Newspaper and magazines are maybe dying because they are simply not as awesome as they used to be. The American Antiquarian Society has put together a book called The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York, and those sporting male weeklies make our modern-day tabloids and lad mags look like they're put together by a bunch of kittens and marketed to little girls. They are called The Flash Press after The Flash, a weekly founded by a drunk Bostonian named William Snelling. He wrote a poem about how much he hated all the other poets in the nation, then moved to New York to spend more time at brothels. Eventually he founded that four-page weekly paper, dedicated to "Awful Developments, Dreadful Accidents and Unexpected Exposures." Was he the original blogger?!

The fun on today's Times corrections page never stops. Ben Schott's March 4 back-matter essay "Confessions of a Book Abuser" (which—irony alert—we've honored previously in the "most bizarre ethical distinction" T.M.I. category) apparently cribs ideas and a whole, highly specific anecdote from Anne Fadiman's "Never Do that to a Book," part of her 1998 essay collection Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader. No, people don't read much no more, but we sure love to know about destroying culture, one trade paperback at a time; unfortunately Schott's methods were rather too similar to Fadiman's, and neither involved the thermodynamic constant 451 deg F. When they weren't awkwardly wrestling/awkwardly making out with n+1, the lit blogs have been on the Schott story for a while, and now the Times comes clean, sort of. Spicy details follow about the subconscious internalizations of European chambermaids.