Lena Dunham and Lesley Arfin.

HBO's critically acclaimed show Girls is mixing it up for Season 3 ... and leaving a few names behind. Don't start crying yet: it's not any of the cast members. In an article last month by Joe Pompeo, a source spilled the beans that three of the show's L.A. writers will not be returning to the already-small writers' room. But why?

Well, relocation, to start. The eternal struggle between L.A. lifers and chronic New Yorkers: the oldest story in the book. But also, more things!

The trio of deposed scribes--senior writer and ex-Vicer Lesley Arfin, former Observer reporter Deborah Schoeneman and Steve Rubinshteyn--were allegedly told before the start of Season 2 that the Dunham brain trust would be moving from L.A. to New York, where the show is filmed. Which actually makes sense, in terms of condensing the operation ... the show already shoots here, why fly out to L.A. to write it? But the downsizing seemingly had less to do with cross-country moving costs and more with giving Ms. Dunham more control over her show.

In an email to The Observer, Ms. Arfin, who had previously gotten in some hot water over a controversial tweet she made during the first season, wrote:

Really the bottom line is that she wanted a smaller writers room and she wanted it to be in nyc and me, deb, and ruby weren't able to do that.

That line seems to suggest the "she" in question in Ms. Dunham herself, who along with being one of the writers, directors and stars of the show, also holds the title of executive producer.

(Ms. Dunham declined to comment on the story.)

Although there has been no official announcement about replacing the three writers, one could read between the lines of HBO's statement to Capitol in its list of writers who did make the cut: Judd Apatow, Jenni Konner, Lena Dunham, Bruce Eric Kaplan, Murray Miller, Paul Simms, Sarah Heyward "and, occasionally, Lena’s parents."

Laurie Simmons and Carol Dunham have never written an episode of Girls, to the best of our knowledge, and neither has Mr. Simms. But if Dunham was really behind taking a nine person-writing staff and cutting it down to six (not counting the occasional parent-written episode, which holy God, actually sounds crazy-amazing), one could reasonably conclude that the 26-year-old wunderkind was taking a firmer hand on the reins for her singular vision of what Girls should be.

Which isn't necessarily a bad thing: Adam Reed does the same thing with Archer, and we love Archer.

And hey, there can't be ten voices of our generation, can there?

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.”

(Mark Hammermeister)

Two weeks ago, Phil Mushnick, a respected veteran sports writer for The New York Post, published a column about the Brooklyn Nets’ new brand identity, as designed with the help of Jay-Z. The team—previously known as the New Jersey Nets—had switched their colors to black and white. “Why not have him apply the full Jay-Z treatment?” Mr. Mushnick suggested, referring to the team’s part-owner. “Why the Brooklyn Nets when they can be the New York N------s. The cheerleaders could be the Brooklyn B---hes or Hoes ...”

Once upon a time, a remark like that would have led to a call for Mr. Mushnick’s head ... or at least a resignation. And while several media outlets picked up on the story on their Web sites, the “scandal” was a non-starter. Mr. Mushnick was not reprimanded by The Post. Forbes even defended him.

If the story of Mr. Mushnick seemed novel, though, it was only because it didn’t happen on Twitter. At times, it seems as if the microblogging platform was designed to ease the glide path of users’ feet directly into their mouths as they dash off unthinking, offensive commentary: Cee Lo Green calling a fan of The Voice ‘gay’; CNN commentator Roland Martin’s homophobic tweets after the Super Bowl; Chris Brown being Chris Brown (his response to a hater: “Grow up n——a!!! Dick in da ass lil boy.”)

Ashton Kutcher's "brownface" PopChip commercial

Nearly four years after the election of a black man as president, intolerant attitudes are having a cultural moment. And one inspiration may well be Mr. Obama himself, whose occupation of the White House seems to have been misinterpreted as a signal that the country has overcome the ugliness of its racist past and we are now all free (at last) to air our most contemptible prejudices.

Of course, not all racists, sexists, anti-Semites and homophobes are created equal. There’s the bilious misogyny of a Rush Limbaugh and the unhinged anti-Semitism of a John Galliano or a Mel Gibson or a Delmon Young. There’s the mass-stupidity of all of those Hunger Games fans outraged by the casting of an African-American actor as a character they thought was white and the semi-ironic, "hipster racism" displayed by Lesley Arfin, a writer for the HBO show Girls.

The latter form was dubbed “ironic racism” after Ms. Arfin responded on Twitter to criticisms that the show didn’t feature enough women of color, cracking, “What really bothered me most about Precious was that there was no representation of ME.”

The tweet, quickly deleted, spurred bloggers to uncover other damning evidence of Ms. Arfin’s racist attitudes—including a 2007 interview on the Huffington Post, in which she noted the n-word “was a great word. It packs so much punch.” (To give more context, Ms. Arfin was asked to pick between three 'hate' terms as her favorite.) Gavin McInnes, Ms. Arfin’s former employer at VICE, jumped to her defense—not that he’s an especially respected authority on tolerance.

It seems that with the rigid speak-no-evil precepts of political correctness now as out of fashion as stonewashed jeans, the rules have become a little fuzzy. It’s interesting to see just what sort of parochialism is forgiven and what is not. The hit Comedy Central series Tosh.0 includes a segment called “Is It Racist?” that is itself, arguably, racist (it’s definitely stupid). Meanwhile, ESPN employee Anthony Federico was fired for headlining a story about Jeremy Lin “A Chink in the Armor,” though he later claimed the implication was inadvertent. There was Ashton Kutcher’s controversial “brown face” ad for PopChips and Jon Hamm’s not-that-controversial blackface in a special episode of 30 Rock.

It seemed an auspicious time for lunch with Taki Theodoracopulos, the charismatic 75-year-old Greek socialite, pundit and founder of The American Conservative, who has been making racist remarks—and getting away with it—for decades now. Despite a reputation for venomous rhetoric, his byline has graced the pages of Hamptons Magazine, Vanity Fair, The New York Press, The Spectator, The Sunday Times, Esquire and Newsweek.

More recently, Mr. Theodoracopulos has been writing mostly for his own Web site, Taki’s Magazine. While the site bears the tagline: “Cocktails, Countesses & Mental Caviar,” it is perhaps better known for a collection of race-baiting essays and blog posts by a rogue’s gallery of politically incorrect luminaries, including Pat Buchanan, Mr. McInnes and Redneck Manifesto author Jim Goad. In early April, the site posted an essay by John Derbyshire called “The Talk: Nonblack Version,” about what children should know about African-Americans (“Avoid concentrations of blacks not all known to you personally ... Stay out of heavily black neighborhoods”). Mr. Derbyshire was also a contributor to National Review, but not for long. The Review’s editor, Rich Lowry, quickly cut him loose, writing that the post “constitutes a kind of letter of resignation.”

Mr. Derbyshire quickly retreated from the public stage, and the news that he was undergoing chemotherapy for chronic lymphocytic leukemia may have even garnered him some sympathy points. But just a month later, Mr. Derbyshire landed a new gig on VDare.com, an anti-immigration site. His first article extolled the virtues of white supremacy.

Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center wasn’t surprised by the development. “More often than not, real racism lies right below the surface, and what holds it back is fear of criticism or fear of losing one’s career,” he said, noting that the center considers VDare a hate site.

Such outspoken racism is increasing, he said. “At a macro-level, what we’re seeing is a lot of white people feeling like they are losing their country ... that after Obama’s election, they’re drowning in a tide of color.”

The ethos of Taki's Mag (TakiMag.com)

Naturally, Mr. Derbyshire is still writing for Taki, who a few weeks after the notorious blog post was sitting in the Midtown restaurant Cognac, spooning up pink lobster bisque and chasing it with two large glasses of pinot grigio. Between bites, Mr. Theodoracopulos gossiped about his time working for—where else?—The New York Observer.

“I called A.M. Rosenthal from The New York Times ‘Abie,’ and his wife thought that was anti-Semitic,” he recalled in his languidly aristocratic accent. “How is that anti-Semitic?”

A genial man in a dapper blue suit and sparkling cuff links, Mr. Theodoracopulos bore a strong resemblance to Anthony Hopkins. He remembered being called into the office of then-owner Arthur Carter after Mr. Rosenthal’s wife, Shirley Lord, called to complain.

“Arthur would say ‘What is the problem, Taki?’” Mr. Theodoracopulos laughed. “I’d tell him, ‘The problem is that I’ve run out of shoe polish, Arthur. Would you mind if I took some from your hair?’”

He smiled.

“You get it?” Mr. Theodoracopulos asked. “Because his hair always looked like he rubbed it with shoe polish!”
When Fraser Nelson took over as editor of the Spectator, where Taki contributed a regular column, he jokingly told the columnist he would be fired. “He said, ‘No one is complaining about you anymore, Taki, so why are we paying you?’” Mr. Theodoracopulos recalled, snickering like a man who was having the last laugh. And perhaps he is.

In his inaugural editor’s “diary,” Mr. Nelson noted a change in the air. “It’s not that Taki is conforming to the world,” he wrote. “The world, I think, is finally conforming to him.”

Racial resentment seems especially uncharitable coming from someone like Mr. Theodoracopulos, a jet-setting playboy of good standing. His father, in addition to being an Olympic gold medalist in rowing, was a shipping baron. His grandfather, Panagiotis Poulitsas, was briefly the prime minister of Greece. After a career as a professional tennis player, and a short stint working in his father’s offices, Taki was recruited by Arnaud de Borchgrave, then senior editor of Newsweek, to go to Vietnam as a photographer.

“I didn’t want to work for my father, I didn’t want to be a shipper, or a tycoon’s son,” Mr. Theodoracopulos said of his beginnings in journalism.

He’s been married twice, currently to his wife of 31 years, Princess Alexandra Carlota Sophy von Schoenburg-Hartenstein, and has two children, “who have never disappointed me,” he said. His son, J.T., is a bike messenger; his daughter, Mandolyna, runs Taki’s Magazine. “She is actually the brains behind the site, because I don’t really read the Internet,” Mr. Theodoracopulos told us proudly.

The idea for the Web site came about after Mr. Theodoracopulos ceased his involvement with The American Conservative in 2007.

“At a certain time, I had to take a step back and say ‘Do I want to keep giving millions of dollars to magazines that no one reads, or something else?’” he recalled. Mandolyna, who spent the ’90s working for publications like Hamptons Magazine and, yes, The New York Observer (as a fact-checker under Graydon Carter, who not only hired her father for his original tenure at the Observer, but who went on to employ both father and daughter at Vanity Fair), then took off a decade to work as an interior designer before returning to journalism.

“I made peace with my dad years ago,” the London-based Ms. Theodoracopulos told us over the phone. “It’s really nice to have a family business.”

The only area where she and her father disagree, she told us, was the Middle East. (“I’m not saying Israel shouldn’t exist,” he said, “but they need to give back the occupied territories.”)

“Be nice to my dad,” Ms. Theodoracopulos warned before hanging up. “He’s one of the nicest, sweetest men you’ll ever meet.”

Taki Theodoracopulos with Arianna Huffington (Patrick McMullan)

MR. THEODORACOPULOS can be charming in person, which might explain how he’s been able to maintain some of his social cachet despite his disreputable opinions. Though he credits William Buckley at the National Review with giving him his first job, it wasn’t until he started his High Life social column in The Spectator that he found his niche. “I was a natural,” Mr. Theodoracopulos said. “People couldn’t believe what I wrote in High Life, but I didn’t care about access, I already had access. I knew what was going on. You have to get your foot in the door writing what you know about, and this was what I knew.”

That particular beat has shrunk with time. “Society doesn’t exist anymore ... or if it does, it doesn’t go out,” Taki sniffed. He is ditching his London home because, he explained, the city is “becoming overcrowded with Arabs.” He is more often found in his apartment on East 71st Street and is plotting a sailing trip to Cannes, where, he said, he will be shooting a movie with Norman Mailer’s son Michael.

During lunch, Mr. Theodoracopulos employed a number of epithets for various ethnic and racial groups. The n-word rolled off his tongue. He was unapologetic about his use of such terms, and made us uncomfortably complicit by leaning in conspiratorially and smiling while saying some of the more horrific things we’ve ever heard outside of a Quentin Tarantino film. He expressed disgust for professional athletes: “They have 12 kids and beat up on their wives, and she can’t go to court because she’s black and doesn’t have an education.” He praised Robert E. Lee and condemned Abraham Lincoln as “a murdering traitor.” He chuckled as he told us the story of a controversial Sunday Times editorial he once wrote: “I said that I thought I saw a gorilla once at Wimbleton. It was Venus Williams.”

Asked if he considered himself racist, Mr. Theodoracopulos shrugged. “It was very bad taste, but blacks make fun of us, why can’t we make fun of them?”

Unsurprisingly, Mr. Theodoracopulos’s mouth has gotten him into trouble over the years. “In this country, there are tremendous libel suits ... I’ve lost five libel cases myself,” he told us proudly. “Not four. Five.”
He sat serenely while we probed him about his xenophobia, then worked himself into a lather about the Saudis. “They are the ones who finance all the terror,” he said. “They eat their own shit. And we’re supposed to call them royals? These are not royal families ... I call them ‘ruling towelheads.’”

But even as he flaunted his most noxious opinions, Mr. Theodoracopulos was oddly eager to clear the record on at least one charge against him. Asked about an article in which he referred to himself as a “soi-disant anti-Semite,” he bristled.

“No! Everyone gets that quote wrong, because they don’t speak French. Soi-disant means ‘so-called.’ I am saying that everyone else calls me an anti-Semite!”

As in most matters, his opinion on this differs from that of the media. As The Guardian wrote, in fact, the term is generally translated as “self-styled.” Mr. Theodoracopulos indignantly told us that he had spoken French for most of his life and knew better than journalists what the translation was.

As if to prove that he had nothing against Jews, he continued, “All my WASP friends in America say, ‘What happened to our money, Taki?’ And I tell them, ‘You drank it all away, and the Jews and n---ers were able to get it.”

It seemed like a good time to mention we were Jewish.

“And you don’t drink a lot, do you?” Mr. Theodoracopulos replied with a smile. “You can’t ever say that the Jews are drunks. The WASPS are drunks.”

With that, the Greek socialite motioned for the waiter and ordered us a second glass of white wine. As it turned out, Mr. Theodoracopulos was right about one thing: we spent the rest of the day nursing a massive headache.

Ms. Arfin has not sought to publicly defend herself (indeed, her second-most-recent Tweet is some weird, illegible snark about the Global South), but that's where Vice founder Gavin McInnes swept in. His piece wherein he dug deep into matters like Ms. Arfin's use, in writing, of slang comparing President Obama to feces (everyone does it!) and compared her experience being written about to water torture was titled "The Lynching of Lesley Arfin." Strange fruit, indeed!

Being taken to task, in writing, for your super-out-of-touch-at-best sense of humor has not in recent history resulted in a person hanging from a tall tree. Not that Mr. McInnes's sense of the English language is terribly robust. As he recently wrote on Taki's Magazine:

I don’t think I’ve ever entered a bar without saying, “Hey homos” to my friends  or at the very least, “Oh, what are you guys doing here? I didn’t know this was  a gay bar.” The fact that everyone got their panties in a bunch over it is,  well, queer.

This is only the beginning of Mr. McInnes's writings, all of which exhibit the language and thought pattern of the soi-disant hipster: where you should be allowed to say whatever you want, and criticism of your every blessed utterance is the only thing that is offensive. (He elsewhere writes, "I wish there was a spooky resurgence of Nazi skinheads"--is Ms. Arfin sure this is the guy who ought to defend her from charges of casual racism?)

A primary critique of Girls has been the manner by which it presents its characters as overindulged from the moment of their birth, far too self-possessed as they scribble their memoirs with an eye only on self-fulfillment at the expense of contact with any world that might be described as "real." While Girls can be read as satirical, and its whitewashed world as the result of its characters' satirically cloistered points-of-view, the attitude it diagnoses of shock-value-craving mindlessness in the guise of individualism is apparently real.

According to a press release, the move is "in response to demand from its audience."

The release goes on to quote founder Samantha Moeller as saying, "Why produce a magazine, when our readers would rather access the same sassy original content online, and engage in the Missbehave community online? This is not the end of a media outlet, but rather a smart business decision on behalf of our readers."

Hey, the editors of U.S. News Weekly would probably agree.

Full release follows:

Is Tina Brown "like Schindler, in a skirt-suit"? That's what John Koblin calls her when it comes to bringing laid off writers into her Daily Beast. But what can they hope to be paid? Plus: January Groans: Mags' Lean Month Gets Downright Gaunt.

Can a 26-year-old consultant who took Columbia's Publishing Course and worked for a time at Little, Brown save publishing? Leon Neyfakh meets Eric Wolff, who says, "Truth is, there isn’t a whole lot of reason for a big media company to own a book company unless it wants to be in that business... Corporations generally want growth stories, and there’s no growth in books.”

Plus: Missbehave's new editor... Superstar avatars... Murdoch the Magnificent.

“Should I accept everybody? Or should I only accept people who are my friends?” Ms. Arfin wondered recently in the conference room of her magazine’s parent company, Colossal Media, which occupies a buzzing, bilevel space just off Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg. “I deleted my MySpace,” she continued. “I wanted to keep Facebook tight.”

Ms. Arfin, who had previously been editor at large at Missbehave, was tapped to edit the two-year-old, 110,000-circulation quarterly in August after founding editor Mary H. K. Choi left to become features editor at the hip-hop magazine Giant. Before that, Ms. Arfin wrote for Vice, including an article called “The Vice Guide to Finding Yourself,” which advised, “Telling your dad to fuck off and being prepared to fight him.” At 29, she’s mellowed, she said. “My taste has gotten more mainstream as I’ve gotten older. … I don’t have as much interest in being cool and seeking out what’s underground to impress my friends.”

How many Facebook “friends” does Ms. Arfin have anyway?

“Like eight hundred.”

Back in real life, she is close to It-girl–turned–premium-cable-Mormon Chloë Sevigny, with whom she recently attended the reopening party for the Fountainebleau Hotel in Miami. Other guests included George Hamilton and some unfortunate swans. (“Surreal,” Ms. Arfin said.)

“Chlo,” as the editor calls her, appears on the cover of the first retooled Missbehave: her hair a nest of complicated braids, her pout slightly less fierce than it was when she staggered onto movie screens 13 years ago in Kids. Another of Ms. Arfin’s pals, Mark Jacobs—the former Paper writer, not the fashion designer—wrote the accompanying piece. Yet another friend, Vice co-founder Gavin McInnes, who once hired Ms. Arfin as an intern at his magazine, has taken Ms. Arfin’s old role as editor at large at Missbehave, where he’ll be contributing a column of ideas conceived while stoned.

“She’s incredibly confident,” Mr. McInnes said of his former protégé. “Maybe that’s why celebrities like hanging around her.” (Ms. Arfin has also worked as a fashion stylist, but found herself frustrated by the demands of personalities like Naomi Campbell, who apparently refused to put on her own socks.)

What about her management style? “I could never think of her as my boss,” Mr. McInnes said. “That would be weird.”

Ms. Arfin has long, dark hair with just a few strands of white at the roots; several tattoos (“nine or something” she said); and Clark Kent–style glasses. In a comfortable-looking brown sweater that fairly swallowed her slight frame, she called to mind the sort of smart-alecky girl Winona Ryder or Christina Ricci used to play in teen comedies: more kid sister than sex kitten, tough on the outside but willing to let her guard down in the final act.

“I would like to think I’m a superhero and can handle anything,” Ms. Arfin said of her cool-girl persona. “But I’m not. My feelings still get hurt. I’m very sensitive.” She laughed a little at this, but still conveyed the directness and clarity of someone who’s spent a lot of time talking to people—friends, therapists, group members, readers—about herself.

That may be because Ms. Arfin is a recovering drug user and alcoholic who chronicled her tumble into addiction in a 2007 book, Dear Diary. It told the story of a self-professed “high-maintenance Long Island Jew” who went from all-ages punk rock shows to getting high in the Lower East Side on 9/11 and wondering “what the big deal was” as the World Trade Center smoldered just blocks downtown.

Ms. Arfin sent copies of her book to “every single person in the world I admire,” she said, a list that included the comic actress and writer Amy Sedaris and director Judd Apatow, along with her old professors from Hampshire College.

“I didn’t get any response,” she said. “But it didn’t matter.”

After rehab at South Oaks and the Betty Ford Center, Ms. Arfin has been clean, she said, for six years. Her blog, Cafe Con Lesley, still documents frequent nightcrawling—Spike Lee, Jay-Z and John Stamos all make appearances—but now, she said, when things get weird, she goes home early. “I have friends who still do drugs, but if they’re going out and doing coke, I leave.”

After Ms. Arfin failed to catch publishers’ interest with two post–Dear Diary book proposals (one she described as “Our Bodies, Ourselves for punk rock kids”), she took some time off and traveled in India. Upon returning, she was offered the job at Missbehave, whose pages she hopes to make more “accessible,” less “urban.”

“I don’t wanna see the word ‘dope’ anymore. Things like that,” Ms. Arfin said. “I’m not into like Electroclash and boom boxes and bamboo earrings. I’ve never really been into that stuff.”

She proudly listed some of her current interests: the Dixie Chicks (“Oh my gosh, they’re so talented!”), Teen Vogue, Gossip Girl, VH1’s Celebrity Rehab and A&E’s Intervention, which she called “the funniest and saddest show.”

“I don’t believe in ‘guilty pleasures’ anymore,” she said, despite the fact that she once wrote “The Vice Guide to Guilty Pleasures.” “Moving onwards, I don’t want to feel guilty about the things that make me happy.”

And she doesn’t want Missbehave to be just about her friends, either, real or virtual. “I wanna get bigger covers. … Believe me, I don’t know how to do this. I’m, like, learning as I go along.”

mhaber@observer.com

Ms. Arfin, who probably still isn't over Rosie O'Donnell leaving The View, is described by Samantha Moeller, Missbehave's founder, as "without a doubt the quintessential ‘Missbehave’ chick: Chic, yet badass, she was the obvious choice."

In 2007, Ms. Arfin told The Huffington Post's A.J. Daulerio in an interview that she could think of no cooler magazine to work for than the Brooklyn-based Vice:

Perhaps Ms. Arfin will come to think that Missbehave is the magazine-world Pinky Tuscadero?