In your pleasant Thursday media column: newspaper ads slide on down, Tavi Gevenson prepares to launch, Tribune Co. is still shameless, a drunk student journalist tells it like it is, and science meets journalism (Hello!).
Journalists reporting on Libya's civil war have stumbled upon 21-year-old UCLA math student Chris Jeon, who has joined the Libyan rebels because "It is the end of my summer vacation, so I thought it would be cool to join the rebels."
HBO finally bought so many ads on the New York City transit system that MTA let them buy an entire car. Coming soon to a 2/3 track near you: A vintage subway car from 1917, with rattan seats, a ceiling fan, and ads for Boardwalk Empire. If you end up on this car you will probably enjoy it a little, but will have to pretend you don't, because you're sick of this mind control ad immersion bullshit, and don't want to be associated with the Instagram obsessives tweeting twee pictures of it. But secretly? Old-timey transit is fun. Admit it, you want to ride in this car.
Lady Gaga has used her latest column in V magazine to go after New York Times fashion critic Cathy Horyn and institutionalized critics in general. She'd much rather all the bloggers of the world be judging fashion instead of, you know, the professionals.
Another September presidential debate has been announced, you guys! Now we have ones scheduled for September 7, 12, and 22, so don't forget to stock up on whiskey and hydrocodone. Especially for the last one: The Google/Fox News debate, which will feature an array of cutesy social media tricks they're calling "context."
Your crush on Prince Harry is about to end. At a nightclub in Croatia, he was videotaped climbing onto a banquette and performing a catastrophic sideways shuffle dance, culminating in a loss of balance and a dive into the swimming pool behind him. Then he gets up, pulls the ol' "I totally meant to do that," dances his way to shore and climbs out, saggy denim butt dripping all the way. Apparently if he were not a prince of England, Harry would be an overgrown frat boy in the Meatpacking district. Good to know.
Frank Bruni is the new Bill Keller is the new Thomas Friedman! Which is to say, the latest New York Times columnist who can be reliably depended upon to use his priceless media real estate to write utterly vacuous and worn-out tripe about this CRRRAAAZZZYYY modern technology we have in our modern world, these days.
Thanks to a comical series of blunders by Julian Assange, Wikileaks' entire cache of unredacted State Department cables is now on the internet for anyone to download. (You can do so at the whistleblowing site Cryptome) But that's not stopping Wikileaks from holding a fake Twitter "vote" on whether it should release them.
One-percent presidential candidate Jon Huntsman is playing a sneaky game in his desperate quest to remain a viable presidential candidate throughout the fall. He's trying to preserve his media image as a "moderate" alternative by letting it be known that he believes in evolution and climate change. Since we have such low standards for "moderation" now, this makes him appear serious. But then he sneaks off and delivers the Republican base a radically conservative plan for the economy, a.k.a. the thing that matters. Do not fall for this seemingly nice man!
The days will soon get shorter, the weather will get colder, and you'll soon have actual things to do at your job now. The end of summer sucks, doesn't it? But at least there's going to be all sorts of new stuff on television! Let's look at everything that will give us a glimmer of hope this fall.
British teacher Benedict Garrett was given a reprimand for working as a stripper and porn star while also serving as the head of personal, social, and health education at a high school in East London. Yup, that's right, the sex ed teacher was a porn star. But although he was reprimanded, he will be allowed to resume teaching.
Here's a trailer for the long-lost but finally found Kenneth Lonergan movie Margaret, made six years ago but just now getting a release because of various legal problems. But it's here! Finally. And it looks strange.
Ray-J confronts Kris Humphries on an airplane. Kim releases a video of Kris caressing her butt. Lindsay Lohan gets a Billy Joel tattoo. Marc Anthony says his love life "is not a funeral." Alyssa Milano gives birth to her baby. Thursday gossip fucked your wife.
Sometimes—as freedom fighters from George Washington to Che Guevara would affirm—the words and deeds of a person become so intolerable the it becomes necessary to write a scathing takedown of them, on the internet. This is our world.
She's always hyping her diet program, but it's really the surgery that got this leading lady to shed the pounds. This couple is about to break up and this actress is upset she's getting asked to play moms. Maybe it's time for a different sort of surgery.
If the second-most powerful official in New York City government spends two days in jail for assaulting his wife, is that something the Bloomberg administration thinks people ought to know about? Nope.
In 2008, when the global economy collapsed, the Bush administration hilariously appointed 30-something Republican ski bum and Ferrari-loving Goldman Sachs alum Neel Kashkari as our nation's "bailout czar." It was America's worst job, and everyone hated him. He fled as soon as reasonably possible for the friendlier confines of private enterprise.
