THERE SURE ARE A LOT OF AWARDS: The magazines with the most bragging rights in the James Beard Foundation Awards nominations, unveiled Monday, were Saveur, Gourmet, GQ and New York, each with three. (One of Gourmet's was for its television show, "Diary of a Foodie"). There were few surprises in that regard — two of New York's nominations, a feature on street food in Manhattan and its Grub Street blog, also are up for National Magazine Awards. GQ food critic Alan Richman is up for his 22nd nomination, and he's already won 12 over the years.

Nabbing single nominations were Departures, the Atlantic, Food & Wine, Travel + Leisure and Forbes Life, among others. In the book awards, "Welcome to Michael's: Great Food, Great People, Great Party!" was nominated in the entertaining category — for anyone who wishes to take their social cues from ever-charming New York media executives. — Irin Carmon

REALLY, SINCE WHEN DID TRUTH MATTER?: Pranks are particularly beloved of men's magazines — perhaps because they secretly want to telegraph that they're somehow too clever for the whole glossy magazine thing, or because they want to grab elusive male attention with schoolboy humor. These are two possible reasons for a February GQ story about a trend of animal aggression against humans that, after nearly 10,000 words of self-referential tangents and apparently reported interludes, revealed at the end that most of it had been made up. To quote author John Jeremiah Sullivan directly: "Big parts of this piece I made up. I didn't want to say that, but the editors are making me, because of certain scandals in the past with made-up stories, and because they want to distance themselves from me. Fine."

At the time, The Washington Post's magazine columnist, Peter Carlson, called it "a clever parody of environmental scare stories" (though he also singled out its "gaseous prose"), and blogger reaction ranged from perplexed to irritated to, well, credulous. Now comes Sullivan's response, published in the April issue following letters about the piece (one of which praised it but did not mention whether the letter's author got the joke, and two of which were less enthused). But the explanation is possibly even more convoluted than the original article, amounting to something of a repudiation of the whole project: "I am totally unable to explain what 'Violence of the Lambs' was, or was meant to be. Even so, some of you gave over a chunk of your day to a piece that in the end was something less, or, at any rate, other than it claimed, and you are owed." Sullivan said the story had passed through several unsuccessful drafts that took it from legitimate feature to satire to a "synthesis of some kind." He ended with a half-hearted apology: "I am sorry not to have shed more light. I love animals."