The latest from the front lines of the (totally trumped up) newsweekly war: The cover of next week’s TIME magazine is pretty classic. Straight out of the “Is God Dead?” school of design. Unfortunately, what’s inside is pretty familiar too. The cover story is about how Geisinger Health System offered writer Joe Klein a humane way to manage his parents’ end of life care. You know, the grueling, costly and emotional battle described by Amanda Bennett in this week’s Newsweek, and Michael Wolff  in last week’s New York. Read More

After nine years at the tabloid, Daily News assistant news editor Carrie Melago is hopping to the Wall Street Journal’s Greater New York Section. (Making her a competitor of husband Jonathan Lemire, a News political reporter!)

Two more Journal hires:

• Meenal Mistry is the Wall Street Journal‘s new fashion director; her predecessor Alexa Brazillian is becoming an editor-at-large. [WWD]
• James Grimaldi is joining its investigative team. He took a Washington Post buyout and sent his colleagues this weird poem. [Fishbowl DC]
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Have you seen Hugo Lindgren in those New York Times Magazine commercials on TaxiTV? We saw a really charming one a few weeks ago, advertising “The Money Issue.” The sound was off, but it looked like Mr. Lindgren was selling an Emmy statuette to a sketchy-looking guy outside The New York Times building on 8th Avenue. Read More

The New York Post attributed the very photogenic Memorial Day car crash on its cover—a red Mercedes crashed into a Long island home and clear out the back without hurting anyone—to “drunk” “Brooklyn hipster Sophia Anderson.” While the Observer generally agrees that hipsters are the most perfect scapegoat to emerge in the course of human history, we’re not sure Ms. Anderson qualifies simply because she’s 21 years old, white, and lives in Bushwick. Read More

New York’s young literary set suffered a tragic loss this weekend: Recent Yale alumna Marina Keegan, a former New Yorker intern who was due to move to Williamsburg and start working at the magazine as an editorial assistant on June 11, was killed in a car accident in Cape Cod late Saturday night. Keegan, who was 22, co-wrote The Independents, a folk musical slated for the New York Fringe Festival in August. Her boyfriend is in stable condition at the hospital. The Yale Daily News is now accepting “funny stories, lasting impressions, lessons from a woman gone so young” for publication. [New York Daily News] Read More

Philip Roth wrote in to The Atlantic to correct one line in Joseph O’Neill‘s “Roth v. Roth v. Roth,” which says Mr. Roth suffered a “crack-up” in his mid-50s. Actually he just had a nasty psychological reaction to a prescribed sedative.

From his very personal correction: “After knee surgery in March 1987, when I was 54, I was prescribed the sleeping pill Halcion, a sedative hypnotic in the benzodiazepine class of medications that can induce a debilitating cluster of adverse effects, sometimes called “Halcion madness.” At the time it was prescribed post-operatively for me by the orthopedic surgeon, Halcion had already been taken off the market in Holland, Germany, and elsewhere because of extreme psychological side effects leading even to suicide.

My own adverse reaction to Halcion, which corresponded to a clinically well-defined adverse reaction, one that has been exhaustively documented in the medical literature, started when I began taking the drug and resolved promptly when, with the helpful intervention of my family doctor, I stopped.” [ Read More

Harper’s Bazaar editor Glenda Bailey appeared on Amanda de Cadenet‘s talk show, The Conversation, recently. She declined to answer Ms. de Cadenet’s signature question (“What’s your favorite sex position?”), citing Britishness, but did reveal that her career trajectory has been a “fairy tale.”

Prepare to feel that singular blend of jealousy and guilt because, unfortunately, like many fairy tales, it begins with her losing both of her parents, her mother while she was still in college. A year out of college, she put her fashion career on hold to move home and take care of her father, who had fallen ill, up until his death. On a bus back to London she told her two best friends she was starting a magazine. She got off the bus, walked to a pay phone, called the head of IPC magazines’ luxury division (we suppose he was in the book), asked for a meeting, made a pitch, and was given the capital to launch British Marie Claire. She’s been an editor-in-chief ever since.

“I was always a great believer in starting at the top,” she said. “I really think that focusing on a career and working your way up is way way way overestimated.” [The Conversation] Read More