"Someone should tell Taibbi that it's the predictable disgust of people like him that make the culture-war posturing of people like Sarah Palin so resonant with the many, many folks who like pick-up trucks and plasma TVs and aren't ashamed of it." [Portfolio]

In July, Aliona Doletskaya looked like just one in a series of baby Vogue editors who might someday replace Anna Wintour atop the American flagship. Then came a buzzy appearance at New York Fashion Week, a writeup in the Times, a Forbes takedown on Wintour, and, now, an embarrassing Wintour loss to Elle. Hachette's fashion title, a longtime also-ran to Vogue, surpassed its rival in October ad pages, Page Six reports. Wintour boss Si Newhouse is supposedly pissed. And Doletskaya was reportedly introduced at a Condé Nast magazine confab in Moscow as "the next editor of American Vogue" — a bit of tongue-in-cheek flattery that now threatens to become a self-fulfilling prophesy. Attached, excerpts from a May Russia Today profile of the telegenic Doletskaya. Click the video icon to watch.

Seriously? Seriously. Fuck, okay: the country sits on the precipice of the Greatest Depression and Barack Obama is slated to share his elliptical regimen for a Men's Health cover story. Yes, the presidential candidate Barack Obama; yes, the magazine edited by the guy who can't spell Barack Obama but that totally doesn't matter because his diet book is becoming a multimillion dollar lifestyle brand, dudes! Um, congrats Obama Campaign! You have officially (through no fault of your own) reached a nadir, no "ha."STOP TALKING ABOUT HOW YOUNG AND VIGOROUS YOU ARE. For one thing, the American public does not be able to read above a second grade level to notice that John McCain is fucking old. For another thing, a lot of them do not know how to read above a second grade level so you are going to have to work extra hard to explain this financial crisis to them. McCain just backed out of your Friday debate; good, no one wants to watch that shit on Friday in times like this anyway. Use this time. Remember all that crap you said about Ronald Reagan being a "transformative" candidate the way he shifted the national debate so irretrievably to the right? You got shit for that, but you were right. Never again would a federal government possess the ideological capital to tax the wealthy or regulate their engines of wealth creation to a societally optimal degree. UNTIL NOW. But no one's making sense right now. No one is capturing this quite clearly. No one is capable of synthesizing this particular historical watershed in way that can build the political capital necessary to reshape American ideology the way you can. And we have to reshape our ideology, in order to get Americans on both sides of the aisle to get on the same page about the gravity of national problems more complex than, like, the Obesity Epidemic. So please, DO IT. Write a speech. Make it good. I know you are tired; I know you are worn out. But so was John McCain when his plane got shot down and he broke those three limbs and he had to swim eleven miles so the North Vietnamese could commence refusing to set his fractures and shit! Don't forget that! Get a good night sleep, and focus! And think about skipping the workout. People always say working out "gives" them energy but actually scientifically that is less true than saying that cutting capital gains taxes and repealing short-selling regulations "helps" the working class.

We're still reeling from the bombshell news that singer Clay Aiken is gay. We keep returning to the picture of his revelatory People magazine cover and pleading to unknowable gods for an answer. Why??? And— Wait a second. Haven't we seen this picture before? The cocked head, the casual yet frank declaration, the curious hair? Um, yes! Yes we have. On NSYNCer Lance Bass's People cover two years ago and comedian Ellen DeGeneres' big Time cover ten years ago. Same exact head position, nearly the same hair, and Clay and Ellen even have that little extra "Yes" or "Yep"—that same sheepish sense of "yeah, I know you knew, I'm just sayin' so it's out there and all." Bass didn't get one of those folksy affirmatives because, we suspect, he was still laboring under the illusion that people weren't sure about his sexuality. Or maybe People magazine was. Gay rumors dogged him, to be sure, but not in the same way that they followed DeGeneres and Aiken. So is this the way to come out on magazines? I mean, straight dudes would never do that head tilt, right? Oh, and where in the heck is Lindsay Lohan's cover?

In 2003, there were 75 news magazines in the US and Canada. Now there are 45. That's a 40% drop in five years. Why? Because magazines are generally too slow to keep up with the 24-hour news cycle, and besides, everyone is too busy reading their "Regional" magazines, of which there are 1,120. So, for example, "The Untold Tale Of Hurricane Katrina's Victims" is now 25 times less popular than "New Orleans' Best Jambalaya Restaurants Under $25." Americans, geez. [Folio]

The MacArthur Foundation announced its annual Genius Grants today—those no-strings-attached, five year, $500,000 awards that let the best among us pursue their science or art or writing free from the cares of the working world. And look who got one: Alex Ross, the classical music critic for the New Yorker! Ross is certainly deserving when it comes to smarts, if not to finance (he won't be quitting the NYer for a mere 100K per year). But genius knows no financial criteria, despite the jealousy of the poors! Ross says he'll use the cash to help him write his next book, upgrade his website, and "launch some home improvements." God, geniuses are the luckiest people ever. [FBNY]

"The Life title is being resurrected as part of a joint venture between Time Inc. and Getty Images that will launch a Web site offering free... downloads from Getty plus the extensive archives from both Getty and the original Life magazine." [Post]

Che is a Belgian men's magazine. So it's not too concerned about pleasing women, or what women think, or not royally pissing off women in general. Here's the only thing Che wants from women: their ass! Amirite bro? Gimme some! The ad pictured at left shows gals strolling around with tags on their ass that say "Please Squeeze Here." Ha, yes ma'am! High five! Whatever the Belgian equivalent of the National Organization for Women is is really asleep at the wheel. Below, three more spots from Che's meat-themed ad campaign, proving once again that Belgian sex advertising is truly a world unto itself:

PMc is here! (Pause for applause). That, of course, is the name of the new iPhone-only magazine founded by nightlife photographer and long-aspiring celebrity Patrick McMullan. For only 99 cents on iTunes, you can now have a piece of this revolutionary bit of media progress. And McMullan himself is absolutely sweating to bring the latest in celebrity ruffle-wearing to his (dozens of?) readers:

Back story: I'm lurking around one of the low-rent haunts of the highbrow magazine elite Wednesday and come upon a friend of mine, Jess, who introduces me to Donavan Hohn, a brilliant writer whose recent piece on a Hong Kong toy fair had inspired me to write a handjobby post about how much I love 'Harper's.' Anyway, like pretty much all journalists under 40 who bother with the whole "crafting exquisite paragraphs" thing anymore, Hohn has cash flow issues. So Jess suggests — naively, I'm assuming — he get into the celebrity profile racket. Her friend Mark Kirby does it! He just wrote a profile of Megan Fox for 'GQ' that was really actually a rewarding effort! And I'm thinking, "Oh Jess, guys like Donovan Hohn are just not wired to hustle celebrity profile assignments. Not least because guys like Donovan Hohn probably didn't know who Megan Fox even was when he saw her at a comic book convention at which he was busy jotting down the philosophies of some enchanting small-time hucksterpreneur, and plus, everyone knows celebrity profiles are the lowest form of hackery." Well shit, was I so totally wrong. Jess had just tipped me off to the best celebrity profile in years. Seriously, you know how the celebrity profile is totally dead? This profile could do for the genre what…Megan Fox does for impotence or something!

The doubters were wrong: the Wired cover featuring dating columnist/microcelebrity Julia Allison is one of the best-selling covers for the tech magazine in the last eight years, Portfolio reports. We suppose that congratulations are in order. So congrats or whatever. Julia's Wired cover outsold Rupert Murdoch's and Sarah Silverman's. (That is 103,000 copies.) Except. She won by default! Sex n' high heels sells, obviousy, and a woman on the cover of a geek magazine—or a celebrity or fashion magazine, for that matter—always does better. And Wired doesn't put very many women on its cover. It's the Sarah Palin effect.

Breaking new media crush alert! The Financial Times columnist Francesco Guerrera went on CNBC this morning for a segment on how the financial crisis is so bad even newspapers read by stupid poor people are writing about it. Ooooh look it's on the cover of a Spanish paper and everyone knows Spanish speakers never met a dollar they didn't need to envia back to nineteen impoverished half-hermanos back in Santo Domingo! This, CNBC believes, is a signal for the superior intellects viewing CNBC to stop panic-selling all those stocks RIGHT NOW. Well, Francesco does not buy this logic.* Even when total idiot tool Dennis Kneale presents him with this turd of wisdom: "Come on, Francesco, you're young! You can make it back!" You know what? I'm not even going to get started on that. We'll have plenty of time to vilify him and his whole awful fact-resistant generation of denial dogmatists while we continuing not investing our nonexistent savings in the market.

Portfolio's Jeff Bercovici hears that former VP and current elitist environmentalist Al Gore is planning to buy Plenty, the environmentally-themed do-gooder magazine. Gore's on the cover of the current issue. No official confirmation yet, although Plenty's owner told Bercovici only "that wouldn't be quite accurate." So, sounds true. Did Gore miss all the smart people saying the "green" advertising boom is over? Is he itching to be a mogul past the point of good sense? Gore already has the youth-oriented Current TV network, which isn't doing incredibly well, business-wise. And his post-White House fame has allowed him to move in highfalutin circles—I'm sure he has more friends in venture capital than in farming these days. Plenty might not be the wisest investment, judging only by the general state of the print magazine industry. So this doesn't seem like mogul envy on Gore's part. He's apparently a true believer, and sees environmental media investments as part of his mission. If he makes money on them we'll really be impressed. [Anybody have inside info about Gore's plans? Email us.] [Mixed Media]

The Kenyon Review published a long, musing piece on the many forms of the rejection letter. What does it mean? Well, it means "nothing" as well as "no." How do various magazines reject you—and how has the New Yorker's rejection slip evolved?

Coco's "official magazine [is] filled entirely with shots of herself." [Sun]

"Forget Anna Wintour, famed editrix of Vogue," begins a story in Forbes today. Why, we'd love to but she runs the most profitable print publication in U.S. America! But not forever, Forbes warns, in a story about Vogue's sorry internet presence and uncertain future that makes a pretty good case for the notion that Wintour's influence at her boring fashion magazine is receding. Which is good for anyone who still gets Vogue, because the magazine reached a new level of inanity in its October issue, come look!

Ariel Foxman is the new editor of Time Inc's In Style. Foxman spent five years at the magazine previously, leaving in 2003 to edit the men's shopping magazine Cargo. Is a gay male fashion expert a strange choice to lead a magazine with a heavily female readership? "While he may not be a buyer of Manolo Blahniks, he is a keen observer of fashion and popular culture," writes Time Inc. editorial boss John Huey, by way of explanation. Okay! Read Huey's full memo introducing the stylistic Foxman to the staff, after the jump.

In December, Fortune magazine admitted it had been remiss naming insurance giant AIG one of its "10 Stocks To Buy Now" before a yearlong 18 percent decline. "We... didn't expect [the] mortgage unit to be such an albatross," editors wrote. To correct the error, the magazine had a fresh list of "The Best Stocks For 2008" — including Merrill Lynch. "Smart investors should buy this stock before everyone else comes to their senses," Fortune wrote, calling a recent correction in Merrill stock "an overreaction." Investors who followed this advice are now down 93 61 percent. All the big financial magazines butter their bread with dubious prescriptions for how hobbyist investors can beat market professionals, so Fortune is hardly alone in being humiliated by the ongoing market meltdown. We'll spread the embarrassment around after the jump.

Remember Chucky Taylor, the young American who his who helped his dictator Dad Charles Taylor brutally terrorize Liberia? (His moved to live with his father there from Orlando, and that's when the trouble began.) He now has the distinction of being the first American to be tried for torture abroad. He is a bad guy. But he's also been sending his newly-recorded rap track around and, well, we have it. Click to listen (it's actually kind of good?) and for a preview of his upcoming Rolling Stone profile.

Hey, Washington DC is getting its very own newspaper fashion magazine! The New York Times has T, which makes enough money to pay for the other, real news bureaus; the Wall Street Journal has its new glossy weekend magazine, which debuted with a model on the cover; and now the Washington Post has decided to celebrate DC's fashionistas with... a "newspaper insert"?