I've been staring at New York magazine's cover story all morning. Operation XXX: New Porn City, internet porn and the men who love it too much. It's so... inexplicable. Unless someone was paying writer David Amsden to propagate the dated term "I-porn"?

Questions of timeliness, questions of zeitgeist, and questions of the story being a story at all dazedly surround this week's issue like a swarm of very bored hornets. Some have gone so far as to suggest that the article's "attractive, Ivy-league educated" subjects ring false. Well, my momma always said truth was more boring than fiction.

It took me all day, but I finally figured it out. Bear with me. Let's turn to Michael Wolff's media column, where he compares the media travails of Schwarzenegger, Limbaugh, and Rove to his own (largely imagined) Martha-ization. Wolff has indeed been mocked a bit recently for his very public attempts to become the next owner of New York, most recently in a piece in the Times. In his column, Wolff basically admits to using any means necessary to control the tone and content of that Times article; in fact, his accusations are so extreme that I'm sure Times writer David Carr is in some editor's office answering some serious questions right now. That was harsh, Wolffie.

Wollf's only concrete criticism of the Times piece has to do with the reporting of his salary at New York mag: Wolff refers to it as a "jibe" and describes the amount as incorrect. If the sentence "Mr. Wolff, 50, makes more than $450,000 as a columnist for the magazine" is incorrect, I'm sure we'd all like to have the facts settled.

So what do Wolff and the wacko porn cover story have in common? The most obvious answer is also the most logical. Wolff is in cahoots with New York editor Caroline Miller to drive the magazine so far into the ground that he can afford to purchase it all by himself on the pittance that is his salary. Now that's good business, kids.
New Porn City [NY Mag]
Arnold, Rush, Karl, and I [NY Mag]