Home-schooling? So over. Try city-schooling your kids at the Met and trendy bars. That's what The Professors' Wives' Club author Joanne Rendell is doing. How does an un-schooled Manhattan five-year-old spend his days? It has its advantages: "Un-kindergarten for us means Benny can sleep late so I can write. It means we don't have to worry about bedtimes and can go out on the town with friends any night of the week. We can go to Europe and visit my family when the flights are cheap..."Heh. It's like she's trying to provoke criticism from the blogs.

Many a trend piece has begun in and around Williamsburg's hip, multi-culti McCarren Park: the Times has been loving to point out what it means for the Way We Live Now, as well as fetishized its summer of rock shows in an empty pool. (Kids with dreads and tattoos!) But nothing has expressed the leisure activities and lifestyle choices of the creative slacker underclass as well as the rag-tag group of young creatives, hipsters, and drunks that make up the Brooklyn Kickball League. We've entertained you with their exploits all summer. And now, as fall approaches, the season is almost over. Yet what would the end of yet another kickball season be without one last fight?From a secret kickballer:

Fired Vanity Fair writer Toby Young's How to Lose Friends and Alienate People (movie version forthcoming) chronicled the Manhattan media hellmouth of the 1990s. It would be much more difficult to make it in print journalism today, he admits to WWD. In fact, he says, if he were trying to start a media-career in the aughts, he'd probably be, like, working as a "slave" for this website in particular—and "sleeping on [Brit It Boy] Euan Rellie's floor":

The much-vaunted Miss Williamsburg pageant we warned you about has come and gone. What to say—the hip neighborhood manages to simultaneously be everything that's wrong and right with Brooklyn's creative slacker class. Since we didn't have the energy to attend (it sounded exhausting), we are happy that the New York Press covered the blessed event. "The girl crowned Miss Williamsburg, C.J. Johnson, boasted the talent of shot-gunning a PBR and taking her panties off through an American Apparel 'onesie'..." Click through to see the crowned King and Queen of Williamsburg, along with pageant drama (includes Xanax and New Jersey!)

Today, a blog post on Glamour's Smitten talked about how it feels when an ex of yours gets married. Which makes it the second essay writer Joanna Goddard has written about Page Six Mag's Joshua Stein. Add this to the New York Times Magazine article by former Gawker Emily Gould that mentioned her relationship with Stein, which followed his own Page Six Magazine essay about the dangers of blogger love, and you have... well, you have an entertaining media clusterfuck. Why does it seem like he's the most written-about ex in New York? Hey, that's just what happens when writers date. Now that everyone's a writer—armed with their blogs and Tumblogs and lifestreams and the like—the scribes among us should just stop dating each other now. Think of it this way:Post-breakup, a writer's first instinct it to write or blog it out. This is their nature. It's totally fine if kept confined to a Word doc or a friends-only LiveJournal blog or whatever. But still, you must work, work—as Chekhov said. Maybe you're freelancing, and you're miserable, and all you can think about is this fucking ex of yours who keeps popping up in the damndest of places—whether it's their byline in a magazine or at the corner deli or at a media party. And hey, why not mine your life for stories? That's what your writing teacher at that night class at the New School told you! You might even earn some sweet freelance cash from a personal essay—or if you're really good, a Modern Love in the Sunday Times, which is the pinnacle of the breakup essay. You can then use the $500 to buy an awesome dress, which is sort of like an investment in a future relationship. (It's easier to catch flies at media parties with honey!) And so you write. Whether what you write is good or bad, the fact is that it's published, and it's out there. The written-about ex might form a rebuttal. They might not. They might get a six-figure book deal which allows them to feature you in any damned essay they want, like Ms. Gould! That essay might get leaked and it might contain certain bits about your sex life or your musculature. Of course, there have been other, more luminary, writer couplings. Sartre and de Beauvoir, Plath and Hughes, the Bloomsbury Group. Do not pay attention to them. They had no high-speed Internet. And so the vicious cycle continues. But enough about work. You doing anything Saturday night?

Sure, internships are supposed to be tough, but the rabid neoconservatives who run the New York Sun seem to be going out of their way to be severe to the unfortunate young souls who somehow find themselves paying their dues there. The dress code, for example, stipulates not only a suit and tie but a specific color of shirt, shine to the shoe and knotting of neckwear. Is this really the paper that celebrated Middle Eastern women who defiantly wear tight jeans, bikinis and punk-rock-inspired clothes under their burkas in the name of not being "dressed like everybody else?" And is the de facto ban on subway rides of more than 30 minutes coming from the same editors who slammed the mayor for taxing suburban commuters? Apparently so! Whether there's hypocrisy at work in them or not, the Sun's "Guidelines For Interns" are pretty hilarious, assuming you don't have to slave under them. Someone who did just sent us a copy, and we've highlighted some of the fun bits:

...So you could be a hero when you miraculously fixed it? That behavior is more common that you think, says the Wall Street Journal—they've dubbed in "Munchausen at work." (Munchausen's syndrome and Munchausen-by-proxy is a creepy psychological disease in which one deliberately makes themselves or someone else sick to get attention.) So: do we all need recognition at work that badly? Apparently we do:

Remember those "You Will" commercials when a narrator said that one day we'd all be able to check our laptops on the beach or whatever? (A friend of mine would always intone this whenever I took out my cellphone.) Now, we will and we do. However, a new study says that most workers don't choose to telecommute, worrying the lack of face time in the office will hurt their career and not get them noticed by the boss. (They may be right—unless they're bloggers measured by pageviews!) "Nearly half of office workers are able to telecommute, but less than a third actually do," says U.S. News. Seriously, though, I've never stopped laughing about those 1993 AT&T ads:

Hey, we've heard anecdotal rumblings and ravings about Klonopin lately. Is it reaching the tipping point as the latest recreational prescription drug? Is it better than Xanax and Valium? Send me your stories. (I'm so on the edge that I can't complain to the doctor about a headache without walking out with a prescription for Xanax. But yesterday I read in Glamour about how stress can make women more vulnerable to autoimmune disorders, which only made things worse.) So, Klonopin?

Be this guy he knew who got a newspaper column because he was a really funny bartender. Oh, and also be talented? [BigThink]

Remember how yesterday we told bloggers they should insist on getting paid because "someone is making money off your work and your content?" That argument applies to the creative side of pretty much any corporate media endeavor. But all rules have their exceptions, and Exhibit A, for today at least, is Project Runway mentor Tim Gunn. For the show's first season, Gunn worked for free, it has emerged in court. Meanwhile, Harvey Weinstein and his Weinstein Co. were milking the show for every last dollar. In season two, Gunn took home just $2,500 per episode. These days, of course, he has his own spinoff program, a best-selling book and a cushy executive suite gig at Liz Claiborne. So should everyone go throwing their labor around for free? Of course not! Here's why it worked for Gunn:

Tricia Romano, the Village Voice's former nightlife columnist (and now editor at Pop and Politics) writes, "the publishing industry isn’t interested in paying for content. They are interested in just generating content." [Pop and Politics]

"I read your post on how some of the AOL/Weblogs bloggers are blogging for free. I don't know who the bloggers are or which blogs within the portfolio this applies to either. I was recently hired (signed a contract) to write for one of the blogs. Last week, the blog I'm with sent out a note to all the members of the team that everyone except for lead bloggers and paid staff should refrain from posting until August because of a budget shortfall. On the blog I was hired to write for, we receive just $X [redacted] per post, features (slideshows and such) are paid at a higher rate. I think some bloggers continue because they feel a sense of mission and duty and are really into it. [Emphasis added] I will not write for free."

There's something about organizing social events over the internet that encourages people — everyone, really — to try a little too hard to impress. This is why Evite pages are filled not only with RSVPs but also with in-jokes, double entendres and various other self-conscious displays of wit. And why so many emailed party invitations take three long paragraphs to get to the point! To make sure you never waste another minute being cute like that in a damned internet invite, have a look at this phenomenon in extreme form: Emails in which n+1 staffers, along with other highfalutin types (from the New Yorker, Council On Foreign Relations, Paris Review and so forth), are told "hey let's meet at the bar" in the insanely obtuse manner they surely prefer. Harper's editor Christian Lorentzen is apparently the one who writes these things, but Jess Roy could no doubt use the emails to spin yet another indictment of the greatest literary cabal of our era, etc. — without even leaving the house! We've reprinted a couple, via Daily Intelligencer, after the jump.

Did you know Frances Bean Cobain, Kurt's surprisingly well-adjusted daughter, is a "summer aide" at Rolling Stone? She is! Also, she's wayyy too rock and roll for the anal-retentive offices of the Wenner title. Insiders bitched to Page Six, "she doesn't get coffee for anyone . . . calls in sick all the time and wears funny outfits." First of all? She's 15. And second? Something tells me Evan Springsteen, Max Spielberg and Gus Wenner weren't fetching too many lattes last summer, either. Anyway, here are some conversation tips, courtesy a February article in People, in case she comes to collect your drink order:

"This 'tiny concentration of hyper-intellectuals has become a juggernaut that subtly controls everything that happens in the industry' is what [Jess] Roy says she came to believe. But most of these people to whom Roy refers can barely put on underwear before noon." [Choire Sicha, Previously]

Once in a rare while, an item comes along that embodies the entire cultural zeitgeist of a particular time and place. Ladies and gentlemen of the creative underclass, we have just such an item in our hands today. And it's up for sale to YOU, the public! The players in this strange saga: Harvard-educated literary it-boy and haughty heartbreaker Keith Gessen; Gawker, sworn enemy of literary culture and pimp of kittens; and a copy of Gessen's poorly reviewed but terribly important book, All The Sad Young Literary Men, with a very special twist. Here's the entire story of how this item came to be, and how you can-and must-buy it, in order to win the culture war and house the homeless:

New York dating columnist, possible future reality star, and C-list party guest Julia Allison (whose employer, Star, recently declined to renew her contract) is back home in Illinois, visiting her parents. And she's being incredibly snide about it, based on her recent Twitters:

Paragraph NY is a Manhattan "work space for writers." It's nicer and quieter than your apartment, and don't worry: "Publication is not required for a membership; only serious intent and a strong drive to write." (Required: the desire to pony up $1,400 a year.) However: there will be rules, a recently leaked memo tells us! For example, "If you're wearing heavy or hard-soled shoes, please bring slippers to wear in the writing space." Um, will do. With all these rules, it's like an super-uptight library that you pay out the snout for:

Yesterday, we brought you news of an anonymous "well known author" seeking a $12-an-hour assistant via Craigslist. Kind of like Carrie Bradshaw's on Sex and the City, she explained, but you'll be paying your own taxes, doing "occasional light housework," and commuting up to White freaking Plains. She's been on the Tyra Banks Show, and stipulated that you had to be a girl—woman, whatever—without a criminal background. Through the collective wit and wisdom of the commenters, it was deduced that the author is probably: