Si Newhouse and the Conde Nasties

I missed this lovely piece by Steve Fishman, about Si Newhouse, head honcho at Conde Nast, and the future for his magazines. The whole thing's worth reading, but two money quotes:

"Si loves being surrounded by divas and egomaniacs," says one former editor. When one editor called another a "fucking bitch", Newhouse didn't mind. "Yes, but she's our bitch," he said.

And another, about David Remnick:

As we walk to a nearby diner in New York's West Village, Remnick checks in with his wife, greeting her in Russian - he won a Pulitzer for his book on the fall of the Soviet empire. Remnick is charming but wary, a working journalist who prefers the role of interviewer to interviewed. He reviews for me the differences between off-the-record and background conversations, and then we order salads. ("That's pretty gay," says Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair, and patently not a salad eater, when I mention my meeting with Remnick.) Remnick salts his conversation with references, and they are all over the place, proudly high and low - JD Salinger; the baseball legend Mel Stottlemyre, Perry White, Clark Kent's editor at the Daily Planet, and Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher in the 6th century BC. Much like in his magazine, there's showy, apparently effortless cultural fluency, though part of the message seems to be: Can you keep up?