Two months ago, New York magazine staffers were emailing friends seeking ideas about New things for the "All New" issue. Now that issue is here! It's just as totally contrived as you would expect.

• Can Michelle Obama single-handedly save America's fashion industry? Here's hoping! [NYT]
• Following the horrific holiday season, Macy's says it plans to close 11 stores in nine states. [AP]
• Communist chic is in. And just in time for the collapse of the capitalist system, too! [NYT]
• William Rast, the brand backed by Justin Timberlake, will make its Bryant Park debut next month. JT will not be performing, though. [WWD]
• Peter Som and backer Creative Design Studios have parted ways. Because of the split (and the economy), a Som show during Fashion Week is not in the cards. [WWD]
• Eight designers you need to know in 2009. [Refinery29]
• Obedient Sons & Daughters is closing its doors. [Style.com]
• New York magazine's fashion-centric biannual spinoff title, New York Look, has been discontinued. [WWD]

Well, partly in the third person. The famous youth culture expert wrote to complain about critic Alex Ross.

We hear that former Gawker editor Jesse Oxfeld has been let go from his position as a senior editor at New York magazine.

The Daily Beast picks Fabiola Beracasa for its "Smart People Recommend" feature and then the "New York correspondent" proceeds to recommend reading BlackBook since "it always seems to be the first to tell readers what's next in nightlife, entertainment, fashion, and arts"? It's enough to make your head spin on a Friday afternoon! [TDB]

Google somehow contrived to include full digital images of old New York magazines in its new magazine search service on Google Books. Sadly, the archive is missing key issues, containing such classics as "Radical Chic: That Party At Lenny's" and "Tribal Rights of the New Saturday Night." But both of those are available, albeit ripped from their original context, on nymag.com, and Google has one classic that isn't: Barbara Goldsmith's "La Dolce Viva," which revealed the seedy side of Andy Warhol's entourage through Viva, a shriveled one-name actress. "I had never seen anything like it," Tom Wolfe wrote of accompanying nude photos from Diane Arbus. But the article's appearance in the fourth debut standalone New York nearly ended Clay Felker's magazine.

NY mag's fashion blog The Cut ran into the Vogue editrix Wintour at the National Book Awards this week. They politely (we assume!) asked her about the rumors that she might retire. They are (sort of) substantive rumors and it's a question about her job, not her personal life, so you'd think that she'd respond as courteously as she could. Except, no she didn't. She gave 'em the ol' heave-ho:

♦ ABC has ordered up new episodes of Life on Mars, but it has no plans to shoot new ones of Pushing Daisies, Dirty Sexy Money, or Eli Stone. [THR]
♦ Penguin's Ann Godoff will be publishing pollster Nate Silver's two books as part of the deal he signed for $700,000. [NYO]
♦ Michael Phelps has signed on as a pitchman for Subway. [AdAge]
♦ Ted Turner's autobiography will make its debut on the New York Times bestseller list this week at No. 8. Also: Artie Lang, Howard Stern's sidekick, has landed a six-figure book deal. [NYP]

Yesterday New York magazine laid off Gael Greene, a food critic there for the past 40 years. Apparently the recession is hurting New York like everyone else—not as drastically as everyone else, of course, but enough to have to pare down their fat roster of restaurant reviewers. So is this just a longtime employee being pushed out, or a sign of something worse under the surface?
New York is owned by billionaire Bruce Wasserstein, the CEO of investment bank Lazard. Does he have money problems? Well, let's see:

♦ Roger Ailes (left) has renewed his contract with News Corp., which will keep him by Rupert Murdoch's side for at least five more years (and keep him running the show at Fox News for at least one more presidential election). [NYT]
♦ New York has fired longtime restaurant critic Gael Greene. [Feedbag]
♦ The Runway battle continues: Lifetime has sued NBC over claims it is blocking the cable channel from airing future episodes of the reality TV show. [NYP]

New York magazine is looking for things—things that are New. For the "All New" issue! Because now that Obama has been elected, everything is New. They're looking for anything New, from architecture to food to music—"the idea," they write in an email to contacts, "is that we're heading into a new era with an opportunity for new thinking and new ways of doing things." Similar emails are circulating from at least two other magazines. And these desperate trend-chasers have unwittingly struck on an important question: Has our national craving for the Next New Thing now surpassed the supply of actual Next New Things? The answer is yes, but that doesn't mean that America will give up on the search for What's Next any time soon. There are a lot of suckers in America. Including all of us, at some point. Magazines know this. They've been selling purported access to the Next Big Thing for years—Wired and Popular Mechanics show you the next big technology, The Fader shows you the next big band, Vice shows you the next big drug. But now the counterculture, very broadly speaking—which is to say, everything that everybody who considers themselves cooler than mainstream Middle America considers cool—is becoming the mainstream culture. People are trusting the fucking government. Lots of people, therefore, imagine that we're about to enter into a new version of the 1960s, a flowering of idealism and rich cultural growth, in which the liberal cool people win. More likely: we're about to enter another iteration of the 1970s. The economy is terrible. Cultural idealism that isn't underpinned by financial means quickly crumbles into bitterness. The next big thing will be hating the rich—the heroes of the past two decades. Culturally, Obama isn't our JFK. He's our Jimmy Carter. He may turn out to be a much more successful president than Carter was, but don't be surprised if he's overwhelmed by reality. Expect ridiculous fads to catch on quicker than ever amongst a populace desperate for something cool to cling to. Guns and religion were for the Bushies; Obamamaniacs will be clinging to....whatever New York magazine tells them to. [Pic via]

♦ Michelle Obama may end up on the cover of Vogue in the next few months: "It's been a long-standing tradition to photograph the new first lady. So needless to say, we are very interested in working with Mrs. Obama." But Ebony may get there first. [WWD]
♦ Shares of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. plunged today following the company's announcement it's revising its 2009 forecast. [Bloomberg]
♦ New York television critic John Leonard has died. [Vulture]
♦ A round of layoffs have hit Hearst, although the exact numbers haven't been released. [Folio]

We hadn't seen Bruce Wasserstein—billionaire financier, Lazard chairman, owner of New York magazine—for quite some time until he made this appearance yesterday at a breakfast for Fortune. We're very happy to see he appears to be keeping up New York's "Best Doctors" issue: The new Bruce is trimmer, his skin looks is taut and smooth, and those unsightly bags under his eyes have completely vanished. We don't know who deserves the credit for this impressive transformation (Sherrell? Dan? Pat?), but whoever it is, please know that we fully approve of Bruce 2.0!

In 2000, New York magazine published a story by Mark Jacobson called "The Return of Superfly," which detailed the life and times of Frank Lucas (left), the drug dealer who cornered the Harlem heroin market in the late '60s and early '70s before he was brought down in 1975. The article was later turned into the movie American Gangster starring Denzel Washington, and now, eight years later, it's spurred a lawsuit. Late last year, New York republished "The Return of Superfly" on nymag.com and repeated an allegation by Lucas that the NYPD and DEA agents who raided his home also stole millions in cash. The retired cops, furious that they have been depicted as thieves, are now suing Lucas, Jacobson, New York, and Primedia (New York's former parent) for "no less than" $5 million for defamation and the "severe emotional distress" they've since had to endure. The full lawsuit is after the jump. But the ex-cops shouldn't be surprised if they don't get a timely response: The lawsuit was sent to New York at its former address on Madison Avenue, which hasn't been the mag's home for close to a year now.

You may have noticed that a large percentage of flat surfaces in America are currently occupied by those vaguely enraging tri-panel HSBC ads, where identical images are given different captions to prove that—I suppose—HSBC does not believe in a Kantian sense of moral absolutism. "A child: Love. Responsibility. Welfare Fraud." Now the bank is sponsoring this week's entire issue of New York magazine, meaning you'll have more than a dozen new chances to soak in HSBC's triumvirates of relativism. But considering the timing, it's worthwhile to ask: "Banks sponsoring entire issues: Smart. The Future. Monumental Fuckup?" This issue has been "in the works for several months," meaning that the bank sure as hell didn't know it would be running in the midst of The Great Depression Pt. 2. HSBC says it's all very "timely and appropriate." Mm hmm. Regardless of the intent, the real question is, is this sort of thing wise? With a bad economic outlook for advertising in general, publications themselves certainly hope so. Banks are mostly wandering trying every possible ad strategy right now—from comedy to doomsaying—in search of something that's effective. They don't really know what to do. Shhh! But! The one thing we know is that the proliferation of media makes it increasingly hard for advertisers to get their messages out. So buying all the ad space in a magazine or on a website is probably just going to gain favor as a tactic. They just need to make sure they're not buying it in something that's about to fold. That would be embarrassing. [NYT]

Some background: Nouriel Roubini is an economist known for his longstanding pessimism, at the peak of his professional reputation, vindicated by the financial crisis. The NYU academic, when he's not predicting another great depression, throws parties at his vagina-encrusted Tribeca loft for young Facebook ladies. Nothing wrong with that-but the Iranian-Jewish playboy-professor equates any comment by this site on his decadent personal life with anti-Semitism. In a late-night Facebook rant earlier this week he slammed "trashy junky" Gawker and its Nazi-minded editor. Now the deranged professor disappointed by the supposedly independent journalists who've failed to take up his cause. After the jump: an extraordinary email calling New York magazine's Jessica Pressler a "coward" with a "trashy column." (By the way, Roubini's prescient warnings about the financial plight of the US won him the nickname Dr. Doom. Given his unhinged rants of the last few days, a more appropriate moniker might be Dr. Meltdown.)

New York magazine's daily online chats about the election are usually just mildly interesting, since the journalists involved tend to be overly polite to one another, because who knows who you're going to be sending a job application to someday? Even Gawker Media veterans and that Daily Kos maniac act all pleasant. But Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi has never been one for such fraternal niceties, and when nymag.com threw him a sparring partner from National Review, the predictably caustic lefty went to work with his fangs, at one point typing, "tell me you're not ashamed." It was awesome and just really uncomfortable at the same time. Highlights:

I sort of loved how most of the actors Dan Winters photographed for New York's "New York Actor" photo essay looked basically like hell. This is not freaking Santa Monica. If someone invented indulgences for all the sins we commit against our skin we'd be the Avignon Papacy. But enough wishful thinking: Liz Smith reports today "some big name stars" were "not amused" by the harsh realism of his portraiture, which Smith credits to his past shooting spreads for Texas Monthly, "where they like things rough and tough." (This assertion appears to have no basis in fact, but it was fun checking out his portfolio.) So: who's the vain aging diva/o who told Liz she wasn't the only one who was put off by Mr. Winters' verisimilitude schtick? Let's examine the evidence:
Well I think we know who it's not:

That Elizabeth Wurtzel had some thing with David Foster Wallace in the nineties is the type of news flash I'd like to have failed detecting this week. Namely because to blog about Elizabeth Wurtzel is to tempt oneself to unwind the various tranches of disquietude summoned when someone like me conducts a Wurtzel Google Image Search. There's the first tranche of familiarity; I've conducted this search before; the second: I remember quickly that I will invariably, though tempted by the grainy topless shots from Bitch, like Radar before me quickly settle on the hottest color photo available, the one she used for the cover of her 2001 addiction memoir More, Now, Again, even though Wurtzel has graciously offered us photographic evidence that she has, in the intervening (ohgod) seven and a half years, aged. For this is not a new asset, this story; the underlying episode dates back to the nineties, when Wurtzel was still dressing up her faculties and skills with too much blue eyeliner and too many mood-altering substances in lieu of the appropriate degree of risk management and/or clothes.So let's examine that tranche for a second: here we have Wurtzel, drawn to David and his big, serious, ambitious, meaty, unfrivolous gold standard of a book; David, drawn to Wurtzel by her fucking leotard and perhaps her nebulous promise to impart upon his serious asset some sort of value-unlocking sense of "buzz"…signing onto one of those confusing, fuzzy subprime relationships that were all the rage, still are. The fine print is almost amusing to us now: the hazy fundamentals and wild histrionics and bombastic promises dependent on "trajectories" neither has any clue how — neither is socialized to have any clue how — to redirect toward a soft landing. Yes, you have done that sort of fucking. From a 1996 account of his reading at the KGB Bar:

This week's New York contains a brief story on the "sudden-onset poverty" — poverty, huh? — of an anonymous Lehman Brothers trader. There are million dollar mortgages and million dollar options packages gone to shit and wives who "can't" work and a sobbing nanny and mostly, lots and lots of blistering infinite anger in search of a target other than the indefensible practices and corrupted culture of an industry he bought into willingly. It's like, "Oh I'm so happy these guys get to stay home and spend time thinking about what's really important while instilling their own unique values systems in their kids!" Except the opposite: