In another highly-necessary shopping piece in the Times Styles section (a piece that we could not face until now), the body modification expert Alex Kuczynski discusses shredders. The office kind, not the Van Halen kind. True to form, she used shredders as a lens to teach us about Alex Kuczynski.

"The first time I saw an International Male catalog was at the all-girls Virginia boarding school I attended in the 1980s. The cool girls—the ones who owned their own horses and got BMWs for their 16th birthdays, with car-size bows on top—got the catalog in their mailboxes, along with subscriptions to GQ. The uncool girls, if we were lucky, got to peer over their shoulders at pictures of male models in thong bikinis. I found the presentation of male genitalia, packaged and posed and seemingly aroused, totally terrifying. Were they really that long and tuber-like? And were men supposed to stare at you in such a brooding, animal way, their eyes glowering at siesta level, their mouths puckered in baby-doll O's?" Read on if you like, but this is where we stopped.

Today's Page Six notes that Times gal and plastic surgery Kool-Aid-drinker Alex Kuczynski is the stupid one in the family, as her brother John-Michael Kuczynski (as Alex has noted) is a professor of philosophy and the author of the hot new beach-read "Conceptual Atomism and the Computational Theory of Mind: A Defense of Content-Internalism and Semantic Externalism." (Ooh, paging Jerry Fodor!) So if you enjoyed Mr. K's "A non-Russellian treatment of the referential-attributive distinction," you'll love this new one! But Page Six isn't being fair: Anyone who's played backgammon with Alex K. will tell you that she possesses a vicious cunning—beyond rat-like even! There's smart in there—and after all, she's the one getting chauffeured around and working at the Times just because she feels like it, not because she has to, while he's slaving away with grad students. So who's the stupid sibling now?

Are you on pretty and somewhat plastically-reconstructed Times reporter Alex Kuczynski's email list? If you are, you'd better get cracking, because she has some columns coming up over there and she's got absolutely nothing. Her plea includes this priceless bit: "Next subject: Art! Any thoughts on art would be greatly appreciated." P.S. Later today we are writing some posts about things! Any of your thoughts on "things" would be totally appreciated!

Taken as a continuously unreeling whole, the oeuvre of Times style writer Alex Kuczynski is one of the more astonishing texts of our time. From her days at the Observer through her stint as serious auteur of a book about plastic surgery, Kuczynski's work has managed to move, baffle, and alarm nearly everyone it's touched. We wondered if maybe there was a method to her madness. Turns out, there is!

Gosh, it's been so long since we've written about Times rich lady beat reporter and plastic surgery volunteer Alex Kuczynski that we almost forgot how to spell "Kuczynski!" But the opening of today's review of Oh The Hell Of It All cannot be ignored. "When Sean Wilsey's memoir, "Oh the Glory of It All," was published in 2005, I went through it in great mouthfuls, laughing so hard I choked on my own spit, gasping with such noisy abruptness on the subway that I was forced to explain to my fellow passengers the contents of the passage I had just read, and why they had to immediately run out and buy this book." Look, the subway is for the poors, Alex. Stop bothering us with your spit.

After last week's triumphant return to the pages of the Times Styles section, Manhattan upper crust queen Alex Kuczynski gets front page placement with an investigation of gynecomastia, also known as "boy boobies." Apparently, there's a growing epidemic of man-mammarage amongst our nation's youth, probably because kids today are so outrageously fat. The solution? Plastic surgery. The Kucz is clearly in her sweet spot here.

At long last, facially-reconfigured semiotician Alex Kuczynski has returned to her old stomping grounds in the Times' Thursday Styles section, and she's more inscrutable than ever! Yay! Reporting on John Varvatos' new Hamptons outpost, she describes the popularity of the designer's signature laceless Chuck Taylors: "The first time I saw a pair, they adorned the feet of a Hamptons-hopping Beverly Hills money manager. You see what I mean. They're not just sneakers; they are the footwear equivalent of the white man's overbite." This might be the most inaccurate usage of the phrase "you see what I mean" in history!

Back in April, when Alex Kuczynski last contributed to the New York Times Book Review, she struck out against "jealous book critics" who like tearing down modeling novels because they "aren't tall and gorgeous" and because they want "to wield their puny amount of power to establish some sort of moral order." She sort of whispered it, but we heard her; this weekend, she appears in the Book Review once again, writing on a pair of short fiction lady books (not yet online, mysteriously), and her campaign for singularity in the scribble sphere is becoming more pronounced.

A few months ago, the Times decided to ramp up some of their more lucrative "verticals" on their website—including Fashion and Style. They had lots of ideas, which they put on the company wiki for everyone to read and comment on. But did all of their plans come to fruition? Well, let's just say we were spared the disaster that inevitably would have been an Alex Kuczynski blog. The wiki, and what really happened, follow.

Josh Quittner is the editor of Business 2.0. Michelle Slatalla is responsible for the New York Times' inexplicable "Online Shopper" column, a collection of hyperlinks well-gussied up with advice on how to Google things that for some reason appears in that paper's print edition on Thursdays. In it, you can learn how to buy English muffins that cost five dollars. Five dollars. Michelle and Josh are married to each other! Boy, are they ever.

The significance of holding last night's party to celebrate the New York Observer and its new website at the Four Seasons restaurant was intentional, obvious, and not at all lost on anyone. Despite its recent Frank Bruni demotion to two New York Times stars, the restaurant remains the symbolic and probably actual center of New York old-guard media power. After so many years of playing gadfly to the media, politics, and real estate elite of this city, the Observer and its boy-owner and his advisers chose to make a very specific sort of statement.

Alex Kuczynski, writing in this week's New York Times Book Review, delivers a taut, 850-word piece on the debut novel by 80s supermodel Paulina Porizkova. Between this and her article on virginity from March 24th, that's two appearances in the NYTBR in three weeks. Might the Kucz be moving over to books full-time now that she's gotten sick of the shopping?

The Alex Kuczynski Beauty Junkies publicity parties continue on the other side of the pond. There's a profile in the Times (U.K., obvs) that provides very little new information but does occasion this amazing quote from everyone's fave shopping columnist:

We'd been missing our Critical Shopper lately, but we totally understood that she had important book-writing duties to tend to. So today's appearance was a pleasant surprise — a gift we weren't expecting! Apparently, the Kucz's editor said, what about Breakfast at Tiffany's? Alex said that she thought that she remembered the film, then went off on a long showoffy tangent about the Capote novella's superiority. As she recalled, though, they'd both kind of liked it, and her editor said, well, that's the one thing we've got. The result was this:

From the Times:

We apologize for bringing you the analysis of the Kucz's Critical Shopper column about a shop in DUMBO from today's edition of Thursgay Styles, but there was just so much in it that it took us all day to properly mine. For one, we love how she oh-so-casually reminds us that when it comes down to it, the Kucz is not like you and me:

Yesterday, we reproduced a tip from a long-ago Observer intern who worked for "pre-plastic surgery" Alex K., whose "cackling" at this young lady's unfortunate choice in panstwear still causes her pain. As you know, our goal is to bring you balanced coverage of the issues that matter, and it's in that spirit that we bring you this counterpoint:

As the noted intellectual Heidi Julavits once put it,

The news that Alex Kuczynski's being sued by a doctor she allegedly libeled in her Beauty Junkies tome brought forth this missive from a former New York Observer intern, who had the good fortune to be employed there at the same time as the Kucz. We say good fortune, because honestly, you can't get this kind of fashion advice from just anyone: