• Bonnie's rich AMI contract is up at the end of June, and — as one of her mags gets shut down and another's redesign is more or less undone — negotiations are underway. Great timing, eh? [NYP (second item)]
• Newspapers execs met in Chicago, surrounded by dinosaur skeletons. Sexy Jon Fine enjoys that metaphor, as he should. [BizWeek]
• Who does Spin hire to replenish its now-virtually-empty staff ranks? An alt-porn auteur and star, naturally. [FBNY]
• Injured ABC anchor Bob Woodruff sends note to colleagues, releases photo. We're very pleasantly surprised to see that he does, in fact, still look like an anchorman. [AP/USAT]
• Forward politics writer E.J. Kessler to move to New York Post op-ed gig. Because people jump from socialist to conservative papers all the time. [Forward]
• All the standard kvetches about media? Wrong, wrong, and wrong, says Bill Powers. [NJ]
• Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, the son of Pinch who we've attempted to saddle with the nickname Prince, to leave the Providence Journal for The Oregonian in Portland. Wonder where he'll end up? [Providence Phoenix]
• NYT Congress reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg to become paper's White House reporter. [Media Mob/NYO]
• The Voice loses another, this time investigative reporter Jennifer Gonnerman. [Media Mob/NYO]
• Are Conde Nast editors being shut out of Devil Wears Prada screenings? Um, no. [WWD]

• Universal good-time guy Gary Busey is arrested at LAX for assaulting a female police officer. Always prepared, Busey was traveling with his attorney, who tried to take pictures of the arrest and was promptly greeted with an officer's gun. [Jossip]
• Starving dwarf Mary-Kate Olsen wants to make and star in a movie about Kate Moss, believing she has the right amount of "edginess" to play the troubled supermodel. That, and they both share the same dealer. [Contact Music]
• Meanwhile, MK and sister Ashley's new ads for Badgley Mishka make us want to come and play with them forever. [Gilded Moose]
• Rock mag Spin finally looks to have a buyer for somewhere in the neighborhood of $5 million, which should almost cover the cost of EIC Sia Michel's stiletto collection. [Folio]
• In a rare fit of good sporting, Vogue stylelord Anna Wintour contemplates throwing a small luncheon for the mag's assistants just prior to the premiere of Devil Wears Prada, complete with Prada gift bags. Too bad the poor slave children will be too afraid to eat or enjoy themselves. [Telegraph]
• Yes, your ass does look big in those jeans. Finally, some closure. [DMALFTP]

Hey, SAG-card holding starfuckers, we've got some great news for you! The film adaptation of Lauren Weisberg's inside-Vogue roman clef, The Devil Wears Prada, is casting:

1. Hear Lauren Weisberger read from The Devil Wears Prada. (No Anna Wintour sightings there.)
2. See John Newman's "Monkey Wrenches and Household Saints" exhibit at the Von Lintel Gallery. (Opens today, 6-8PM.)
3. Catch a preview of the surefire hit production of O'Neill's Long Day�s Journey Into Night, starring Vanessa Redgrave, Brian Dennehy, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Robert Sean Leonard.

Scene from departing GQ editor Art Cooper's farewell last night: Vogue editor Anna Wintour arrives with Ralph Lauren. A spy writes, "Cooper made a big point to thank his secretary. He said he hopes her upcoming bio'The Devil Wears Blue Label'is a big success. Everyone turned around to watch Anna's reaction...there was none." An unrelated Anna moment, from another reader: "Discussing unrealistic images in women's magazines with Janeane Garofalo on 'the View' this morning, Joy Behar called Anna Wintour a 'war
criminal.'"

The New Yorker's Nick Paumgarten profiles Francis McInerney, a "top reviewer" at Amazon whose name can be found in the acknowledgements of The Da Vinci Code, a surprise NYT bestseller. McInerney has done over 800 reviews. (Alas, no James Frey; no Devil Wears Prada.) It appears to be a competitive hobby: "other reviewers sometimes create multiple e-mail accounts and repeatedly vote 'not helpful' on his reviews in an attempt to catch up with him. 'As soon as Amazon started ranking people, everything in human nature that�s associated with being competitive came out,' [McInerney] said."

Acknowledged [New Yorker]

In the interest of at least attempting to be fair (after I slammed it), I feel compelled to point out that Lauren Weisberger's roman-a-clef, The Devil Wears Prada, is Number 5 on the Publisher's Weekly bestseller list.
Bestsellers [Publisher's Weekly]

Shameless but relevant self-promotion: I interviewed Lauren Weisberger, the author of The Devil Wears Prada (a roman a clef about Vogue editor Anna Wintour) on Monday for Salon. Lauren, on the book: "It's a beach read; this is not great literature. We all know that."
When personal assistants attack! [Salon]

The Observer reports that Vogue's Aimee Cho sent out a mass email indicating that Anna Wintour was looking for a new assistant. "The magazine, she said, was looking for people 'who have not read The Devil Wears Prada'" (Lauren Weisberger's roman-a-clef about her year at Vogue as Anna Wintour's assistant.) [Disclosure: I interviewed Lauren on Monday. The article will run tomorrow at Salon.com]
Off the record [Observer]

From Lauren Weisberger's (roman-a-clef about Vogue) The Devil Wears Prada: "...I recognized the description immediately from a New Yorker article I'd just read. It seemed the entire book world was eagerly anticipating his next contribution and couldn't shut about the realism wiith which he depicts his heroine...The critics had gone crazy over the first book, hailing it as one of the greatest literary achievements of the twentieth century...The New Yorker piece had included an interview in which the author had called Christian "a force for years to come" in the book industry, but one with "a hell of a look, a killer style, and enough natural charm that would ensurein the unlikely event that his literary success did nota lifetime of success with the ladies."

The Gothamist is starting a campaign against The Devil Wears Prada author and former Vogue employee, Lauren Weisberger. "Gothamist thinks that Weisberger is dumb as a brick for thinking that she'd have a byline right out of school. And, Christ, you can't wake up to get to work early and make a good impression in order to try and move higher in the pecking order? At a competitive, cutthroat company?" Our take is a slight variation on that theme: How naive do you have to be to sign up to work for [Vogue Editor] Anna Wintour, expecting that she's going to be nice to you? She's Anna Wintour, for god's sake! Of course she's going to abuse you! It's her job!
Gothamist hates Lauren Weisberger [Gothamist]

Kate Betts, the former Editor-in-Chief of Harper's Bazaar, reviews The Devil Wears Prada, Lauren Weisberger's roman-a-clef about working at Vogue under editor Anna Wintour. Betts tears into Weisberger, criticizing her for the character's (read: Weisberger's) superiority complex: "Andrea makes no bones about the fashion business being beneath her, or that her true calling is not to be fetching tall lattes for Anna/Miranda but to be supplying high-minded prose for The New Yorker."

The NYT examines a series of fashion novels that appear to have some basis in reality:
· Gini Alhadeff's new book, Diary of a Djinn, revolves around a protagonist that bears a striking resemblance to Giorgio Armani.
· The Devil Wears Prada, due out in June, was written by Anna Wintour's former assistant, Lauren Weisberger.
· Caroline Hwang's In Full Bloom is the story of a young Korean-American woman climbing the designer corporate ladder in the fashion mag world.
· Ex-Vanity Fair editor, Laura Jacobs, chronicles the social-climbing exploits of two New Yorkers in the design and media industries in her book, Women About the Town.
· Plum Sykes' book, Bergdorf Blondes, sounds suspiciously autobiographical.
A tyrant from Milan leads a parade of fashion novels [NYT]