When you hear the name "Leven Rambin," you think of so many things. You might think about how Leven was styled by Kristian Laliberte! Or about how she is the 'adopted little sister' of Julia Allison! And then there's her career as an award-nominated soap opera actress! Well, you'll have to add yet another achievement to that litany: Leven has been selected to be the new face and spokeswoman for Caressa jewelry. It's about time. She shared the happy news in a mass email to her friends and fans.

Julia Allison is brand-new on the job as Time Out's dating columnist, but being a maverick thinker, she's already working to disassemble the entire dating machine from within. She says ladies don't actually want you to take them out for fancy dinners! No, your date would prefer "a walk in the park, Rollerblading, trapeze class" and "if you really want to stand out, buy her shoes." And Julia isn't the only person who feels this way!

"Please join me and my adopted little sister Lev for her 17th birthday at Tenjune this Tuesday night!," TONY dating columnist Julia Allison wrote in an email to some of her closest pals in the wee small hours of this morning. The lucky people invited to soap actress Leven Rambin's birthday bash may not be her contemporaries in age, but they often do act like teenagers. The full list includes some mighty strange bedfellows!

"I found The Sex Diaries thoroughly entertaining, but I was disappointed by your omission of a critical Manhattan dweller: the college student," writes Lena Chen to, and in, New York mag. "My friends and I were inspired to take a page from your book and start weeklong diaries of our own. After seven days of awkward dates, booty texts, and drunken hookups, we came to a conclusion: Harvard students are getting more play than New Yorkers." Well, sure, we'll buy that. What's a more powerful aphrodisiac than not having gotten any in high school? But Lena neglects to mention a crucial detail in her letter: she writes Sex and the Ivy, a sex blog full of insights like "Is it any wonder that of the guys I have hooked up with, the overwhelming majority are from this year's graduating class? It's not as if two-year's difference means terribly much but the difference, however minute, is enough." What's the real purpose of the letter, then? Perhaps Lena, though she's only a sophomore, is already spreading the word about where she'll be spreading her postgrad legs. Watch your back, Julia Allison!

• Candy Spelling wrote an open letter to Paris Hilton about how to turn her life around. Later, Patty Hearst seconded her sentiments. [TMZ]
  

We were sad when Julia Allison parted ways with AM New York. How would we keep tabs on Julia now, besides her blog and the HuffPo and Red Eye and this website and her incessant IMs? Luckily, another fine publication has stepped in where that free newspaper left off. Time Out New York, the self-styled "arts and entertainment bible," has hired Julia to be its new dating columnist. "Dating in New York is an inexhaustible fount of amusement, insanity, and confusion," says Julia in the press release announcing her new position. Yes, dating in New York and Julia Allison: inexhaustible founts both. The full release is after the jump. Read it for the part where TONY's EIC describes Julia as "renowned in her field."

As you surely know, Time columnist and ex-Wonkette Ana (pronounced AH-na, by the way) Marie Cox exchanged choice words with "contributor to virtually every significant national publication in the US and many in Europe" Eric Alterman on the weekend of the White House Correspondents' dinner. Present and accounted for were two Observer reporters, one of whom actually reported on the conversation. Bitchiness ensued. Soon, Cox's husband, CQ editor Chris Lehmann, stepped in to defend his woman's honor; along the way, a new term, GawkerGate was coined. Now enjoy this video version of the transcript and its accompanying blog ephemera, starring Julia Allison as Eric Alterman, Catie Lazarus as Ana Marie Cox, and our own Joshua David Stein as Chris Lehmann. Shot and edited by the indefatigable Richard Blakeley.

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.

While the rest of us are drinking and snoozing, the television is trying to transmit important information into our homes. Today, our special correspondent for T.V. punditry catches us up on the week in chat shows. Because we totally wouldn't watch that shit if you paid us. Get your tinfoil hats on!

"The Official Intelligence-Pulchritude Fairness Equation usually works like this: you either get beauty, or you get brains. You don't get both," reads the intro to Julia Allison's interview with author Robin Hazelwood, whose Model Student: A Tale of Co-Eds and Cover Girls detailed her experience as a Yale student and fashion model. Yes, yes. Like rain on your wedding day. Anyway, Hazelwood was less than thrilled with the way the interview came out, and even less thrilled with the professionalism Julia displayed while conducting it.

In our unbridled pursuit of fame and of the validation of the establishment, we do a lot of things of which we are not particularly proud. Things like appearing on Fox's 2 a.m. shit-show "Red Eye," attending panels where Graydon Carter is a featured speaker, being in the same neighborhood as Julia Allison, walking by the Beatrice Inn, that sort of thing. As we watched the Don Imus drama unfold this week, though, we decided that there must be limits, even for us. No matter how desperate or attention-starved we may be, there is no excuse for condoning racism and sexism. All that is necessary for evil to succeed is for good men to do very little, or something like that. Now we must take a stand: We will never make a guest appearance on Mr. Imus' television show or his radio program. Pardon our brief sincerity, but we feel that strongly about this issue, and thought now would be exactly the right time to make this pledge.

The author needed to meet some very important person from the world of publishing, and his tightly-wound editor let him know it by waving frantically and then physically dragging him over to the corner of the bar. Dana Vachon had been born wealthy and healthy and handsome and he was right to view himself as entirely blessed, especially considering that his first novel, Mergers & Acquisitions had already gone to a second printing that very day. No one wore costumes on the night of his book party at Felix, that Eurotrash magnet on West Broadway, but there was no need for costumes to have a masque ball. Everyone knew their role and played it.

• In his memoir, former Time Inc. EIC Norman Pearlstine paints NYT honcho Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., as a lightweight for that whole "not caving to federal prosecutors like Time did" thing. [NYP]
  

Good news for folks who want to relax while they're coming down from the meth rush and have exhausted all other opportunities. A judge has denied Tribune's request for a preliminary injunction against "Red Eye with Greg Gutfeld," the 2 a.m. Fox News chat show where anyone can be a guest. (Seriously, just e-mail Gutfeld, he's totally up for it.) Tribune claims that the show's title is too close to the free tabloid the company distributes in Chicago, but a U.S. District judge dismissed the claim, noting that while the newspaper is written for mouth-breathers, the television program is aimed at imbeciles, and the groups are unlikely to confuse the two. However, the issue will still go to trial in August. Memo to Greg: Don't go tossing those "Let's Get Stalky With Rachel Marsden" title cards just yet. Also, my super wants me to tell you that he can't tape on Thursday, but any other night next week is fine.

It wasn't just Henry the Intern looking foxy at Arianna Huffington's party on Friday night. Men's Vogue fella Hud Morgan was there, too, in a blue blazer, a french cuffed gingham shirt, Nantucket red trousers and a pair of velvet monogrammed slippers. (Sockless, of course.) Mr. Morgan said the shoes "had soles that cost more than your entire closet" but later recanted, because of course he got them for free. (And: was this a "Kennedy clambake in Hyannisport"? one attendee wondered. We just wonder if he can't mate up with similarly-fashioned Dana Vachon. Think of the mix-and-match outfits they could create! It's like preppy Grranimals.) In any event, Mr. Morgan, for some reason, decided to steal former AM NY dating columnist Julia Allison's cellphone.

Because she is SCREAMING ABOUT IT on her cellular telephone in our office for no apparent reason. Why? Who let her in here? That is all. Anyway best of luck to our favorite Men's Health editor with his future romances. Oh wait—now apparently she is getting a parking ticket? From a lady cop. Ha! She's not going to sweet-talk her way out of that one.

Julia Allison, our generation's very own brain-damaged Bradshaw, and free newspaper AM New York have mutually decided to end their relationship. We're sensing this won't be the kind of breakup where sometimes the former couple unites for intense hatefucks and crying: "We've enjoyed working with Julia for the past year and a half. We wish her all the best in her career," is all AM New York wanted to say when we asked whether Julia had been fired. We're guessing that maybe the blog post where Julia called AM on its lack of "journalistic integrity" might have had something to do with the split. But Julia's not looking back: "There's other shit I want to do, most of which involves marrying rich, but I've wanted to leave AM for a while now, and I was really passive aggressive in the last few weeks ... oh yeah, baby, it's all downhill from here. ;) i do hope i can stick with tv. writing is far too much effort ;)" she volunteered to us via (obvs) instant messenger. We have nothing to add.

We know how yesterday's Pinup Gallery got you all hot and bothered. Wouldn't it be great if there were some kind of "making of" video to give you a peek behind the scenes? Guess what, there is! Thanks to the special videographic talents of Nick McGlynn and some fine editing work from Richard Blakeley, you can actually hear what Julia and Brooke sound like. Although we can imagine how that might be a turnoff.

Julia Allison. Brooke Parkhurst. As authors, diarists, fashion darlings and long-time spiritual counselors, they each serve as the Edith Wharton, the Judith Martin, the May Sarton and possibly even the Virginia Woolf of our time. But these ladies already have a room of their own. It's a very sexy, sexy room. And when we think of them, we think of all the feminist heroes that have gone—and gone down—before them.