I love the way that Rushdie says “If you ever write mean things about my wife again.” Rushdie has a huge vocabulary so his comment was quite revealing. He could have said don’t you dare insult her honor, don’t call her a gold digging whore. Instead he pointed out exactly what was bothering him – that somebody was mean to her. Heaven forbid Padma Lakshmi ever gets a bad review …

If you can’t stand the snark (without screaming at people and getting violent) stay away from the fashion pages and … don’t read Sepia Mutiny.

First, this is totally irrelevant. You might as well drag in Rushdie’s celebrated literary history.

Second, he’s a culture writer, not a news reporter. Anybody who writes on entertainment for the Voice, the New Yorker and the NYT is going to be off the charts on snark.

… it’s funny that you see insults between the lines… but ignore the direct complements…

It’s lipstick on a pig. ‘She’s a C-list hustler, but she does it well’ is far from a compliment.

That makes me lose respect for him.

You forget that when Pakistanis made a movie urging that he be assassinated, Rushdie personally intervened to get it uncensored. And he’s spoken out for artistic freedom countless times.

This is not a matter of artistic freedom, this is a matter of personal honor. He lost his head, and he shouldn’t have threatened physical harm, but he’s well within reason to be upset.

The Mike Berger Award was presented to Guy Trebay, who recently joined the New York Times and is currently writing for its Style section. For two decades Trebay covered New York for the Village Voice and was recognized with numerous awards, including the Deadline Club Front Page Award and a Pulitzer Prize nomination. Committed to covering the city’s many diverse communities, Trebay has written about the not-so-storybook life of the Central Park carriage horses, the use of Viagra as a party drug, and how the tragedies of regular New Yorkers go unnoticed in a celebrity-fixated age. His cultural coverage has extended to places and scenes outside the five boroughs, including coverage of the murder of Matthew Shepard (which earned him a nomination for a GLAAD Media Award), the emergence of fashion as a major cultural force, the Romanian Revolution, and Vietnam’s opening to the west. Trebay’s work has been collected (In the Place to Be, 1994) and widely anthologized. He has written for The New Yorker, Details, Vibe, Condé Nast Traveler, Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine and other national publications.

Trebay sure sounds like he’s saying she married Rushdie for his money.

Hustle is a compliment. Hustler is most definitely not.

Anyhow, I’m glad you don’t perceive obvious smackdowns easily. It’ll keep you blissful, and save me from a well-deserved beating

Well, C-list was your description, but it’s accurate. I mean, she doesn’t have the Q-rating to be either A-list or B-list.

The writer does call her a hustler, but it’s in this context:

A burgeoning brand married to a global brand, she has no problem making public an inventory of brands she chooses to wear to fashion shows. In other words she knows how the business works.

He’s complimenting her on her savvy! People say that about Madonna all the time!

As for having “no problem making public an inventory of brands she chooses to wear to fashion shows” he backs that right up:

“The coat is Gucci,” Ms. Lakshmi said, seat-hopping before Luella Bartley’s show at the National Arts Club on Gramercy Park. The fitted white leather boots she had on “were made for me by my friends at Costume National.” The sequined handkerchief-hem wrap dress was a vintage one from a Diane Von Furstenberg collection; Ms. Von Furstenberg was the next show on Ms. Lakshmi’s schedule that day. Her day ring, set with a whirring wheel of white gold kept spinning by the movement of her hands, was by Angelo Meru, an Italian jeweler. The enormous emerald-cut flasher on her ring finger was Mr. Rushdie’s wedding gift. The dangling seed pearl earrings came from Tara Famiglietti, a young New York jeweler

If you don’t like people calling you a duck, stop quacking so loudly.

MEOW. massively attractive, you hot-blooded knight in shining Benzer.