Saltier than Bob Mackie, livelier than DVF and far less earnest than Eleanor Smeal, Helen Gurley Brown is far and away the best interview I ever scored as a journalist. The story was about Scavullo, her longtime Cosmo cover collaborator, and Brown was all frankly funny talk about putting “friendly girls” with “busts and cleavage” front and center. She addressed me by my first throughout our conversation, and she begged off my lunch invite as she apparently does with just about everybody — “most days I eat a tuna sandwich at my desk.” Sorta gives the gal some serious workaholic, feminist street cred that you just wouldn’t expect from, say, super-glam Gloria Steinem, doesn’t it? And happily, the new, decently received autobiography, “Bad Girls Go Everywhere,” serves as a reminder, notes the adoring New York Times critic Dwight Garner, of just how groundbreaking Brown’s work — the book “Sex and the Single Girl,” her early days at Cosmopolitan — was for its time. Which is what makes perusing Cosmopolitan in its current state that much more depressing. Brown might call me prude, but all the sex talk comes off as silly. (Could you get through even one “hot-fantasy” scenario in the current issue — “I notice a silk tie and wrap it around your … finish this fantasy” — without laughing your wah-wah off?) On the other hand, perhaps Cosmo was never meant for urbane women. Perhaps it’s meant as a kind of grown-up sex ed for the sort of underexposed rural woman that Brown once was, which has allowed her to speak so candidly of our country’s often ignored working-class women. For if Cosmo is their brain candy, it’s important to note that it also preaches self-love. And who could really say that about Vogue?

The next time you’re knocked up and jonesin’ for a drink — but you fear inflicting permanent retardation on your fetus — you’d do well remember this scene from New York Times media columnist David Carr’s insane-yet-believable-because-of-the-reporting addiction memoir: Handing his pregnant girlfriend a crack pipe, he watches her water break at the seven-month mark — and then goes on to report that, some 19 years later, his twin girls are flourishing at the Universities of Michigan (yay!) and Wisconsin, respectively. Now, I can’t imagine the psychological impact of knowing that your parents acted in such an irresponsibly destructive manner. (Like, would you always wonder if you suck, say, at math because of your mother’s prenatal drug addiction?) But I do know the feeling of being pregnant and needing a half-glass of malbec to take the edge off a day with a toddler, but refraining because I’m too afraid. Never mind that, cultural prejudice aside, the French aren’t idiots and neither is Frances Bean Cobain (whose mother, Courtney Love, admitted shooting heroin while pregnant). So while David Carr’s L&D crack scene hasn’t fully relaxed me on wining while with child — and I’d bet that wasn’t his objective — I’m sneaking sips from Mr. MILF’s glass my second time around, and he has clearly taken something of a chill pill following “Night of the Gun” too. Certainly, I feel far less guilt about my own white-powder habit — that is, Splenda.

Besides the astounding fact of his survival, what’s so striking is both Carr’s ambition — his career appears to be the one thing not really derailed by smoking coke for breakfast, lunch and dinner — and his delicate economic existence. That’s no surprise in the drug decade. But even during a relapse several years into his tenure as The Times’s highly respected “Media Equation” columnist, Carr is forced, because of insurance issues, to dry out at a gritty midtown clinic that might as well have been called the Dungeon of Desperation. So when he reveals that his daughters’ college essays inspired him to hunker down on the book, you can’t help but think it was actually the looming tuition bills. Who could blame him?

As unlikable as Carr often seems — girlfriend beating and emotional abuse will do that — it’s hard not to think he’s a lot of fun too, even as a sober guy who shamelessly admits that cheesy AA slogans are his lifeline, and especially as a media insider whose use of first-names-only encourages media whores like me to pinpoint every last New York character, including Kurt Andersen and Mim Udovitch. Two identities, however, have continued to elude me: Seth, the young writer who is a recovering addict — Schiesel? Kugel? Mydans? — and the totally nameless Times executive who shepherded Carr through his midtown detox. Gold stars to anyone who enlightens me. Off-the-record anonymity guaranteed.