• A look around Ward III in Tribeca, which opens tomorrow night. [GS]
• Lever House on Park Avenue will reopen as "Casa Lever" this fall. [NYP]
• Frank Bruni downgrades JGV's Spice Market in the Times today, giving the spot owned by the "clone-happy" chef one star instead of two. [NYT]
• The New Yorker's Lauren Collins doesn't have anything good to say about the Armani restaurant located inside the designer's Fifth Ave flagship. [NYer]
• Ryan Sutton is of a similar mindset, concluding that Montenapo, "like Armani Ristorante across town, serves mediocre hotel-Italian at absurd prices. [BN]
• Restaurant Girl gives Monkey Bar (otherwise known as "Graydon Carter's uptown dinner party) two stars out of five in the News this week. Over on her own site, she sits down with Keith McNally for a chat. [NYDN, RG]
• Lobster prices haven't been this low in more than 20 years, FYI. [Atlantic]
• Gansevoort Café opens in the former Florent space next month and the dining conglomerate New York City Restaurant Group will have a hand in it. [TFB]

Giovanni Luciano just got done spending a couple years in jail for running a big credit card scam in Bungalow 8 while impersonating a Dolce and Gabbana heir. Now he's back in New York and acting rather strangely!

While you're waiting for your old-ass iPod to reboot, why not click through this survey? If you email the last question to surveys@gawker.com, you will be magically entered to win an iPod Touch. Then your life will be perfect. (Standard Contest Rules apply, K?)

E! recently conducted an online reader poll and a resounding 94% of voters wanted to get over-exposed reality blobs banned from coverage. And the network is going to oblige for Heidi and Spencer, and nobody else.

Soon-to-be-former South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford just admitted to cheating on his wife. He used to be a Congressman, back in... oh, look, the '90s. What did he think about Mr. Clinton?

No, of course it's not too soon! Marshall "Mark" Sanford's abject, prostrate confession this afternoon was wrenching to watch, and has already inspired some outbursts of much-needed sympathy from the punditocracy. It's best to be prepared for a backlash.

This sexualization of mass-produced, tongue-pleasing food will continue forever, because selling the myth of easy sex to men and the myth of being able to eat fast food while maintaining a model-esque body to women in one fell swoop is just too damn effective—especially when paired with cheap food products designed to activate our mouth's pleasure centers—because people are basically dumb animals. That burger looks gross though.
[via Adrants]

New York magazine's Hugo Lindgren proves that—with just a few hours in the studio—Moby can transform a scratchy demo of an amateurish ballad into a rejected outtake from some bad Jennifer Grey movie soundtrack. [NY Mag]

Mark Sanford's press conference. Did you watch that performance? Wow. He just... he just kept going. How did it compare to some classic political meltdowns of the past? Favorably!

Clarium Capital boss Thiel was an early investor in Facebook, where he sits on the board of directors. But Thiel, an outspoken campus conservative at Stanford, has had trouble reconciling his self-professed faith in science and innovation with the "fraud" he argues "major research is turning out to be."

In all fairness to his aides, "I'm getting some Argentinian tail" sounds a lot like "I'm hiking the Appalachian trail"

Have you heard the tragic tale of the Boy With the Yellow Rose, the teen who was swatted away by Megan Fox as he tried to hand her a flower? Well now the hunt is on to find the lad.

You won't be checking out the Blue Collar Comedy Tour this summer. Can we interest you in the White-Collar Criminal Tour instead? Click on the image above for the locations of a handful of white-collar crooks currently behind bars. Then all you have to do is use Google's driving directions to plot out your fun, summer road trip! (You'll have to check with each prison about visitation privileges, of course.) As you can see, it's an incomplete list. Email us at tips@cityfile.com and let us know who we're missing and we'll add them right away. [White-Collar Criminal Tour]

"Eloise," the little girl who lived at The Plaza hotel. What kid wouldn't love an Eloise-themed birthday at The Plaza? (Just play along). All kids would, yes. But at what cost? You will be amazed to learn!

Please don't insist on having your dogs attend your wedding. Don't dress them up in special outfits, or make them play the role of ringbearer. Don't require they sit for wedding photos. Or send them for pre-wedding beauty treatments. Your guests may smile politely and tell you what a cute idea it is. These are the same people who will be laughing at you for weeks to come. (Unless, that is, the person is blind and it's a seeing-eye dog we're talking about, in which case ignore what you just read.) Next thing you know people are going to start holding bar mitzvahs for their canines or something. Oh, right. Too late. [NYDN]

Chris Anderson's plagiarism scandal is still unfolding; Brooklyn writer Ed Champion has found instances where the Free author copied material he was supposed to be summarizing. But there was grumbling about Wired's editor long before his book scandal.

Updated: Fighting back tears, Mark Sanford explained that his mysterious disappearance was really a visit to "a dear dear friend in Argentina," a mistress he met eight years ago and fell in love with a year ago over e-mail.

Nick Jonas (not the ugly one) (but not the cute one?) testified on Capitol Hill today, and guess who acted like a bunch of tween girls: the mothers of tween girls, and the DC press corps. And a Senator!

Sick of trying to decide which of the five Best Picture nominees will win in your Oscar pool? Well, now you'll get to decide between ten! Yes, in a move to attract more ratings, the Academy is widening the race.

In your ever-gray Wednesday media column: Les Moonves can barely afford a dozen new million-dollar condos, The Daily Beast folds on freelance contracts, layoffs at MTV and TruTV, and the New York Times Co. is sick of your rumormongering.