1. The Lindsay Lohan brouhaha was covered in last week’s “Comments,” but we did want to note that in the second wave, the story became the butt of late-night comedy—on February 23, Tina Fey led her “Weekend Update” segment on Saturday Night Live with a riff on Lohan as Marilyn Monroe (“The Last Sitting,” February 25). And a few nights later, Stephen Colbert remarked that Barack Obama had been “caught in an embarrassing scandal: He posed nude as Marilyn Monroe in New York Magazine.”
2. Not all the talk about our February 25 issue was about Lohan (just 99 percent of it). At the European fashion collections in Milan, the contretemps was over Amy Larocca’s profile of French Vogue editor Carine Roitfeld (“The Anti-Anna,” February 25), in which Roitfeld referred to her American counterpart, Anna Wintour, as “so iconic that she becomes like a puppet.” Questioned by Women’s Wear Daily about the story, Wintour replied, “Maybe you should ask Carine.” Roitfeld tried to distance herself from her quotes, claiming that she had been misunderstood by Larocca. “Maybe my English is not perfect,” she said. Meanwhile, the response to Chris Norris’s “Untitled Heath Ledger Project” (from the same issue) was notable for its lack of controversy. “Finally a coherent, diplomatic, unbiased and sane article on the life of Heath Ledger,” went one of dozens of such posts on nymag.com. Another lauded it as “a testament to what happens when we wait a little, reflect a little, let the dust settle.”
3. For all our old “Letters” loyalists, these are for you—a couple of missives, only slightly abridged. First, from Jane Edgell of Bridgeport, Connecticut, in response to Ariel Levy’s profile of k.d. lang (“Culture Pages: Return of the Ingénue,” February 25): Levy’s “laughter at the notion that k.d. doesn’t get that she is the ‘king of the bulldaggers’ left me to doubt that I had read the sentence correctly. I generally would prefer to learn more about the subject than the writer. K.d. can call herself butch if she wants, but for Levy to impose her categorizations based on k.d.’s haircut and clothing seems retrograde, not relevant, and without nuance in 2008. Apparently Ms. Levy has never been to the supermarket outside of the New York metro area, because if she had, she would see that by her own visually driven reasoning, a large portion of American women are bulldaggers.” Meanwhile, Gary Johnson of Minneapolis was offended by Will Leitch’s argument about steroids in baseball (“Intelligencer: Impotent ’Roid Rage,” February 25): “Leitch maintains ignoring this pox on fair competition is ‘an entirely healthy attitude.’ There are so many things wrong with this perspective, I can’t begin the litany. Perhaps Will’s colleagues at the magazine should check his ‘guns’; he sounds like he’s doing more than just drinking the Kool-Aid.”
4. Finally, we are pleased to note that our Website, nymag.com, won two Magazine Publishers of America Awards. The Daily Intelligencer was named Best Magazine Blog of the Year, and for the second year in a row, nymag.com was chosen as the Best Magazine Website of the Year (in the service/lifestyle category—not fully inclusive of what we do on the Web, but we’re not complaining). Congratulations to our Web colleagues, especially Chris Rovzar and Jessica Pressler, who write Daily Intelligencer.
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