Maza's Bazaar

Anna Wintour on her political interests, and other scenes from the White House Correspondents’ Dinner

Me: Let me ask you now a serious question, you’re staying at Conde but you’re clearly interested in politics -

Wintour: Don’t go there, Erik.

Me: Well, I’m just curious, what kind of political causes are you interested in advancing?

Wintour: In terms of the causes I work with right now, I work very closely with the Met and the CFDA/Vogue Fund. Those are the two things that I’m involved in from the magazine’s point of view that I care deeply about. I also do a lot of work with the CFDA/Vogue AIDS foundation that we started back in the 90s.

Relive the entire Correspondents’ Dinner 3-D experience with my party report. Proceed at your own risk.

Instructions to recreate Stanford and Anthony’s wedding from Sex and the City 2

Meeting the one

“Mr. Bailey, 63, and Mr. Bleckmann, 46, met at the Chelsea Piers gym.”

“It wasn’t until he met his fiance Georgi Balinov at an Equinox gym in New York that he realized that he could fulfill his fantasy on his wedding night.”

Take your time to look around for something better

“They remember first noticing each other about 10 years ago, across a room full of StairMasters.”

2009: “Small differences were pushing them apart. Mr. Dixon felt increasingly alienated by his partner’s need to post the details of their lives online. “For me,” he said, a vacation or a party was “real just for the two of us. It seemed like Bradford often needed to put it online for it to be real.” 

2013: Shellhamer: “When I met my current boyfriend, I was getting married, invitations were getting sent, everything was done, and then I met Georgi and fell in love. I met him and a month later, I called off my wedding.”

Settling

“Mr. Bleckmann asked Mr. Bailey what to put in his protein shake. Mr. Bailey told him exactly, then said, “We should have dinner sometime.”     

“Mr. Balinov (left), 30, is a vice president for investment banking at Bank of America Merrill Lynch in New York.”

Every wedding must have a theme

“They were married just after midnight on Valentine’s Day on the 21st floor of the Empire State Building in a wedding with, appropriately, a King Kong theme.” 

“Shelhammer knew there had to be masks, and guests wearing only black and white—in homage to Truman Capote’s famous ball.”

The minister

“Then, the officiant, Joan Rivers, appeared on stage. She had been ordained by the Universal Life Church.”        

“The comedian and actress Sandra Bernhard, who is also a Universal Life minister, led a nondenominational ceremony before relatives and friends at the Russian Tea Room in New York.

The music

“At midnight, white curtains dropped to reveal a stage where Mr. Bleckmann stood, singing “You Make Me Feel So Young.” 

“Shelhammer and Balinov walking down the aisle to a recording of Julie Andrews singing “My Favorite Things.”

Congratulations, you have now had the gay wedding from Sex and the City 2

Andrew Sullivan’s Declaration of Independence

mmagazine:

For M’s spring issue, Erik Maza found the blogger no longer quite so randy, no longer quite so arrogant and in the midst of taking his act solo.

“Have you ever heard ‘Your Funny Uncle’ by the Pet Shop Boys?”

Andrew Sullivan is standing in a room no bigger than a walk-in closet in his Greenwich Village apartment. He’s a compact lumberjack of a guy with a prodigious beer gut and a Santa beard speckled with white. He is wearing a T-shirt with a grinning cat on the front. “Space Pussy—Provincetown,” it reads, with a thought bubble poking out: “Fuck Yeah.”

The gloriously melodramatic, unapologetically gay-pop Pet Shop Boys are his favorite band ever: “It’s like someone created a pop group just for your life.” He plays “Your Funny Uncle” and sings along, hitting each word milliseconds before Neil Tennant. “Isn’t it beautiful?” he says.

This is not how I expected to find Andrew Sullivan at 49. British-born, Oxford-educated, the son of a strict Catholic family who has hung onto his faith despite his problems with the church, Sullivan has long had a sneering attitude toward the trappings of the East Coast elite, which he dismissed in the run-up to the Iraq War as “the decadent left” and “a paralyzing, pseudo-clever, morally nihilist fifth column.” Yet here he was, this fixture of MSNBC and HBO’s Real Time With Bill Maher, cozy in his apartment, steps away from the Stonewall Inn, in the city he used to despise but is now getting used to. New York magazine editor in chief Adam Moss, once Sullivan’s editor at Seven Days and The New York Times Magazine, lives just down the block. There is freesia in his living room and freesia in his blogging cave—Sullivan loves flowers. “It’s my English thing,” he says.

Read More

I spent a couple of hours with Andrew Sullivan for this piece. He cried, he cruised, he apologized, again, for Iraq, and he talked about his ‘why the fuck not moment’ with The Dish. 

So how many copies did the New Republic’s redesign issue sell?

Give or take 13,675 copies.

Chris Hughes passed over Steven Brill’s 25,000-word piece on healthcare costs in favor of an interview with Barack Obama that even Andrew Sullivan described as a “suck-up.” Brill’s story went to Time, where, on the strength of heavy promotion on corporate sibling CNN, and the ensuing controversy about Hughes’ snub, it sold well. It wasn’t a record-breaker! - covers stories on Steve Jobs, Osama bin Laden’s death, and the special issues of Person of the Year and the royal wedding did better - but the issue “sold more than double the typical number of copies,” a Time publicist chirped to the New York Times. ABC numbers are not yet available.

Hughes defended his cover choice, telling New York the Obama interview “sold at record rates on the newsstand — over five times larger than any issue in the past decade.”

This is hard to fact-check because since 2009 TNR hasn’t been audited. BPA booted the magazine that year for not paying its bill.

But from looking at the last report from BPA, which looked at the 12 month period that ended June 2009, it’s possible to estimate a number. 

The newsstand average for that period was 2,008 copies, according to BPA. (The bulk of TNR’s circulation, then and now, is subscriptions, which is why you see them charging $40 for a year’s package; advertising, as we’ve noted is negligible.)

The highest seller of that June ‘08-‘09 period sold 2,735 copies at the newsstand.

Using our elementary math skills, and Hughes’ logic, that means the big blockbuster redesign issue sold, give or take, 13,675 copies.

That number might be different if you include digital single-copy sales, as well as the magazine’s current newsstand presence, which we assume is greater than it was in 2009.

Hughes’ figures might also be exaggerated. He told the Times TNR’s circulation had grown from 34,000 in March 2012 to 44,177, which if true, is, like, an astonishing, almost unheard-of circulation spike.

The reason circulation was so small by the time Hughes took over the magazine is that in 2009 budget cuts forced its then owners, which consisted of a new ownership group called TNR 2 consisting of Marty Peretz and Larry Grafstein, to cut back on print costs by renegotiating all vendor contracts and scaling back newsstand distribution. Losses were scaled back from about $5 million at the start of the decade to about a million dollars a year by the time Hughes bought it, several sources confirmed to me when I reported on TNR for M. Presumably, that has changed, and TNR now has a larger newsstand footprint. 

But for most of 2008, circulation was higher than Hughes says it is now - according to BPA, overall circ started declining Dec 2008. For the entire 12-month period ending June 2009, average subscriptions was 49,760 and overall circulation was 58,165.

The last issue of Time reported to the Alliance of Audited Media sold 41,450 copies, including digital sales. Subscriptions totaled 3,245,700.

If Brill wanted to reach a mass audience, he made the right call.