So Disco Night happened on American Idol. Everyone still with us? Ten toes, ten fingers? All right, good. We made it. That wasn't so bad, was it? I mean, it could have been much worse.

As the recession takes a toll on print media, magazines have been busy looking for new ways to drum up cash and stay in the spotlight. Sadly, they don't have much to show for their efforts. The once unmalleable line between art and advertising has been getting blurrier by the day, leading purists to point their fingers at publications like ESPN and Us Weekly for gussying up their front pages with ads meant to look like actual articles. Esquire's silly "blinking" issue last year, which featured a computer chip embedded in the cover, earned the title some press, but it didn't exactly boost circulation. But with print publications starved for cash to the point of emaciation, are there any gimmicks that will lure readers to newsstands?

So this morning, Usher just showed up at the White House, apparently uninvited, and he and his entourage just walked in the northwest gate. But President Obama wasn't home.

All this hippie wanted was to cast off his wizard's robe and be nude and free and happy at Coachella. The cops weren't convinced. So they Tasered him. Police still fear wizard wang. [Animal NY]

Maggie and Jake Gyllenhaal's dad wants Bernie Madoff released from jail.

General Motors is defaulting on an upcoming $1 billion debt payment. A bankruptcy is "probable," says the CFO. So why isn't the stock at zero already?

A Halloween episode of Real Housewives of New York City is awfully redundant, isn't it? Costumery, scary skeleton people, the ache in your tooth from too much junk? That's every week on this miserable show!

"Norm Coleman today proposed a more leisurely schedule for his election appeal than Al Franken wants, asking that oral arguments in the case be held no sooner than mid-May." [Strib]

These are busy times for bankruptcy attorneys (they're also quite profitable times too), and stress levels are on the rise, according to psychologists. Presumably that will be Madlyn Primoff's defense when she answers to charges she abandoned her kids on the side of the road after she couldn't get them to stop fighting in the backseat. Primoff, who lives in Scarsdale and is a partner at Kaye Scholer, ditched her 10- and 12-year-old daughters in downtown White Plains on Sunday.

Last month, a movie producer announced he was working on a movie about the Madoff affair. (You can see the official website here.) The folks at The Daily Beast has a few casting suggestions, and while we're not sure about their pick for Bernie himself (Dustin Hoffman), having Barbra Streisand play Ruth and Sam Waterston take the role of Walter Noel is truly inspired. [The Daily Beast via Dealbreaker]

This is a lot like when George Tenet was awarded the Medal of Freedom and Dick Cheney didn't die of shame, right?

In your hacked Wednesday media column: Rachel Maddow's less fascinating, 4Chan's smarter than Time, online news fails, and newspaper layoffs reported not in newspapers:

Remember when Amanda Congdon was rocketing to the top? Yeah, me neither. Videoblogging's forgotten stars.

Peter Kaplan, the Observer's long-running editor-in-chief, is stepping down effective June 1. "I wanted to take care of my family," he said, adding that "his next dream job is to get on the frontlines to figure how to save journalism." [DHD, Gawker, NYO]

There is so much torture news! Honestly? Just grow up and read the Times, Journal, and Post stories yourselves. But there is one small torture anecdote that sums up the whole thing nicely.

It's hard to know what to make of Charles Johnson, the batshit crazy founder of Little Green Footballs, engendering the hatred of his even batshit-crazier former compatriots.

Layoffs, reported to be 20% of the staff, are happening now in the Chicago Tribune newsroom.

Graydon Carter, Robert De Niro, and Ron Perelman hosted a Vanity Fair-sponsored dinner at the State Supreme Court House last night to celebrate the opening of the Tribeca Film Festival. They were joined by Carter and De Niro's wives (Anna Scott Carter and Grace Hightower) and Tribeca Film Fest co-founders Craig Hatkoff and Jane Rosenthal, as well as a long list of guests, including Bono and Ali Hewson, Kanye West, Diane von Furstenberg, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, Tory Burch and Lyor Cohen, André Leon Talley, Fran Lebowitz, Spike Lee ... (continued)

The Way We Live Now: In rubble, soaked in our own urine. Americans are giving up on baseball. Iraqis are giving up on jobs. And entire cities are giving up on existence and bulldozing themselves.