Inside, her crystal collection sat on a shelf above a bin of bras. A couple of stuffed animals, inspirational sayings and books with titles like Use Your Body to Heal Your Mind decorated the room. A file cabinet served as a combination bedside and dining room table next to a double bed with a plush green velvet headboard.

“See, this is what happens when I try to clean up,” said the Amazonian blond writer famous for revealing things that most people wouldn’t confess to their best friends.

That Ms. Stadtmiller would try to hide anything at all might surprise readers of her work on xoJane, Jane Pratt’s confessional website, where she has written about “hate-masturbating” to Paul Ryan and recording herself masturbating in the News Corp. bathroom for a potential suitor, and where she has crowd-sourced her search for both a gigolo and a fantasy to act out with him.

This past February, Ms. Stadtmiller and her colleagues detected a foul odor in the office, “forcing us to root around to try to find the dead mouse or rotting corpse that might lie somewhere buried,” she explained. It turned out that the pungent odor was the result of a tampon that had been trapped inside the author for a month. Naturally, Ms. Stadtmiller wrote a post about the incident. Actually, two.

While she is hardly alone in her TMI tendencies, Ms. Stadtmiller has become a master of the medium during her tenure at xoJane, where she is tasked with writing a daily personal essay—no easy feat. Her boundless ability to plumb her personal humiliations for blog posts raises the question: what could possibly come next? Where does a writer who has confessed to stinking up the office with a rancid tampon find the next degradation to exploit?

“Her writing makes me cringe, because I don’t get the sense that she’s capable of editing herself or being at all self-aware,” said a prominent female blogger. “It’s addictive to read, but in the same way that it’s addictive to watch Celebrity Rehab or the Real Housewives.”

Ms. Stadtmiller embodies an exhibitionistic media moment in which writers, particularly women, often find that they get more attention when they traffic in self-revelation rather than straight reporting. What was once a central tenet of the women’s movement has morphed into a no-holds-barred culture where nothing is off limits and everything is archived on the Internet.

The art of the transgressive disclosure, as seen in Erica Jong’s zipless fuck, Joyce Maynard’s J.D. Salinger affair, Amy Sohn’s blow-up boyfriend and even Lena Dunham’s Tiny Furniture, has its roots in the consciousness-raising groups of the 1970s, in which simply talking about sexuality and gender roles was an act of liberation. But is all silence meant to be broken?

“The most interesting stuff that I do is when I come from my own honest, authentic voice rather than through the zombie magazine filter that a lot of copy gets put through,” Ms. Stadtmiller said. “That’s why Girls is successful. It’s not impossible wish fulfillment, it’s flawed and messy and embarrassing.”

But there is a big difference between Girls and Ms. Stadtmiller’s work. Ms. Dunham may get pilloried in the press for what every single line in an episode says about our culture, but it is worth remembering that even pantsless Hannah Horvath is a character. In real life, Ms. Dunham has been extremely selective about what she will and will not share about her personal life. Even former xoJane train wreck Cat Marnell, who just signed what is in publishing parlance a “major” book deal for a reported half-million dollars, has a deceptively controlled persona. Ms. Stadtmiller, on the other hand, doesn’t hold anything back.

“Some people can’t handle Mandy because she is so endlessly, unabashedly herself,” said Sara Benincasa, Ms. Stadtmiller’s friend and fellow comedy writer. “She doesn’t hide embarrassing things about herself.”

In person, Ms. Stadtmiller is a towering presence: she is over six feet tall and has long blond hair, even features and a toothy smile. She has taken enough selfies that her face is familiar from a quick Google search.

Married to her college boyfriend at 25 and then divorced five years later, she writes a great deal about sex, but her romantic situation is currently in flux. She said she mostly dates men from the comedy scene, including an “almost-boyfriend” of a few months back, because they can handle her body humor. But even they can be wary of becoming column fodder.

“There is a dirty little secret about writing about your dating life,” she wrote last September. “What people don’t tell you about doing the whole personal memoir thing—or ‘oversharing’ if you want to be a reductive hipster dick about it—is that many dudes live in fear of being written about.”

Ms. Stadtmiller didn’t always mine sex and personal hygiene for material. The San Diego native studied journalism at Northwestern, interned at The Washington Post and got a reporting job at The Des Moines Register. She was working in a quasi-PR role for a medical school alumni magazine at her alma mater when she “found her voice” by hatching a blog called Bloggy McBlogalot and started doing stand-up comedy. She divorced her husband, who, she wrote, “cheated on me brutally,” and moved to New York to pursue writing and performing.

She was hired as an entertainment writer and eventually as a dating columnist at The New York Post, where Ms. Stadtmiller did not shy away from talking about herself. A casual newsroom encounter with her might result in a monologue about her upcoming comedy shows, or masturbating, or a “finger-banging” encounter of some sort.

Her dating column, “About Last Night,” made her a favorite Gawker punching bag back when the blog still had favorite New York media targets (the recurring slugline was “Oh Mandy”).

But she was also a workhorse who could turn copy around quickly. “Mandy would act bipolar. Sometimes she was so warm and would say ‘great to see you,’ and other days she’d walk past you like a zombie,” said a former Post colleague. “She was really hardworking and very talented—but very damaged.”

She made it onto the Post’s front page by going to a Nevada brothel to bed America’s first legal male hooker, but wound up making fun of him instead as he invited her to caress him, told her he wanted to be spanked and lavished praise on her naked body. (Documenting other people’s pleased reactions to her nudity and prowess is another branch of Ms. Stadmiller’s exhibitionism, one that would seem at odds with her willingness to project herself as sexually repulsive.) “It was like a bad second date. That cost $500,” she wrote.

The piece was a boon to her career, garnering attention on The Colbert Report and elsewhere. At the Post, some colleagues felt that she had exploited her subject, a 23-year-old ex-Marine who came across as earnest in his efforts to please, only to be mocked in print by the author in a Page 1
tabloid story. It was unclear whether he knew he was being written about. “We all died a little death when she went out and did that story,” said a former Post colleague. “We felt that if it is the future of journalism, get us out of here.”

She quit The New York Post in February 2012, when she said the culture of the features department changed and started taking on the “toxic” news mentality of the tabloid.

After the Post, Ms. Stadtmiller bounced between sublets and friends’ couches before landing at xoJane, a confessional web magazine whose writers are encouraged to share details of their lives. The magazine, founded by Jane Pratt, the editor of the much loved ’90s alt-beauty magazines Sassy and Jane, is a catalog of “It Happened to Me” testimonials about waxing, STDs, miscarriages, menstrual cups and, of course, orgasms. Ms. Stadtmiller was instantly at home.

To be fair, not all of her own posts revel in humiliation. As background for this piece, she sent links to 30 stories; sobriety, self-esteem and advice culled from personal experience were common themes. She has also mined her parents’ marriage; her mother left her fiancé to marry a marine vet who was blinded during combat in Vietnam. In an almost Parent Trap-like plot twist, her parents got divorced when Ms. Stadtmiller was in her 20s and then remarried five years later.

She wrote about adopting her dog, and penned an open letter to Lindsay Lohan encouraging the actress to get sober—like she herself has done. There is a new-agey, self-help quality to a lot of her posts, something that seems to resonate with xoJane readers, who lavish her with praise, thank-you notes and drawings.

“Thank you for helping me see myself as a player” read the subject line of an email Ms. Stadtmiller got in response to a recent post.

“I felt like you were talking directly to me,” the college-age reader continued. “I just can’t believe how much I relate to you and how similarly I feel.”

Colleagues at xoJane say she’s a generous editor. “What I don’t think Mandy gets enough credit for is her extreme generosity with other writers. She will break it down for you: ‘Here’s who to email with your pitch, here’s the exact word count you should use in that email ... here’s the time of day you should send it. Here’s how to follow up without being a little bitch,’” the writer and comedian Carrie Seim told us. “There’s a sincerity and nurturing quality—she’s genuinely thrilled when you succeed—that you rarely find in the brutally competitive New York media world.”

Ms. Stadtmiller does have an ethical code of sorts. She doesn’t write too much about her ex-husband, for example, a musician who likes to keep his Internet footprint minimal. She also insists that she filters out information that might compromise others, a practice she arguably did not deploy in her encounter with the prostitute, nor in her regular dispatches about sobriety. “I get shit sometimes for breaking the tradition of AA where you don’t reveal you are in it,” Ms. Stadtmiller writes. Anonymity isn’t really her thing.

In between xoJane posts, Ms. Stadtmiller is currently working on a roman à clef called News Whore, about her time at the Post. She expects to finish the book by the end of the year and start submitting it to publishers, although a self-published eBook prequel, a “compendium of blog posts” from the last eight years, will be available for download this month. The prequel, along with her podcast, is part of her effort to make the “News Whore” label into a brand.

Unsurprisingly for someone so concerned with branding, Ms. Stadtmiller is a tenacious profile subject. Within a 15-minute time frame on a recent Saturday, we received 10 text messages from her.

Following a prolonged back-and-forth to arrange details, we found ourselves back at Ms. Stadtmiller’s apartment. But this time, it had been transformed into a sound studio for her debut podcast. The bras were gone, replaced by microphones. The comedian Colin Quinn, whom Ms. Stadtmiller knows from the comedy world, sat in the upholstered armchair. Graham Smith, a musician friend, was on hand to help with the audio and chime in. Samsung was off in the park with a dog walker.

Ms. Stadtmiller, in sneakers, ripped jeans and a striped shirt, smoked an e-cig (she is an occasional vaper) and showed Mr. Quinn a childhood photo album. They bantered and traded barbs. Ms. Stadtmiller mentioned the summer that two different masseurs “ate her out” and volunteered that she has been listening to a tape of motivational speaker Louise Hay’s positive affirmations while masturbating.

“What’s my verbal tic?” Ms. Stadtmiller asked.

“Talking about sex,” Mr. Quinn replied.

“I don’t appreciate that,” she said. “And I don’t think it’s true.”

Mandy Stadtmiller (Patrick McMullan)

On August 6, Mandy Stadtmiller started as a deputy editor at Jane Pratt’s women’s-interest site xoJane—the date was marked “Job Starts” in her iCal—but that wasn’t the biggest thing that happened to her that day. XoJane had just lost one of its main attractions in beauty bloggger trainwreck Cat Marnell, but happily Ms. Stadtmiller was able to generate considerable attention of her own. In the morning, she published a piece entitled “I Inspired a ‘Bad’ Version of Myself on Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom.” The SEO-enabled headline was no joke; the piece detailed Ms. Stadtmiller’s brief romantic relationship with Mr. Sorkin. The movie and television writer had written into the show a hard-charging gossip reporter character he told Ms. Stadtmiller he was calling “Bad Mandy.”

The emails between the pair are included in the piece—Ms. Stadtmiller published screenshots. “It was a choice that changed that relationship forever,” she told Off the Record over calamari and Diet Cokes at a steakhouse near xoJane’s NoMad offices. “And it was the right choice to make ... I obviously recognized that he’s not going to like it. But I chose to crucify myself and paint him as kindly as possible.”

“I heard from him two times after the piece,” she went on. “The first time, he was very nice. The second time, he was very pissed.”

The former New York Post scribe knows how to play a story for all it’s worth—especially when it’s about her own experience. She published stories at the tabloid about a night with America’s first legal male prostitute and undergoing the New York Jets cheerleaders’ training regimen, as well as a dating column, “About Last Night” (“We kiss a little, but it’s the holding that sends shivers down my spine.”).

This first-person, self-as-news approach is perfect for xoJane: the site’s exclusives are derived from the fact that they happened to the staff. With her first-day story of ending up on the small screen thanks to an Oscar-winning cad of an ex, Ms. Stadtmiller fit in immediately; she’s since written about masturbating to Paul Ryan and worrying that all her friendships are “transactional.”

Ms. Stadtmiller’s tenure at the Post began in 2005 and ended this February, when the writer chose to leave and announced plans to publish a roman á clef, entitled News Whore, which she works on over the weekends. She insisted that she will not burn any bridges—“I do not enjoy ruining lives ... If I’m writing about doing a line of blow at my desk with a Fox News reporter, not naming him is a classier way to do it!” Even the title, News Whore, isn’t meant to be taken at face value. “I’m positioning it the way the Post would position it. ‘Slutty, Crazy Girl Tells All!’”

The Post was ultimately not for her, due to its reliance on the sort of easily digested narrative that makes the morning commute pass quickly. “It’s this black-white, hero-villain, News Corp. storyline.” Those looking for dirt on Rupert Murdoch may be disappointed: Ms. Stadtmiller never tapped a phone or anything of the sort. The misdeeds here are subtler. “Did I feel like I had to crucify people just to have an angle? I did.” (On that note, she counts The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm among her favorite books.)

As a character in the xoJane cast, Ms. Stadtmiller may soon get the chance to appear on television; Ms. Pratt is mulling the possibility of an xoJane reality show. The editor published a screenshot of her inbox depicting an email from an executive assistant with the truncated headline “Context for Tomorrow’s Reality Sh ...”

“There’s been a lot of different interest, explained Ms. Stadtmiller, “and there’s a likelihood that it’ll happen. For Jane, if it was done the right way, it’s clear that it would make a fun reality show. It’s in progress, and it’s been fun to come on board with that in the works.”

As Jane Pratt told Buzzfeed’s Amy Odell, she’d been taking meetings and saw her newsroom as a good fit. “In hiring, I did feel like I was casting a soap opera or reality show.”

Ms. Stadtmiller, who read Ms. Pratt’s Sassy as a young woman, showed us a text on her own phone. It was from a childhood friend from San Diego, about working with the provocative editor: “I can’t believe you are living our dream.”

Photo credit Twitter

In last week’s installment of her Vice column, “Amphetamine Logic,” Wild child blogger Cat Marnell announced that her time at the hipster web mag was coming to an end.

“I’m writing my last columns,” Cat Marnell explained when we reached her late Friday afternoon .“I almost feel addicted to them, like I could go on forever.”

However, Ms. Marnell, who celebrated her 30^th birthday earlier this week, is ready for her next venture. She said she has become a perfectionist. “I’ve  just got to do it right. When you are writing weird, it’s make it good or go home, you know?” Ms. Marnell noted she scrapped this week’s column because she wasn’t happy with it and missed her deadline.

“I miss my deadlines all the time, and my editor just has to deal with me like Jane did.” Ms. Marnell was the Beauty Editor at xoJane.com until June. Ms. Marnell said she still talks to Jane Pratt all the time, and they plan to have dinner soon.

“I love her, she’s the great love of my life,” Ms. Marnell said of her erstwhile mentor.

But, even though she readily admits she's difficult to deal with, Ms. Marnell said she has enjoyed a great working relationship with Vice EIC Rocco Castoro.

“I mean, I’m a nightmare person to have work for you,” she said. “Half the time they give me edits and I don’t accept them and they are cool with that.”

“Rocco is very empathetic. He’s not happy that I have missed my deadline like multiple times. He’s offered to get me help if it’s a substance issue. He’s manly, I’ve never had a male editor-in-chief.”

To illustrate Mr. Castoro's testosterone quotient, Ms. Marnell told us about how he invited her to an upcoming Vice BBQ by texting her pictures of tomatoes and cucumbers (“so cute!”) to entice her. “He was like, you need to come to my backyard and grill meat.”

Ms. Marnell is preparing her book proposal, which she described as 80 percent done and said she hopes to have finished by next week. She noted that she should have already finished it this summer and said her agent, Byrd Leavell (who reps Tucker Max) of the Waxman Leavell Agency is mad at her for taking so long.

She originally thought her book, which she described as The Devil Wears Prada meets The Basketball Diaries was going to be an addiction memoir. Instead, she now sees it “not as a druggy book, but more about how it worked out.”

“As soon as I said, 'Fuck it,' things started working out for me,” she said. Accordingly, Ms. Marnell said she has adopted a new motto, which she got from a wheelchair advertisement on the side of a bus: “If you can’t stand up, stand out.”

Although known for her drug use, Ms. Marnell believes her writing and progress towards some semblance of sobriety is often overlooked.

“I go to parties, but I don’t really party that much. I’m not, like, Charlie Sheening,” Ms. Marnell said.

As proof of her newfound moderation, Ms. Marnell pointed out she hasn’t smoked PCP in a month.

“I’ve been working really hard at being a better person, but it’s not something I’m writing about.”

The title refers to Ms. Marnell’s public falling out with xoJane editor-in-chief Jane Pratt and parent company SAY Media, who asked Ms. Marnell to go to rehab a month before she left. She announced her departure (a mutual decision with Ms. Pratt) in a Page Six item, saying that she couldn’t spend another summer meeting deadlines when she could be on the roof of the Standard Hotel “looking for shooting stars and smoking angel dust with my friends and writing a book.”

Talk about red flags. Though hardly known for its strict decorum, Vice does have more suits walking around since partnering with big shot TV executives and expanding internationally. Off the Record asked editor-in-chief Rocco Castoro if he had any concerns about the new hire.

“She is not an employee, she is a contributor. So, no, I am not concerned,” he wrote an in email. “This also means we can’t ‘make’ her do anything; we wouldn’t want to anyway.”

“There really aren’t any shooting stars. I looked,” Ms. Marnell told Off the Record the evening after the Page Six item ran. She’d recently woken up after a long night out at the Soho House, gone to the Starbucks on Delancey, listened to some Britney Spears, and read all about her departure on the Internet.

“Everyone’s like, ‘She’s dying.’ I’m not dying,” said the 29-year-old East Village habitué, who will do sporadic freelance magazine work and write her memoirs in between columns.

Nor is Ms. Marnell the only xoJaner to cross-pollinate with Vice, a magazine which shares Ms. Pratt’s affinity for the frank, the personal, and the taboo. Amy Kellner, a longtime Vice editor, helped launch xoJane. (She is now associate photo editor at The New York Times Magazine.) Liz Armstrong, formerly xoJane’s “New Agey” editor, became Vice’s West Coast editor, though she still freelances for her old employer. And another Vice fixture, Lesley Arfin, who now writes for HBO’s Girls, is a role model of Ms. Marnell’s.

“She was the first person I ever met who is cool and sober,” Ms. Marnell said. Although she’s unapologetic about her drug use, Ms. Marnell said that friends in fashion and art who secretly abstain could motivate her to get clean.

“The only higher power I could ever settle upon was social climbing,” she said, though she has trouble maintaining the interest of would-be sponsors.

xoJane’s critics argued that Ms. Pratt (known since she was the editor of Sassy for making characters out of her writers and editors) enabled Ms. Marnell’s addictions by paying her to write about them, but Ms. Marnell said the exploitation was more basic than that.

“The deadlines were my only enemy,” she said. Daily quotas gave her less time for “the fun, normal stuff” that xoJane writers mine for daily blog output.

“I had nothing else to talk about!”

There’s a pertinent Jenny Holzer aphorism pinned up in her room that says, “Recluses Always Get Weak.” As “someone who gets depressed and needs their brain stimulated,” she found the solitary blogger lifestyle—ordering Seamless, checking Twitter, taking self-portraits on Photobooth—detrimental to her health. “Especially as a pill head, you know?”

Ms. Marnell will use the extra time to hone her craft.

“I’m going to be writing in a different voice. I’m much more ambitious.” she said.

It’s apparent in her debut column, in which she trades her chatty, intimate xoJane voice for a non-narrative stream of drugged-out conscience sort of thing.

“VICE has always been all about the ART ... and taking risks,” Ms. Marnell wrote Off the Record in an e-mail shortly after her column debuted. “I met with the editor in chief yesterday and he gave me no direction. I did what I wanted to do ... which I always do anyway ... Obviously.”

Ms. Marnell, right, in February.

xoJane.com beauty writer Cat Marnell has left Jane Pratt's site after refusing to kick her extremely well documented drug habit. The former Lucky beauty editor recently returned from rehab, as mandated by xoJane.com parent company SAY Media, but sources told The New York Post she was still high all the time.

Ms. Marnell wrote Page Six a "Why I Quit" letter so beautiful it really puts that Goldman Sachs guy to shame.

“I’m always on drugs. [...] Look, I couldn’t spend another summer meeting deadlines behind a computer at night when I could be on the rooftop of Le Bain looking for shooting stars and smoking angel dust with my friends and writing a book, which is what I’m doing next. [...] Drug addicts undeniably bring editorial black magic to the table like nobody else, but obviously we make the worst staffers. [...] We can fake it [for a time . . . before we turn into coddled emotional vampire nightmares.”

We miss her already.

Who is this lady??

It's quite impressive, really. In a post titled "Too Tired to Name-Drop,"  XOJane editor in chief Jane Pratt liveblogged on her iPhone yesterday during a conversation she was having in a tea shop.

Which seems kind of...rude? Liveblogging during a conversation? Especially since Ms. Pratt could have used the phone to look up the name of the very famous actress she was talking to. Instead, she just gave readers clues and asked them to solve the mystery for her.

What is the world coming to? That nice cool woman from the Sopranos and Nurse Betty -- the fantastic actress and fellow single mom I know from years ago -- is talking to me in the tea place and I can't use her name in conversation, even though she is using mine, because I can't remember it. Something with an E? Don't you dislike when that happens? I wind up saying "honey" way too much in these instances. As in, "Bye Jane!" "Bye honey!!" Ugh.

Ms. Pratt knew the person she was talking to was a famous actress who was on the Sopranos and Nurse Jackie. Ms. Pratt knew the woman's name began with the letter "E." She also knew that the woman was a single mother and a friend of hers from a while back. But she just couldn't think of the lady's name, because the former Sassy editor was too tired (and too busy using her phone to blog), because she doesn't drink caffeine except for kombucha and she spent all last night at Courtney Love's house (whose name she can definitely remember). Oh well.

Anyway, what do you do when you can't remember someone's name? (And who is this cool lady I'm talking to?) Good morning, y'all!

This is like a kid's TV show, where Dora the Explorer waits a beat so we can yell out the answer. It's EDIE FALCO! Yay!

We admit, we are a little obsessed by Jane Pratt's creative use of phone-blogging. It's so informal! Now, someone show her how to use Google on this damn thing.

In addition to the celebrities reportedly involved (Miranda July, Winnie Holzman, Joss Whedon, Jack Black, Dan Savage and Fred Armisen), Ms. Gevinson actually hired contributors from the open call for submissions she posted on her blog almost a year ago. She received thousands of applications, according to Ms. Condon.

Following through on that promise is move that might have been harder to pull off at xoJane.com, where Ms. Gevinson was originally planning on publishing her teen-oriented content. Ms. Gevinson backed out of Sassy editor Jane Pratt's project at the eleventh hour (sans acrimony, Ms. Condon says) because she wanted to own her own work. xoJane.com is published by the jargon-happy marketers Say Media.

Rookie contributors include many precocious, self-publishing young people like Ms. Gevinson, as well as some pros, including xoJane.com fashion editor Laia Garcia, Girlcrusher Emma Straub, Girls staff writer Lesley Arfin, fashion blogger and Bon Appetit designer Elizabeth Spiridakis, Daily Intel blogger Joe Coscarelli and novelist Stephanie Kuehnert.

Rookie plans to pay contributors, managing editor Emily Condon told the Observer. New York parent company New York Media will exclusively sell advertisements, but there were no investors covering the overhead.

Friends of Ms. Gevinson are helping out pro bono, including This American Life founder Ira Glass, who performed with Ms. Gevinson at the Sassy magazine tribute, and his wife, Anaheed Alani, who is Rookie features editor. Ms. Condon is a This American Life alumna. (Ms. Gevinson lives in Oak Park, Ill., outside Chicago, where This American Life was produced for many years.) The Awl founders have also served as informal advisers.

Tavi Gevinson, thestylerookie.com

Teen fashion blogger Tavi Gevinson has decided not to launch her web magazine Rookie under the umbrella of Jane Pratt's partnership with SAY Media, xoJane.com, reports WWD.

Perhaps our ambivalence toward clothes had prevented us from understanding the full extent of Ms. Gevinson's genius, but to us this decision signals some serious savvy.

SAY Media is a web publishing company that provides advertising sales services to help SAY "creators" leverage their "influence" into lucrative "brand experiences," including advertisements created by the creators, SAY told us back when xoJane.com launched. They trade in the slick content commodification that makes people who care about ideas and writing miserable.

From the SAY site:

"Connect is an influencer driven program that syndicates brand experiences across a tailored collection of sites and communities, anchored in conversations and passionate voices."

"Real voices make brand programs personal and conversational."

"Advertising is content."

Maybe SAY Media is the future of getting paid to write. If it is a good fit for any site, its xoJane.com, which is almost entirely voice-driven personal narratives ("Everything we write is an exclusive, because it only happened to us") that SAY thinks makes readers feel like they can really trust whatever shampoo brand they're advertising.

Unlike xoJane's dishy older sister take,  its the inexperience that allows Ms. Gevinson to describes things adults already know about with sweetly unchecked emotion and (what feels to us like) revelatory simplicity. She doesn't sound like a shampoo commercial, not even a subversive viral anti-commercial commercial. She's more memorable for her insight and her perspective than her voice.

Ms. Gevinson added that instead of partnering with a corporate publisher she's hired her own design and sales team.

“It was just that I want to have full control, and it’s important to me that we’re independent, not so that we can be indie and ‘down with the Man,’ but because I find a lot of comfort knowing that it’s all in my control," she told WWD.

We're extrapolating, here, but it seems like Ms. Gevinson's Google-driven love of the 90s (which she didn't live through, as we love to point out) yielded not just a Courtney Love haircut, but a Gen Xer's suspicion of marketers and a DIYers entrepreneurial wherewithal.

And now that we know she's such a boss, we selfishly hope she outgrows her interest in writing about clothes. She's good at writing about other stuff too.

Jane Pratt (Getty Images)

Magazine impresario Jane Pratt did not speak at last night's tribute to her departed magazine, Sassy--despite the presence of marquee speaker Tavi Gevinson, the youthful dynamo collaborating on a future venture with Ms. Pratt (about which Ms. Gevinson spoke last night!). Per another speaker, Marisa Meltzer, "she was out of town on vacation" from her compelling duties managing website xoJane. "She sent a video."

What does it take to command Ms. Pratt's presence? Well, in a fifty-percent markup on the rate of the supermodels Ms. Pratt's magazines once disdained, Ms. Pratt doesn't get out of bed for less than $15,000.

We called the speaker's bureau representing Ms. Pratt and told her we wanted her to deliver a brief address to a small group a month from now, in New York. We were just interested in hearing about Sassy, we said, when asked if there were any alternate speakers in whom we might be interested. We were quoted a fee of fifteen grand--because Ms. Pratt is local.

That's fine, but can we choose her outfit?