How cool is this? George Orwell’s diaries are being published as a blog.

Judith Warner hates dogs too!

Maureen Tkacik dispenses a brilliantly catty proscription for The Wall Street Journal’s forthcoming snoozer, “Modern Wealth” magazine.

I have no idea whether legendary model agent Jerry Ford was a good man but he did introduce advance pay for models and that seems like a nice thing to do. He died this week.

Slate’s Lauren Sandell does an attitudinal hemline analysis of how the September women’s magazines are dealing with the fact that five-figure handbags may not be au courant at the moment.

Tough cookie Cathy Horyn is a baker! Here is her blueberry pie recipe. I am whipping one up this weekend.

In a strange and thrilling development, the celebrity cover may have reached its logical last phase. Both Vogue and Cookie forwent puff pieces for their cover girls, and gave each the straight model treatment. And why not? Considering that this is Keira Knightley’s fourth cover in three years, Vogue had little smoke left to blow up her tiny tushie (Anna Wintour does, however, pick on Knightley’s penchant for historical roles). At Cookie, there was likely little to write about Milla Jovovich following the closure of Jovovich-Hawk. Much as I like Milla, her movie career is such that the subhed references the 15-year-old “Dazed and Confused.” In any event, Conde Nast has found a nifty money-saving device in cutting out writers of stories nobody reads. But this approach has its perils too. While Milla, a former model, is capable of carrying a multipage shoot, Knightley clearly has no idea what she’s doing and even Mario Testino can’t save her. Sad.

Here is the directive Vogue forgot to include — and kindly asked me to publicize — for wearing this Norma Kamali one-piece: You are only allowed to wear this tanksuit if you have returned to a preadolescent state down there. Don’t even try to get away with El Flytape style. This bathing suit is strictly for Brazilian-waxed wah-wahs.

Ever since moving to New York, I have had an ongoing conversation with my fellow Detroit transplants about the possibility of moving “home.” That is, until about two years ago when Michigan entered a single-state recession, which has since gone national. Who wants to settle in a place that everybody seeks to leave, if only they could sell their homes?

So reading Adam Sternbergh’s great and sympathetic story about quitting the city for a backwater like Buffalo makes me wistful. How lucky are his subjects that they see opportunity in their hometown! (As Sternbergh reports, “Buffalo is the second poorest city in America. Number one: Detroit.”) How lucky are Sternbergh’s subjects that they have a mayor striving to implement Richard Florida’s “Creative Class” proscriptions! (Detroiters have the hip-hop mayor who is about to land jail time.)

And how lucky for Sternbergh himself that, as an editor-at-large for the media bubble’s hottest magazine, he will only leave New York on his own terms. Because he’s totally made it. And that makes me totally love Sternbergh — that from such a high perch, he can write with such sensitivity about a subject that completely goes against everything the deservedly cocky New York Magazine stands for, that New York City is the only place worth being, period, and if you can’t take it, get out.

As for me, I’m hoping that by the time New York beats me to a bloody pulp, I will have convinced Mr. MILF that L.A. is really, truly just another suburb of the city. Or that Detroit has transformed itself into the new Buffalo.

p.s. Pictured above is an abandoned house in Detroit. Have you ever seen so much empty land in something that calls itself a city?

As if magazines weren’t enough of an ecological disaster, Conde Nast is plastic-bundling the entirely unnecessary Fashion Rocks with every September subscriber issue of every magazine in its stable. All told, I have received eight copies of the silly superfluousness, including one packaged with The New Yorker. How’s that for a stretch in the crossover-audience department?

Next year, Mr. Newhouse, put some of your R&D into figuring out how to get me just one of these suckers. That way I won’t be forced into ripping it apart twice.