So. The Park Slope hat. New York reported on it this week, and we brought you the whole email exchange yesterday afternoon. All sorts of things were debated: Is it a boy's hat or is it a girl's hat, or is it for infants with abnormally large heads? Does headgear reinforce gender roles, are parents inadvertent sexist, are Park Slopers crazy P.C. Nazis? (Um, yeah, definitely yes to that last one.) But one thing was never really resolved: What ever became of the hat? This morning, thank God (whomever your god might be), there was an answer:

New York mag has a cute front-of-book item today on an only-in-Park-Slope battle that recently raged on an email list for earnest and progressive parents in that earnestly progressive Brooklyn neighborhood. As Ben Mathis-Lilley explains:

This week, presumably in honor of their Travel Issue New York magazine's Look Book posse went to London for some original style. And lo, look who they found — Molly Carroll, the British Carmen Miranda! We don't know what it says about New York's fashionistas when our regional glossy has cross the Atlantic to find some real freakage, but we're more than happy to meet miss Molly, a writer/artist/musician who really wants to see New York's "Jewish part, with lots of old jazz," because she's heard "Jewish New Yorkers make all this great music." Sigh — we've so much work to do abroad, don't we?

Back in August, some random perv on the R train whipped out his shlong and showed it off to 22-year-old Thao Nguyen. Nguyen had the presence of mind to snap his pic with her cameraphone, and the shot made its way to a website and then to the front page of the Daily News. At which point it was discovered that the flasher was in fact a very specific perv: Dan Hoyt, the owner of the East Village restaurant Quintessence and a leader of the raw-food movement. Convicted of public lewdness and awaiting sentencing in a few weeks, he allowed himself to be profiled in the new New York. You'd imagine he'd have lots of apologetic things to say, wouldn't you? Probably some therapized talk about how he was frustrated and misunderstood and acting out in response to childhood neglect, right? Alas, wrong. Way wrong:

As the Observer Mobsters reported yesterday, next week's New York mag will prostrate itself before four "Brainy Young Things," the "youthful, erudite whippersnappers" who had recently taken over some of "America's oldest and most venerable magazines. They're James Bennet of The Atlantic, Franklin Foer of the New Republic, The Paris Review's Philip Gourevitch, and Roger Hodge of Harper's. We got a quick preview of the text, and we admit we're intrigued, especially by a quote from Hodge:

• New York to anoint hot young editors; those photographed rumored to include TNR's Franklin Foer, The Atlantic's James Bennet, Roger Hodge of Harper's, and the Paris Review's Philip Gourevitch, who, at 44, calls the whole conceit into question. [Media Mob/NYO]
• The Times nominated Dargis for a Pulitzer, and no one there understands why; New York is pitching a Look Book book. [WWD]
• The Washington Post gets 88 New York Timeses every day, costing $18K annually. At least it's nice to know someone other than us isn't getting free papers. [WCP]
• Cargo was confused, and nobody will miss it. Um, yeah. [Slate]
• Bob Woodruff, the ABC anchor badly wounded in Iraq, last night received the Radio and Television Correspondents Association's David Bloom award, named for the NBC correspondent who died while covering the early days of the Iraq war. [B&C]

New York magazine's mating columnist Amy Sohn — who's been on the world's longest maternity leave — is apparently gearing up for her return. We suspect that the new mom will be writing about issues near and dear to her heart, judging from the following email she's sent around:

New York mag, March 27:

New York had nine pages this week on 9/11 conspiracy theories, and, truth be told, a lot of them sounded not entirely ridiculous. (The temperature of a jet-fuel fire is lower that the temp at which steel melts? Not even the experts can explain why 7 WTC fell? Bush's black-sheep brother Marvin worked at the security company that protected the World Trade Center and United and American airlines? Interesting.) But, still, it also seemed to be coming from the usual, if well-intentioned, wackos — you know, overearnest Starbucks-bashing punks and overearnest Birks-wearing old hippies and that East Village priest with a soul patch — and so it was easy, as you sat reading Mark Jacobson's piece, to assume that these people were just a little nuts.

Sports Illustrated, issue dated March 20, 2006:

Before we begin this week's treatment of New York mag's Look Book, we just need to say something: holy fucking wow. We don't mean that in a nasty way; we're truly in awe of unemployed Judy Arlick, who keeps herself busy by decorating her door for all the holidays and painting her scary claw nails. Judy used to model for a "well-known raincoat" house, but now she spends her time trying to figure out how to get away from the East Village, where she's forced to live amongst "low-class people." Poor Judy — not everyone below 14th can manage to swaddle themselves in dead animals and accessorize like Laurel Touby.

• The latest in the Times' ever-growing stable of blogs is Wall Street and financial blog DealBook, edited by Andrew Ross Sorkin. We imagine that when Gawker alum Elizabeth Spiers gets her similar venture, Dealbreaker, up and running, these two will spend the spring mudwrestling one another. Kinda hot, no? [DealBook]
• Before you get all wet and saucy at the prospect of more pictures of Kate Moss blowing rails, keep in mind that these ones are from 1998 or so. And really, once you've seen her hoover one, you've seen her hoover them all. [Sun UK]
• Win yourself a free meal on 71 Clinton's last night of service. All you have to do is come up with the best answer to how you would spend $250 on food and drinks, in a single night, on the Lower East Side. If you want to win, we suggest refraining from mentioning Welcome to the Johnson's. [Eater]
• WASPdate continues to thrive, lending its support to plaid pants-wearing whiteys everywhere. [AM New York]
• New York mag puts out its Best of New York issue, and yet the "Best Way to Get on a Hipster Photo Website" strikes us as the worst of our fair city. [NYM]
• Frank Bruni gets highly philosophical on the issue of whether or not a restaurant should be re-reviewed. How one man puts so much thought into the star system, we'll never know. But bless him for all that he does. [Diner's Journal]

In this week's New York there's yet another example of how thimble-sized Tom Cruise can wreak havoc on mass media. According to the blurb, Cruise skipped out on a Men's Journal cover article after Wenner Media went ahead and published a piece titled "Inside Scientology" in the latest Rolling Stone. The article revealed the not-so-breaking news that "the church has a storied reputation for squelching its critics through litigation, and, according to some reports, intimidation." True to form, Cruise then pulled out of the cover shoot before Kate Rockland, the writer on the MJ story, could even get to him.

David Edelstein, New York's new film critic, and his Park Slope neighbor, NPR's Brooke Gladstone. It was that kind of night.

We actually kind of like the featured fashionista, Kate Chapman, in this week's edition of New York magazine's Look Book, if only because she straight-up admits that she sometimes looks "like a crackhead." Oh, if only all the other Look Bookers were so self-aware, the world would be a better place. Anyhow: Miss Kate works at Jen Bekman's gallery and can be seen walking around, sockless and in linen pants, in the middle of winter. She describes this look as "pretty classic and downtown-preppy," inspired by Debbie Harry, and explains her bleached hair as a rebellious move inspired by life at Wake Forest. She also notes that her headband is taken from her "ski bin," which we believe is where Kate stores dirty pictures of Bode Miller. Good to know, right?

We were joking — sort of — when we suggested earlier that life at New York magazine is in fact just one big Ivy League reunion. Then this showed up in our inbox, sent out to the Princeton career network last week:

New York toys with the brand-new Davie-Brown Index, which is designed to rate a celebrity's worth as a marketing tool (think of it as an updated Q rating). Denizens of Famousville are quantified by a survey of 1.5 million Americans, who scored celebs on all sorts of endorsement-worthy attributes. And what did we learn?

The new New York has a front-of-book squib covering the coverage of the recent ouster of Harvard president Larry Summers. The facts are this: The Crimson's Summers reporter, Zachary Seward, spent so much time covering the president he failed a class and was suspended; no longer a student he couldn't continue as the student paper's managing editor; but no hard feelings, instead he got a co-byline on the Wall Street Journal's Summers story, which scooped everyone else — including Seward's pals on the Crimson. Did Seward feel bad about competing against his fellow students? Not at all, he told New York's reporter, Ben Mathis-Lilley: "Isn't the media a big Ivy League reunion anyway?"

Meet Ai Ly, a jeans designer for Ralph Lauren. In New York magazine's latest Look Book, Ai confesses that despite being the evil one behind atrociously expensive jeans, she prefers vintage — so much so, in fact, that she owns pieces that have vintage blood stains on them. So hip, right? Ai also makes her own clothes, thinks tomahawk-style fringe and feathers will be big for spring, and considers her look very "ragamuffin." We don't know; she lost us at the blood stains. Intern Alexis (who has a much stronger stomach than we do) rounds up Maisie Tivnan, Sarah Gray, and Daniel Feder for further analysis.

I Want Media today fawns over Michael Wolff, and in so doing it reminds us of why we've always had a soft spot for ol' baldie: