From a very cute Op-Ed in The Times, further confirmation that my people pull the strings.

Who would have thought that a formerly marginal crackpot like Arianna Huffington could transform herself into the type of media mogul that a formerly powerful crackpot like Tina Brown aspires to be? And yet, how cool! These battle-axe broads — profiled in The New Yorker and The New York Times, respectively — are corralling the internet’s limitless potential for reinvention into personal power centers that no man can claim (Graydon Carter, who currently puts vanityfair.com to similar use, could do it without his magazine’s imprimatur). What I love about my fellow media-obsessed mommy bloggers — Huffington on the HuffPo and Brown on the week-old Daily Beast — is that the friends appear to have hit their strides in middle age, when society expects women to disappear. That both women have employed the “soft-launch” approach with their sites — get the tone and content right before selling advertising — confirms that mi amigo Robert Wolfe of Moosejaw was dead-on when he advised me, “Build it and they will come.” Tick, tick, tick …

I hearby decalre Magazine MILF a Sarah Palin Free Zone. Bitches barred from entry.

If you eat, you must read the Sunday Magazine’s amazing Food Issue. Consider this: Unless you exclusively eat organically grown food from your backyard, you eat oil. Not olive or canola, but the black sludge that has allowed Middle East despots to terrorize everybody. If that disgusting nugget does not inspire you to join a farmer’s co-op, it should make you want to learn more about what you consume, and the Sunday Magazine provides a terrific, often-uplifting primer. There is scandal — as Samantha M. Shapiro reports, a very cute rabbi is attempting to make the kosher seal mean more than dollars again — and there is glamour — a former nightclub promoter is devoted to safe drinking water for poor people. Predictably but essentially, there is a surfeit of great ideas by foodie superstar, Michael Pollan, whose memo to the next President presents a better visual of hope than anything Barack Obama has dreamed up: a five-acre fruit and vegetable garden on the White House lawn, in the spirit of Eleanor Roosevelt’s Victory Garden. Talk about the coolest field trip ever. Celebs and schoolchildren would vie for time cultivating tomatoes, and Oscar de la Renta, a gardening enthusiast, could design staff uniforms!

When I learned I had birthed a girl, my first thought was, “F*ck. She is going to hate me in 13 years.” Then I started writing for Teen Vogue and I moved into an apartment above an Urban Outfitters — where there is a perpetual teen gaggle — and now I am totally psyched for my daughter’s teen-dom. But sweet relief not to have a teenager at this hysterical moment. As Sunday Styles reporter Jan Hoffman writes, today’s teens have rarely heard the word “no” applied to their material desires, and now that we’re experiencing financial armageddon, their parents are paying for their permissiveness — and not only with their checkbooks. Having to say “no” has turned teen homes, which typically exist at Pakistan-like levels of car-bomb warfare, into Iraq. This just may be the silver lining to the market meltdown. Why?

Once-clueless teens are learning fiscal responsibility the hard way (which sucks because it’s not really their fault), and the ordeal will grow them into parents who are generous with no and thrifty with yes, and determined to raise financially savvy children. On a personal level, The New Frugality is a major validation of my own toy minimalism. Where my toy maximalist of a neighbor used to make me feel Scroogey, I now feel positively au courant in the parenting department. So, thank you, Mr. Dow for your collapse. I have finally won a round with the wench.