In a 5,000+ word essay published in this week's New York Magazine, Alec Baldwin ripped the press, insulted his former colleagues at MSNBC and announced he was done with New York City and public life, picking up his family and moving back to Los Angeles.

The trigger for Baldwin's rant was the incident last November where Baldwin exploded at a press photographer calling him a “c***sucking f*g," per news reports or a "c***sucking fathead" as Baldwin claims.

I just can’t live in New York anymore. Everything I hated about L.A. I’m beginning to crave. L.A. is a place where you live behind a gate, you get in a car, your interaction with the public is minimal. 

(...) It’s good-bye to public life in the way that you try to communicate with an audience playfully like we’re friends, beyond the work you are actually paid for. Letterman. Saturday Night Live. That kind of thing. I want to go make a movie and be very present for that and give it everything I have, and after we’re done, then the rest of the time is mine. 

While he does accept part of the blame for his recent failures, Mr. Baldwin spends much of the piece blaming others:

MSNBC assigned a producer to me, Jonathan Larsen. Like Sullivan with Orphans, Larsen didn’t get me or the show and didn’t want to be there. When I told him I wanted to interview Debra Winger, Larsen looked like, We’re here on a set, with an expensive crew and studio time, and you want to talk to Debra Winger? There was nothing less interesting to him. Most of the guests I suggested—Ellen Barkin, Neal Barnard from PCRM, JFK-conspiracy icon Mark Lane—he couldn’t care less. As we went along, Larsen would simply stare at me after everything I’d suggest and say, “Well, let’s see what Phil says.” Larsen was sent there to babysit me.

Baldwin goes on to cast judgment on many of his former colleagues, including Phil Griffin, who "couldn’t give a flying f**k about content." As for Morning Joe's Scarborough, Baldwin describes him as neither eloquent nor funny, and a pain to work with. Mika Brzezinski he calls the Margaret Dumont of cable news, and Rachel Maddow "the ultimate wonk/dweeb who got a show, polished it."

However, Baldwin reserves his fiercest venom for TMZ and its host/editor Harvey Levin, who first revealed the controversial homophobic comments that caused him to lose his MSNBC program.