A thorough, deliberate hatchet job is a thing of beauty and a joy forever. It is for this reason no one could remove their eyes from Pete Well's review of Guy's American Kitchen & Bar last month; it is for this reason that Adam Mars-Jones was given an award by newly-minted Hatchet Job of the Year for dismantling Michael Cunningham's (of "The Hours? They should call this thing The Weeks!" fame) new book, By Nightfall, earlier this year.

A New Yorker journalist is calling around for a story on the "Real Arianna Huffington," the Post reported. The scribe is supposedly asking about the allegedly ballooning value of the Huffington Post, recently pegged at $200 million, and about whether publisher Huffington is a "cutthroat boss." Perhaps the New Yorker writer — former New York Post man Ken Auletta? — should ring up HuffPo senior editor Rachel Sklar, who just last night aired news that Huffington spiked her story about MSNBC because she wants to tightly control how politics is discussed on her site. From Sklar's message on Jim Romenesko's Poynter.org forum:

Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni really really really really didn't like Harry Cipriani, the mainstay of the Cipriani restaurant empire. He gave it no stars and used words like "robbery," "generic," and "confused" in his review. He also used phrases like "sexual harrassment" "highway robbery" and "bizarre mix of indulgence and deprivation." We're only disappointed that perverse and often baffling" didn't make the cut. [NYT]