And by love, we mean the Times Book Review, which sets the stage for an overly precious round of meta-ironic bitching, sent from Dave Eggers to Neal Pollack with love. Once Intern Alexis gets past that load of eye-rolling, she's on to more of the same from Review editor Sam Tanenhaus, who wants you to know that sentences are for artistic appreciation, not understanding. That's the only way, anyhow, that we can explain his invocation of every Jew since Moses to Rocco Ritchie as part of national myth-building. Yeah, we don't get it either, but Intern Alexis at least pretends to understand. After the beloved jump, her weekly guide to acting like you'd know a book if it bit you on the ass.

If you're frustrated the All-Star break is leaving you with insufficient athletic-spectation opportunities this evening, we've got some great news: New York battles The New Yorker on the soccer pitch tonight. The game starts at 9:05 at Houston Street and the West Side Highway. And the smart money (at least at 444 Madison, it seems) is on The New Yorker.

Aw, shucks. Sometimes — and, we should admit, only rarely — we love you guys. This is one of those times.

Celebrity weeklies do the funniest things. Just ask Bonnie Fuller, who famously took heat for a Star cover that changed Demi Moore's dress to a lovely shade of white, so as to compliment a rumor that the actress would be marrying Ashton Kutcher. Leave it to Life & Style, however, to raise the bar by releasing a cover in which 3/4 of the images are actual Photoshop cut-and-paste jobs. After the jump, a quick lesson from the entrails of tabloid photojournalism, in easy-to-digest, charticle form.

We're loath to point out another Times article, but we found a little something in a piece about corporate Feng Shui-ster Alex Stark, who makes a living consulting companies on the ancient art of furniture placement. What we actually care about is hidden in the 2nd-to-last paragraph of the item (which, we must add, is best suited to 1999), but it's a gem nevertheless:

• Matt Cooper's original conversation with his source was on "double super secret background." Which apparently can only be relinquished with "dramatic" and "secret" permisison. [Newsweek]
• But Cooper's "dramatic" and "personal" release from his confidentiality pledge was neither dramatic nor personal. Discuss. [NYT]
• Norm Pearlstine: Journalist, lawyer, businessman, David Carr subject. [NYT]
• Miller/Cooper fallout reaches Cleveland, where the Plain Dealer is holding two stories because they're based on illegally leaked docs and no one wants to go to jail for publishing them. [E&P]
• Who owns a reporter's notes? Who knows? (And how much would some scrawled notepads with Media Bubble lists and possible Times-mocking punchlines fetch on eBay?) [Slate]
• Breaking: In wake of London bombings, Fox News is insensitive and anti-French. [Guardian]
• Even worse: Big July news screws with journos' vacation plans. [USAT]

We can't say we were blown away with the union slogans y'all submitted for the not-actually-striking writers at The Onion. There are several potential reasons for this, we realized. First, you are not Onion writers, and, thus, are less funny than they are. Second, strikes are not inherently funny. And third, and perhaps most significant, it's not a real strike, and our gullibility did not inspire you to deliver your best work.

The latest New York magazine has a too-many-words-to-count feature on Riker's Island inmate Jason Itzler, also known as the free-spending, arrogant pimp behind NY Confidential, a high-dollar escort agency that brought in as much as $25,000 a night from its Worth Street loft. The story is a typical tale of a rise-and-fall in the underworld, complete with a heartwarming storyline of Itzler's beloved, a $2K hooker named Natalia. In this story, however, it's not the money and the sex that are fascinating — it's Itzler's interaction with high society that we find particularly enlightening:

It's possible page one of this weekend's Sunday Styles didn't feature the most coverage of the most despicable people ever fit onto one page of the Times. (There have probably been entire pages inside the front section devoted to, say, Hitler.) But it certainly must be a record for cramming all sorts of hideous human beings onto a section front, to the exclusion of anything else. Dov Charney? Check. A hipster asshole engaging in competitive air guitar? Check. "Hollywood actors," "a famous Brazilian model," "men splashed with too much cologne," and "women with collagen-inflated lips teetering in heels" at a rooftop bar in Chelsea? Check, check, check, and check.

Click to enlarge.

In all the thousands of words written about last week's terrorist bombings in London, one very important angle was overlooked by our "journalist" friends in the MSM. Sure, we were told what this may or may not mean for Blair, for Bush, for the War on Terror, for Iraq, for Londoners, for British Muslims. But no one told us the most important thing: What will this mean for Conde Nast?

Yeah, well, a new Hummer could drive right through a hurricane while eating that bomb for breakfast. No contest, dude.

Thereby betraying the beer industry's long history of subtle and nuanced ad campaigns.

Are you filled with contempt for yourself? Do you realize that you're not good enough even to be beaten as Naomi Campbell or Scott Rudin's personal assistant? Do you need a job that will remind you hourly of just how small, insignificant, and worthless you are? Boy, do we have the listing for you.

Folio: funnyman Dylan Stableford — and we're pretty sure there's also a Bront hero with that name — takes a hard look in the new issue at the messy business of product placements. He's not saying that mags accept payments for placements in their editorial (sorry, BusinessWeek). But all bets are off, he says, when it comes to which products editors will push on TV, where an editor will often mention products from a company with which her magazine has a "relationship."

Who knows if it true? But, in case it is, a word of advice: Sodomize tonight, while you still can.

• Dressed to be sentenced yesterday, Judy Miller's "quilted jacket speaks of Barbour and the Upper East Side. And the black reads like a nod to glamour and chic and the thing that proclaims: I'm a New Yorker and not some well-to-do lady from Chicago." [WP]
• Today she's wearing "a green or brown jumpsuit with the word 'prisoner' on the back." [NYT]
• But, hey, whatever she's wearing in jail, it's basically just book leave, says Russ Baker. [Mediacrity]
• PBS and ABC clean up in news Emmy nominations, and ABC's World News Tonight — who could use some good news — gets most nods of the three evening newscasts. [NYP]
• Virginia Heffernan doesn't like comedies that aren't necessarily funny. Much as we feel about reviews that we can never tell if they're positive or negative. [NYT]
• And reports of the press's death might be greatly exaggerated. [National Journal]

WHAT BLOG, full of catty commentary on her publishing-world coworkers, recently got the junior employee who was writing it fired from a major house?

...thus crushing any musical fantasies we were entertaining. Nevertheless, The Media Mob has information crucial to your Hallmark card-sending campaign:

Political cartoonists are a special breed. They must bring to work every day a delicate mix of elegant artistry, clever wordplay, gimlet-eyed observation, genuine insight, biting satire, and a refined appreciation for the absurd.