A Russian oligarch and former KGB agent is trying to buy London's Evening Standard. The paper is just the latest traditional journalism institution to cozy up to autocracy. Take CNN.

The news network joined HaperCollins, Random House, the BBC and the Financial Times in a government-built media campus in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. At a time of widespread cutbacks by U.S media in international coverage, CNN will staff its new bureau there with 30 people and launch a new show from the the hereditary Islamic plutocracy.

CNN insists it's paying for the space, but a UAE exec told the Times in October that the payments are "negotiable." Also, the government invested $1 billion in a movie deal with Time Warner, so CNN's parent company is still net positive, cashflow-wise.

Then there's Forbes. In November, a Russian billionaire was rumored to be trying to buy the magazine for around $700 million. Forbes denied any deal.

But the transaction seemed plausible, if only because authoritarian media sugar daddies dominate deal talk like never before. And it doesn't stop with Sam Zell and Tribune Company or Carlos Slim taking a stake in the Times (ahead of a once-rumored sale to Michael Bloomberg); the once-sacrosanct, nonprofit world of journalism education is in the game as well.

The Northwestern j-school, Medill, is setting up a Qatar branch; USC's journalism school has plans in Dubai and NYU is duplicating its whole academic program in Abu Dhabi.

If the internet is pushing a new, more democratic crop of news outlets online, it seems to be having the opposite effect on traditional journalism. For old organizations, it's far easier to switch from one well-heeled boss (say, a family or benevolent media mogul) to another (an oligarch, sheik or finance billionaire) than to try and adapt to the uncertain, low-margin business of publishing for the online masses.

(Pictured: Alexander Lebedev, said trying to buy Evening Standard, and reportedly kind of a good guy, as far as oligarchs go.)

How soul-draining it must be to work at the world's best company! Hence the launch of Google's School of Spiritual Growth, an arm of the search engine's in-house university.

Behind it: star-struck engineer Chade-Meng Tan, who's known for his disturbingly large collection of snapshots with the famous people who visit the Googleplex. Tan, a Buddhist, is shown here with Lama Surya Das, the "American Lama", explained the purpose at a recent conference, according to Soul's Code, a spirituality website:

Google wants to help Googlers grow as human beings on all levels. Emotional, mental, physical and ‘beyond the self’. (This) is why Google University instituted the School of Personal Growth, perhaps the first of its kind in a large corporation. We don’t just pamper Googlers, we want to help them fulfill their full human potential.

It was inevitable that northern California's most successful company would embrace the region's embarrassingly goofy human-potential movement. And timely, too, that Google management would try to get employees focused on their spiritual well-being, at a time when so many of the stock options lavished on engineers are worthless.

The risk for Google: that newly enlightened workers will realize that working at an overgrown advertising broker which peddles personal-injury lawyers and diet pills to Web searchers is not the ultimate route to spiritual advancement.

Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one. After hackers took down SoapBlox, a one-man blog-hosting company which runs local political websites, a silenced liberal commentariat found out how true that was.

SoapBlox grew out of Scoop, the software used on DailyKos, Markos Moulitsas's left-of-center superblog. Paul Preston, its developer, found himself running 25 different sites — the likes of My Left Wing, Blue Hampshire, West Michigan Rising, and Swing State Project. (All politics is local!)

And yet SoapBlox remained a one-man band. So when still-unidentified hackers infiltrated SoapBlox's servers, causing them to be taken offline, Preston despaired:

(+) SoapBlox is Dead
by: pacified
[subscribe]
January 07, 2009 at 08:15:46 MST
It was a good ride, but it's over.

Thanks for all the fish.

All these hackers messing with our stuff, and we here at SoapBlox have no clue what to do. We don't have enough knowledge, time, money, or care to fix it.

So I hope the Hackers are happy.

If you want the data from your blog, we will get it. But we are not going to try and restore anything.

Consider this the "We're Out of Business" post.

Most of the servers have been taken off line because they were being used to hack and exploit other websites. The hackers install this crap on servers after they get in. SoapBlox's ISP then takes the servers off line.

We do not know when they will come back online.

We do not know if they will come back online.

Since then, a groundswell of grassroots support has lifted Preston's spirits, and he's working on restoring the service. But how did so many sites come to depend on such a fragile operation in the first place? One argument is that other blogging services didn't offer SoapBlox's features, like the ability to feature a casual user's contributions on a site's homepage with a single click.

That's hardly true: Drupal, a popular piece of software used on Fast Company's website, has long offered a similar tool, as do the latest versions of Movable Type and WordPress. But what SoapBlox offered that they lacked was the comfort of familiarity, and DailyKos's stamp of approval.

For its liberal bloggers, too lazy to research alternatives, it was the — how to put it? — politically correct way to publish. And why should they have bothered looking elsewhere, since it was a fine choice for their purposes? But I suspect their built-in biases against market mechanisms played a role. SoapBlox's customers never bothered to ask whether Preston really had the financial resources to support it. That's far too capitalist a question for the left-wing blogosphere to have pondered.

Sam Adam Jr., a former defense lawyer for R. Kelly, is now working for Rod Blagojevich, the embattled Illinois governor. What's his advice for his wiretapped client? Don't pick up the phone!

refused to talk to Roland Burris on the phone. Burris, the man whom Blagojevich controversially picked to replace Barack Obama in the Senate, allowed that the fact was "curious" when testifying before an Illinois House panel which met to discuss Blagojevich's impeachment for allegedly trying to sell Obama's seat.

(Photo via MTV News)

No Silicon Valley company is more arrogant than Apple. But Palm, the smartphone maker, is trying to copy Steve Jobs's knack for hubris — as well as everything else about its rival.

Anyone would be forgiven for thinking the Palm Pre, the long-overdue smartphone unveiled today in Las Vegas at the Consumer Electronics Show, is an obvious iPhone wannabe, with a similar shape, a touchscreen, and a fancy built-in Web browser.

It was built, too, by a cast of Apple hand-me-downs: Chairman Jon Rubinstein was formerly Jobs's right-hand man, and Palm's campaign of hiring away Apple employees grew so large, and so obvious, that Jobs is said to have called Rubinstein and screamed at him. Palm is backed by Elevation Partners, a private equity firm where former Apple CFO Fred Anderson now works. (The rivalry might explain why Jobs is no longer seen palling around with Bono, who's also a partner at Elevation.)

But the most glaring way in which Palm has rebuilt himself in Apple's image is in its executives' raging superiority complex. Take this exchange between AllThingsD blogger Peter Kafka and Palm CEO Ed Colligan:

The biggest unknown is price, which went unmentioned during the demo. My assumption is that Palm would try to take market share by coming in significantly lower than the $200 or so Apple wants for its iPhone. But when I ran that theory by Palm CEO Ed Colligan, he looked at me liked I’d peed on his rug. “Why would we do that when we have a significantly better product,” he asked, then walked away.

Jobs could not have put it better himself. But Palm, which has struggled for years, has far more to prove before Colligan and Rubinstein can act so cock of the walk.

(Photo by Corinne Schulze/CNET News)

Attendance at this year's Consumer Electronics Show, the annual gadgetfest in Las Vegas, is down 25 percent from 2007, with 130,000 expected to attend. Are we just not that into tech toys anymore?

Actually, we are — but the thrill is gone.

The two biggest attractions at the show — Microsoft Steve Ballmer's demo of Windows 7 and Palm's Pre smartphone — are more apologies than anything, mea culpas for the subpar products they replaced. There are, as always, gee-whiz products that will likely never hit the mass market, like Dick Tracy-style watches and games where you control a ball with your mind.

For the past decade, gadget porn — media which seductively presents the latest gear — has been a growth industry. When Wired first started showcasing gadgets as erotically charged objects of desire in the '90s, not for nothing was the section called "Fetish." (The love affair sometimes went hilariously wrong.)

But the sex angle somehow seems out of step with the national mood. The Consumer Electronics Association argues that gadgets have become a necessity, not a luxury, and so spending will hold up comparatively well. A Forrester Research survey, on the other hand, suggests that consumers are cutting back, with 63 percent saying they won't buy a smartphone like the iPhone this year.

Of course, survey-takers routinely lie. And an $199 iPhone is hardly a luxury splurge on the scale of a Louis Vuitton handbag or an Ermenegildo Zegna suit. Come on — it's on sale at Wal-Mart!

So we'll keep buying gadgets. That won't change. What will: Bragging about the latest gear-shopping expedition will be socially unacceptable. Flipping through a glossy digital-camera layout on the subway? A little pervy. Who does that in public? Gadget blogs, though, will thrive — since they can be enjoyed in the privacy of one's home, like a filthy DVD.

When that comes to pass, gadget porn will really have earned its name: a shameful habit most indulge in, but few discuss. It will be the new parsimony's dirty secret.

All the major movie awards nominations, with the exception of those for the Oscars, have been announced. So we can make a pretty good guess about what will get nods come January 22nd.

Best Picture
Looking like sure bets are Milk, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, crowd-pleaser Slumdog Millionaire, and Frost/Nixon. The fifth slot is shaping up to be a horse race between Doubt and The Dark Knight. Actors are the biggest voting block of the Academy, and the Screen Actors Guild didn't nominate TDK. But it is an audience favorite, which would mean good ratings for the awards show. And no one wants to win an Oscar when no one's watching. So we'll see. Either way, sorry, Wall-E.

Best Director
Usually falls in line with Best Picture, so Slumdog's Danny Boyle, Milk's Gus van Sant, and Button's David Fincher are sure bets. We're not positive that Ron Howard will get a nod for his somewhat utilitarian direction of what is mostly an actors movie, though he did get recognized by the Directors Guild. Christopher Nolan could very well squeak in for TDK. John Patrick Shanley, who is viewed (rightly) as mostly a writer probs won't end up here for Doubt. Maybe Wall-E's Andrew Stanton will get a little "hey thanks for playing."

Best Actress
Definitely Anne Hathaway for her stripped-down-yet-still-showy work in Rachel Getting Married, Kate Winslet's for her mopey/yelly turn in Revolutionary Road, and Meryl Streep's barking in Doubt. Sally Hawkins' pluck in Happy-Go-Lucky didn't woo SAG, but everyone else seems to love her. We hope that Melissa Leo gets recognized in the fifth slot for her grizzled performance in Frozen River, but it might go to Angelina Jolie because she's pretty and yells a lot in Changeling. Boo.

Best Actor
Yes on: Sean Penn for Milk, Mickey Rourke for The Wrestler, Frank Langella for People Talking!: The Non-Musical Frost/Nixon, and Bradley Jane Pitt in Button. Number five will mayyybe go to Six Feet Under Papa Richard Jenkins for The Visitor. Though everyone likes the growly old Clint Eastwood schtick he does in Gran Torino.

And the rest of these are really too wide to tell, but we're going to go ahead and predict anyway...

Best Supporting Actress
Viola Davis is practically a lock to win the whole damn thing for her two scenes in Doubt. Joining her at her table at the pre-awards luncheon will probably be Taraji P. Henson for Button, Amy Adams for Doubt as well, Penelope Cruz for Hannah and Her Spanish Sisters or whatever, and Annette Bening for her deliciously screwball work in 2008's most overlooked gem, The Women. (We're joking on that last one.) Let's give it to that creepy girl in Let the Right One In!

Best Supporting Actor
Josh Brolin will win for Milk as a consolation prize for no one really liking W. that much (and for him having to deal with Babs as a mother-in-law). Robert Downey Jr. and Heath Ledger ought to get notices for their heavily-made-up work in Tropic Thunder and TDK, respectively. I dunno. Who else? Maybe Phil Hoffman for Doubt. Maybe George Clooney for just being alive in the world. We hope Emile Hirsch gets recognized for his fantastic work as Cleve Jones in the fantastic Milk.

Screenplays
Both Adapted and Original are much wider races, but look for TDK (surprise!), Button, and Nixon in the former; Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Milk, and Rachel Getting Married in the latter.

I know you guys mostly care about Best Sound Editing, but you'll have to wait to find out about that. Happy ballot making or whatever!

DGA Nominations
PGA Nominations
SAG Nominations
WGA Nominations

No one wants to buy Yahoo. And the only person who wants to run Yahoo is an insider who helped sink it. Is there any hope left for the beleaguered Web giant?

A ludicrously patchy trial balloon lifted off this week, airing the notion that Microsoft might fund some kind of complex buyout of Yahoo, at a knockdown price of $20 billion — less than half what Microsoft offered last February. It was swiftly shot down: If Microsoft wanted to get its hands on Yahoo, why would it loan someone else the money to buy it?

Another tall tale is making the rounds: that Sue Decker, Yahoo's president, is still a candidate to replace founder Jerry Yang, who's stepping down from the CEO job after a disastrous year and a half. (Anyone care to bet on whether one of the "sources familiar with the search" who told CNET News that Decker was a contender was Decker herself?)

Decker, a former investment banker who wrecked her credibility with Wall Street through overoptimistic forecasts. Never a strong manager, she similarly killed whatever loyalty Yahoos had left for her through her mistreatment of key underlings. (She had Wenda Harris Millard, Yahoo's former U.S. sales chief, locked out of her office over the weekend when Millard told Decker she was planning to leave — and only months later thought to invite Millard to a farewell party, which Millard refused to attend.)

What Decker has going for her: She's already in place, and is a known quantity. If Yahoo's CEO search utterly fails to find an outside candidate and doesn't settle on a board member, Decker is the board's only option. John Chapple, a board member who was previously CEO of Nextel Partners, has said he's no longer interested. One of the outside possibilities, Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin, has reportedly dropped out. Another, former Autodesk CEO Carol Bartz, has yet to express any enthusiasm. But what does it matter that you have a known quantity, when you have taken that quantity's measure and found it lacking? Insiders whisper that Yang, Yahoo's dithering founder, is loyal to a fault, and that's the only reason Decker has not been fired.

If Yahoo ends up with no choice but Decker, it will surely spell the end of the company. What options will she have, other than to sell it at a cut-rate price to Microsoft?

How depressing for a company once worth more than $100 billion, which promised to bridge Hollywood and Silicon Valley and dominate new media. It still has formidable assets, and valuable businesses. Why does no one know what to do with them?

Last month Cityfile unveiled, oh, a hundred or so domain names of famous New Yorkers' names that it had bought, just because it could. Conde Nast immediately marshaled its team of high-powered attorney warriors!

Soon after his post went up, Mr. Stern received a call from one of Condé Nast's lawyers, Eric Gisolfi of Sabin, Bermant & Gould. Mr. Gisolfi requested that Mr. Stern turn over the domain names belonging to New Yorker editor David Remnick, Vogue publisher Tom Florio, Portfolio editor Joanne Lipman, Lucky's Kim France, and Glamour's Cindi Leive.

So Cityfile chief Remy Stern decided to give Conde back its precious web addresses, god, okay fine. At least Conde is putting them to good use. [NYO]

We learned this morning that Nevan Donahue, from MTV's reality tinkle The City, had a warrant out for an old prostitution charge. Now we know all the white trash details! How will Olivia Palermo live this down?

According to The Smoking Gun, Donahue, who on the show seems to fancy himself some sort of New York City Valmont (so I guess that would be Ryan Phillipe in Cruel Intentions), was arrested on February 27, 2007 after he rolled up on an undercover police officer, hollering out of his Jeep Cherokee in his "'white cheetah shirt' and blue jeans." The then-24-year-old was looking for a beej, and offered to pay her in Oxycontin. When he approached the officer, his "green rhinestone belt" was unbuckled and pants were undone, revealing "shiny black underwear."

Wow, socialite and series-star Olivia Palermo! Your cuz totally gets your tony Upper East Side high society culture, doesn't he? He and you really ought to rescue Whitney from that hideous and seedy downtown lifestyle. She'll be so grateful.

Donahue has also been arrested on two other occasions, once all the way back in 2001 for drugs and, another for a regular traffic stop. TSG got mugshots!

Sheesh.

Joe Cuello is MTV's VP of "Creative Music Integration." He chooses what music goes into their fine reality shows. He "Makes The Hills Rock"(!). Why would someone send the nice man a box of poop?

A totally unverified rumor, courtesy of a tipster, who says they heard it from a witness:

Yesterday Joe Cuello Vice President of Creative Music Integration for MTV was messengered a box of shit (feces) to his office. Don't know why or by whom but it sounds like a copy of an episode of Entourage. It wasnt sent via USPS mail, just messengered in private. Also no indication if it was human or animal feces.

If true, this incident could be on a par with the legendary Pooping Intern story. What could spark such an outrageous action? A private feud? An inside music industry beef? Or could it be a small outcry from an artiste who objects to the soundtrack on Pimp My Ride? If you have any information on this alleged crime, please email us at once. Together we will discover the truth.

Burger King, for no good reason, has America's edgiest advertising. And it just got edgier. Now you can make it known publicly that someone's "friendship" is less valuable to you than 1/10th of a sandwich.

The grease monarch has released an "app" (APPLICATION, slang) for Facebook letting you destroy your fake "friends" and humiliate them at the same time:

The app rewards people with a coupon for BK's signature burger when they cull 10 friends. Each time a friend is excommunicated, the application sends a notification to the banished party via Facebook's news feed explaining that the user's love for the unlucky soul is less than his or her zeal for the Whopper.

Anything designed to take on the excess-Facebook-friend menace while simultaneously promoting obesity is okay with us. [Adweek]

Your daily media column is here. Today, the Great Magazine Die-Off continues, your annual "Gawker sucks now" story, Les Payne's pain, and more!

Meredith has folded Country Home, meaning 250 layoffs. The company is also "relocating the creative functions of the ReadyMade brand and Parents.com to Des Moines," which really sucks, let's be honest. An internal memo said ad revenue was down 15% last quarter, and this quarter is even worse.


Gawker, Nick Denton, and Gawker Media as a whole have finally jumped the shark, reportedly, an event which occurs with the same frequency as mustaches coming back in style. I'm a little concerned that this has happened and it's only January, though. Can we jump the shark twice in 09? Let's hope so! [Independent]

Les Payne was a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter a popular editor, and a columnist at Newsday for almost the past 30 years. The paper, which is struggling like every other paper, just dropped his column. Their grand sendoff? "The writing of former Newsday columnist Les Payne can be found at http://blog.lespayne.net/. Thank you." Meh. Learn all about Payne's distinguished career in this retrospective.


At Nielsen Business Media, home to shaky trade mags like Adweek, Brandweek, and Mediaweek, top editor Tony Case has quit. One source tells us he "couldn't take the browbeating" any more. We also hear that the masthead on each of those three magazines includes every staffer left at all three, to "make it look as if each magazine is well-populated."

The new New Books columnist at Harper's will be Ben Moser. John Leonard, who passed away in November, had written it since 2003.

Dow Jones freezes salaries for the year! They're just copying the NYT. Or McClatchy. Hey, who isn't doing it? [Fishbowl DC]

There was a grenade attack (crazy) on Mexico's top television station (unbelievable) during the nightly news broadcast (totally psycho). The fact that this item is just appearing here is part of the problem. I'm starting to wonder whether Mexican narcotraffickers really believe in the First Amendment of the US Constitution, and that it should apply to Mexico. [CSM]

The most important issue of Barack Obama's impending presidency has yet to be answered. Just who, pray tell, is going to perform at his big inaugural concert bashes?? No one knows! And it's so soon!

The Washington Post runs an urgent story today about the trials and travails of planning a party of such scope. Two guys named Erik Smith and Jim Margolis, Democratic communication strategists, have been tasked to cobble the damn thing together. The Post sort of wrings its hands and vaguely prognosticates doom, but the thing is, Obama's a huge celebrity who lesser celebrities lurve. He can get anyone he wants, anytime.

Beyoncé has made her services available, gratis, and Barbra Streisand, Bruce Springsteen, and Billy Joel have all been vocal supports of the boy from Illinois. It seems likely they'll make appearances. And I'm sure any manner of other acts would trip over themselves to be present at this most Hopetorical occasion. The Post needn't worry, unless they're concerned about like set changes and stuff. In that case, well, who really cares.

Plus Obama just doesn't need a ton of famous people encouraging us to like him. He's enough. He's the main act. While Bill Clinton—whose inaugural set the watermark for big splashy presidential fetes—was propped up by his many celebrities endorser-performers, Obama is an industry of fabulous entertainment unto himself. "Clinton basked in the glow of celebrities. Now celebrities bask in the glow of Obama," a Hollywood publicist told the Post. "Somehow he has become the sun and we're rotating in his orbit." Exactly. He can book anyone he wants, but in the end he's still the main draw of the whole enterprise.

As the girls on Super Sweet Sixteen continually remind us: even if Mystikal or whoever shows up, the party is still about meeee. So, as long as the Mercedes the American people promised Barry is waiting, with a big bow on top, outside the White House, I think it'll be just fine.

The most important point to make, though, is that whatever the performance ends up being, even if it is just Obama orating lyrically for a few hours (we wouldn't mind!), it's bound to be better than the last shitstorm inaugural. Here was Bush's line-up. See if you can spot which two of these things (but especially one) is not like the others:

"Destiny's Child, Lee Ann Womack, George Strait, ZZ Top, Clint Black, Brooks & Dunn and Ricky Martin"

Ugh.

Larry Craig, the U.S. senator whose airport-bathroom gay-sex bust introduced the phrase "wide stance" into Beltway argot, has run out of appeals to withdraw his guilty plea for disorderly conduct.

Craig may never have uttered the words "wide stance" himself; that phrase came from a police report filed by Minnesota airport police officer Dave Karsnia, in a summary of Craig's explanation after his arrest. So let's relive this great moment in criminal history:

Image via Foundshit.com)

[Ed Westwick of "Gossip Girl" on that series' set today; image via Splash]

It appears that Sarah Palin's post-campaign career activities will consist exclusively of bitching about the media. In a new interview she takes on Katie Couric, Tina Fey, Caroline Kennedy, and all you jerks watching at home:

This is a friendly interview with "conservative filmmaker John Ziegler," so Sarah could open up. She "wonders" if Caroline Kennedy—another woman, trying to get into politics—"will be handled with kid gloves." (Not by us! We're on your side, Sarah.) There's also, hilariously, this:

“I did see that Tina Fey was named entertainer of the year and Katie Couric’s ratings have risen,” she said. “And I know that a lot of people are capitalizing on, oh I don’t know, perhaps some exploiting that was done via me, my family, my administration. That’s a little bit perplexing, but it also says a great deal about our society.”

And! Palin's rational explanation of why she declined to reveal to Katie Couric what newspapers she read:

“Because, Katie, you’re not the center of everybody’s universe.”

Oh Sarah. How could anyone doubt you? Watch it all below. [Politico]

The Feds still want to throw accused Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff in jail for mailing mittens. Oh, and some diamonds and emeralds and other expensive things.

In December, Madoff mailed five packages of valuables; two went to his brother, who cosigned for his bail agreement, and others went to his children. The Financial Times reports on the contents:

The list reads less like a court document than a catalogue of the trappings of Park Avenue privilege: diamond Cartier and Tiffany watches, a diamond bracelet, four diamond brooches, a jade necklace, a gold watch and other assorted jewellery.... One package contained about 13 watches, one diamond necklace, an emerald ring and two sets of cufflinks and could exceed $1m.

And, bizarrely, a $200 pair of mittens. Who has $200 mittens? Madoff's lawyers called the items "heirlooms." Prosecutors say Madoff violated his bail agreement by sending the items, and that if he's not thrown in jail right away, he may continue to terrorize a frightened nation by mailing jewelry.

(Photo by Hiroko Masuike/Getty Images)

Drop your razors, fashionable young men: the New York Times reports that mustaches are back—in style! Somehow this story sounds vaguely... familiar:

• NYT today: "The Mustache is Inching its Way Back"
• NYT, 11/2/06: "One Hairy Lip, a Mix of Messages": Hey, Borat, etc! Mustaches are back!
• NY Mag, 8/6/06: "What Your Facial Hair Is Really Saying": Ladies these days dig the 'stache! It's the craziest thing.
• 5/16/06: Beard and Mustache Championships, here in New York? The mustache is back, ladies and gentlemen!
• 4/10/03: "Salon reports that the mustache is back."

[Pic via]

Celebrity news hasn't been popping lately. It's vulgar—but more importantly, it's gotten repetitive. The new pastime is mocking the rich. But now, the journalists feel more sympathy with the fallen rich than ever before.

Watching the Wall Street titans lose everything in the Great Depression, for example, certainly inspired a lot of schadenfreude, egged on by the yellow journalists, which were the style of the day. But back then, journalism was a decidedly blue collar profession. The fall of the rich was a story told from the outside, to your peers, with just the natural amount of "take that, richie" thrown in.

Today things are different. People in the top-level media have become just as fancy as those they cover! Business reporters for the WSJ, TV reporters for CNBC, and, you know, wealthy magazine writers like Michael Lewis (for example) have far more in common with the ruined Wall Streeters than they do with the far-flung masses who were already poor to begin with.

Not only that, but the entire media industry in such an upheaval, and the traditional structure of the media that provided job security and luxurious perks to the journalism elites has been so destroyed, that it's almost impossible for those media people to feel anything but sympathy for someone in a similarly shaky industry like, say, finance.

Consequently, the rabble that makes up the vast majority of America has lost a certain amount of identification with the journalists that cover the ongoing financiapocalypse. Which is why it is more important than ever that we step up to fill the national schadenfreude deficit. It is the salve for a nation's angry soul.

Sure, the inauguration is twelve days away, but Barack Obama's speech today was his most public declaration that he's in charge and (Lord help us all) knows the way out of the financial apocalypse.

The immediate political purpose of Obama's speech, given today at George Mason University, was to build the case for Congress to pass a stimulus package with virtually any price tag he asks. And the excerpts released to the media in advance were full of doom and gloom: "this recession could linger for years" ... “In short, a bad situation could become dramatically worse.”

You can read the whole speech over here, but in the clip above, Obama closes out on the hopeful, poetic note that he is known for, alluding to Langston Hughes ("more dreams will be deferred"), Winston Churchill ("And that is what we will do") and, of course, the last president to take over in such grim times, Franklin Roosevelt ("face down war, depression, and fear itself"), as well as his own contribution: "a new and hopeful beginning."

Maybe Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick aren't so broke after all? Though they lost money in Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme, a tipster tells us they're flying first class to LA right now.

As our tipster emailed earlier this morning: "On American Airlines flight 1 to LAX. First row on the right. He wearing black hat and glasses and she with her back to the boarding passengers."

So they're in the air right now, as Flight 1 is the daily 9am departure. That's kind of funny to think about.

And first row means first class, and that ain't cheap! So that's reassuring. Plus, Kyra has all that money rolling in from The Closer., so they may have lost some of their savings, which sucks for them, but they still make more money with one gig than most of us could make in ten years. If you were worried about them, I think it's okay to exhale.

A landmark actual new scientific study has discovered that, yes, Axe Body Spray can help you get laid. But opening your stupid mouth could render the sickly juvenile aphrodisiac worthless.

And a new study in the U.K...found that men who used Lynx deodorant, Axe's British-brand cousin, were seen as more attractive by females than men who used a "placebo" deodorant with no fragrance.

But: the women just saw videos of the guys in the study—they couldn't smell them. Meaning that Axe actually works by making you feel more attractive. If you feel more attractive after soaking yourself in an aerosol version of car air freshener, you may not be the most urbane man to begin with, which leads to the second part of the study's results:

Women rated the fragranced men as more attractive when the sound on the videos was off, but had no statistically significant preference when the sound was on.

I think this is what we all suspected to be the case. [Ad Age]

Ha! You know Nevan from The City? (Oh you don't? He's socialite cast member Olivia Palermo's fey cousin.) Well, it seems he has a police record for soliciting a prostitute in Miami.

So warbles the New York Post's Page Six this morning. Apparently Nevan Donahue (all the way left in that photo) was nabbed back in 2007 and given probation and 75 hours of community service. When he failed to complete the service, a warrant was issued for his arrest.

We've no idea if it was a male or female hooker, but for what it's worth P6 calls him "ostensibly straight." (While I called him a "shrill pile of chicken bones," so take that as you will.) A rep for MTV says "we had no knowledge of his arrest," and Nevan's people had no comment.

So, oops! How Uptown of you, Nevs!

Who sat next to me in celebrity hotspot Cafe Grumpy today? Clark Johnson, a.k.a. heroic city editor Gus Haynes from The Wire! Of course he is a big fan* of Gawker:

I told him I liked The Wire and he said, totally unbidden and without having any idea who I was, "Yesterday somebody sent me a thing from Gawker.com about how they stripped the set."

Whoa, hey, alright! He also said he hasn't watched some of the earlier seasons of The Wire yet, but it's on his agenda. This is the most exciting celebrity sighting here since the Williamsburg hair man.

*(May or may not be a fan.)

Hello. My name is Joshua David Stein. I'm an avid Top Chef fan and am here to discuss with you that show.

As Mister Hippity noted, it's been three weeks since we last visited the Top Chef kitchen and its attendant retinue of woe, beauty and product placement. On Wednesday at ten, the shlooop sound of the knife bifurcating the words Top and Chef was like a dinner bell, telling us it was time to come home. Then British piece of shit Toby Young showed up as the new judge and home seemed a lot less homey.

Before we get to all the things wrong with Mr. Young, let's take a moment to cycle through the Quickfire Challenge. The challenge was sponsored, apparently, by the godawful beverage Diet Dr. Pepper. It was entitled the Diet Dr. Pepper Ultimate Sweet Treat Challenge. The chefs were forced to create sweet things without using sugar. They were strongly encouraged to use Diet Dr. Pepper. Not seen in last night's episode, the shaky handheld footage of Fabio being waterboarded by Top Chef producers with cans of Diet Dr. Pepper. "Basta! Basta!," he cried, "I wheel coohk weet the Dohctor Peppeer!" Aryan, ladychef from the bowels of consumerism, had no qualms, chirping "Diet Dr. Pepper" every chance she had. That is why, sadly, she might win. This time she didn't. As French pastry chef Jean-Christophe Novelli mentioned, her dish sucked and her cream wasn't whipped. Instead it was Radhika who won with her bread pudding which was nice and didn't have any Diet Dr. Pepper in it. Someone's going to die.

In the elimination challenge, chefs were divided into two teams for a blind tasting. There was little guidance beyond Mr. Collichio saying, "cook what you want." Each team cooked for the other half plus the team of judges which included—besides Monsieur Novelli, Padma Lakshmi (still single?) and Tom Colicchio—the new judge, How to Lose Friends and Alienate People author Toby Young. Mr. Young replaces Gail Simmons.

It is unclear exactly why the producers chose Mr. Young whose main claim to fame is fucking over Graydon Carter, being an EPIC FAIL and who maintains an entirely deserved reputation as a self-serving whiny drunk pissant. True he was a restaurant critic for the Evening Standard for a few years but he knows little bordering on nothing about food. (Something to which his current state of joblessness attests.) Gail Simmons may have been whiny and a bit mean but she knew about food. Instead what Young brings to the show is cruelty and what he thinks to be bons mots. Take a look at how he judges the food before him. Instead of responding to the flavors, Young spits out soundbites you can be assured he thought of earlier, perhaps while practicing his scornful scowl or tweezering out unwanted and ingrown thigh hair from his pasty legs. Jeff's avocado sorbet is like Tom Cruise in Tropic Thunder. Radhika's bisque contained "the weapons of mass destruction." Eugene's dish was the "bland leading the bland." Good job, Toby Young, you were (slightly) witty.

Empathy has never been Toby Young's strong suit and no one ever said he was a nice guy. (He isn't.) But the thing that made How to Lose Friends and Alienate People even vaguely tolerable, that is Mr. Young's portrayal of himself as a bumbling loser, is now absent. (One can argue that being offered a cush VF editorship undermines that argument but at least Young was open about how he fucked that up.) On Top Chef Young is still the asshole he always was but there's no longer any vulnerability on his part. Infuriatingly and dishonestly, Young still clings to the aggrieved party mythology that justifies his cruelty but at this point it's outmoded and obsolete. Now he's just a bully.

Is it smart for Israel to blow the hell out of Palestinian civilians past all boundaries of good sense? No. But has Israel timed this war brilliantly, from a PR perspective? No doubt.

They launched their strikes against Gaza on Dec. 27, when most of the media was on vacation, and the rest was in a holiday stupor.

Two months ago, the Supreme Court said that Israel's rule against letting foreign reporters into Gaza could not stand. Then the war started. Which gave them the perfect pretense to ban reporters from Gaza once again:

And so for an 11th day of Israel’s war in Gaza, the several hundred journalists here to cover it waited in clusters away from direct contact with any fighting or Palestinian suffering, but with full access to Israeli political and military commentators eager to show them around southern Israel, where Hamas rockets have been terrorizing civilians. A slew of private groups financed mostly by Americans are helping guide the press around Israel.

Maybe the Palestinians should have their own American backers pay to bring reporters into Gaza? No, those supporters have all been jailed under the Patriot Act. And it's not like most reporters are eager to try to smuggle themselves into Gaza, because they stand a fair chance of being blown up. One reporter, the Associated Press's Ibrahim Barzak, who was already inside the war zone because he lives there, has given a grim account of life inside.

The final piece: when this whole thing wraps up (likely) next week, the news will be wall-to-wall Obamanauguration. And the nasty parts of Israel's war will be quickly forgotten. PR mastery. [Pic via]

I sat through the whole hour of The Real World: Brooklyn premiere last night. (Plus some of the After Show.) It was surprisingly better than I'd feared it would! And, ugh, surprisingly worse.

We got to briefly go home with each cast member, to all the respective burrows and glens and hollows they crawled out of, chasing some blinding camera light that enticed them all their lives, hovering just beyond the reaches of their dim existences. Until now.

There was rumply Ryan, a jokester with a secret dark back story about fighting in the desert war, and all the rage and terror that comes attendant with that hellish experience. He's also an idiot smalltown prick. But we'll get to that later. There's Katelynn, the most worrisome and pitiful cast member, a post-op male-to-female transgendered woman who was just three weeks out of recovery when the show began taping. She's nice and shy and sexually daring and seems a bit like a witless sheep led to the slaughter. Considering two of her roommates are such magnificent jackasses about her particular circumstances. The other prick—a worse, far more malevolent presence than the aw-shucks dopery of Ryan—is our friend Chet, the blonde Mormon hipster fuck who we previously thought would just be a cute "watch him get laid!" character but instead swiftly revealed himself to be a creepy, prurient, lecherous asshole. I don't care if he's gay (he probably is), straight (he probably hates women), or whatever. He's just an unrelenting bag of dicks.

The other roommates seem fine for the most part. I was surprised to really like JD, the gay dolphin trainer from Miami. We'd previously ragged on him for maybe dating Anderson Cooper and stuff (although, is that really teasing?) but on this episode he mostly came across as an articulate, kind, intelligent person who doesn't put up with shit from anyone (see: table Hulk smash in preview of upcoming episodes.) Devyn is just a dopey beauty queen with a crush on the boring but nice Scott the Bodybuilder. Baya the dancer seems fine, and Sarah the tatooed reformed lesbian seems kind of cool one minute, then really way too into the idea of being on the show the next.

Basically the episode revolved first around the meet and greets, of which the only real moments of note were Scott saying "she's cute but um... not my type" when he met Katelynn, and Chet, having hung out with Devyn for about twenty minute, saying "OK, let's get personal... What did you think of me when you first saw me?" Because he's completely obsessed with his heinous, stupid self and hopefully will get a lesson that his little hipster party boy with filthy, sex-starved ultra-religious insides shtick may serve him well in Salt Lake, but here in Brooklyn they will beat a fucker down for such behavior. (That is also something to note! Every time they mentioned Brooklyn or played a song about Brooklyn they used, well, a lot of black dudes shouting "Brooklyn!!" Which is all well and good, that kind of Bed-Stuy braggadocio is certainly a significant part of popular, visible Brooklyn culture. But I hope they switch it up sometimes. To like a bunch of Lubevitch from Midwood singing "Brooklyn!" or some old Polish ladies from Greenpoint or a Chinese guy from Sunset Park or a nice Italian girl from Bensonhurst. If we're going to stereotype and noveltize, let's get everyone in the pot.) For the record, Devyn thought he was gay because he was wearing a purple shirt. Nice.

The other major segment was the poke-it-with-a-stick antics of the tittering Ryan and the leering, skin-crawling Chet when they figured out, through no admission on Katelynn's part mind you, that she was in fact transgendered. (This was mostly JD's doing. Not so cool there.) "She touched my nipple!" Chet tweeted at one point, referring to an extremely brief friendly tap Katelynn gave him in the hottub (of course these people went in the hottub right away, their Real World chips flipped on the minute they landed in New York). Ryan was just rude and unfunny, making loud wisecracks about her underwear and treating her like she was a circus freak. Seemingly completely unaware that she was, in fact, an actual fucking person who was living in the same place as him and that he couldn't just discuss her openly like she was some kind of odd, misplaced piece of furniture.

The boys basically continued like that the entire episode, speculating disgustedly about who was gay&mdash