Have a burning desire to label "new" trends that have been around for months, if not years? Like looking at Bill Cunningham's fancy pictures of fancy people at really boring fancy parties? Yearn to find a new essay each week about why modern love sucks? Then today, folks, is your lucky day. Luisita Torregrosa, the editor of Sunday Styles, is "realizing a long-held dream and resigning from the paper to write full-time." (Apparently working for a newspaper makes it hard to write full-time.) They need a replacement to start June 30, and resumes should go to Trip Gabriel. One imagines the competition will be tough, however: The New Republic, after all, recently named this the less morally reprehensible half of Gabriel's kingdom. Probably because it's so much less gay.

Random but we think reliable rumor of the day: We hear that Toby Usnik, the No.2 PR person at The New York Times, will be leaving the Gray Lady to go flack for Christie's, the auction house. If we had to guess, we'd bet he's moving up to a top PR job there — finally, a chance for stock grants. Or maybe it's just exhausting doing corporate communications for a company that just faced an enormous vote of no confidence in his management. Either way, Usnik's the second person — after Kathy Park — to leave the Times PR staff in the last few months. Take that whatever it's worth.

Is the Times Book Review experiencing some sort of cranky Groundhog's Day? We have to ask, given that they've allowed reviewers to make impossibly unfair comparisons of their subjects to HRH Joan Didion for two weeks in a row. Of course nobody's Joan fucking Didion — is it really necessary to deliver an extra slap in an already unfavorable review by name-dropping? Yeah, we're talking to you, Kurt Andersen. Intern Alexis tackles that, plus the formal fellating of Gary Shteyngart, in her weekly guide to sounding halfway literate.

We wanted to read New York mag's article today on Howell Raines, his new book, and his post-Times life. Really we did. But then we got to the full-page portrait that opens the feature and, man, we just couldn't get any further. Are we appalled? Are we intrigued? Is it the jowls? Is it the nose? Is it the dark, penetrating eyes? We have no idea. But we haven't been able to look away.

As we weren't reading Times public editor Barney Calame yesterday — does anyone read insufferably boring and continually irrelevant Times public editor Barney Calame anymore? — we happened across Carl Swanson's Q&A with former public editor Dan Okrent in the new New York mag. It's a discussion of Okrent's new collection of his public-editor columns, which apparently his fans demanded. A highlight:

An Editor's Note in yesterday's Sunday Styles:

• Teen lit packaging expert Lizzie "Old Hag" Skurnick talks about the realities of 17th Street's "packaging" of Kaavya Viswanathan's first novel: Packagers are writers and editors who get the job done quickly for larger publishing houses, and make a lot of money doing so. If that meant pulling out some stock passages for Viswanathan to get her manuscript in on time, that would explain the suspected plagiarism. Related: Why aren't we in the packaging business? [Harvard Independent]
• How do you calculate New York's nightlife apocalypse? Take a bill to freeze liquor licenses and multiply it by Axl Rose at Misshapes. [VV]
• Good news for anyone who likes to touch themselves: Nerve.com launches its video site. [Nerve]
• The FBI launches an investigation of Pellicano case leaks to the Times. PlameGate for Hollywood, yay. [Fishbowl LA]
• Fox News' Shep Smith doesn't appreciate being mistaken for Steve Kmetko. But who does? [You Tube]
• Donald Trump has paid the $5 registration fee necessary to become a Rhode Island state lobbyist, so now he can schmooze his way towards — what else? — yet another casino. [ProJo]
• For the record, we've no fucking clue who made a Gawker MySpace profile — but we're thrilled to have 541 friends! [Got Detroit]

The Times has an front-section piece today on the latest twist in the Anthony Pellicano wiretapping saga that's metastasizing through Hollywood. Today's wrinkle: A prominent L.A. divorce lawyer who used Pellicano on his cases "was aware of at least one instance of his illegal wiretapping." And how does the Times describe this attorney?

There's precious little good news out of Iraq these days. (For example, take our defense secretary. Please. Yuk yuk.) But the photo on the top of the Times homepage right now provides at least a small glimmer of hope. As the theoretically sovereign nation slides further into disarray, it's nice to know that if civil war rages on and supplies become scarce, President Jalal Talabani will provide enough meat to feed entire neighborhoods.

We'll admit that after we saw Murder in the First a decade or so ago, in which an enranged Kevin Bacon kills a fellow Alcatraz inmate by stabbing him in the neck with what we recall was a fork, we found pointy utensils ever so menacing for the next few days. Beyond that, though, we were totally unaware that there's a "growing fear of flatware." Are people all scared of spoons? Have you been eating with your hands? Exclusively chopsticks? Suddenly we're very glad we've never been asked to lunch at the Times cafeteria.

From "Mayors Discuss Efforts on Gun Crimes," a Times article by Sewell Chan reporting on the meeting Mayor Bloomberg organized at Gracie Mansion today, in which 15 big-city mayors pledged to work together to reduce gun trafficking and gun crimes:

• Jann Wenner finds himself a new RS publisher, to replace the one he forced out in February. He'll drive away this one soon enough, too, no doubt. [NYP]
• CBS Radio, which fired Opie and Anthony from WNEW a few years ago, hires them for Stern's old slot on WXRK — booting David Lee Roth. [USAT]
• Cookie or Playboy? You make the call. [Media Mob/NYO]
• Those male socialites the Times discovered on Sunday? Yeah, one of them shtupps (or, at least, used to shtupp) the guy who wrote the story. [WWD]

In this week's installment of the Times' catty Sunday book club, a University of Chicago academic comes to the defense of Sven Birkets, who was heralded last week as poised to "replace Rick Moody as Dale Peck's 'worst writer of his generation.'" Plus, Birkerts has just been hired by Harvard, and it's nice to see someone finally stick up for a beleagured Crimsonette. Meanwhile, Erica Jong gets smacked by comparison to Joan Didion, leaving Intern Alexis stumbling on such an uneven playing field. That, plus some unerotic erotic lit, after the jump.

On Sunday, the Times ran a disconcertently glowing story about shaken-down billionaire Ron Burkle's friendship with Bill Clinton. One of the fuzzy details included was how Clinton and Burkle had met; according to the Times, the two were introduced after Clinton had heard that Burkle's supermarkets were spared in the LA riots because he was so good to his employees. After Slate's Mickey Kaus pointed out that Burkle's properties weren't so much spared as torched, the Times has put its tail between its legs:

• Details missed its rate base on eight of 10 issues in 2005. Fun. [Ad Age]
• Martha Stewart launches Blueprint today in a bid to reach younger readers. There should probably be a joke about Alexis here, but we can't think of one. [NYP]
• Daily Candy remains for sale. [NYM]
• Punch Sulzberger has allegedly said that he'll read the Times on the computer when he can take a computer into the bathroom with him. Now, apparently, he can. [NYT]
• Kurt Andersen thinks we're in a tech bubble again. How does he know? Because Michael Wolff wants in. [NYM]
• Simon Dumenco answers the questions you didn't ask, including whether he has a clothing line and what his jingle sounds like. [Ad Age]
• Existentially speaking, who is Brian Williams? [MW]
• NYT M.E. Jill Abramson's grandfather could have invested early in Paramount Pictures but didn't. [NYSun]

Maybe we don't understand these things because we didn't go to an Ivy League school. But it would seem to us that the first part of getting yourself perceived as one of the cool kids — as a big front-of-Metro takeout in Saturday's Times explained a crew of Cornell kids is trying to do — would be to not have big front-of-Metro takeouts on how damn hard you're trying to become one of the cool kids.

No long able to justify any intense, above-the-fold, gossip industry fun, Times had an oddly feel-good article about shaken-down billionaire Ron Burkle and his business-boosting friendship with Bill Clinton. In short, Clinton helps Burkle's Yucaipa Companies "find investment projects," and Burkle's profits help Clinton pursue his philanthropic projects around the world. So how'd these two power-brokers forge a friendship? According to the Times:

• Hearst mags get move-in dates for new tower, where the cafeteria will serve sushi five days a week. [NYP]
• Four Time Inc. mags will move their TOCs to the first page, sponsored by Philips Electronics. Finally, the cure magazines have been searching for. [WSJ]
• Housekeeping no longer so good for EIC Ellen Levine? [WWD]
• High-end book pubisher Rizzoli looks to enter U.S. magazine market with a title that's "Time Out meets Star magazine with N mero kind of fashion," whatever the hell that might mean. [FWD]
• Critics should stop worrying so much about the Times and focus more on the sins of local TV news, says Brian Montopoli. Coming soon from Public Eye: Is your weatherman really jolly?! [Public Eye/CBS]
• More Times blogs: Now covering state politics. (Oh, shit. Were we not supposed to be talking about the-paper-that-cannot-be-named anymore? Sorry.) [The Politicker/NYO]
• Elizabeth Spiers popularized the word "snarky" when she worked for Gawker. It's a testament to our precocity, then, to have been miraculously using it even before blogs existed. [Downtown Express]

A quick check-in to complete the death-of-Boldface storyline: As hinted by Bill Keller's memo announcing the demise of the Times's meta-gossip column, and as widely rumored among the sorts of people who bother to think about such things, erstwhile Boldfacer Campbell Robertson has indeed taken over the Broadway-reporting beat recently vacated by California-bound Jesse McKinley. Robertson started in the job at the start of this week, but his first Broadway byline is still TK. Better get cracking, Robertson — at this rate it'll be years till you can finagle a free redesign of your apartment.

• The state of New York is the nation's leader in migration outflow, losing an average of 182,886 people per year; metropolitan New York area is also up there, averaging 211,014 people yearly. You know what? Good! Get the hell out of here! But it's not like a mass fucking exodus will burst the housing bubble. Only seven or eight apocalyptic horsemen can do that. [NY Sun]
• The California Supreme Court threw out a sexual harassment lawsuit from a former writer's assistant on Friends, ruling that "trash talk is part of the creative process." Remember that when you want to tell your boss to fuck himself — now you can, the law says so. [CNN]
• TomKat becomes TomRat, which is uncomfortably realistic. [Gallery of the Absurd]
• The Post makes an earnest attempt at some Page Six humor — but not really of the self-deprecating sort, which means it's not really funny. [NYP]
• It's always fun to screw with spammers. It's even more fun when there are deaf kids involved. [Corporate Casual]
• The Times doesn't really know much about this Pinch guy, but they sure are hungry for a Sulzburger. Har, har — thanks, we'll be here all week! [CJR]
• The Observer's Bridal Blog confirms what every stressed-out, bride-to-be already knows: Grooms are nuptially retarded. And they're all yours for a lifetime. [Bridal Blog]