Caitlin Flanagan told the New York Observer a year ago that "You’d never, never, never leave The ­New Yorker," but now she has. Flanagan has left the magazine's staff to concentrate on writing books here in Los Angeles. Since her last byline, on Mary Poppins creator P.L. Travers last December, Flanagan's "feminist-baiting book on modern motherhood," as the Observer calls it — To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife — has come out. She then contributed that piece for The Atlantic about girls and oral sex. The book she's working on now is "about teenage girls and the ways that they have been both served and also shortchanged by the women’s movement." Says Benjamin Schwarz, her editor at The Atlantic: "She’s done the math, and it’s not really worth it for her. She’s rewarded extremely handsomely for her book-writing, and no magazine can compete with that. Any work she’s doing for a magazine, she’s doing for charitable purposes."

Previously: TNY's woman in L.A. and She's everywhere

Photo: Seth Taras/The New Yorker/Little, Brown