It's a good thing this epic recession is an opportunity to "reset" our culture, as Kurt Andersen tells us, or slough off the chains of corporatism, as per Douglas Rushkoff. Otherwise it would really suck for all the unemployed people.

First came former Valleywag Nick Douglas' Twitter book deal with HarperCollins, followed within a month by New York Times columnist David Pogue and his similar compilation of tweets for O'Reilly. Now Pogue is trying to leapfrog.

• Graydon Carter turned 60 on Tuesday, and Frank Bruni was kind enough to give him a gift—an unflattering review of his Monkey Bar. Carter: "Frank Bruni's review in The Times was the perfect nightcap to the perfect birthday." [WWD]
• Speaking of Bruni, a long excerpt from his forthcoming memoir, which appears in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine, is now online. [NYT]
• Are restaurants like Minetta Tavern the city's new nightclubs? [BB]
• Word has it Cafe Boulud will be undergoing a major renovation and expansion sometime this summer and will be close for about a month or so. [Eater]
• A new cocktail lounge could be coming to Bryant Park next year. [Crain's]
• Philippe Massoud's ilili showcases Lebanese wines for the next month. [NYT]
• Le Cirque's Sirio Maccioni will undergo open heart surgery next week. [P6]

We all know that LA Project Runway is going to suck on Lifetime, but we'll probably watch it anyway. But what about this Models of the Runway about the, uh, models from Runway? It'll sort of be Rashomon, won't it.

[A street performer leaps over a group of people in Washington Square Park yesterday; image via Edgie168's Flickr. Click through and then on the image for larger.]

TechCrunch has been taking heavy flack for publishing purloined Twitter documents, but the tech/business blog has a message for the haters: Don't worry, we're sitting on the most newsworthy documents. Um, what?

Massive enemy PR firm Edelman is moving its office from Times Square to Hudson Square. Employees received (and leaked!) a motivational brochure that has a decidedly...propagandist design style. Compare:

July 16 @ 4:30pm Jennifer Lopez filming a movie at Duane Park in Tribeca. An entire fake farmer's market was put up for the shoot. [Submit your own Gawker Stalker sightings to stalker@gawker.com]

Ah, the good old days—when crazy oddball media titans stood astride the magazine world, being odd. We have more fun stories about former Maxim publisher and admitted killer Felix Dennis! He's a neat freak who takes care of friends.

Remember Erich "Mancow" Muller, Keith Olbermann's radio-clown pal who kept getting MSNBC airtime because Olbermann found his waterboarding conversion politically useful to flog even though it was a hoax? He just called Barack Obama a "Kenyan-Muslim turd" on the radio.

Mayor Bloomberg has spent $37 million on his mayoral campaign so far. Where's it all gone? In addition to the $20 million that's gone to the firm that produces Bloomberg's TV ads and the $1 million or so that's has gone to pay his campaign staff, campaign finance records released today also list office snacks ($72,000) and pizza ($7,000), which, the Times's City Room blog reports, is usually ordered from Goodfella's Brick Oven Pizza on Staten Island. Why the mayor's staff needs to order pizza from another borough isn't explained—maybe his campaign volunteers like their pizza cold?—but the mayor's pizza tab isn't the only curious item on the list of expenses. (Not that it really matters: It's the mayor's own money that is being spent, so if he wants to order his pizza from Naples and have it delivered to NYC via Air Bloomberg, that's up to him.) But the $50,000 that Team Bloomberg has spent on phone expenses? It's a little early to be planning for Hanukkah, yes, but finding gifts for billionaires who have everything is a huge pain, less us tell you. So we're making it public here and now. Mayor Bloomberg's very first MagicJack is on us. So step off. [NYT]

As the ranks of America's idle funemployed swell, many are asking themselves, "Dude, what am I gonna do with myself?" Their answer, increasingly: "I am gonna have a yoga party all day every day, in exchange for room and board."

Last week David Letterman posted his largest weekly victory over The Tonight Show since 2000. Last week's Tonight Show posted its smallest audience since Letterman premiered in August 1993. Is Conan turning out to be a disappointment for NBC?

[Handbags Pratt from "The Hills" in Soho today; image via Splash]

CUPERTINO – Working in concert with a giant sound stage, a local software developer today introduced "Ridley," a new iPhone app which helps directors envision very large camera moves at the facility. [Read the rest of the original post here.]

Vanity Fair overlord Graydon Carter just turned 60, and his staff rewarded him with a positively Vanity Fair-ish birthday party! The highlight was sung to the tune of 'A Few of My Favorite Things'...

Goldman Sachs earned $3.5 billion in profits last quarter. Also, it earned a huge fucking target on its back.

• McGraw-Hill, which announced recently that it's looking to get rid of BusinessWeek, has now announced plans to get rid of 550 employees. [WSJ]
• Jim Spanfeller, the president and CEO of Forbes.com, either decided to leave the company or was forced out, depending on who you talk to. [DF, NYT]
• As expected, the new Harry Potter movie raked it in yesterday. [THR]
• Donald Trump's long-running libel lawsuit against author (and New York Times business editor) Timothy O'Brien has been dismissed by a judge. [NYP]

Mea culpa: We reported here previously that Twitter had yanked TechCrunch from its list of suggested users, apparently retaliation for publishing hacker-obtained internal Twitter docs. Not true. Details of my dumb error after the jump.

In your salvation-drenched Thursday media column: Media career ascension! An available media job! People buying newspapers! People saving newspapers! People saving Paste magazine! Huzzah!