Does the Times' Play magazine want to marry awesomecredible Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps? Or just perform fellatio on him? We guess both. [NYT]

The magazine industry cares about the environment. They promise. For example, did you know that magazines can be recycled? Just put them right there in the recycling bins and feel the satisfaction! The industry is even running a campaign to urge you all to "Please Recycle This Magazine" after you read it (though I choose to recycle Entertainment Weekly before I read it). But are the biggest publishing companies themselves living up to these lofty recycling standards? One possibly soon-to-be-fired Conde Nast insider says hell no! Conde Nast Portfolio media blogger Jeff Bercovici says in a post about the green campaign:

People magazine has won the heated bidding war for the new Brangelina baby pictures, according to a report (unconfirmed, so far) on JustJared.com, who puts the winning bid at "between $10 million and $15 million." Rumors of a $15 million payday for the tot photos surfaced almost two months ago. People was bidding against OK!-where publisher Richard Desmond was reportedly so determined to land the rights that he was leading the negotiations personally. If People really walked away the victor here, they will have succeeded in staving off (temporarily) OK!'s ominous ambition to corner the baby picture market. [JustJared]

OK, the "beleaguered Vanity Fair editorial assistant Bill Bradly has to get 10,000 VF fans on Facebook before he gets fired" stunt is wearing a bit thin, but it's still relevant. Why? Because it proves that somehow, deep down, Vanity Fair actually believes that getting those 10,000 fans on their Facebook group is actually important to their online brand strategy. That's what's funny! But. Ladies! You could win a date to Graydon Carter's Waverly Inn. Hang on to your panties, though. Ol' Bill won't be getting fired anytime soon. [VF Online]

Sick of the negativity rampant in the liberal mainstream media, the Cook County (IL) Board paid $25K to produce its own magazine-one that would ensure "regular, positive press." But the initial run of 5,000 copies (which has already been printed) will never be distributed, because the magazine had too many misspellings and grammatical errors. Your government at work, ladies and gentlemen. "I have to find a way to get rid of them," said the county's spokesperson. Build a fort? It probably won't be too much of a loss, considering:

Seriously, what's going on with these Bonnie Fuller columns in Ad Age? The deposed Star chief must still be desperate for cash. And Ad Age must be desperate for amusement, because the main thing these columns do is expose the fact that Bonnie Fuller-despite being paid astronomical amounts of money by several media moguls-is not all that bright. At least when it comes to writing about and/ or analyzing things. Her last column blew the big A-Rod-and-Madonna conspiracy wide open; and today, she reveals what's really going on with Barack Obama's "celebrity" strategy. The twisted truth must come out! You see, Barack Obama didn't just stumble onto the cover of People magazine by chance. Oh no. It's all part of a big PR strategy! That's how things work in the high-level circles to which Bonnie Fuller is privy:

Being the poet laureate is the highest honor a poet can receive in this country. You get $35,000 and a beautiful office in the Library of Congress. (Kay Ryan just became the newest laureate, tasked with "bringing poetry to the forefront of the American consciousness.") It's not as idyllic as it seems, though. Time talks to past laureates and finds out that it's mostly a huge pain in the ass, full of e-mails and networking and people making demands on your time.

Monocle, the worldly Tyler Brule-helmed lifestyle magazine for young, stylish, business-oriented jetsetters who receive free subscriptions, is sending out the following note to editors: "Monocle magazine offers a briefing on global affairs, business, culture and design. It is not a lifestyle magazine." Hmm. Monocle has formerly been described on Gawker as a "travel-culture magazine" and a repository of "lifestyle sensuality and gaywad uptightness." Close enough. [NYO]

It looks like American Media didn't cut its $2.4-million-per-year editorial chief Bonnie Fuller fast enough: the tabloid publisher is reportedly nearly broke, desperately trying to raise money before a bunch of junk bonds come due in February. Granted, those bonds are worth $415 million, so Fuller's salary is only a sliver of the problem, but had Fuller delivered on hopes she could improve Star and National Enquirer enough to beat back competitors like Us Weekly and People perhaps the situation might not be so bleak. The company's worth has fallen by half in seven months, and its private equity owners will likely give up equity to keep it going. Perhaps some sort of juicy scandal will come along to breathe some life into the firm! [Post]

Female->male transsexual Thomas Beatie is featured in People magazine today with his new daughter Susan Juliette, born June 29 in Bend, Oregon without a c-section (which would make it a "natural birth," haters!). GaySocialites.com said the child will live a "confusing life" because of the father's love for the spotlight, adding that admirers of the pioneering birth should bear in mind that "you don't go on the cover of People magazine for free honey!" Actually, that's very true!

The much-vaunted new issue of Italian Vogue featuring only black models has already been re-printed in New York to satisfy the city's creative chattering class. Of course, fashion magazines always allege that issues with black cover models don't sell well. While that's proven to be true, there's nothing like actually having an opinion and doing something interesting to generate some buzz. This reminds us even more of how staid and boring Anna Wintour's American Vogue is.

Rupert Murdoch and his deputy Robert Thomson are eager to get the Wall Street Journal's new magazine off the ground. The publication, WSJ., is to get the Journal in on a consumer-glossy bonanza that now nets the Times' T magazine $46 million in annual revenue and helped it grow 12 percent last year. Murdoch and Thomson are so keen on this concept that they're racing ahead with WSJ. even though it was conceived under the Journal's prior owners, the Bancrofts' Dow Jones. So convinced are the News Corp. executives of the magazine's future success that, the Observer reports in today's paper, they are making staff sign a "code of conduct" to ensure they will not be swayed by the inevitable mob of overeager advertisers. But to hear one reliable inside source tell it, WSJ. will be lucky to launch without embarrassing itself on the editorial side, to say nothing of selling ads.

"So many people are trying to make a statement by hiring bodyguards," one bicoastal club owner tells W magazine. "They want the stares and the whispers. It's ostentatious." Well, we always tell our guys to keep a low profile, but I suppose we're a bit more cultured than most. The magazine explores the etiquette of bodyguard-having in a new article-which, like having bodyguards, is primarily motivated by a desire to be ostentatious. But it does have some valuable clues as to which celebrities are the worst self-important assholes:

So then this happened. Vanity Fair, a late yet uninvited guest to the New Yorker cover fiasco, went and drew up this parody of a misunderstood parody. As you can see, it's like taking the square root of comic failure. Not only is McCain not depicted as a caricature of feverish political imagination (he doesn't look half bad here, really), but there's hardly an exaggerated element in the pic, save perhaps the burning Constitution in the fireplace. (It's under secure glass at the National Archives, silly!) Cindy enjoys her pills, the Macs at least like the incumbent well enough to hang a portrait of him, and the walker is only a matter of time. Plus, it sounds as if VF got Wolcott to write this tepid nyuck-nyuck introduction:

In the wake of last week's Obama cover scandal/satire, "this week's cover depicts a bunch of affluent whites carousing while their crustacean dinner escapes through the kitchen window... Clearly this is a veiled attack against the Jews. In this case, the humanoid character with the Semitic nose (on the right) is shown drinking some sort of red wine... red wine does not go with lobster." [Joshua David Stein]

Bushwick, Brooklyn was once a minority neighborhood. Really! Recently, a bunch of hipsters have moved in there. But here's a secret: Bushwick is still a minority neighborhood. It even has ten separate housing projects, which are not full of whites! But Brooklyn's minorities are boring, because they're hardly on the cutting edge of art, culture, or cheap imported beer. So when Paper Magazine set out this month to answer the head-scratchingly inane question "Can the hipster ghettos of Brooklyn really replace Manhattan?", they took the logical step of including only the relevant people in the neighborhood: tattooed nilla hipsters. Check out these scans of the magazine's photo shoot and play "Guess the area's demographics":

After fourteen months as a founding editor of Gawker Media's Jezebel, Moe Tkacik is jumping to Radar as a senior writer for RadarOnline.com. She joins, on the online side, Gawker alumni Alex Balk, Neel Shah and Choire Sicha (sorta — Sicha freelances). Ana Marie Cox, founding editor of Gawker Media's Wonkette, is a contributing editor at the print magazine. Jezebel's Jessica Grose went the other way, from Radar to Jezebel, in October. If Tkacik is anything like Balk, you'll want to keep up with her not only online on Radar but also on her new Tumblr (one of them, anyway). [Radar] (Photo via Moe's Myspace)

British comedian John Cleese is, as the UK tabloids would put it, dating a blonde HALF his age. But that's not the most embarrassing thing about the 34-year-old. The woman, Veronica Smiley, is also vice president for marketing at Radar magazine! (We kid, we kid. Radar has fantastic marketing.) (UPDATE: According to LinkedIn, Smiley works for Radar's parent company, Integrity Multimedia.) Smiley is based out of the Chicago office, according to Cleese's quote, although Smiley's Facebook has her in New York. Apparently she's never even heard of either Monty Python or Fawlty Towers, Cleese's two most popular serials. While we're waiting for the definitive coverage of the fling from Radar, here are some basics on the couple, who've been very chatty with the press:

Oh, New York Times "T" fashion magazine: we will never understand you. We know the glossy mag brings in a ton of advertising dollars for the paper. But beyond that, its editorial mission is too rarefied for us to grasp. There's the odd indie rock fashion spread or child porn dustup, but what for? Today we were informed by a marketing person that the magazine has launched a series of celebrity "screen test" videos on its website. As far as we can tell, they're the first people to succeed in editing a five-minute long Will Ferrell interview in such a way that it is not funny at all. Beyond that, we're not sure what they were trying to accomplish. Watch the clip below, and take your own guess:

Esquire's September cover will have a flashing digital display made by E Ink, the company that hopes to replace print with its digital paper technology. Iif you put it on the cover of a print magazine, doesn't that defeat the purpose? [NYT]