Photo via NYU

When Hugo Lindgren took over as editor-in-chief of The New York Times Magazine in 2010, publisher Arthur Sulzberger asked whether he was going to keep the magazine’s signature “On Language” column.

“I hope I’m not talking out of school here,” Mr. Lindgren said, recollecting the incident. But in fact, he was talking in a school. He was addressing the magazine program at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.

“Maybe in some way,” Mr. Lindgren hedged at the time.

“I think you should just dump it,” the publisher responded.

Mr. Lindgren told a roomful of journalism students about his adventures reinventing the Sunday insert. The journalism students mostly asked for pitching advice.

Meryl Gordon, the director of the magazine program, asked Mr. Lindgren about running a magazine that is included in the Sunday Times rather than sold separately on a newsstand.

Mr. Lindgren mentioned the recent Vanity Fair cover that featured Katie Holmes.

“It was just a write-around on stuff that’s been covered by the New York Post,” said Mr. Lindgren, who said he hasn’t read the story. Mr. Lindgren said he would have put Michael Lewis’ exclusive profile of Barack Obama (a story which made him “fueled with envy”) on the cover – but then again, that’s one of the luxuries of the Times Mag.

Another perk of the NYTM is that the magazine doesn’t have to respond to current events – the paper takes care of that.

Ms. Gordon mentioned John Jeremiah Sullivan’s popular 2011 piece about getting stoned at Disney World.

“I was shocked and amazed that we got to do that at the New York Times,” Mr. Lindgren said. Although he loved the idea when he first heard it, he had to check withstandards editor Phil Corbett.

Mr. Corbett responded with a casual “no problem.”

Ms. Gordon asked if the magazine’s younger staff writers mean “there is hope for these students.”

Kind of! Mr. Lindgren suggested pitching.

“Risk being a pest, especially if you want to be a journalist,” said Mr. Lindgren. “Follow up and appeal to an editor’s sense of guilt.”

The students wrote that down.

Hanna Rosin

“Last night we did a version of this where we walked down the aisle!” said Atlantic senior editor Hanna Rosin at the beginning of a debate last Wednesday at the Maritime Hotel, on occasion of the publication of her book, The End of Men. “It was like our wedding!”

She had just come onstage along with an unlikely interlocutor: her husband David Plotz, the editor of Slate. The couple were conducting a road show of sorts to debate whether or not the male gender was less nimble in the current economy, they appeared together in Washington the night before and were scheduled to appear on Today together on Thursday. The sell—woman declares male gender dead (or, at least, her book jacket does), and here’s her loving husband!—was irresistible, and the pair played it up at the Maritime reading. Mr. Plotz referred to himself, early in the evening, as “Mr. Rosin,” and instructed his debate partner, “You need to stay on mic, sweetie. Just hold it! It’s very simple.”

For her part, Ms. Rosin bristled good-naturedly at a tough question, saying “It’s weird! Because you’re my husband! And you’re Charlie Rose-ing me!”

Not every viewer was entranced, however. We noticed New York Times Magazine editor Hugo Lindgren, who excerpted The End of Men for a recent, characteristically splashy cover spread in his publication. The editor spent much of the speech whispering loudly to one male and one female friend.

“Do you like my boots?” Mr. Lindgren asked his male friend, pulling up the leg of his trousers to peacock.

“Yeah! Do you like mine?” asked his male friend, as Ms. Rosin spoke.

The debate was won by Ms. Rosin, but by then Mr. Lindgren was already gone.

A new Ethicist Twitter account (@nytethicist) has been formed, Longform founder Max Linsky quickly pointed out, and it follows two people: the Times mag and Mr. Lindgren. Its bio is quite revealing: "I write the Ethicist column for @NYTmag and also tweet as ‏@CKlosterman."

Which would make Chuck Klosterman, the author of Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, your new Ethicist. Look, they even drew his bearded silhouette already. According to Mr. Klosterman's Twitter, he'll be reading at Book Court tonight, if anyone has an ethical dilemma they'd like to try out on him.

This guy is adorkable! (NYTMag.com)

Hugo Lindgren, ethical feminist, entered Reddit's Ask Me Anything forum an hour ago to appeal to Reddit readers who have been on the fence about subscribing to The New York Times Magazine.

Of course, the questions soon turn to the important topics of the day: What Girls character did Mr. Lindgren most identify with?

23967230985723986: Are you a Hannah, Jessa, Marnie, or Shoshanna?
Also, this is more of a Times question, but do you have any good stories about David Brooks, Maureen Dowd, Douthat, Friedman, et al. that you'd be willing to dish on? David Carr?

Hugolindgren: I am consulting with my Girls experts, and they say: "Zero percent Shoshanna, zero percent Jessa. 60 percent Hanna because she is the archetypal writer & self reflective, but the rest Marnie because you don't let your self reflection paralyze you." I have no idea what any of that means because I am the designated non-Girls watcher on staff. Not for any good reason, except, you know, the Rangers.

Mr. Lindgren did not consult with his New York Times experts in order to answer the second half of that query. But yeah, Mr. Lindgren is  is totes a Hannah!

Unlike the short-lived “Last Month on the Internet” column, a sort of collage of found Internet gems, “They’re Famous!” takes Internet personae for its subject matter but otherwise sticks to the conventions of traditional journalism.

As far as Internet correspondents go, Ms. Dunn is practically embedded.

In October, an American Express business blog published an article called “How Gaby Dunn Self-Promoted Her Way to Internet Fame.”

Short answer? By writing a quality blog and having a funny Twitter.

Post-journalism school, flitting between the media gulags and stints on her brother’s couch, Ms. Dunn started a Tumblr called 100 Interviews. It had the self-imposed rules that she must interview 100 different kinds of people in person over the course of one year. Her subjects included a child prodigy, a present or former Guinness Book of World Records record holder, someone who was left at the alter and Stephen Colbert. Number 100, appropriately, was an Internet celebrity.

Some people noticed the blog, including The Village Voice, which named it the Tumblr of 2010, and Times Magazine culture editor Adam Sternbergh.

He wrote to say he was a reader, and Ms. Dunn remembered thinking, “What? Why? You’re a real person, though. You’re a real guy. What are you doing? You have much better things to do.”

Evidently not.

“And he asked if I wanted to get a drink, and we talked, and he said, ‘I want you to write stuff for us’ and I was like, ‘O.K., wow, yes.’”

“They're Famous!” will be edited by front-of-book editor Jon Kelly, she said.

In the first installment, Ms. Dunn profiled Mike O’Brien, host of a web talk show called “7 Minutes in Heaven.” His interviews with celebrities like Patricia Clarkson, Andy Samberg, Hoda Kotb and Elijah Wood take place in a closet and end with a kiss.

Ms. Dunn said that the biggest challenge so far is explaining the magnitude of her subject’s fame to people for whom YouTube hits do not unequivocally confer household name status.

“It’s an alternate universe,” Ms. Dunn said of the Internet. “There are people that are legitimately super famous.”

Like two of her favorite YouTubers: Charlie McDonell, a red-headed Brit who incites “Bieber-level” insanity, and Kingsley Russell, a skinny black college student who critiques pop culture while wearing a fur-lined hunter’s cap.

“His word is gold online,” Ms. Dunn said, “I don’t understand why he doesn’t have a TV show.”

It’s probably only a matter of time.

New York Times Magazine editor in chief Hugo Lindgren made waves with this week’s cover story, an 8,000-word foreign policy report about Gilad Shalit, the young Israeli soldier held captive in Palestine, for whom Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu traded 1,027 Palestinian prisoners.

But even more memorable was the cover.

“Hugo Lindgren comes in my office and says he wants 1,028 little illustrated people on our cover,” design director Arem Duplessis tweeted. “Here’s the end result.”

The 1,027 tiny Palestinians and sole tiny Israeli—hand drawn by Tim Enthoven—made quite an impression, earning the Society of Publication Designer’s biweekly best cover award.

“This labor-intensive approach not only looks cool, it conveys an important point,” Mr. Lindgren wrote on the Times Magazine blog, “That each prisoner is an individual with his or her own identity.” Indeed, many of the Palestinians returned in prisoner swaps end up as high ranking Hamas members who kill more Israelis, author Ronen Bergman pointed out.

The memorable cover isn’t the only sign of evolution at the Sunday crossword vehicle. Mr. Lindgren has added two new recurring pages. The first, “Who Made That?” is a weekly column of material histories (last week it treated spray paint; this week, the rubber duck), by Dana Rubinstein and Times designer Hillary Greenbaum.

More innovative is “The One Page Magazine,” a new front-of-book assemblage of paragraph-long “features” apparently intended to skewer typical magazine forms. Eric Spitznagel’s “What the Kids Are Doing These Days” gives trumped-up youth trends (beards, “vandwelling”) the three-sentence treatments they merit; Dave Itzkoff distills “The Big Profile” into a celebrity sound byte, and, in “That Should Be a Word,” Lizzie Skurnick offers tech-inflected neologisms, like “clogin: One who blocks an entrance or exit while checking a smartphone.” (Rest in peace, “On Language.”)

With its mini info-graphics, Twitter-length reviews and blogger bylines, “The One Page Magazine” is not unlike peering into one’s recently refreshed Google reader, and quite a bit like Edith Zimmerman’s experimental Times Magazine column, “This Month on the Internet.” That got put on indefinite hiatus, but Ms. Zimmerman still contributes to the magazine, this week in the “Riff” space (that’s the one printed on blue), with an astute piece about the Internet, and how it confronts its users with their waning cultural relevancy at younger and younger ages. (Ms. Zimmerman is 28.)

That piece too might have yielded a splashy cover, according to the 6th Floor blog.

“Now if we thought like the legendary magazine designer George Lois did, we might have asked Edith to pose in a very dramatic and uncomfortable way,” Mr. Lindgren wrote, referring to the famous Esquire cover “The New American Woman: Done at 21,” in which a nude pin-up is folded into a trash can.

Alas, readers had to settle for a thousand tiny Middle Eastern soldiers and, as a consolation prize, one of the sillier corrections in recent Times history.

“The Riff column on Page 54 this weekend, about age and cultural relevance, misstates the author’s age in 1998, when a toy with a McDonald’s meal made sounds her grandmother could not hear. It was 15, not 8 or 9.”

Write it off as premature memory loss, induced by the Internet.

In May, Mr. Sullivan published a review of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, and in June, he made a memorable debut* as a Times magazine contributor with “You Blow My Mind. Hey, Mickey!” about visiting Disneyland stoned. (He remains a GQ correspondent.)

Now that Mr. Sullivan’s first essay collection, Pulphead, has been received with near-universal adulation, Mr. Sullivan and Mr. Lovell made a brief return to the old neighborhood. On GQ.com, this month, they “rap” about the “making” of the “classic” Pulphead pieces, in a behind-the-curtain Q&A moderated by current GQ associate editor Daniel Riley.

“Most of the stories collected there, after all, were first published in GQ,” Mr. Riley wrote.

Mr. Sullivan praised editor Jim Nelson (absent from the rap session) for his open mind, liberal use of red pen, and generous invites to the magazine’s swank Men of the Year shindig.

“Jim was really cool to invite me and fly me out to L.A.,” Mr. Sullivan wrote, “you know, it was like he was throwing the writers some love.”

*Technically, this one was first.

Which New York Times section is responsible for this viral photo sensation, again?

In an era in which everyone’s becoming a critic, or at least a Yelper, one would think that fewer and fewer people would care what The New York Times says about a restaurant. Ruth Reichl said as much around the time it was announced that Frank Bruni was leaving the post.

“From the time of Craig Claiborne—who basically invented the genre—there has been a waning power among each Times restaurant critic,” she told The Observer.

But that didn’t stop Hugo Lindgren from getting much of the disempowered foodie gang together in this week’s Times Magazine. He enlisted former Times restaurant reviewers Sam Sifton, Mimi Sheraton and Ms. Reichl for the annual food issue, plus Amanda Hesser, who used to write Recipe Redux for the magazine. The package occasioned a specially designed web page.

“It’s not just about a restaurant,” Mr. Lindgren told Off the Record. “Food has cultural, political and policy implications for the whole world. It’s not contained to one human activity.”

Indeed, within the world of The Times, just the opposite is occurring: in the past decade, restaurant reviewing revealed itself to be one of the most opportune perches within the paper. Frank Bruni graduated to write for the Times Magazine and then took Frank Rich’s spot on the op-ed roster. Mr. Sifton will start as national editor later this month.

It’s probably true, as Ms. Reichl suggested, that a Times reviewer no longer makes or breaks a restaurant, but given food’s rising prominence within the national discourse (First Lady Hillary Clinton wrote a health care plan; First Lady Michelle Obama planted a vegetable garden), it may be more true that food coverage makes or breaks a newspaper. Any time the Minimalist Mark Bittman compiles a list (“101 Things to Grill”), it’s likely to top the Most Emailed charts for a week; Mr. Bittman was recently given a Sunday Review column.

“It hasn’t escaped the notice of anyone,” Times dining editor Pete Wells told Off the Record. “The list can be tricky to interpret, but in a crude measure it tells you people care about food stories.”

Mr. Wells agreed that the cultural significance of the restaurant reviewer has risen but said the trajectories of Mr. Sifton and Mr. Bruni are more likely reflections of their personal versatility.

Mr. Bruni’s reviews revealed his skills as a reporter, Mr. Wells explained. “He picked up on trends and noticed things about restaurants no one else did. Those reviews were great examples of criticism, but they were really well observed and reported.”

Mr. Sifton’s pop culture references reflected the democritization of fine dining.

“Sam’s reviews were loaded with super smart, plugged-in references to books, theater, TV, music and movies, and just a general sense of the common culture and the way that restaurants now belong to that culture,” Mr. Wells noted. (Although Mr. Sifton’s legacy may not be in food criticism, Off the Record believes his recent battle of the boroughs with his predecessor Ms. Sheraton will be a primary source in the history of Brooklyn-Manhattan culture wars.)

On the matter of who will become Mr. Sifton’s successor, Mr. Wells had no comment.

For those with money on the question, Mr. Wells, who may be a candidate, did say that invisibility is no longer a make-or-break job requirement. Mr. Bruni’s “unmasking” gave his memoir a boost of publicity, but having already promoted oneself in the occasional TimesCast or gratuitous Tumbling won’t disqualify any writers. Critical anonymity was instituted to replicate the treatment and experience of a normal diner, Mr. Wells explained, which is no longer the exclusive domain of The Times.

“If you want to know how a normal diner is treated, go to Yelp or other places and actually hear from them,” Mr. Wells suggested.

Breivick.

Two things tend to be givens in the modern-day 24-hour news cycle: One, that something sad and tragic will invariably happen; and two, that when something sad and tragic happens, someone with a large social media following will not hesitate to immediately crack an inappropriate joke about it. (Too soon? Never on Twitter!)

When Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s accuser, Sofitel maid Nafissatou Diallo, revealed her identity for the first time in Newsweek’s cover story, Esquire—ever the gentleman—took the opportunity to use the alleged rape as a jumping-off point for a service-y web post about oral sex. “As we’ve learned over the years ... a blow job need not be degrading or hurtful, for either party,” the magazine wrote in the article, which has since been deleted but which was teased on Twitter as “How to get a better blowjob than #DSK.”

Of course, that tactlessness pales in comparison to Glenn Beck’s reaction to the massacre in Norway last Friday, in which anti-Muslim right wing nationalist Anders Breivik set off a large bomb in Oslo and then went on a shooting spree at a Labor Party youth summer camp on a nearby island, killing in total at least 76 people (at last count). One would think that the guilty party in this scenario was obvious. And yet Mr. Beck, who regrettably still has time to pontificate on the radio between penning bestselling children’s books about itchy Christmas gifts, took to the airwaves Monday to compare the camp victims to Hitler youth. “I mean, who does a camp for kids that’s all about politics?” Mr. Beck asked. “Disturbing.” In related news, the Tampa Liberty School, a weeklong Tea Party day camp modeled after Mr. Beck’s very own 9/12 Project, recently finished its inaugural session.

Yet even more tragic than small children in Florida using hard candies to learn about the gold standard was the untimely death of Amy Winehouse at age 27, presumably from drug and alcohol abuse. Some fans cried; some—in a well-meaning but probably inappropriate vigil—left bottles of vodka and beer bearing hand-written messages outside of Ms. Winehouse’s north London home. Missouri congressman Bill Long, on the other hand, chose to use the singer’s death as a plea to resolve debt ceiling talks. “No one could reach #AmyWinehouse before it was too late. Can anyone reach Washington before it’s too late? Both addicted—same fate???” he tweeted on Monday, prompting international vitriol. (Esquire couldn’t resist an opportunity here, either. On Monday it published an appreciation of Ms. Winehouse’s ex, Blake Fielder-Civil, and his remarkable ability to remain stylish in the face of tragedy.)

Speaker John Boehner neglected to comment on the capitol’s sobriety, but did seem to drown his own sorrows in platitudes over the weekend, announcing to whoever would listen that President Barack Obama “wants a blank check” and “moved the goalpost.”

And speaking of goalposts, the NFL lockout is over, which means that football is back! Not that it ever really left, because we’re in the off-season. But still! It’s kind of like Bill Keller at The Times—even though he keeps on quitting, he never goes anywhere. Just four months after debuting as Hugo Lindgren’s controversial magazine columnist, Mr. Keller has announced that he will leapfrog over to the op-ed page in September, around the time that he cedes his executive editor desk to Jill Abramson. The difference between his old gig and his new one, presumably, will be that the op-ed rate of correction is somewhat more forgiving (Mr. Keller is currently averaging just over 41 percent, which WWD helpfully points out is about eight times worse than Jayson Blair).

Of course, even when good news seeps across the transom—just as raw sewage has been inconspicuously seeping out into the Hudson—someone tries to ruin it for everybody else. Case in point: one day after New York’s first legal gay marriages were performed at City Hall, a conservative group filed a suit against the New York state legislature, alleging that standard voting procedures were broken in order to pass the Marriage Equality Act. It’s unlikely to make an impact, but it’s distracting and destructive, serving as yet another reminder that sometimes, despite what the M.T.A. tells us, when we see something, we probably shouldn’t say anything at all.

Youth!

The New York Times Magazine's Sixth Floor blog posts, for reasons obscure, an aggregate list of each staffers' five favorite novels, with names redacted (perhaps the one instance in Times Magazine recent history of editors not wanting to attach their names to something). Who can it be who likes both The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, and the latest Jennifer Egan (besides "a Middle American Reader"?)

Hugo Lindgren, though, lets the cat out of the bag that he is the one contributor whose favorite novels include The Godfather by Mario Puzo, and his four other favorites thus are revealed as:

• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chabon
• The Thin Man, by Dashiell Hammett
• The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., by Robert Coover
• Bright Lights, Big City, by Jay McInerney

Did American Psycho feel too cliché?

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_