Yes you are!

Updated: Tina Fey responds below!
Have you been reading all about Taylor Swift telling Amy Poehler and Tina Fey that they are going to hell for their Golden Globes jokes in the most recent issue of Vanity Fair? Or wait, was that Katie Couric who told Taylor Swift that, and the singer was just relating it back in an anecdote? Did Amy Poehler say she was actually going to hell? Did Couric totally rip off a very famous Madeleine Albright quote about a basketball?

If you are confused, don't worry. Here are some GIFs from Mean Girls to help explain.

Okay, so first of all there is Taylor Swift, who is a person who is not above mocking her ex at Grammys during her opening song, because:

And she is pissed because during the Golden Globes, Amy Poehler and Tina Fey were making some jokes, and one happened to land on her. Technically, Ms. Fey was the one who dug it to the singer about her relationship with Harry Styles, warning her not to go after Michael J. Fox's son.
"Or go for it!" Ms. Poehler said.
"No, she needs some me time, for herself," Ms. Fey countered. Remember, they were pretending to be drunk.

And then Taylor Swift, who never told Kanye West to go to hell BY THE WAY, was all:

So she waited until she was on the cover of Vanity Fair this month, so she could say this in a profile (re: the Golden Globes jokes):

"You know, Katie Couric is one of my favorite people, because she said to me she had heard a quote that she loved, that said, 'There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.'"

Because seriously, Amy and Tina, don't even try to mess with the girl who literally wrote a song called "Mean":

Unfortunately for Katie Couric, who you just know is feeling like:

Especially when it was Madeleine Albright who actually said that.

So right out the gate, we're pretty much feeling:

But luckily, Amy Poehler is a classy lady, and responded, "Aw, I feel bad if she was upset. I am a feminist and she is a young and talented girl. That being said, I do agree I am going to hell. But for other reasons. Mostly boring tax stuff."

Ms. Swift has not yet responded, nor has Tina Fey. But as it stands right now, we have Amy Poehler being all:

While a grown-ass 23-year-old is freaking out in a corner, like:

Update: On Wednesday, Ms. Fey joined the fracas, telling Us Weekly that Swift should just get over it."It was just a joke, and I think it was actually a very benign joke," said the comedian. To New York Magazine, she added that the young singer wasn't the only one who could take out her fury in verse:

"Me, too, though! Me, too. I could do a song. I could do a whole song about it."

Which, as much as we'd like to see, is also kind of defensive response for someone so much older, wiser, and cooler than Taylor Swift. Like, turn the other cheek, Tina Fey! You do not have to drag yourself down to "Dear John" levels! Be more like Poehler, who has a new social network for girls about self-esteem issues, instead of the woman thinking up satirical songs that rhyme "Swift" with "John Mayer's dick."

The implied error page on Vanity Fair's website. (VF.COM)

Zero Dark Thirty actress Jessica Chastain must have some friends over at the Graydon Carter offices. Last night, Nikki Finke was able to reproduce, word-for-word, a pulled essay from VF.com that slightly criticized the actress as an "empty vessel" (honestly, it sounds much worse out of context) and using one of her own quotes--"I’m the unknown everyone’s already sick of"--to explain why she didn't quite work in the film Mama.

Deputy editor Bruce Handy, the article's author, has a lot of good things to say about Ms. Chastain as well! But you would have never had known that, because VF.com pulled the article--which ran January 25, during a crucial build-up week for Oscar-baiting, with ballots going out to Academy members that day--from the site within 24 hours.

From the article obtained by Nikki Finke over at Deadline:

The Jessica Chastain Conundrum: Greatest Actress of Her Generation or Found Art?

By Bruce Handy

Movie acting is a strange, alchemic art. This weekend, for instance, you can go to your local multiplex and see Jessica Chastain play a credibly fierce C.I.A. officer in Zero Dark Thirty. Then you can go next door and see Mama, in which Chastain plays the least fierce, least credible punk rocker in the history of film. Maggie Smith could have done it with more edge and nerve. (Actually, that’s not a bad idea: a movie about an aging all-girl punk band starring Smith, Judi Dench, Helen Mirren, and let’s say Rebel Wilson as the dead original drummer’s drummer granddaughter. Billy Nighy can be the manager. It could be a sort of non-sequel sequel to The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, and you’re welcome, Harvey Weinstein.)

But back to Chastain. Why is she so excellent in the one movie and so not excellent in the other? To the extent we can bat around theories—and ignore the collaborative nature of movie-making—we can begin to solve the even deeper mystery that is Chastain herself, who, as if she were Hollywood kudzu, has starred in half of all films released over the past two years. If that weren’t accomplishment enough, last weekend she had the No. 1 and 2 films at the box office. She has also received an Oscar nomination for the second year in a row and is currently on Broadway starring in The Heiress. And yet, as a public figure and performer, she is as elusive as she is ubiquitous, one of the most curious stars ever anointed by Hollywood. As she herself put it to Evgenia Peretz in a Vanity Fair profile, “I’m the unknown everyone’s already sick of.”

She’s obviously beautiful, but there’s something about Chastain’s features that doesn’t quite hold your eye. To me, Cate Blanchett is from the same mold; maybe they’re both too perfectly beautiful, almost burnished. When you get past the dazzle, a lot of movie stars are actually kind of funny looking, like Julia Roberts with her big upper lip or Emma Stone with her huge, Bratz-doll eyes or Channing Tatum with his blockhead; the classic examples are the Dumbo ears on either side of Clark Gable. Other stars are better-looking versions of people we might know in real life—Reese Witherspoon or Ryan Reynolds, say. But one way or another, their faces have visual “hooks” analogous to the musical hooks in pop songs; we’re drawn back to them again and again. Actors and actresses who lack that quality, who are too blandly beautiful, we dismiss as “soap-opera-y.” Actors and actresses who are even more beautiful than that, who approach a classical ideal, as Chastain and Blanchett do, we call “timeless” or “ethereal,” but that can be limiting. Put another way, whom else but Cate Blanchett would you cast as an elf queen?

Looks aside (a phrase rarely spoken in the film world), on-screen Chastain seems disinclined to convey a sense of who she really is—she can often be a recessive presence. (As she also told Peretz—perversely for an actress—“I don’t want people to look at me.”) All acting is a combustion of craft and personality, but the personality quotient tends to run high for movie stars. Once you’ve seen Jennifer Lawrence in a couple things, you get a sense of her as mischievous, smart-mouthed, scrappy—perhaps a false impression, but there’s an underlying beat in her performances that, aside from her talent, goes a long way toward making her a star. You know what you’re going to get with her the way you do with Katherine Hepburn, so it’s easier to welcome them as your make-believe friends, at least for two hours.

Plenty of actors are said to “disappear” into their roles; Meryl Streep and Sean Penn come to mind, but even they throw off a consistent charisma no matter the thickness of their accent or putty on their nose. Chastain is more like an empty vessel, and I think she’s at her best when she either has very little or very much to do. Terrence Malick used her as if she were found art in Tree of Life, where she had almost no lines but filled space wonderfully as an idealized mother figure, more symbol than character. The truth is, she doesn’t really have that much to do in Zero Dark Thirty, either, where a lot of the performance takes place in reaction shots, and she’s mostly required to just look fierce and determined. She’s very good at that—and I doubt it’s easy—but I’m surprised it’s being hailed as one of the year’s great performances, and that it has earned her an Oscar nomination for best actress. It’s not the sort of flashy thing, like playing a transgendered murder victim or quadriplegic boxer, that the Academy normally rewards.

On the other end of the Chastain spectrum was her role in The Help as a sexy, white-trash housewife. The part, like every other one in that ridiculous film, was a caricature, but Chastain brought depth and nuance and vulnerability to the caricature, if that’s not all a contradiction in terms, which made her the best thing in the movie and won her a well-deserved supporting-actress nomination last year. (She lost to her co-star Octavia Spencer, for her update on the time-honored Sassy Black Maid part.)

The problem for Chastain in Mama, a modern-day Gothic-style ghost story that opened last week, is that her role is not particularly well written or interesting; there’s not much there there, though it’s a busy part all the same, larded with stair-climbing and closet-door-opening and screaming. Another actress—Lawrence, say, or Kristen Stewart, either of whom would have also been more cast to type as a punk—could have filled out the part with their personalities. Chastain just looked lost, as if she couldn’t find any traction in the dialogue or action. (Unlike on Zero Dark Thirty, where she got to model those boss aviator shades, she wasn’t helped on Mama by a weird shag haircut or an uninspired wardrobe that, as my colleague Juli Weiner says, looked like the costume designer Google-imaged “punk” and then went home.) She was better in Lawless, last fall’s dopey moonshine drama, but still seemed adrift. Perhaps the lesson is she’s a performer who needs either too much scaffolding from a script or almost none at all.

(Mea culpa: in a similar post a couple of weeks ago where I sought to explain the appeal of Ryan Gosling, as my wife pointed out, I neglected to mention his most salient attribute as an actor—that he’s “fucking hot.”)

At least the magazine owned up. According to a VF spokeswoman who talked to Deadline, "We took it down because it ran counter to what a number of people at the magazine believed.”

Maybe. Ms. Chastain has a sort of "hot sister of Cate Blanchett" thing going on, which isn't in and of itself interesting. Maybe try doing a rom-com next, and see if you are the next crossover hit or Katherine Heigl.

Judd Apatow (Getty Images)

Today is the street date of the most anticipated Vanity Fair cover since Jennifer Aniston announced that, yes, she did want kids. Judd Apatow has guest-edited the glossy rag (it’s sort of like when Roseanne guest-edited The New Yorker, but five times as long and far more self-serious), presumably commissioning photo spreads of his coterie of comedy stars (who will be the one to surprisingly doff his or her clothes? Seth Rogen? Lena Dunham? Jason Segel?) and long think pieces on the state of comedy in These Economic Times ... Meanwhile, another old-school publication trying something altogether new, the Village Voice, throws its third annual web awards for the best stuff out there online.

Vanity Fair’s comedy issue hits stands today; the Village Voice Web Awards, Drom, 85 Avenue A, 7pm, RSVP at villagevoice.com/webawardsrsvp.

Then the Vanity Fair staffers noticed that the glitch was more widespread then they thought. It wasn’t just Vanity Fair and it wasn’t just Golf for Women’s ghostly domain name. Other email addresses throughout Condé Nast were switched to the domain @fairchildfashion.com (a current, fashionable division of Condé Nast) and to the tech mag domain @wired.com. At one point, email addresses moved like a Ouija Board between @golfforwomen and @fairchildfashion.

If this switch took place in a movie, just think of all the pranks that could have been played in an hour. Unfortunately, life is not a movie and pranks take a while to think up.

Do Vanity Fair staffers have any regrets?

“We may never know why, for one lucky hour, we were unwitting, involuntary staffers of a gendered athletics magazine that folded four years ago. What we do know is this: we did not use our time as Golf for Women staffers wisely. Far more gear from pro shops should have been called in, many more reservations at exclusive golf clubs should have been made, and additional solicitations to Tiger Woods’s mistresses should have gone out,” Vanity Fair’s Juli Weiner wrote on the magazine’s blog.

Although we know it was most likely a technology glitch, we prefer to think that for a brief time yesterday afternoon Condé Nast was haunted by the ghosts of editors past.

The October 2012 issue of Vanity Fair.

Tom Cruise's vigilant lawyer Bert Fields has issued a statement on Maureen Orth's not-yet-released piece about the Church of Scientology's long-term "audition process" that yielded bride Katie Holmes.

Vanity Fair's story is essentially a rehash of tired old lies previously run in the supermarket tabloids, quoting the same bogus 'sources.' It's long, boring and false.

We'll reserve judgment on the media-criticism aspect of Mr. Fields's statement until we read the piece--one that Scientology apostate Paul Haggis has said is true. But it's interesting that no mention of legal action is made here; Tom Cruise has historically been a litigious star, filing a $100 million lawsuit against a gay porn star who claimed to have dated the Mission: Impossible actor.

Peter Brant Jr., Harry Brant (Patrick McMullan)

If you haven't heard of Peter and Harry Brant yet, you should be calling the Postal Service and Time Warner to find out why they've discontinued service to that rock you're living under. The teenage sons of paper mogul Peter M. Brant have been everywhere lately: gracing the Style Section of The New York Times, tweeting from a shared Twitter account and being profiled in this week's lugubrious three-page spread in the latest issue of  Vanity Fair (to make matters worse,  the piece was titled "Little Lord Flauntleroys").

Now the blood is in the water, and its officially hunting season as the collective new media aims to take a shot at these young male socialites.

Because young master Peter Brant Jr. (18 years old) and his brother Harry (15) fit squarely into Nick Denton's wheelhouse, Gawker was on top of the Brant children (calling them "The World's Luckiest Teenage Homosexuals") before most people had heard of them.

But the mockery of the Brant Brothers didn't end there. We had to ask ourselves why a site like Cracked.com would be interested in these two, since even negging on regular celebrities doesn't fit with the pop-culture listicles the site mainly traffics in, let alone making fun of underage rich kids. (You're more likely to see, say, a story on the many inconsistencies in Back to the Future than an update on Lindsay Lohan.)

Yet on Tuesday, Cracked.com editor Soren Bowie published a 1,300-word-plus open letter to the Brant siblings, titled "Introducing Two Wealthy Young Celebrities You Will Soon Hate." The piece included such advice as:

You think building aggressive, baseless opinions is the same thing as building character, partially because you're just 15 years old, and partially because you're probably surrounded by other people doing the exact same thing, since your third interest, of course, is fashion.

And:

Your entire existence, everything you have chosen to be, is so big and means so little ... Your personalities are built entirely on some CW show you saw once and have since been unable to shake. A lack of actual responsibilities or needs in your life afford you all the time you need to just sit and invent yourselves from scratch, from the crack of noon until you fall asleep in each other's arms on the 18th century couch in one of your family's many living rooms. "We need to be that," you likely whisper to one another in between kisses, pointing at the flickering flat screen. "We need to become gossip girls."

(Of course, one could argue that there is no need for the word 'likely' in that last sentence, as the brothers think their life is exactly like Gossip Girl, but that's just splitting hairs.)

If this seems like a particularly harsh take-down of two easy targets, well, Cracked isn't the only one. (We ourselves are not immune to noting the disproportionate amount of media slobbering over children who have yet to accomplish anything.)

But why, exactly, do the Brant brothers infuse us with such red-eyed rage? We have a theory.

The term "socialite" has become sort of a catchall in the last several years, referring to anyone who is famous for being famous. But let's be clear here: having a reality show doesn't make you a socialite, nor does it apply to every one of Paris Hilton's friends with a sex tape. (But we understand how you might be confused.) True socialites, it turns out, are hard to find, for two reasons:

1) because their existence has been eclipsed by movie stars and celeb-reality wannabes; and

2) because the word "socialite" has been given such a bad rap that most people who do fit the description eschew major publicity. After all, no one wants to appear on a show called High Society when the country is in a recession, lest they be dragged out of their apartments by an angry mob. (Possibly spearheaded by a modern-day Robespierre in a scary face mask, as the dystopic Dark Knight Rises predicted.)

As the Muffy Astors (and even the Tinsley Mortimers) of the world impose a sort of media blackout on their comings and goings, we began our search for the next generation of le bon ton too rich and too young to grasp the concept that "All press is good press" doesn't apply to The New York Times chronicling your Gossip Girl-inspired lifestyle. And male socialites, like male models, are exceptionally absurd (not least because of their obsession with fashion as an art form).

Consider Peter and Harry Brant the real-life equivalents of Derek Zoolander: innocent idiots who just happen to be really, really, really, ridiculously wealthy. And love Gossip Girl. Don't blame them for the media shitstorm they've stirred up, and don't go all high and mighty on their parents either. If it's anyone's fault, it's that of the publications who deem the musings of children to be worth your precious reading time.

We're looking forward to the inevitable New Yorker piece.

What the media industry lacks in earning potential it makes up for in self-congratulation. A killer scoop might not make you rich, but it will put you in front of the judges of the National Magazine Awards, the Pulitzer nominating committee, and whoever's curating Longreads these days. And if your Roger Ebert profile doesn't win the Ellie for feature writing this year, well, that's just fuel for the chase of the next perfect profile subject, the one that will render your byline immortal.

But what about the writers, reporters and editors who take on the thankless task of feeding our national addiction to celebrity news? US Weekly, Star, Life & Style, OK, People.

"For an entire ant colonies of professional word producers, next year never comes, hope never returns," writes Vanity Fair columnist and media critic James Wolcott this month. "No guild or institution honors what they do; no banquet halls are rented to host their futile festive presentation ceremonies. They are the unknown soldiers of the journalistic trade, the unsung utility players never called out of the dugout for a curtain call."

Jezebel has its "Midweek Madness," of course, but the tabloid report card is more interested in fact-checking their fabrications than in judging the pseudo-journalistic art on its own terms.

Happily, Mr. Wolcott has arrived to end this industry-wide snub with a new award called "The Kimmie," for the lifeblood of the trade, Kim Kardashian. His winners are guaranteed to inspire a renaissance of respect for the purveyors of "Brangelina" and other fine portmanteaux. Look! There's even an award for "Best Multi-Part Investigation."

The snack craze that swept the nation!

Sure they are crunchy and delicious, and maybe the appearance of the popular snack on Sunday's Mad Men was a little disconcerting. (Who knew they had Bugles in the 60s? Or Jewish copywriters?) But Fat Betty Francis' favorite snack has become something of an obsession to writers over at Vanity Fair, who have taken their hunger pangs to a whole new level.

Now, let's be fair. In the recaps of Tea Leaves, nearly everyone writing about the show mentioned the Bugles-versy. From Grantland comes Mark Lisanti's Faulkner-esque take:

Oh, and the Bugles! The Bugles, the Bugles. If (Betty) has just been eating the Bugles in the bathtub, true mind-scrambling, pathos-drowning perfection would have been achieved.

...to Twitter, which immediately saw the creation of @FatBettyFrancis:

But it was the Conde Nast publication that really took the cake (and Bugles). The paper's resident wunderkind Juli Weiner started it out with an innocent tweet:

This snowballed into an entire post about junk food from the Mad Men era by Bruce Handy on VanityFair.com yesterday. Banana Wackies, Whistles and Daisys, Space Food Sticks...when will these all be making an appearance on the show, Mr. Handy asks. Or maybe he just wants to reminisce about his favorite childhood snacks.

Either way, we think that it's time that the writers over at Vanity Fair get their annual allotted lunch-break.

Tis a far, far better thing I do... (PriceTower.org)

There are two great thrones in American architectural criticism, that of The New Yorker and The New York Times. It was at these two journalistic institutions that the practice was born, at the hands of its king and queen: Lewis Mumford, that great champion of public works and technics, and Ada Louise Huxtable, still the dean of the design press.

Paul Goldberger has been in the fortunate, indeed unique, position of wearing both crowns. After graduating from Yale, he would find himself at The Times in 1973, a young buck roaming the city he loved, engaged to write just about whatever he thought of the buildings and street life therein. He was, quite literally, heir to Ms. Huxtable, who had not yet been pushed out of the paper for her obstreperous ways, and the two of them shared the job of architecture critic for nearly a decade. Two years after she left in 1982, Mr. Goldberger won the Pulitzer for his efforts.

Thirteen years later, in 1997, he would himself depart one side of Times Square for the other, joining The New Yorker, restoring the Sky Line column begun by Mumford half a century earlier at the behest of Tina Brown. "When I went there, I thought it was as perfect a life as you could have," Mr. Goldberger told The Observer in an interview Sunday evening, "to spend half your career at The Times, half at The New Yorker."

But like so many landmarks, from the Parthenon to Penn Station, few endure. Starting today, Mr. Goldberger will board the notorious Condé Nast elevator, but instead of getting off on the 20th floor, he will report to work two floors up, where Graydon Carter has finally poached Mr. Goldberger for Vanity Fair.

"I've known Graydon a long time, and this is something he has talked about for awhile," Mr. Goldberger said. "When he heard I might be leaving the critic's post at The New Yorker, he called again, and things sort of progressed from there."

An unofficial announcement has been making the rounds, as first reported by The Architect's Newspaper, and Mr. Carter praises his latest acquisition as unparalleled, according to a copy obtained by The Observer. “This is an appointment that thrills me profoundly,” Mr. Carter says in the release. “Paul is about as gifted a commentator on architecture, urban planning and design as anyone you’re going to find these days—in other words, he’s just a brilliant writer.” An interview request to Vanity Fair was not immediately returned.

While Mr. Goldberger acknowledged he will miss The New Yorker in some ways, he said it was his decision to leave the magazine, in part so that he would have more time to tackle a biography of Frank Gehry. He said he is very much looking forward to the new possibilities presented by his new publication, for which he has written in the past, "on a one-off basis" starting five years ago. His first effort was a profile of Ralph Lauren, followed by one of Robert A.M. Stern, who had just finished his magisterial 15 Central Park West. (Mr. Goldberger is quick to point out that he reviewed the building for The New Yorker before he wrote about it for the in-house rival.)

"Graydon's eager to do a broad range of things on design and I'm excited to be doing that," Mr. Goldberger said. "And I'm not being coy, we haven't figured out exactly what the parameters are yet, but there will certainly be stories that are design-oriented, not strictly architecture."

That eagerness is not a small reason for Mr. Goldberger decision to leave The New Yorker for Vanity Fair. "David has, I think it's fair to say, mixed feelings about the architecture column," Mr. Goldberger said of New Yorker editor David Remnick. It is a complaint he has aired before, most recently at a panel hosted by the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects. Getting stories into a magazine, especially one that has shrunk considerably in size over the past decade, has become more and more difficult.

Four Times Square, an architectural masterpiece outside and in. (REW)

Indeed, there has not been a single Sky Line column since September 19 of last year, followed by two blog posts over the next week, and nothing since. Of the 14 pieces written last year, out of a total of 178 (according to The New Yorker's online archive) over a 15 year career, only six made it into the magazine—five columns and one Talk piece. Never mind that when you google either "architecture critic" or "architecture criticism," Mr. Goldberger's author page at The New Yorker is the second result, after Wikipedia.

Mr. Goldberger professes no animosity toward his former boss, and indeed said this has been one of his best and most productive working relationships. "David was great, just great," Mr. Goldberger said. "But change is good, too. I love The New Yorker, I like Vanity Fair, and I like the possibilities, which seem a lot broader than at The New Yorker."

Much of this is to do with the changing nature of publication, at Condé and beyond, the wealth of opinion online, the dearth of magazine pages, and so on. When was the last time you read a Joan Acocella review? And no, not one of those frivolous Critics Notebook pieces in the front of the book—which Ms. Acocella is at least fortunate enough to have to keep her busy every week or two. The answer is mid-January. Alex Ross is a little more lucky, managing a review of classical music at least once a month, plus regular blogging.

Mr. Goldberger is not alone in this, as his chief rival, The Times' newly coronated Michael Kimmelman, has been a less regular feature in the newspaper's pages than many had hoped. But at least The Times, which was criticized for appointing a non-expert to this important post, has not given up on the beat entirely. The New Yorker just may have, as there is no apparent replacement lined up for Mr. Goldberger. Any design writing, be it on IKEA, America's next top starchitect or tiny houses is likely to appear in the well of the magazine, not the back of the book. As of this publication, Mr. Remnick could not be reached for comment.

The absence of an architecture critic from the hallowed halls of Eustace Tilley Inc. is not actually as wretched as it sounds. Despite the prominence of Mr. Goldberger and Mumford before him, that is nearly the extent of architecture criticism at the magazine. Sure, New Yorker icon Brendan Gill took up the mantel near the end of his career, in the 1980s and '90s, but like Mr. Kimmelman (and Mumford) he was more of an enthusiast than a professional, like Mr. Goldberger, who has also taught architecture for years and briefly served as the dean of Parsons.

For his part, Mr. Goldberger said he is looking forward to his new gig and the flexibility being a Vanity Fair contributing editor will afford him, particularly to work on that biography of Frank Gehry. "It's a shitload of work," Mr. Goldberger said. "I've never written anything like this before, and I'm quickly realizing that writing a biography is going to take up a lot of time and energy."

That said, he still expects to write a number of things for Vanity Fair this year. But with the April issue already on newsstands, and production so many months in advance, how long will we actually have to wait for Mr. Goldberger to file his first piece?

In his first proper review for The Times, a piece on the then-new One Police Plaza published on October 27, 1973, Mr. Goldberger opened dramatically, as he often does: "Designing a building for the city of New York is the sort of nightmare that makes architects wonder why they didn't go into some easier profession, like neurosurgery."

The same might be said in some way about the business of architecture criticism these days.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

Tory Burch's place setting. (image via vanityfair.tumblr.com)

Place settings at the annual Vanity Fair Oscar dinner party included a Zippo lighter engraved with a Christopher Hitchens quotation.