Preeminent among the magazine world's kingmaking power lists is Vanity Fair's New Establishment, which appears in the October issue — on newsstands in L.A. and New York today, but not in the Bay Area for another six days. Silicon Valley gets similar short shrift: The names who make it there are predictable bigs like Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison, or Hollywood-crossover types like Jeff Skoll, eBay's first employee turned movie producer. Walt Mossberg, now employed by New Establishment perennial Rupert Murdoch, also squeaked in. The consolation prize Vanity Fair offers: Its "Next Establishment" list, reserved for the likes of Twitter's Ev Williams. It's a marvelous piece of New York media trickery — flatter the geeks by making them feel included, but corral them into a side room so the real power brokers aren't offended by comparison. True, the "Next Establishment" suggests that these are people who might matter in the future. But in saying that, Vanity Fair's editors are also sending the message that right here, right now, its "Next" nominees are nobodies. On this year's list:

If you've visited sites like those run by New York magazine and the Observer over the past couple of months, you may have noticed, in the comments section, repeated instances of a message that begins, "Steve Ratner [sic]... has paid my wife $500,000.00 to leave me." If you saw these comments, you probably wondered what the hell was going on. Well, the Times this morning sheds precious little light on the situation because, get this, there is a Steven Rattner, he did sleep with that guy's wife and now, as a result of the angry ex-husband's smear campaign, he has vacated his job atop the private equity division of Credit Suisse. The lesson, as relayed by the Times' hotshot finance writer Andrew Ross Sorkin, is that the internet renders "helpless" ordinary plutocrats who just want to hush up stories about how they allegedly taunted and harassed the husbands of the high-class escorts they procured on trips abroad. Wait, what?

One of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales's most charming personality traits is his relentless starfucking. It's a tendency that's exacerbated by his role as spiritual leader of the world's most comprehensive collection of inconsequentially inaccurate details about famous peoples' lives. On CNBC's Squawk Box this morning, note Wales's body language — the shoulder roll, the falsely modest talking-into-his-coffee-cup maneuver — as he chats up New York Times reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin, making sure to remind viewers that he's totally BFF with Virgin founder Richard Branson.

When Microsoft's bid for Yahoo fell through, hotshot reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin produced a scathing analysis of the deal-making skills of the Redmond software giant's boss, Steve Ballmer. 'Microsoft has tried to spin its reversal as a show of "discipline" and "self-control." But what it really shows - painfully - is Mr. Ballmer's indecisiveness about this deal.' Ouch! And fun! But you won't find Bill Keller and his fellow editors boasting about Sorkin's punchiness: because they're still in denial about the blurring of news and opinion, and so much else.

At a farewell party last week, some Journal staffers bitched that Marcus Brauchli, the managing editor pushed out by the paper's new owners, had sold his silence for a generous severance package. "It was disgusting," one told David Carr of the New York Times. But there was some more intriguing scuttlebutt from the event. Brauchli's predecessor Paul Steiger was overheard saying that Rupert Murdoch's lieutenants were looking externally for a replacement atop the newspaper. The name Steiger mentioned: Andrew Ross Sorkin, the Times' blue-eyed mergers and acquisitions correspondent.

Ever-industrious Sorkin is the Times' wunderkind finance reporter and the editor of Dealbook, the first blog the Gray Lady launched.

New York Times business reporting wunderkind Andrew Ross Sorkin gets married to a literary agent whose mother is an editor at W and WWD, at Lower East Side Jewish grup-fave wedding emporium the Angel Orensanz Center. [NYT]