B-b-breaking: Liberal wonky magazine American Prospect opens up a can of lefty whoop-ass on beleaguered New York Times editor Bill Keller and publisher Arthur Sulzberger by imploring both of them to resign. The Prospect's executive editor Michael Tomasky brings up the usual lot of blemishes — Judy Miller, James Risen, et al — and says in order for the paper to restore its credibility, Keller and Sulzberger must go:

• Bush summoned Sulzberger and Keller to Washington earlier this month in a last-ditch attempt to get them not to run the domestic-spying story, reports Jon Alter. [Newsweek]
• And, says Greg Mitchell, as the Times's handling of the domestic-spying story increasingly seems to be another major management fuckup at the paper, George W. Bush proves he is the true Teflon president. [E&P]
• Bigtime journalists aren't paid enough, argues Slate's Daniel Gross, who, charmingly, hasn't yet realized that of course we'll never make enough to live like real human beings anywhere in New York City. [Slate]
• Redesigned TV Guide, which now looks basically nothing like TV Guide, is doing great numbers. But they may not be great enough. [WWD]
• Carl Icahn, who hasn't been happy with Time Warner management in a while, ain't at all happy with the proposed TW-Google deal. [NYP]
• Radar published what might have been the best sentence of magazine writing this year: "In 2004, a man playing Pluto was run over and killed by a 'princess float' in the Share a Dream Come True parade at Disney World's Magic Kingdom." Plus Peter Carlson's other "wild and wacky" magazine moments from 2005. [WP]

We have no desire to get into Jesuitical parsing of our relationship/ nonrelationship with the New York real-estate blog Curbed, and of Curbed's relationship/nonrelationship with the Times. So we won't. And we'll simply — without any disclaimers or nondisclaimers — welcome the latest Times blogging effort, the Gray Lady real-estate blog called The Walk-Through.

• More cuts are coming at Time Inc., according to David Carr. [NYT]
• Time Warner picks Google search over Microsoft for AOL, and sells the the search company a 5 percent stake in AOL — which means Parsons ain't selling off the whole thing. [NYT]
• The Times gets it from two sides on wiretapping story: Some media folks don't like the paper held the story for so long, while Bush doesn't like that the paper pointed out he's spying on citizens. [USAT]
• Jon Friedman thinks the new Nightline sucks. [MW]
• Media Guy Simon Dumenco looks back at the 10 big media-news stories of 2005 — nearly all of them bad for the biz — and realizes where it'll all end: Google Hunting and Gathering. [Ad Age]

Buried in the Metro section, yesterday's Times finally noticed something odd: Apparently it's kind of hard to afford to live in New York these days if you're not a hedge-fund manager, and so the city is starting to lose some of its vaunted "creative class." We were busy trying to figure out under what definition this was news when we noticed an interesting — and newsworthy, even — fact near the end of the article:

Every once in a great while, Bill Cunningham's "On the Street" photo feature goes deeper than the Upper East Side's continuing fascination with Mukluk boots. Yesteday, he pointed out a subtle wrong in the world: On a day when the temperature hovered around 14 degrees, Abercrombie & Fitch staffers were seen taking their lunch breaks while dutifully wearing their company-mandated flip-flops.

• Mort Zuckerman pulls the plug on Radar; hearts are broken, dreams are shattered, and business cards are destroyed.
• The Transit Workers' Union goes on half-strike, which means we'll continue to wait for news on when shit gets really inconveniencing.
• Now that Michael Cooke has ditched the Daily News, editorial director Martin Dunn is so inconvenienced to act as editor-in-chief. Meanwhile, Orla Healy returns from the Post and Lloyd Grove finds himself an innocent, new fluffer.
• There's no time like the holidays for some serious, ass-kicking lay-offs.
• We never thought we'd see the day, but Andrew Krucoff is finally, technically, a man.
• MediaLand continues to celebrate the season with boozy staff parties; New York magazine goes so far as to bring out the Karaoke torture device.
• Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. gets a gentle spanking while Judy Miller hits the high seas.
• PETA continues to cheerfully annoy Anna Wintour.

It's exactly 15 days until New Year's Eve, and we're guessing you couldn't care less. We certainly couldn't. Like St. Patrick's Day, the 31st is a giant amateur hour, an excuse for wannabe-alcoholics to waste hundreds of dollars on an overcrowded, open bar, and don sparkly shirts that no God could ever have intended for them to wear. And after the ball drops and your night has officially reached its expected level of letdown, you can spend 75 minutes searching for a cab, only to finally hail a ride in a mobile vomit unit. Fun!

In this week's installment of Alex K.'s Amazing Adventures of the Ladies Who Lunch, our fearless reporter goes fur shopping. At first, she's put off by the idea — apparently she's got a dog she rather likes — but, naturally, the ridiculously expensive decadence grows on her.

Above, quite possibly the perfect example of the Times gone wrong. This piece COULD be a totally great article, but we'd never know: We're not going to read anything with a hed like that.

Feeling like it's been too long since you last heard outraged self-justifications from Miss Once Ran Amok? We certainly feel that way. And so we've been wondering how she possibly let a whole week or so pass without a disastrous appearance on a television of radio show.

One hopes they'll at least be dueling with legal guns.

• Ken Auletta is right about Pinch Sulzberger, Timesmen tell Keith Kelly. [NYP]
• George Stephanopoulos named ABC's chief Washington correspondent. And he doesn't even have to share the title. [B&C]
• Frank Rich is a New York celebrity, speaking pitch-perfect Manhattan liberalism, and that's his problem, says Bryan Curtis. [Slate]
• Atlantic publisher David Bradley to back 02138, a "Vanity Fair-like alumni magazine for Harvard students," which, we imagine, will increasingly be littering the 100TKs. [Boston Globe]

And here we were, with no idea that dapper D.C. mayor Anthony Williams had any notable musical ability.

Sunday afternoon we threw out our back. Did we do this the way most non-geriatrics do, in an athletic endeavor? No, we did not. Did we do it exercising? Nope. Having sex? Alas, no. So how, then? We threw out our back lifting a case of wine. Which, ultimately, seems about right.

Haven't read enough yet about Pinch Sulzberger? Then be sure to catch this week's New Yorker, in which you'll get 10,000 Ken Auletta words on the Ochs scion who has visited upon the world's greatest newspaper both Howell Raines and Judith Miller.

Thought we've read it, more or less in its entirely, for the five years of its existence, it occurred to us yesterday that perhaps we've entirely misunderstood the Times Magazine's annual "Year in Ideas" feature.

• PETA places stickers featuring Anna Wintour's luverly visage on urinals, knowingly located at venues frequented by the Voguester. We're counting on you to catch some images of the campaign (at Da Silvano, La Esquina, and the Four Seasons) before management is forced to remove the handiwork. [Page Six]
• Madonna waltzes into the Mercer Kitchen and seduces hotelier Andre Balazs for a solid 10 minutes. Balazs's girlfriend, actress Uma Thurman, seemed to not notice — or, perhaps, care. Madge ain't much competition these days. [Lowdown]
• As a nice complement to Katie Couric's own retardation, a poet within NBC has penned a holiday-appopriate ode to the Today princess: "'Tis right before seven, On the set of 'Today,' There struts a smug diva, Who wants things her way." [Page Six]
• The New Yorker's Ken Auletta rips Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. a new one in the latest issue of the mag. [R&M]
• How does Jessica Simpson deal with an ugly breakup? Collagen, natch, because your first rebound hook-up goes so much more smoothly when you're sporting a nice set of DSLs. [Scoop (last item)]

In this week's Thursday Styles, Alex Kuczynski takes her multimillions and goes shopping at the new Abercrombie & Fitch flagship store on Fifth Avenue. She doesn't much care for it — of course, being 37 years old, she's not supposed to care for it — and she fixates mostly on the fact she found the store too damned loud. But she also took a moment to turn her nose up at the store's famously oversexed shtick:

It's tough to complain about The Carpetbagger, the Times's just-launched Oscar-season blog by David Carr, mostly because it's a pleasure to read David Carr on just about anything, especially when he's given some extra leash to be un-Timesianly light and clever. But we wouldn't feel like ourselves if we didn't at least try to complain, and so we've come up with this: