Yesterday for three barren hours we sat in the back of a dining room at Tavern on the Green and watched media people accept essentially pointless awards from Min magazine. Portfolio won hottest launch. Atoosa Rubenstein shared nuggets of wisdom. Laurel Touby, one of the web's most "intriguing" people (if a poorly spelled sign is to be believed) embarrassed herself. Photographer Laurel Ptak really outdid herself in creating a photo essay of the luncheon. It's like 'Kids,' just more magazine-y!

If the dearth of latke recipes in Martha Stewart Living has got you down, don't despair: Jewish Living, a magazine that attempts to rectify the "shortage of information specifically for Jewish women in the popular homemaking magazines," is soon to debut. "Martha Stewart Living and Oprah magazine and Good Housekeeping and Cookie magazine all do a wonderful job of doing Easter and Thanksgiving and Christmas, but no one is doing Hanukkah or Passover," said its publisher, a former ad exec. Um ... maybe because only 2.5% of the U.S. population even feels guilty about the fact that it barely halfassedly celebrates those holidays? [NYT]

Serviam—not to be confused with non serviam, the online magazine devoted to post-Hegelian philosopher Max Stirner!—is a newish publication interrogating these modern times! Local blogger Ephemerist reviews: "It's chock full of fascinating facts and revisionist history. For instance, did you know that if not for mercenaries—sorry, Private Security Contractors—there would have been no Thanksgiving? It's true! Myles Standish was basically the forefather of Blackwater. Also, Capt. John Smith. PSCs are basically as American as apple pie." Yeah. Apple pie that shoots you.

The post office is going to kill all the magazines! Your favorite magazine's logo may soon be obscured by more than just the inhuman photoshopped face of Jennifer Garner, the words "PERFECT ABS IN 10 MINUTES," or a brown paper sack. No, a hideous mailing label might soon be up right where the logo's supposed to be, if the "chatter" overheard by Folio and Designing Magazines is to be believed.

So everyone at Food and Wine was just called in for a "great news!" meeting; they were told that the mag's publisher is becoming the Travel and Leisure publisher, and that the associate publisher is being promoted. But! Despite that framing, the American Express Publishing mag staffers are still in a tizzy. They think the assumption is the two mags can be blended; lots think one might fold.

Men's Health's editor Dave Zinczenko has peered into the future of media, and he, unlike everyone else, is not worried. Nothing to feel, everyone! Magazines will be around forever and people will always buy them, even though everyone's circulation keeps sliding. How does Zincetera know this? Because it already is the future, and no one dresses like they're in Logan's Run. Think about it!

The American Society of Magazine Editors revealed the finalists of their second annual Best Cover Contest today. We find out the winners next week! Oh boy! 9/11 covers from The New Yorker and New York, the day Time decided to just run a huge picture of an elephant's ass (it's a metaphor!), and a cover from Skiing with the headline "secret powder" that is apparently actually about skiing and not coke are just some of the highlights of this year gone by. Overall, as this sampling of the nominees suggests, you had a winner on your hands if you featured the inescapable Stephen Colbert, a lady on a roof somewhere, or a disembodied sphere of lady-part on the right half. Also we're glad to see that New York's coverline question "What If 9/11 Never Happened?" just still refuses to resonate.

2007 Best Cover Contest [ASME]

The second issue of the new SuicideGirls Magazine is out, and it's just as high-minded as the first, starting with the subtitle: "Anthology of model-annotated pinup photography and conversations with notable thinkers, artists and authors excerpted from the pioneering website of the same name." No, we are not making this up. Let's peek inside!

Donald Trump, that arbiter of good taste and sound judgment, is reviving his twice-failed namesake magazine in November with the help of upscale publishing house Ocean Drive Media Group. The last iteration of the magazine, Trump World, dispensed with staff payroll for the last two months of a brief, debt-filled existence under publisher Michael Jacobson and Premiere Publishing Group. "It's the third relaunch of a brand that dozens of advertisers won't go near, on a publication schedule that guarantees nothing can be timely or more than marginally detailed, being done for a man with no compunctions about screwing his licensees into the ground," a (totally disgruntled, for obvious reasons) former staffer told us.

In an attempt to eliminate their competition, Bauer may be folding Life&Style into InTouch. "L&S would be dunzo come November- all of the L&S newstand pockets would be turned over to InTouch, thus instantly increasing InTouch's presence," a tipster informs us. Genius plan! Except one detail: "InTouch doesn't want anyone from L&S." Well, of course they don't! Those people work at freaking Life&Style.

Passing the newsstand, we wondered, not for the first time, what is up with Nylon Guys magazine? Launched late last summer, the quarterly supplement to Nylon "disinfected, unfunny Vice" magazine still somehow exists. How? Why? And, maybe most importantly, for whom? The tagline is "Not for Girls." Okay so... who is wanting to read a pink-logoed magazine whose coverline asks, "Is Jason Schwartzman The Coolest Guy in Hollywood?" The best answer we can come up with is: aspiring heterosexuals.

The other day, a magazine arrived addressed to a former occupant of my apartment. It was a copy of The Nest magazine, which is published by theknot.com. The thinking seems to be that women go to theknot.com and buy The Knot magazine to prepare for their weddings, and then once they're married, they move on to The Nest. If there was ever a reason to want to avoid becoming a "married," as they refer to themselves, this would be it.

Remember Page Six The Magazine? The first issue, helmed by Jared Paul Stern, was a glossy brand extension of Richard Johnson's fiefdom. The second issue, published months later, was another decent, if seemingly random, attempt to further monetize the paper's gossip sheet. It was also presumably to give the celebrity weeklies a run for their money—though coming out once every eight months or so isn't the best way to instill fear in your competitors. But multiple sources confirm that Page Six The Magazine is coming back on Sunday, Sept. 23 as a weekly, and it won't look very much like its predecessors. Instead, it'll be more like the New York Times money-minter T. But can a glossy lifestyles magazine make it attached to a gritty tabloid?

We hear that New York Times Business honcho Larry Ingrassia is trying to lure fired Portfolio deputy editor Jim Impoco (whose bio is still on Portfolio's website) back to his old Times home in Biz. That would be an interesting, if not entirely unpredictable, turn of events. (Where is there to work, anyway?) And they have something in common. When Ingrassia left the Wall Street Journal for the Times, one of the great benefits for him was getting away from Lipman.

Have you guys ever actually read Domino magazine, "the guide to living with style"? We hadn't either, until recently (housesitting). Here is the kind of quote we found within. From interior designer David Netto, on his "signatures": "Cedric Hartman lamps, log baskets, Prouve chairs from Vitra—inevitably, you need one somewhere." Inevitably. Also, from interior designer Tom Schaerer: "There's nothing worse than a dining table with legs at the edge or corners." Uh. Genocide?

The classy way that Bauer handled the shuttering of Cocktail—hiring four people to start the day it closed, for one thing!—made us wonder just what else goes on in the offices in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. You probably already knew that our German friends who run the home of Life & Style and In Touch are as cheap as anything. But what you might not have known was just how cheap. Let's bring on the disgruntled Bauer staffers!

As the staffers of Bauer's ill-fated launch were picking up the pieces of their short-lived careers in Englewood Cliffs, they received an inadvertent forward from the mag's editor-in-chief, Maria Lissandrello, that was meant for the eyes of one staffer only. Some context: Lissandrello, unlike many of her staff (several of whom had started only on Monday, when the magazine shut down), was quickly installed at Women's World when Cocktail folded; she had been at First for Women before. Yeah, we get them confused too. The correspondence after the jump. (Later today, we'll have more on why you should think twice about accepting a job offer from Bauer. But for now, enjoy!)

Today we learned that Scripps Howard will start publishing Skirt, a free magazine for "educated and empowered women," this fall. Also, "as a part of the fun, men who appear in Skirt! must, in fact, wear a skirt in order to appear in the magazine." What... fun! Skirt joins Cocktail on our list of "why? WHY?" magazine names. Seriously, can you think of a worse name for a ladymag? Or a worse concept? Well, Panties.

Some afternoons, after the requisite low blood sugar-induced perusal of LOLcats, we turn once more to the serious problem of magazines. What do we want to read? Who can bear thumbing through a witty snippy front of book section? But then, who can bear a ponderous essay about boxers or ideas or colors? What all of us really want to read right now is something sexy, something that pulls its pants down a little—but that heavily edits its contributors (but its editors not at all!) and is also concerned about the ramifications of capitalism!

July, 1993. Sassy had just turned five years old, and wouldn't make it much longer. (On the cover: "My brother's gay. Big whoop.") A young lass named Kim France—Oberlin '87, now the editor in chief of Lucky—had recently left the magazine. Christina Kelly was newly Jane Pratt's number two, doing the real running of the mag. And so Sassy—Christina, we assume—gave Kim a rude send-off in the form of a fake advice letter about her rump. (Recent sightings of Kim France from behind reveal that her butt has not been exceptionally large in some time.) Click to enlarge for the full-page of "Dear Boy," with questions (real and fake) answered by J Mascis.