I was getting kind of sick of the calculators and clocks that come with my other subscriptions. How will any of that stuff ever make my heart explode? [JTA]

What do you know about Stephen Perrine, editor of Best Life magazine? Email.

Sports Illustrated has put a huge gallery of its archived content online for free. The best part is the selection of old covers, from back in the grainy days of short shorts and wild hair. Some of the production meetings back then probably involved drugs. We've selected the five weirdest covers from 1978, a year we picked because SI put Clint Hurdle on the cover that year, and you have to admit that man has a fine name. Look at the covers below!

The relaunch of free bar mag Homo Xtra ("the totally biased, politically incorrect party paper") is turning into a hair-pulling match, spilling into the streets of Queerty with stories of secret meetings and whatnot. Like a trannie fight (which we use as a comparison only because Boulton is proudly macho!), it's super high-pitched and confusing. As told to Queerty, "It's bullshit that Matthew Bank listens to everything Neal Boulton tells him to do like a puppy dog (like fire Matthew Farris!). They have secret meetings that everyone can overhear." Sounds like someone—besides every single mediagay in town—might be mad at Genre gay-mag editor Neal Boulton, who's a consultant for HX's relaunch. Quite possibly for his free-spirited bisexual ways? We asked Boulton to explain the accusations about trouble at HX and he did, entertainingly, ending with, "I did not, and I want you to listen this now, have a Prada suit from last year on last week."

Which magazine boss, managerial successor to the flamboyant characters who used to run his shop, is more colorful than one might imagine? Word is he's dating one of his daughter's classmates.

People boasts 4m visitors to the Time Inc. magazine's web site on the day photos of Jennifer Lopez' newborn twins went up. So, is that supposed to be impressive? Well, it is more than New York magazine drew for its cunningly classy recreation of Marilyn Monroe's last photo shoot, with the troubled actress played by a modern-day trainwreck, Lindsay Lohan. Adam Moss' stunt drew 1.3m US visitors per day at the peak of public interest, according to Quantcast. However, People simply directed web visitors to the print magazine, while New York milked the interest for all it was worth, generating nearly 20 pageviews per visitor. And, while People paid a record $6m to Jennifer Lopez for rights to the actress' babies, New York gave Lohan only a boost to her faltering credibility, which cost nothing, except Moss' reputation for high-mindedness. On the web, at least, People got the poorer deal; and that makes their chest-thumping all the more silly. (Data on New York magazine's traffic comes from Quantcast.)

Vice Magazine, which was ironically abandoned by its target audience of dirty trendsetters at the exact moment it became popular, has finally discovered how to sell out IN SECRET. The new issue has an ad for BMW superimposed on the freaking cover itself—but it doesn't appear until you turn out the lights! As long as you don't read it in the dark, nobody will know you are bought and owned by corporations just like everything else in this rotten country, dude. This is a brilliant idea that may save the American print media and destroy the editorial/ advertising divide as we know it, and that's really all we have to say about that. [Media In Canada]

Portfolio editor Joanne Lipman should learn rule number 63 or web publishing: by deleting a blog post, one only draws greater attention to it. On Friday, the Conde Nast magazine's media industry terrier, Jeff Bercovici, wrote a typically niggling piece for Portfolio's website about best-selling fabulist, Malcolm Gladwell (displayed after the jump). According to Bercovici, the Tipping Point author is the bane of the fact-checking department at his day job, as a writer for the New Yorker, another title owned by Conde Nast boss Si Newhouse. There was nothing that controversial about Bercovici's item: Gladwell has himself drawn attention to his mockery of orthodox journalistic practice. But the post disappeared from Bercovici's Portfolio blog over the weekend.

The question weighing on the mind of the print media at large is, "In what month will I be getting laid off?" But in the luxury print media sector, the question is more like, "Will our readers be buying more, or fewer, private planes this year? And when should I buy mine?" As hard as it is for crusading journalism school grads to admit, magazines targeting upscale readers—a polite term for "rich Wall Street bastards"—will naturally attract more premium advertising, and are usually better positioned to ride out any crazy economic fluctuations than other magazines whose readers are quicker to go broke. Or are they?

So, was Esquire's last-minute inclusion as a finalist in the National Magazine Awards a stroke of luck for the languishing Hearst magazine, or merely the result of a fix? As you might have read, David Granger's men's title, which used reliably to feature in several categories in the magazine industry's annual exercise in mutual flattery, only received a solo nomination for its work in the past year. Mixed Media's Jeff Bercovici explained that even that was a fluke: the nomination was to have been New York's, until the judges realized that the magazine, an awards hog, had naughtily entered material it had already submitted in another category. So, a lucky break. Or maybe not.

What was the motivation for Playgirl offering cash to Eliot Spitzer to appear naked in their magazine? Equality! "We knew that everybody was paying a lot of attention to the girls in these scandals and we knew that if we went after Spitzer it could be good. Of course being at Playgirl it occured to us immediately that we could get in on this game of going after people to get naked," says editor-in-chief Nicole Caldwell. Now if the former Governor refuses, he's just reinforcing his support for the American patriarchy. Your move, Spitzer. [PRNewser]

Anna Wintour complains, in her editor's letter in the upcoming issue of Vogue, that the models at the New York runway shows are "pale and thin, entirely lacking in... joyfulness and charm." I thought that was the example the legendarily frosty fashion arbiter was herself setting.

Streetwise agitator Bucky Turco is leaving his post as blogger in chief for Complex, the Marc Ecko glossy urban shopping rag which had only one really interesting feature: its blog. Bucky says he's bringing back Animal New York, his dormant passion. Beware. [Bucky Turco]

Among the most "whipped" men in America, according to GQ: Ashton Kutcher, John Edwards, Keith Urban, and Ben Stiller. Their favorite magazine: GQ, presumably. [via Mixed Media]

If you're in the magazine publishing business, you care deeply about these numbers, nominations for the National Magazine Awards. No great surprises. The New Yorker still leads. Adam Moss' New York is the comer. Virginia Quarterly Review: is it really good, or do they just have some editor who's mastered the politics of ASME, the association which hands out the prizes (like the creepy Pulitzer-chasing editor in David Simon's HBO show, The Wire). Outside the top ten, Maer Roshan's Radar and Joanne Lipman's Portfolio squeeze in with one nomination each. As Jeff Bercovici says, they are now officially as good as once-reputed Esquire magazine, which only gets one nomination. (After the jump, the full list.)

Late-night TV host Conan O'Brien was surprised to read about his "St. Patrick's Day Stew" in Good Housekeeping given that he doesn't cook, has never tasted the dish and has no idea how the recipe got into the magazine. O'Brien devoted three prime minutes of his show, immediately following the monologue, to the recipe. He said the Hearst magazine "completely made this [recipe] up" and made a jokey statement about feeling "a little exploited." Well, Conan, just imagine how the rest of us feel: First we lost any faith in the accuracy of personal memoirs, now we can't even trust that celebrity magazine recipes aren't totally fabricated? Video after the jump.

Hey! Can you help Jonah Green (son of Mark Green, best known for having run against Bloomberg and being president of Air America Radio)? He's starting a new video series for New York magazine tentatively called "On the Job." Explains Jonah, "It could be a video Look Book of professions, if you will... to finally understand what a hedge funder does, to view the madness a dog walker encounters while roving the upper east side, or watch a hot dog vendor brew that funky hot dog juice." He's looking for some candidates. What kind of candidates? "Fashion/art assistant, Hedge funder, commodity trader, Food inspector/taster, Architect, Art dealer, Dog walker." Or maybe "high-priced call girls," since everybody is so interested in those lately!

Portfolio magazine's highly conceptual covers were commercially foolish, but rather brave. The cityscapes and factory floors of the Conde Nast title's first four issues paid homage to an earlier, more confident era of magazine publishing, in which editors could survive a bad month on the newsstand. And then, spooked by low sell-through numbers, Joanne Lipman panicked. January's Spy vs Spy cover could have been borrowed from the defunct Business 2.0; February's How Fat Won, illustrated by an overloaded burger, is a bogus trend story more often found in Newsweek. The latest shows a man's black shoe treading on a woman's red stiletto reminiscent of nothing more than a classy fetish magazine. Provocative? Pathetic? Discuss.

Oh noes! It's that weekly installment of overshare from (usually classy) New York magazine: the "Sex Diaries" column. Advice this week: what to do when you're a 29-year-old woman in l-u-v with a 19-year-old? Hint: "I ignore [his] call on purpose to seem not so interested... This is my tactic to keep him interested and wondering what I'm doing. [NY mag]

The fall of Eliot Spitzer, the zealous crusader who relaxed with high-priced hookers, has scrambled the propriety of New York's media institutions. Not only was the staid New York Times first to publish the identity of Spitzer's escort; the latest cover of Adam Moss' usually high-minded New York Magazine is borrowed from the more provocative playbook of Spy or Radar.