Perhaps the imploding real estate market is getting under the skin of Julian Schnabel, the artist turned film director turned high-end condo developer. The auteur's movies are widely admired and his smashed-plate paintings were at least big in the 1980s, but his hot pink ("Pompeii red") Palazzo Chupi has turned into a controversial icon for angry neighbors, gauche celebrity speculators and tumbling prices. And though Chupi didn't come up during Schnabel's 60 Minutes interview, the thin-skinned artist didn't take this blessing to heart, instead lashing out at Morley Shafer for daring to ask about art critic Robert Hughes, one of his most prominent detractors.

Last night on 60 Minutes, a middle-aged man spent fifteen minutes attempting conversation with an inarticulate bohunk until the younger man finally agreed to let him come over. Or, as it was promoted, "Anderson Cooper interviewed Michael Phelps."

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.)

♦ Time Inc. is slashing another 250 jobs. [NYP]
♦ CNN is spending a fortune on fancy-shmancy technology and new talent, but it's making a mint, too: The network is recording double-digit profit growth for the fifth straight year. [NYO]
♦ Dan Abrams is starting some sort of research firm/expert network/PR agency now that he's been replaced by Rachel Maddow at MSNBC. His first client is Ron Perelman. [NYT]
♦ 60 Minutes has been the most-watched program in the nation for the last two weeks, believe it or not. [NYT]

And I'm Barack Obama: The post-election afterglow scored a direct hit last night on 60 Minutes, where the President-elect and wife Michelle's rangy hour-long interview with Steve Kroft drew 24 million viewers. The 6.4 rating is the newsmagazine's highest in nine years, and what did we learn? There will be Republicans in his Cabinet, no new dog would survive the grueling transition process to the White House, and college football needs a playoff system. Also, if you stuck around to the end, Andy Rooney bemoaning frivolous TV news. And here we thought Obama had dispatched all those mavericks. [The Live Feed]

Did you think That One would need to be sworn in before he started breaking promises, to children, in front of TV cameras? It was all right there in front of Steve Kroft's face on 60 Minutes tonight, but he just smiled, from the tank. The "emotive" Associated Press, though, noticed Obama changed his tune on the show: The president-elect promised his daughters in his victory speech that a new puppy was "coming with us to the White House." Yet all of a sudden on 60 Minutes it's coming only after Obama gets "settled" in the White House — "late winter, early spring." Watch hope get sucker-punched, after the jump.

So it turns out "crazy" old Dan Rather has turned up some actual, you know, evidence for his theory of a vast right-wing conspiracy to take him down at CBS News four years ago: CBS memos show the guy who led the "investigation" into Rather's 60 Minutes story on the president's Air National Guard service was appointed after getting "high marks from the G.O.P." Another Republican was rejected after being deemed not sufficiently right-wing by a CBS lobbyist and executives. Craven CBS News suits even considered having Rather's work reviewed by Ann Coulter and various other terrible right-wing demagogues:

60 Minutes did a segment on Chinese people who live and work among "e-waste," the recyclable-yet-toxic remains of discarded consumer electronics devices. An Engadget reader dug up this longer, more yucky Current documentary. I'm going to get a sandwich, so I can fall to my knees and thank God for it.

God knows why Robert Pickel, head of the association of derivatives traders, would want to go on 60 Minutes yesterday to explain credit default swaps. These complex financial instruments—at the center of the credit crisis—are now about as impossible to defend on television as child pornography. Watch this clip from the CBS news show for Pickle's eyebrow-raise when words fail him. It's an enjoyable moment of television but it's time for a defense of Wall Street against their critics in Congress and the media.

Comedian Joe Mande invented a cute game: Remove all but the first and last sentence of Andy Rooney's segment from 60 Minutes, and put the result on YouTube. Incredibly, this makes Rooney sound more sensible than before. Below are Mande's seven editions of the Andy Rooney Game, including last weekend's segment, "Surprise Party."

Millennials! Who are they and what do they want from us? They Facebook their MySpaces all day and Twitter their iPhones all night, and they have terrible manners! Have they come to take us to a Home? Morley Safer investigated on last Sunday's 60 Minutes. [In a repeat, apparently!] The video of the segment is below the jump. It will terrify you! These kids have tattoos and still expect to hold jobs and there are 80 million of them.

For all the career renaissance we've seen from Alec Baldwin over the last three or four years, not even his Golden Globe for 30 Rock overshadows his legendary turn as "Sociopathic Father" in last year's wildly popular Web-exclusive release Thoughtless Little Pig. Even Morley Safer couldn't stop talking about it last night on 60 Minutes; in the accompanying video, watch the "appalling" Baldwin float like a butterfly and sting like a bee under Safer's withering sallies, punch back with word of his forthcoming book on "divorce and parental alienation" and finally score the knockout with his disarming rejoinder about a potential political career: "There's other things I want to do. I mean, in a matter of weeks I'm going to be 50... By 60 Minutes correspondent terms, I am a young man!" Oh, Alec, you bastard. We just can't stay mad at you. [60 Minutes]

Actor Alec Baldwin was on 60 Minutes last night discussing the infamous voice mail in which he called his daughter a "thoughtless little pig." Baldwin said his behavior was "totally wrong," but also offered so many excuses for the outburst that it made me wonder if he isn't going to lose some of the public goodwill he's built up in the year since the call surfaced. Here's how my own thinking on Alec Baldwin has evolved (along with a video except of Baldwin on 60 Minutes):

So Alec Baldwin would like run for office some day, maybe. Possibly soon! After all, he's almost 50. And 50 is when you are allowed to "run the world," he says. "There's no age limit on running for office, to a degree. [It is] something I might do one day," the amusingly intense actor tells 60 Minutes this Sunday. Ha ha ha let's all laugh at him! He'll never win any elections, because of how insane he is and how we all know terrible things about his family and his life and his temper and how he yelled at his daughter that one time. But hey, the actual reason he'll never win an election has nothing to do with his sordid past. It's his unrepentant liberalism. Because California will happily elect drug-abusing unqualified actors with histories of gross sexual misconduct and harassment governor, as long as they're business-friendly Republicans. Seriously, Baldwin's past is way less gross than Schwarzenegger's, plus he's never done anything as embarrassing as this. [CBS]

Katie Couric is in talks to leave the CBS Evening News, the Washington Post reported, lending credence to an earlier report in the Wall Street Journal that the anchor is likely to leave before her contract expires in 2011. Couric would be offered "either a syndicated talk show or a full-time role on 60 Minutes" if she is eased out as anchor, the Post's anonymous sources said. Howard Kurtz, who wrote the Post's Couric story, is playing a bit of catchup: he published an interview with Couric Monday that missed the exit talks, allowing the Journal to scoop him two days later. [Washington Post]

Former wooden President-elect of the United States Al Gore was on 60 Minutes last night, being frumpy and endearing, as is his wont. His new project is promoting a huge $300 million ad campaign by the Alliance for Climate Protection, which is based on the (correct) theory that we Americans are such lazy, brainwashed zombies that we need a shiny, consumer-friendly ad campaign to convince us to stop choking ourselves with carbon dioxide. The 60 Minutes segment showed Gore visiting the ad agency, and even showed a clip of the ad, which is great free media exposure. Too bad its benefit was canceled out by the bitter taste left by the subsequent mutterings of Andy Rooney. Well, let's all hope this ad thing works so we don't die! After the jump, the first ad, which is Gore-like in its earnestness.

While most of you heathens were watching The Hills and/or The New Adventures Of Two And A Half Men Who Met Your Mother on Monday night, your Uncle Grambo was plowing through the first two and a half hours of the new Frontline documentary, Bush's War. On an emotional level, it was a thoroughly exhausting experience — reliving those nightmarish days of September 2001 and the resulting six-plus years of what can only be described as another long national nightmare had precisely the opposite effect on my sleep patterns as a fistful of Ambien. That said, it deserves classification as essential viewing, regardless of your party affiliation. That said, this post is not about George Bush or politics, nor does it have anything to do with the subject matter of the two-part series that Variety describes as a "great historical drama." Rather, it's about how glorious it was to watch a news documentary that was specifically tailored to HDTV and why we're considering boycotting 60 Minutes until they make the switchover to hi-def programming.

We're still not sure why dreamy CNN anchor Anderson Cooper profiled dreamy "football" star David Beckham on 60 Minutes last night (something about Beckham being rich and famous and dreamy?) but he did. And it's on the internet! We're sure the old people who make up the 60 Minutes audience wondered who these dashing young men were and why they were invading their TV screens with their youthful virility and mutual appreciation of athletic prowess. Becks' amazing robot wife Victoria, oddly, is barely mentioned. Full segment, after the jump.

OMG everyone who's psyched for 60 Minutes this Sunday! CNN hearththrob Anderson Cooper is going one-on-one with "football" superstar David Beckham!!! There's a minute-long clip on CBS that we've embedded after the jump. But if sitting through an ad is too much work, you can just gaze upon our screenshot gallery of The Coop and Becks broing out on the "football" field (turf? some other word?). Anderson admires Beckman's powerful leg, then does a manly job defending the goal. This is gonna be the best profile ever!

60 Minutes and former CBS White House correspondent Lesley Stahl's breathless recounting of the "cat burglar" who broke into her apartment and stole her jewels, on the new menopausal Wowowow site, reads like a hardboiled detective drama. "'We know him,' said Detective Kenney. 'He's a serial. This is his pattern, his MO.'" It's a bit unnerving, and perhaps unbecoming, to see her going on at length about rather quotidian personal dramas; the web is an undignified place for old-media icons. But at least Stahl has a little perspective: "What I am thankful for is that our housekeeper wasn't harmed..." The NYPD actually made her a WANTED poster, so you'll want to click for that and the rest of the drama.