"By the time the [Time Style & Design] issue hit newsstands in late November, reports suggested people were not buying much of anything, much less the $36,000 cellphone, $1,000 skin cream or Fendi Persian lamb jacket 'misted with gold particles' featured in the issue." [Times]

• Christopher Buckley is writing a tell-all book about his parents William F. and Pat Buckley. "This book is going to land hard in some quarters," he said. Not unlike endorsing Barack Obama. [P6]

"I sense that part of her is keeping her distance from the fray." [New Yorker]

It turns out the news media had a pretty shameful weekend. A British couple came forward to say that while they were hiding from terrorists at the Taj Mahal Palace hotel in Mumbai, CNN broadcast details of their specific hiding place in the facility, resulting in a fresh search by the gunmen in control of the hotel at the time. The Indian government blacked out local TV after claiming the terrorists were gaining tactical information from the broadcasts. And now David Carr weighs in via the Times with a column about how U.S. newspapers were complicit in whipping shoppers into the frenzy that culminated in a deadly Wal-Mart stampede:

Anderson Cooper has to consider it one of the highlights of his career thus far, a thoroughly pleasurable counterbalance to his weeks of depressing Hurricane Katrina coverage back when the CNN anchor was still paying his dues: A flirty interview with champion Olympic swimmer and fellow heartthrob Michael Phelps, complete with shirt removal, medal-fondling, a cozy little nap together and the line, "Mind if I hold one? They're very heavy!" Viewers of Cooper's own AC360 are used to being brought in on this sort of innuendo; it was only a matter of time before the 60 Minutes contributor started beating CBS' larger audience over the head with the "boys make me giggle" routine. So to speak. (Clip after the jump.)

The Associated Press is said to be planning staff cuts. Customers and readers are up in arms over its drift away from hard news. CNN, meanwhile, is fat and happy, and getting moreso by the day, investing in free food, holograms and international staff. So there was probably more than a little jealousy behind AP chief Tom Curley's disdainful swipe at the cable network's plan for a "CNN Wire" to compete with AP.

For the most part, Rupert Murdoch courts controversy. "He likes to set the house on fire and watch all the fire engines drive maniacally down the road," Michael Wolff writes in a biography of the News Corporation chairman. But he's touchy about his third wife, Wendi Deng, nearly 40 years his junior. He was upset when the Wall Street Journal decided to profile her in 2000. And he is suspected to be behind the spiking of a Fortune contributor's Deng profile for an Australian newspaper chain he partly owned at the time, and the subsequent sanitization of Deng's Wikipedia entry. So Murdoch can't be tickled that Wolff says Deng has him by the short wires, according to the Times' new review of Wolff's Murdoch bio:

In April, the Times published a 7,600-word story on how major news networks presented as their own military "analysts" former officers who were on the payroll of major defense contractors and who had received talking points in special Pentagon briefings. The networks declined to cover the story and the scandal never caught fire. The newspaper's solution? Recast the story to focus on a single villain, retired General Barry McCaffrey, who NBC News' Brian Williams defended as a "passionate patriot" the last time around.

Did you happen to catch Barack Obama's weekly camboy YouTube this Thanksgiving? Earnest and adorable as ever, the Office of the President Elect was unsubtle in its marketing; the word "new" appeared seven times in its 600-word speech on the economy, including two prominent instances of what appears to be the Obama administration's new catchphrase: "New Beginning." It looks like we have the much-awaited replacement term for "stimulus," "bailout" and "recovery package," all of which are despised by voters.

[The pop sensation leaving a taping of The X Factor, Britain's American Idol; image via INF]

Following the New York Times' non-bombshell "exposé" about how Angelina Jolie expertly controls her image and weaseled People magazine into only running good coverage on her and her family, People fired back denying everything. And, yawn, now the whole non-issue has carried over to Washington Post sadsack Howard Kurtz's CNN show Reliable Sources. Kurtz spoke with people like an Extra junket correspondent who basically said what we all knew: that every celebrity blurb is heavily padded and protected and handled. Duh. Let's not treat frigging press junkets like some serious journalistic endeavor. They are the exact opposite. People editor Larry Hackett was on too, and he made only one thing clear:

So what's been rumored for a week or two now has finally been confirmed. Junior Senator from New York Hillary Clinton will be Barack Obama's Secretary of State, the Madeline to his Bill, the Frederick Frelinghuysen to his Chester A. Arthur. There will be a press conference tomorrow morning declaring the whole thing official, in which the former warring enemies will smile for the cameras and say kind things, while Hillary does succession counts in her head. She'll be the third lady in the past 12 years to hold the position, which is funny because: women, secretaries, ha ha, etc. Let's ask Pareene or Ryan to explain all this later, shall we?

This Oops! screenshot is from the always delightful Page Six Sightings section. It's a little blurb about Paris Hilton's former boyfriend, a fellow named Benji Madden (who actually looks like this). The picture, though, is of a fellow speaking into microphones with Arabic letters behind him (in green! He must be Hamas! Right??). Sadly we couldn't rack our meager brains (and Googles) well enough to name him. Can you please do that for us? Who is this mysterious bespectacled fellow, and why is he being associated with Ms. Hilton?

You know those movies where the big city hotshot character comes back to their town for the holidays and learns humbling lessons about life and love? Well that apparently played out in real life when Julia Allison—internet fame connoisseur, lifecaster—traveled back to Chicago for Thanksgiving. Between lazily pushing mashed potatoes around her plate and clubbing at "the hottest spot in Chicago," she seems to have experienced an existential crisis that led to a big, HUGE decision that she's of course loudly announced on her website: Julia Allison is going to Business School! And not just any business school. Like some sort of businessy Elle Woods, she's aiming for the crème de la crème: Harvard! And Stanford. What, like it's hard? There are, though, some small flaws in her plan:

Maybe the dude that started busting caps in Toys-R-Us yesterday had a point; like a psychotic, morally reprehensible one, but a point nonetheless. Certainly it's too much to ask that $7 an hour and no health insurance would instill esprit de corps among the workforce. But after I've been turned into a sputtering mass of frustration three times in two days by surly holiday hell, I can see how someone close to the edge might be pushed over by so-called "seasonal help." Maybe moneygrubbing corporations shouldn't unleash untrained hordes of underpaid nitwits on an unsuspecting public looking to buy their yearly allotment of trinkets. The lurid coverage of frenzied bargain hunters trampling a Wal-Mart employee to death and spraying a Toys-R-Us with machine gun fire might be having an effect on the morale of big box store employees!

In keeping up with the Spanx/underwear beat—guys, here is your new foundation garment. It's called Core Precision (heh), reports the London Times, and it makes you look like you have a six-pack. Now dudes will understand what it's like to be a lady wearing a spandex-y waist-cincher, because you really can't let anyone touch or see you undressed at all when wearing it, or they'll find out your terrible secret. So it's like a chastity belt basically. Have fun at the bar!

The Pledge of Allegiance was written by, of course, a Socialist. But the good kind! Francis Bellamy was a late-19th century Baptist Utopian Socialist, not a Stalinist or one of those white kids with dreadlocks. Naturally his Pledge was different from the one we know: it doesn't mention God! Luckily Congress fixed that in 1954, adding the words "under God" right in the middle, disrupting the flow of the whole thing. The Commie-hating clergyman responsible for adding God to our pledge just died!

Have any excess weight? Might you after the holidays? It's getting easier to follow in the increasingly shallow footsteps of Horatio Sanz, the former Saturday Night Live castmember who told New York he'd lost about 100 pounds. "I've been eating better," he told the magazine. And you can too! Publishing bosses are curtailing expense-account lunch options, with one (Random House) going so far as to issue tipping and venue guidelines. If that doesn't cut it you might try, you know, exercise. For motivation, there's always this blog, put out by an Equinox trainer who supposedly "all the Conde [Nast] girls live for," according to one magazine-industry source. Recent more-than-a-little-obsessive entires dealt with cardio workout times (you never need to exceed an hour!) and the entirely natural phenomenon of wanting to sit on your ass rather than working out.

President Bush has long assumed, rather idiotically, that his universal unpopularity was just a fluke, and that historians would remember him kindly. The fact is there will almost certainly be revisionists at some future point who will say "he's not so bad" but torture and Katrina and Iraq kind of seal the deal for his future reputation. But, sitting down with, uh, his sister for an oral history interview on the end of his administration, Bush is sanguine and only slightly defensive. How would he like to be remembered? As a guy who "did not sell his soul." The rest of his answer veers off into patently untrue nonsense:

Bill O'Reilly and Chris Matthews are both famous cable news shouty persons, yes, but beyond that how much do they have in common? Both cling to a Northeastern Working-Class Catholicism that colors their broadcast personae even though they've both been rich and famous long enough to leave most of the lessons behind besides the strict moralism. But Matthews is an old Democrat working for liberal-leaning MSNBC, and O'Reilly is a culture war conservative with GOP in-house propaganda machine Fox. One more thing they share: they're not particularly liked by their peers! Matthews is seen as an overenthusiastic, affection-starved dog, at least if last April's devastating Times Magazine profile is to be believed. O'Reilly is just seen as a dick, if Michael Wolff is to be believed.