“We were always looking in, you know, watching this party happen,” he told The Observer. “Really attractive people would go in and drunk people would stumble out, and we’d just be watching it,” he said, turning around and plopping down onto a plush, tan chair in front of his desk. He was dressed in crisp jeans and a white-and-blue-striped button-down shirt.

“It’s nice to finally be at the party,” he said.

Mr. Peres was referring to the party known as, well, the Internet, to which Condé Nast has arrived not-so-fashionably late.

Last week, Details launched its own Web site, finally breaking off from its former online home at men.style.com, which the men’s monthly shared with brother publication GQ. The change had been planned since July, when Condé Nast Digital president Sarah Chubb announced that the men.style.com “destination site” would change into GQ.com. The company hopes that two separate Web sites might entice more high-end advertisers that are familiar with the print titles.

Men.style.com had been overseen by Condé Nast Digital, and magazine editors and writers were given strict publishing schedules for the site’s content. Staffers were only allowed to send new magazine content twice a month and were restricted to a certain number of photo slide shows, quizzes and additional features. There were no daily blogs, sparse commenting features and mostly faulty search functions. Worse, article URLs had mucky Web addresses, with a men.style.com slapped on them, which confused readers and bruised writers’ egos.

“It was a nice little science project we rigged up,” said Michael Hainey, GQ’s deputy editor, referring to his magazine’s former online home. He was in a conference room with GQ’s in-house multimedia editor, Andy Comer, and assistant Web editor, Andrew Richdale, who together run the just-launched GQ Web site. Mr. Hainey, in a camel-colored corduroy jacket and tailored jeans, offered a tour of GQ.com on a giant screen, pointing out two new blogs, online forums, how-to videos, podcasts and GQ’s City Guide feature with a grease pencil. He describes the new site to GQ staffers in a language they understand. “I call it a Mini Cooper: it’s nimble, it’s fast, it looks great,” he told The Observer.

“This is where a man begins—he searches for his life here,” he said.

But touting a Web site where writers can blog (wow!) and readers can comment back (gee whiz!) seems a little silly in 2009. Sure, both sites are gorgeous, with simple design and lots of potential, but the joke among Details staffers is that, even now that they finally have a functioning Web site, “it’s very 1999.” Mr. Hainey, for his part, figured GQ was slightly more advanced. “We’re very 2002 right now,” he told The Observer. 

Well here’s something a little more exciting: Last week, GQ also announced that the magazine will have a new iPhone app, available for $2.99 per issue, debuting with their crown jewel: the December “Men of the Year” edition. They expect it to be available in the iPhone app store the day the print publication hits newsstands, Nov. 18. (Though, with that price tag, why one wouldn’t just cough up two more dollars for the print edition and all its shiny photos is a bit of a mystery.)

Elsewhere at the Condé Nast Digital revolution: Wired is working with Adobe to get content on mobile screens besides the iPhone; The New Yorker is the most subscribed-to magazine on the Kindle; and Concierge.com (the online home of Traveler) just yesterday announced a new app that will allow users to turn vacation photographs into emailable postcards. Condé Nast Digital senior product manager Chris Gonzalez told The Observer that “tons of other apps” are in the works. “Every publication is asking, ‘When can you make one for my magazine?’” he said.

DESPITE THE SUCCESSES of sites like Wired.com and recipe resource Epicurious.com, Condé Nast has often been accused of forgoing quality Web sites to save glossy print titles. Fearing that the Internet would “cannibalize” print sales, Condé Nast built sites for most magazines that seemed more like teasers than destinations—they existed online simply so that readers might be enticed to click on the “subscribe” button to get the all the good print stuff. 

But in the post-McKinsey age, some Condé Nast executives are eager to mark the launches of Details.com and GQ.com as a glittering new beginning for the company, where attempting to make money off the Web will (finally) get its due focus in 2010.

Condé Nast Digital’s newly named publisher, Josh Stinchcomb, who was formerly in charge of ad sales as executive director of Condé Nast Digital Business Group, said more mobile apps, e-commerce and premium paid subscription models (like the one already adopted by Condé Nast Digital’s niche technology site Ars Technica) are on the way. He also said that along with a Golf Digest Web re-launch in January, two new Condé Nast sites will debut during the first half of the year. “There’s no reason for us to not experiment, and we’ll find the right approach,” he said.

Mr. Peres, for his part, is getting his Web legs by leaning on Paul Katz, Details.com’s new Web editor. “It’s actually really hard; I’m a magazine guy, we’re print people,” he admitted. “I have to learn a new language. I have to learn to say things in a smaller space, I have to say things on a daily basis, not a monthly basis. That’s why it’s good to bring on guys like Paul, who are Web-fluent. I’m more like a Web illegal.”

greagan@observer.com

“We were always looking in, you know, watching this party happen,” he told The Observer. “Really attractive people would go in and drunk people would stumble out, and we’d just...

Sadly, the article was released too prematurely (tee-hee) to include this month's poster boy for self-love, David Duchovny.

But you probably already know about the perils of using internet porn if you read David Amsden's October 13, 2003 story in New York Magazine. Or Naomi Wolf's essay accompanying that piece. Or Amy Sohn's column from the same magazine from May 21, 2005. Or Pamela Paul's 2005 book, Pornified: How Pornography Is Damaging Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families. Or Ms. Sohn's September 11, 2005 review of Ms. Paul's book, in which she dismissed its thesis despite having written about it a few months before.

Not a reader? Maybe you saw Rita Cosby's MSNBC report from March 3, 2006. Or CBS News' 'Eye on Technology' segment from May 1, 2007. Or Good Morning America's Pornography Threatens a Marriage from June 5, 2007. Or Fox News' 8 Signs Your Partner is Addicted to Porn from June 9, 2008.

Of course, that's not to mention the classics from The Holy Bible to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Medical Arts Productions to Philip Roth, Jerry Seinfeld to There's Something About Mary to American Pie, and David Denby, and countless others who have known for centuries that men sometimes masturbate.

This has to be good news for the editors of Details, whose September cover features the continually inexplicably famous actor with the headline "Shia LaBeouf Just Can't Get Laid." If Mr. LaBeouf turns out to be innocent of the charges against him, he may just break the magazine's developing curse on its coverboys.

Christian Bale appeared on the June 2008 cover of the magazine and found himself arrested after being accused of assaulting his mother in London. (Subsequent reports say that no such assault took place, but the actor and his reps are asking for privacy.)

In September 2007, Jonathan Rhys Meyers was featured on the magazine's cover ("Jonathan Rhys Meyers Wants to Rule Hollywood"). In November of 2007, he was arrested in Dublin for public drunkenness. (Save your jokes, please.)

Thankfully, when Mr. LaBeouf is fully exonerated, this imaginary curse will be no more. That means Hayden Christensen can breathe a little easier. Now, can someone explain why Shia LaBeouf is famous?

First out of the gate is Esquire, which features Stephen Colbert on its August cover in a re-creation of the magazine's iconic April 1968 image of Muhammad Ali as St. Sebastian. Inside, Mr. Colbert—or his writing staff—offers a humorous take on America's most beleaguered minority: white men.

Then there's GQ's Comedy Issue, which places endomorphic comic phenom Seth Rogen on the cover and teases a package including Jack Black, Sarah Silverman, Kal Penn, Flight of the Conchords, Tina Fey, David Sedaris, Ricky Gervais, Seth Meyers, Chris Rock and Don Rickles. (Mr. Rogen is not unknown to the pages of GQ.)

Not to be outdone by its corporate brother, Men's Vogue has Ben Stiller as its cover boy this month. And, no, he does not do "Blue Steel," "Ferarri," or "Le Tigra." (Besides, they're all the same face. Doesn't anybody notice this?)

Funniest of all, though, is Details, which put James McAvoy out front with the hilarious cover line "James McAvoy Made Out With Angelina Jolie and You Didn't." (Get it?) Actually, the story on E!'s Joel McHale rounds out the comedy trend quite humorously.

Just when we weren’t looking, Details got all straight-acting on us. Surely editor-in-chief Dan Peres hasn’t exhausted Hollywood’s bottomless supply of fresh-faced actors. Or maybe he has.

On the cover of the book’s latest issue, which touts a “Power and Influence” theme, Britney Spears’ ex, Kevin Federline, isn’t photographed count-the-pores close or even slightly naked (perhaps in spite of the fact that he was shot by Steven Klein.) In fact, with K-Fed’s crossed, tattooed forearms and his what-up-dude glance, he looks nothing at all like his twinkishly-styled predecessors. (Ashton…Rhys Meyers…Beckham…Radcliffe…Anyone?) What’s more, the cagey lad-mag has gone and ranked him No. 7 on their list of 50 “power players.” Huh. The 29-year-old father of Ms. Spears’ two sons, Sean and Jayden, doesn’t give any good goss about the pop singer he once loved, but he doesn’t exactly leave readers crying ‘Gimme more,’ either. Mr. Federline does admit, however, that he can’t decide which animated character he likes more—SpongeBob SquarePants or Nemo (as in the fish one looks for).

Talking to US, Mr. Peres says, “Here is the person who people think of as this universal joke, who has oddly emerged as father of the year…The kids would go running to him and were very warm and very well behaved.”

In the letters section of the magazine’s December issue that hit newsstands Tuesday, Mr. Peres wrote in an editor’s note: “Our November issue’s cover interview with Ben Affleck quoted him as saying, ‘I’ve gone out and directed a movie and made it really fucking good,’ about his movie Gone Baby Gone. Affleck never made such a statement.”

The story was written by freelancer Bart Blasengame. But when a Details spokeswoman, Lisa Dallos, was asked whether Mr. Blasengame made the quote up, she told The Observer, “The comments were taken out of context. There was absolutely nothing that was fabricated.”

Those two statements appear to be at odds with each other: On the one hand, Mr. Affleck “never made such a statement,” and on the other hand nothing in the story was fabricated and the quote was taken out of context.

But Mr. Peres did not make a distinction between the two when The Observer tried to follow up, releasing this statement through a Condé Nast spokeswoman: “I stand by the correction that I published, and I stand by the statements made on behalf of me and Details.”

When asked to make sense of the contradiction—how, The Observer asked, could Mr. Peres stand by both the original correction and the subsequent statement that denied any fabrication?—the spokeswoman would not comment.

Shawn Sachs, a publicist for Ben Affleck, was more definitive. “Ben didn’t say that [quote],” Mr. Sachs told The Observer. “It’s completely made up. In having to pick a side, I pick Dan Peres and the magazine over what their spokesperson is trying to spin.”

When informed of Mr. Peres’ statement, Mr Sachs e-mailed: “The magazine apology said ‘Never made such a statement.’ … The Details publicist said ‘Taken out of context.’ … They sure don’t sound like the same thing.”

Mr. Peres, as of press time on Tuesday, continued to defend both statements.

The New York Post first reported the news of the correction on Tuesday, and quoted a spokesman for Details saying that Mr. Peres and Mr. Affleck are “good friends.”

When asked if Details would run a correction on their correction, the spokesperson wouldn’t comment. Mr. Blasengame did not return a message seeking comment.

Dan Peres, the editor-in-chief of Details magazine, wrote in an editor's note in the letters section in the December issue: "Our November issue's cover interview with Ben Affleck quoted him as saying, 'I've gone out and directed a movie and made it really fucking good,' about his movie Gone Baby Gone. Affleck never made such a statement."

But according to a spokeswoman for Details, the quote in the story—written by freelancer Bart Blasengame—was actually accurate. "The comments were taken out of context," said Lisa Dallos, a spokeswoman for Details. "There was absolutely nothing that was fabricated."

In that case, it would be Mr. Peres who was inaccurate.

An assistant for Mr. Peres said he was in meetings all day Tuesday. Ms. Dallos said he was not available for comment. The New York Post reported the news first on Tuesday and quoted a spokesman for Details saying that Mr. Peres and Mr. Affleck are "good friends."

When asked if Details would run a correction of their correction, the spokesperson wouldn't comment. Mr. Blasengame did not yet return a message seeking comment.

A newly-mustachioed Jonathan Rhys Meyers—in tight white jeans, no less—will grace the cover of Details’ December issue. With Mr. Meyer’s fury, burly mug on the front, questions about the sexual orientation of Dan Peres’ lad-mag-in-loafers can stop! Right?

Inside the issue, the Match Point actor adds flame to the fire by coming clean about his acting skills, telling the monthly:

“You know why I stay out of the limelight? I always think there will be that time that people will find out that I’m crap at what I do. I think they will figure out I’m crap. Doesn’t everybody have that feeling?”

Jonathan Rhys Meyers Speaks The Truth [D Listed]