People can be so confusing! Take Dany Levy. I admired her when Daily Candy was genuinely fun and insidery. Then I hated the company — and Levy, indirectly, I suppose — when the newsletter lost its culty edge and I was only able to rid my life of the Daily Headache with a change of email address. But yesterday Levy was featured in the “Corner Office” column of The New York Times, and if I hadn’t personally experienced such annoyance with Daily Candy or heard the word on the street that she’s mean, I would view her as a super-astute and generous manager, one who has “zero tolerance” for cattiness, who trumpets the value of working as a “scrappy little nobody” and who meets with young entrepreneurs gutsy enough to cold-call her for advice. Sometimes, you get the feeling that certain bosses have learned what a good boss is, but just aren’t disciplined enough to follow through on their own hard-earned knowledge. And those are the people who should become mentors and professors, as Levy has said she would like to be, while retiring as tormentors.

p.s. Check out Daily Candy New York’s home-page art, above. It’s the surest sign yet that advertisers are changing their minds about black people!

I am starting to think this whole democracy thing sucks. As if American voters hadn’t proved themselves suckers enough for bland mediocrity by handing victory to earnest Kris Allen over dazzling Adam Lambert on American Idol, and to neckless Shawn Johnson over dashing Gilles Marini on “Dancing With the Stars,” now the people who actually participate in pop-culture popularity contests have voted Kate Winslet as the most glamorous woman of 2009 in Glamour’s annual poll — over Michelle Obama, Heidi Klum and even Kate Moss. (Let’s not even talk about that Oscar for the stupid movie about an illiterate Nazi.) Not that the experts can always be trusted: I still have very high hopes for Vanity Fair’s first-ever voted-by-the-masses International Best-Dressed List. Don’t let me down!

If you find the sight of Blackberries on the playground and at the dinner table as galling as I do, and you consequently felt waves of righteous indignation washing over you at the mere sight of New York Mag’s lead cover line — “The Attention Crisis — And Why Distraction May Actually Be Good For You” — I’m here to tell you: Don’t sweat this one. It’s not worth the, ahem, distraction. As far as I can tell, writer Sam Anderson doesn’t attempt to make the case that distraction may actually be good for you, except to voice some skepticism at the idea that blowing a couple hours on the Internet is a serious waste of time — yeah, reading Jezebel’s midweek tabloid breakdown is an intellectual must — and to marvel at the so-called Net Gen, who are capable of carrying on 34 conversations across six different media — woo woo. Mostly, he presents a lot of evidence about why multitasking is bad for you — all pretty fascinating, in fact. What’s actually frustrating is that Anderson doesn’t so much as glance at why PDAs and the myriad other technological distractions without which humankind lived in ignorant bliss for the past 10 zillion years is bad for society. Like why checking your messages mid-conversation is rude. Or why texting in front of your children creates monsters who use the behavior of their role models — you — as a perfectly legitimate reason why they need not listen to their parents or anybody else. Of course, the consideration of the collective “we” is not what this Multitasking Moment is about. For as many online communities and connections are made, it’s really all about me, me, me.

p.s. For a micro-critique of the idiocy of so much contemporary distraction, check out Adam Sternbergh’s pithily brilliant “Spam Haiku,” in the same issue of New York. To wit: “Twitter [is a] tool to mass-blast the public with whatever message you choose, whether you’re promoting your book or yourself. This practice used to have a different name: spam. But ‘tweeting’ sounds much more cuddly than, say, ’shilling.’” See? I told you it’s brilliant.

If there is any truth to anything “revealed” about Renee Zellweger in Glamour’s cover-shoot behind-the-scene story — that she ate beef from the buffet, that she dances to ’80s music pre-red carpet, that she appreciates a good potty joke — don’t you think somebody would have advised her by now to make this fun-girl persona a bit more public? For one thing, men both gay and straight might actually find her attractive. And for another, she might actually sell magazines — not to mention making bank at the box office.

Models may have Hoovered up all the glory of the May issue of Vogue, but the mag deserves major kudos for two very good stories exploring modern motherhood, one about new evidence of embryonic damage due to antidepressants, the other about mercury levels in seafood. What could be alarmist and irresponsible turns out to be even-handed and, in the best way of women’s magazines, heartfelt. So much so, in fact, that you wonder why Bangs, who is often accused of being out of touch, doesn’t insist her publicists trumpet pieces like these as proof of her grasp of her readers’ everyday lives — for what mother, to-the-manor-born or not, doesn’t want as much information as possible on these topics? Such stories should be viewed as feathers in Vogue’s Stephen Jones-crafted cap — to be bragged about on the cover, and featured on the web site, rather than used as wordy filler. The key is striking a balance, not only in the pages of the magazine but also in the media outlets from GMA to Jezebel, where public perception, unfairly or not, is made.