The guys from Spy - the first magazine to ever be funny! - showed up on Today for a celebration of satire. It's a fairly dry interview, but we did love learning that the idea of one thing looking like another thing was invented at the Algonquin, and were particularly impressed by Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter (current cover subject: Brad Pitt) inveighing against "crazy celebrity culture." There's also a nice moment at the end of the bit that a cantankerous observer might view as evidence that Carter cannot get away from Kurt Andersen quickly enough.

The Times does another "covering Spy in the style of Spy" pieces today, with a "charticle" chronicling where the magazine's staffers have dispersed to. Is it us, or is this one just kind of mean?

• Will Kristine Johnson replace Roz Abrams as weekday anchor on WCBS News? Yeah, us either. [NYDN]

It's another "how great was Spy" piece, this time from The Observer (Graydon Carter's subsequent gig):

• David Carr likes Rachael Ray, man-hands and all. [NYT]
• Kurt Andersen can handle Gawker's spitballs. It's Thelma & Louise metaphors that give him trouble. [NYM]
• AdAge names Vogue Editor Anna Wintour Magazine Editor of the Year. It describes Wintour (Editor of Vogue) as "more Horace Greeley than Coco Chanel." We can't wait for the Vogue Editor's presidential run. If you can't get enough Anna Wintour, there's also video and photos of the Vogue Editor. [AdAge]
• If you like Wallpaper you'll love Monocle, the new title from Tyler Br l . We could actually care less about either, we just like typing Tyler Br l . It's a pretty perfect name. Try it yourself: Tyler Br l , Tyler Br l , Tyler Br l . Fun, right?[WWD]
• Hearst almost as cheap as New York. [Radar]
• If you go on Charlie Rose's show, he will totally take you out to dinner. [NYT]
• "We're looking for soulless people with a passion for writing and a willingness to report on the latest celebrity muckity muck." We swear to God, we did not place this ad. [Craigslist]

Over at Very Short List they're pimping out VSL co-founder Kurt Andersen's Spy: The Funny Years. (It's okay, though, they do it under the rubric of "Logrolling in our time," which is so, like, meta!) There's a sneak preview of the book, offering about five pages of vintage Spy, (The Greatest Magazine Ever! The first mag to use funny charts! And be snarky! Or notice that this thing looks like that other thing!) including graphs, the feature you see above, and a mean letter from Donald Trump. Gah. Either years of non-stop ironic detachment have somehow withered our sense of humor or people had way lower standards in the eighties. But whatever, we'll still buy it. Probably a few things left to rip off.

The more thoroughly some set of facts reinforces the relevant preconceptions, caricatures, clich s, and conventional wisdom, the easier it makes life for everyone, journalists as well as their audiences. Most people want to be told what they already know. And in a world of murky moral grays, who doesn't sometimes relish a black-and- white tale, with villains to loathe, victims to pity, injustice to condemn? Thus the enthralling power of the Duke lacrosse-team story when it broke last spring.

• Maggie Gyllenhaaaaaal and Peter Sarsgaaaaard buy a $1.75 million townhouse in Park Slope, crushing the dreams of one silly civilian who'd been dying for a shot at the property. Alas, famous people always win. [NYO]
• Blogging for Rolling Stone requires biting one's tongue, even if it's on the matter of Fergie's prune face. [Idolator]
• A new Page Six writer learns that freebies really don't fly, especially when you gloat about your trappings in a mass email sent to half the city. [Radar]
• Our socialist brother taunts Edelman PR. [Consumerist]
• If you're excited about the Spy book, you'll likely enjoy Radar's homage to how it came to be. One thought: poor Kurt Andersen. [Radar]

• Rupert Murdoch and Sumner Redstone: Old and in charge. [LAT]
• Media readership falling? (Yes.) Maybe we should change the way it's measured. [Guardian]
• Social networking: The next big thing for parents. And dogs. [NYT]
• Memo to the NYT: When a guy's your go-to quote pretty much every time a new magazine launches, you might want to learn how to spell his name correctly. [Seth Mnookin]

We just received the first "edition" of Very Short List, IAC head Barry Diller's newest attempt to console himself over losing out on the purchase of Daily Candy. (Not even the CollegeHumor deal cushions that sting.) VSL, still in double-super-secret test format, is in fact a Daily Candy for the "smart set," specifically the smart set that doesn't have time to, you know, read reviews to figure out what book or movie they need to pretend to have seen or read. Among its contributors VSL includes "godfather of snark" Kurt Andersen, which makes sense when you consider that the newsletter is under the supervision launch-editorial consultancy of Simon Dumenco, whom Andersen still owes big time for that whole Bennetton magazine thing. The e-mail itself is fairly concise, if unexciting; this project might work. But what about those of us who are too busy to even read e-mail? Maybe at the end of the month they can take all the stuff they've recommended, stick it in a box, and mail it out. Someone would pay money for that, right?

• Sulzbergers buying up NYT stock. Insert your own "at least someone's buying The Times" joke here. [Boston Herald]
• Is Portfolio the new Inside.com? Probably not, but it gives us the excuse to mention that Kurt Andersen quote about how getting funding for Inside was as easy "as getting laid in 1969" again. Ha ha, what a douchebag. [Hard, Cutting]
• After last week's piece on Wikipedia, The New Yorker turns once again to the Internet, looking this time at citizen journalists or some such. We liked it better when The New Yorker's web coverage was mainly just Rebecca Mead writing about Meg Hourihan. [NYer]

• So it really looks like De Niro and pals will buy the Observer. And Kurt Andersen — like Peter Kaplan — is just thrilled about it. [NYM]
• Michael Eisner pisses off Pat Robertson by having the rightwing preacher on his CNBC show, challenges him on gay rights, whether Jews can get into heaven, and whether it was in fact a good idea to have advocated the assassination of Hugo Chavez. For the first time perhaps ever, we're kind of liking Eisner right now. [NYP]
• NBC honcho Jeff Zucker says he's not worried about Today without Katie, or about Brian Williams competing with her. He also says he's thrilled with NBC's primetime performance, positive the stock market is going up up up, and confident that the Iraq insurgency is in its last throes. [USAT]

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Mediaweek reports that today's the day over at Time: "[M]anaging editor Jim Kelly dropped a big hint to staffers that they should be around for a 'pour' later today, according to Time insiders." Speculation over Kelly's replacement continues (Kurt Andersen finally gets his name mentioned by someone who isn't related to him!), but "the in-house favorite appears to be Priscilla Painton, who is a co-executive editor." Painton would be the first female managing editor of a newsweekly, which makes a lot of sense: You don't hand the important positions to the broads until they're not worth having any more. Seriously, apart from speculating about Time, does anyone spend any time actually, you know, reading it?

A tipster writes:

• Details missed its rate base on eight of 10 issues in 2005. Fun. [Ad Age]
• Martha Stewart launches Blueprint today in a bid to reach younger readers. There should probably be a joke about Alexis here, but we can't think of one. [NYP]
• Daily Candy remains for sale. [NYM]
• Punch Sulzberger has allegedly said that he'll read the Times on the computer when he can take a computer into the bathroom with him. Now, apparently, he can. [NYT]
• Kurt Andersen thinks we're in a tech bubble again. How does he know? Because Michael Wolff wants in. [NYM]
• Simon Dumenco answers the questions you didn't ask, including whether he has a clothing line and what his jingle sounds like. [Ad Age]
• Existentially speaking, who is Brian Williams? [MW]
• NYT M.E. Jill Abramson's grandfather could have invested early in Paramount Pictures but didn't. [NYSun]

• Hurrah: Mag ad revenues were nicely up in 2005. [Folio:]
• Boo: Mag ad pages barely rose in 2005. [Ad Age]
• Kurt Andersen is the godfather of snark, says Jon Friedman. And we fear for the day — and that day may never come — when Kurt calls upon us to do a service for him. [MW]
• Robin Williams made an ass of himself at Jann Wenner's big birthday bash. [WWD]
• TW COO Jeff Bewkes agrees with his boss, that the company shouldn't be split up, rather than with Carl Icahn, who thinks otherwise and is harassing his boss. Shocking news, that. [MW]

Kurt Andersen on NBC President Jeff Zucker last week:

You know why Kurt Andersen is an in-demand cultural critic and you aren't? Because of the brilliant, against-the-grain thinking he demonstrates in columns like this one, a biting attack on "intelligent design."

In the latest, extra beautiful issue of New York mag, media-whore-cum-foodie Kurt Andersen comes forward to point out that, in light of the subway bag checks, it's remarkably unwise to ignore the obvious racial profile of would-be terrorists. We're not gonna touch that one with a 10-mile pole, but we did enjoy learning about the alternate philosophies behind the NYPD's anti-terror tactics: