersey Douche de-slimed a succulent and scored 15 grand, Brian Moylan observed: "If only he could take the slime out of himself like he took the slime out of that cactus."
• Commenters got sick of ceviche, and so did the judges after tasting Tintin's putrid cod concoction. Ron "put de lime in de coconut" (as Mo MoDo put it) but it didn't make the judges feel better.
• Many of us were startled by the appearance of a cheftestant named Laurine, whom we didn't remember ever seeing before. Was she just a desert mirage, or will she appear again tonight?

That's something to watch for … and here are a few other things we can watch for tonight while we're at it:

• Penn and Teller will try to trick us into thinking they have small balls, but will then reveal that their balls are actually quite large. Sadly, this trick isn't as interesting as it sounds.
• The chefs well be given a "deconstruction" challenge—during which, Eli will cleverly deconstruct a pressure cooker using the "explosion" technique.
• Many cheftestants will wear red neckerchiefs in a tribute to Mattin, who was booted last week. When Ashley gets kicked off, I wonder if the other chefs will honor her memory by not washing their hair for a few days?

Also, as noted above, we'll see the return of Toby Young, which I've already suggested we discuss when the show starts. Or better yet, why not start discussing it right away? The Internet pipes are open, and Gawker is accepting your comments now!

[Image via Tony's Blog]

His account follows:

"You're bringing a book?" This was Tom Colicchio's reaction on seeing the paperback in the pocket of my Tux. Had that been a mistake?

It was 1.30pm when I got into the limo with Tom outside our hotel and the Emmys weren't due to start until 5pm. Even factoring in a bit of red carpet action, that was a lot of down time.

Top Chef was nominated for six Emmys this year, including one for hosting and one for outstanding reality show. As a regular judge on the show, I had been flown in by Bravo to attend the ceremony. It felt strange heading over to the event in a limousine with Tom. Back in my days as a hard-drinking rogue journalist I had crashed plenty of award shows, but I'd never been invited to one before.

Gail Simmons was also in the car and we discussed whether to rush the stage if Top Chef won in the hosting category. Technically, the hosts of the show are Tom and Padma — they were the named nominees — but I did my best to convince Gail that if we grabbed the Emmys before them we'd probably be able to keep them.

One of my closest friend in Los Angeles is a television writer and the previous night he'd told me about a similar stunt pulled by a couple of writers on a show he'd worked on that won a Golden Globe. These two writers weren't the named nominees, but they'd rushed the stage, hoping to grab the statuettes, only to be apprehended by security. Afterward, an official of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association came and sat down at their table and told them that all the writers on the show, including my friend, were entitled to take home a Globe. "All you have to do is fill out these forms," he said, pulling a sheaf of documents out of his pocket. The only snag was that they'd have to cough up $750 a piece. "Back then, the Globes weren't as big a deal as they are today," my friend explained. "In retrospect, I wish I'd handed over the cash."

Tom revealed that, as a nominee, he'd had to fill out a long questionnaire sent to him by the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. "One of the questions said, ‘If you weren't an actor, what you be?'" revealed Tom. "I didn't know how to answer that one."

He'd also been sent an elaborate set of guidelines, telling him exactly how to behave if he won. If you were nominated as part of a group, only one member of the group was allowed to speak and if you went on for more than 40 seconds they would cue the orchestra to play you off. Tom didn't think this applied to the hosting category and if he and Padma won they were planning to speak for 15 seconds each.

"Who's going to speak first?" I asked.

"Padma."

"In that case, forget about it. She's just going to carry on talking until they cue the music."

In the event, this wasn't put to the test because the Emmy in question went to Jeff Probst for hosting Survivor. I had joked to Padma the night before that if she didn't win I was going to "do a Kanye", ie, storm the stage, grab the statuette and say, "This should have gone to Padma."

"Oh please, please, please do that," she said, her eyes sparking with mischief.

As anyone who watched the Emmys will know, good sense prevailed. One of the reasons I restrained myself is because I was convinced that Top Chef would win for outstanding reality show and that category was up next. I didn't want to tarnish what would be a proud moment for the show by behaving like a jackass. (There's quite enough of that in each episode.)

I carefully placed the book I'd brought under my chair. Gail and I really would be going up on stage if Top Chef won in this category — "We all go up," Tom explained — and I didn't want to be seen by 13 million people clutching a copy of Hold Tight by Harlan Coben.

Unfortunately, we didn't win for outstanding reality show either. For the third year running, Top Chef was beaten by The Amazing Race. A clip was shown in which a deaf contestant told the host that being in The Amazing Race meant the world to him because it proved that deaf people could achieve their dreams, too. This proved to be such an emotional moment that both the deaf man and the host broke down in tears. Cue rapturous applause in the Emmy auditorium. In the bar afterwards, I told Tom that if we wanted to stand a chance next year we'd have to get some contestants with disabilities.

"That's why we hired you Toby," he said.

Believe it or not, going home empty handed wasn't too much of a blow. We were up against 27 different reality shows in our category — that's how many official submissions there were — and to make it to the final shortlist of six was an achievement in itself. At least, that's what I kept telling myself as I headed off to the HBO party in my limo, reading Hold Tight. In any event, there's always next year …

After our own Joshua Stein said Young "knows little bordering on nothing about food" and called him "a self-serving whiny drunk pissant," and after many other critics railed against his Top Chef performance, Young fired back a reply in the Evening Standard:

Almost all the reviewers — and there were dozens of them — accused me of regurgitating lines I had written down beforehand, irrespective of whether they applied to the dishes or not. For instance, I said of one plate of food, in which the vegetables were much better cooked than the two meat components: ‘It rather reminded me of one of those Hollywood films in which classically trained British actors have been cast in character roles. The two leads were upstaged by the supporting cast.’
Now, I can assure you that I came up with this on the spot — no great shakes, considering it isn’t exactly Wildean in its wit. But one of the penalties of being a well-educated Brit in America is that people are constantly accusing you of having memorised lines for the simple reason that you talk in complete sentences and — completely unheard of, this — you don’t make any grammatical mistakes.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is how you fail upward. Always whip your tragic embarrassment into a foamy controversy, smear it on top of your next slapdash cultural concoction and hope no one thinks too hard about what he is tasting.

As Mister Hippity noted, it's been three weeks since we last visited the Top Chef kitchen and its attendant retinue of woe, beauty and product placement. On Wednesday at ten, the shlooop sound of the knife bifurcating the words Top and Chef was like a dinner bell, telling us it was time to come home. Then British piece of shit Toby Young showed up as the new judge and home seemed a lot less homey.

Before we get to all the things wrong with Mr. Young, let's take a moment to cycle through the Quickfire Challenge. The challenge was sponsored, apparently, by the godawful beverage Diet Dr. Pepper. It was entitled the Diet Dr. Pepper Ultimate Sweet Treat Challenge. The chefs were forced to create sweet things without using sugar. They were strongly encouraged to use Diet Dr. Pepper. Not seen in last night's episode, the shaky handheld footage of Fabio being waterboarded by Top Chef producers with cans of Diet Dr. Pepper. "Basta! Basta!," he cried, "I wheel coohk weet the Dohctor Peppeer!" Aryan, ladychef from the bowels of consumerism, had no qualms, chirping "Diet Dr. Pepper" every chance she had. That is why, sadly, she might win. This time she didn't. As French pastry chef Jean-Christophe Novelli mentioned, her dish sucked and her cream wasn't whipped. Instead it was Radhika who won with her bread pudding which was nice and didn't have any Diet Dr. Pepper in it. Someone's going to die.

In the elimination challenge, chefs were divided into two teams for a blind tasting. There was little guidance beyond Mr. Collichio saying, "cook what you want." Each team cooked for the other half plus the team of judges which included—besides Monsieur Novelli, Padma Lakshmi (still single?) and Tom Colicchio—the new judge, How to Lose Friends and Alienate People author Toby Young. Mr. Young replaces Gail Simmons.

It is unclear exactly why the producers chose Mr. Young whose main claim to fame is fucking over Graydon Carter, being an EPIC FAIL and who maintains an entirely deserved reputation as a self-serving whiny drunk pissant. True he was a restaurant critic for the Evening Standard for a few years but he knows little bordering on nothing about food. (Something to which his current state of joblessness attests.) Gail Simmons may have been whiny and a bit mean but she knew about food. Instead what Young brings to the show is cruelty and what he thinks to be bons mots. Take a look at how he judges the food before him. Instead of responding to the flavors, Young spits out soundbites you can be assured he thought of earlier, perhaps while practicing his scornful scowl or tweezering out unwanted and ingrown thigh hair from his pasty legs. Jeff's avocado sorbet is like Tom Cruise in Tropic Thunder. Radhika's bisque contained "the weapons of mass destruction." Eugene's dish was the "bland leading the bland." Good job, Toby Young, you were (slightly) witty.

Empathy has never been Toby Young's strong suit and no one ever said he was a nice guy. (He isn't.) But the thing that made How to Lose Friends and Alienate People even vaguely tolerable, that is Mr. Young's portrayal of himself as a bumbling loser, is now absent. (One can argue that being offered a cush VF editorship undermines that argument but at least Young was open about how he fucked that up.) On Top Chef Young is still the asshole he always was but there's no longer any vulnerability on his part. Infuriatingly and dishonestly, Young still clings to the aggrieved party mythology that justifies his cruelty but at this point it's outmoded and obsolete. Now he's just a bully.

• Tom Cruise drives around in a bomb-proof vehicle, supposedly, because he believes anti-Scientology protesters want to kill him. He also believes he is following in the footsteps of a Galactic Confederacy faction that rebelled against an alien tyrant named Xenu who ruled the galaxy for 82 trillion years. So maybe take his threat assessments with a grain of salt.
• Here's Katie Holmes no longer looking like a zombie, although the Daily Mail's parenthetical is correct: "Shame about the shorts." [Mail]
• Britney Spears is now rumored dating the Bollywood dancer who choreographed her Womanizer video, and who she met at a party thrown by Madonna. Supposedly they've already been to India. Spears was previously rumored to be alternately crushing hard on ex-husband Kevin Federline or ex-boyfriend-and-paparazzo Adnan Ghalib. [Mirror]
• Former editor-from-hell Joe Dolce, now a flack, has taken on client-from-hell Heather Mills. This'll be fun! [P6]
• Toby Young, who wrote that book about his stint at Vanity Fair, is trying to start a charter school in Britain. [WWD]
• There's a big uproar in Britain because Prince Edward may have wacked one of his hunting dogs with his walking stick. The pheasant he shot dead could not be reached for comment. [Mail]
• Rebecca Jarvis may owe her CNBC job to Donald Trump, but she has the good sense not to mention this publicly, except when absolutely necessary. [P6]
• Drew Barrymore hooked up with Jason Segel, 28. But she's like 33, so whatever, right? What's with the cougar pawprint, X17? [X17]

Obviously, electing Oboma [sic] is a step in the right direction. Americans deserve approximately half the praise they’ve been heaping on themselves because, after all, Obama is half-African-American.

Why are you light-skinned African-Americans always trying to sneak past Toby Young? He sees you. [Spectator]

Upon being shown the evidence, Tierney, who had never read the book, concluded it was plagiarism. More bemused than angry, he remarked, "It's at the very least unattributed lifting..."

Young did in fact footnote Tierney's article in the book, however. "I don't think it's a sort of mealy-mouthed or weasely defense to say that the standard that British journalists are expected to hold themselves to are not as high as the standards that some American journalists hold," he explained to Intel.

Hah. A mere cultural misunderstanding, then—British foreign correspondents, for example, are notorious for their rewrite jobs. In America, however, this is the sort of reasoning that can and will get you fired, Toby!

[Daily Intel]
[Photo: Nikola Tamindzic/Home of the Vain]

—

New York Times reporter and recovery memoirist David Carr brought up the afternoon's faux pas: I had impulsively Facebook-friended him without, um, meeting him before. "I hovered over your picture for a moment," he rasped. "I thought, 'She seems nice!" He seized me by the shoulders. "Are you going to ass-fuck me, though? You really can't tell."

Carr's close personal friend in sobriety, actor Tom Arnold, said he just loved fameballs like Julia Allison. Really? "Yes!" Why would an actual celebrity care about fake famous people? "Their stories are well-written... Do you like them? Do you hate them? I can't tell. I see you guys trying out other people, seeing how they'll play." Fameball tryouts! He hugged me.

Observer roustabout George Gurley was lamenting his one-month-and-counting ban from celeb coke den Beatrice Inn, from which he was barred after his affectionate piece about the West Village bar ran in Fashion Week Daily. He's been "so much more productive" during his shutout. Kirsten Dunst probably hasn't, though, as they let her in the door quite often.

Dating columnist Julia Allison refuted dating rumors in legalese: "I'm technically single." Also: "I am hiring a publicist as soon as I get the money." But doesn't Web 2.0 allow everyone the freedom to be their own publicist? "As we've seen, that doesn't always work so well."

There is a thing as too much freedom.

Click for the gallery slideshow by Nikola Tamindzic/Home of the Vain:

"I think it’s probably tougher to make it [in New York media] now than it was 13 years ago, particularly in the print media. I don’t envy young Brits crossing the Atlantic to make their fortunes today….Probably the difference is I’d rent somewhere in Brooklyn rather than in the West Village. I probably wouldn’t be working for Vanity Fair, I’d probably be working as Nick Denton’s slave at Gawker and being paid nothing. I’d probably be sleeping on Euan Rellie’s floor."

This is uncomfortably accurate, except we do too get paid! But for the record I was sleeping at the Malibu Hotel SRO during my first few weeks in the city, not Euan Rellie's floor.

[WWD]

"The days when Sag Harbor was known as a writers' colony are over," says a local estate agent. "They can't afford the rent any more." Indeed, to rent a three-bedroom cottage from Memorial Day to Labor Day (the period that constitutes the summer in America) now costs at least $75,000.

Part of the problem is that the book-publishing business is in dire straits...

According to one New Yorker staffer, "It is becoming increasingly tough to score a decent advance, even as a household name."

Luckily Toby Young was able to use a tiny fraction of his movie money to secure a spot on the front lines of the Hamptons to bring this news to the people of the UK. Meanwhile Adam Gopnik can't even get $250K for his next book of essays on raising children like the French! Where's the justice?

[Independent UK. Toby Young's most notable contribution to American culture was actually just to play party host to our own Ian Spiegelman.]

In a column for London's Spectator, Young mentions the current campaign to reclaim that section of the Village as 'Little England.' American prejudices against British interlopers have come full circle, much like the neighborhood itself. The British journalist in the film is as gauche as the Times found his countrymen.

Toby Young is the son of a peer, studied at Oxford and Harvard, and founded one of the first high-low cultural reviews; but that obviously didn't work dramatically. Toby Young was painfully self-deprecating in his best-selling book; in this trailer for the movie, his upper-class background is almost entirely discarded. He's portrayed as a clueless oik who's plucked from obscurity in a bedsit above a kebab shop by Vanity Fair's Graydon Carter; the ruddy Brits dismissed by the Times a century ago seem positively charismatic by comparison.

Click for one scene from the trailer, in which Young breaks one of the cardinal rules of celebrity journalism, asking an interview subject whether he's gay.

• Cop-slugging reporter Alycia Lane sued her former employer, saying the Philly TV station pushed her into an embarassing Dr. Phil interview, as though there is any other kind. [AP]
• Someone wrote an entire song about the night he, then a bartender, punched a rude Russell Crowe in the face. Crowe's flack artfully said Crowe may not "know anything about" the incident, except that it's not true. Convincing. [P6]
• Mike Myers is supposedly some sort of tyrant who demands that Late Night With Conan O'Brien interns fetch him Twizzlers, raspberry seltzer and soy milk. That's a joke, right? You can't be a non-child-star tyrant with that list of demands. [P6]
• Toby Young doesn't think his former Vanity Fair boss Graydon Carter will give any magazine love to Young's Carter-slamming movie. [YoungManhattanite via P6]
• Town & Country magazine just loves this little place in Ireland run by a kiddie porn collector. [P6]
• Britney Spears's 17-year-old sister Jamie-Lynn gave birth to a baby girl, Maddie Briann, not via c-section, in case you were wondering.
• The issue of Vanity Fair with 15-year-old Miley Cyrus' scandalous photo shoot is hot in prisons acorss the country, so Cyrus has been deluged with thousands of, uh, supportive letters. According to HollyScoop, "that's what ya get for posing half naked." Yes, she deserves to be hounded by horny felons. [HollyScoop]
• Katie Holmes sent a $2,000 "congrats-on-getting-knocked-up-ps-help-I'm-being-held-prisoner" gift basket to her husband Tom Cruise's ex-wife, Nicole Kidman. [OK!]

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.

According to a spy, "Kirsten Dunst was really nice and cute and bubbly and Simon Pegg"—playing the Toby-esque role—"was talking to the extras like they're real people. We did take after take of Simon kissing Kirsten, which is the last scene of the movie. So now we all know how it ends: He gets the girl in the frumpy dress. We were supposed to be watching a movie in the park in front of the Brooklyn Bridge and I think that 'La Dolce Vita' will be playing on it in the movie." How romantic. How Hollywood! How lifelike!

"I'd be working a story and I'd find myself in a room, where there might be a movie star, or somebody who ran a media company. A room where there was, at long last, no line at the bar, and where that heinous piped-in house music had finally been turned off, and where, if somebody wanted to smoke, they could just smoke. And I figured that after passing through three rooms to get there, to that fourth room, I had finally made it to the epicenter—the white-hot center of New York."

Vanity Fair surpremo Graydon Carter, explaining New York to Toby Young in Young's How to Lose Friends & Alienate People:

"'You think you've arrived, doncha?' he said. 'I hate to break it to you but you're only in the first room.' He paused. 'It's not nothing — don't get me wrong — but it's not that great either. Believe me, there are plenty of people in this town who got to the first room and then didn't get any further. After a year or so, maybe longer, you'll discover a secret doorway at the back of the first room that leads to the second room. In time, if you're lucky, you'll discover a doorway in the back of the second room that leads to the third. There are seven rooms in total and you're in the first. Doncha forget it.''

This, I later discovered, was Graydon's 'seven rooms' speech, a pep talk he gives to all new recruits."

Actually, it's probably for the best that Carr doesn't know about the other three rooms; that's where all the drugs are.

News Junkie [The Rake]

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