In the olden days, the preferred way to sell chocolate milk powder was with pictures of futuristic scientists shining heat lamps onto the bottoms of naked young boys. Afterwards, families retreated to 7-Eleven parking lots to bask in nature's glow.

What're the odds: four siblings, admitted into the same Yale class? Not bad. BOOLA BOOLA!

How many fortunate coincidences can one family have? First, three successive generations of Sulzbergers become publishers of the New York Times. Then young A.G. Sulzberger lands a reporting gig there. Now another Sulzberger relatives's joining the paper! Total insanity.

The Way We Live Now: Chewing the cud of resentment. The New York Times has assigned all of its reporters to ferret out and write up the most awkward and awful examples of opulence, as if they were news. Hey I wonder if Per Se's kitchen is nice, still?

Ayelet Waldman is smugly married to Michael Chabon and wrote about how fucking her husband is more fun than dealing with her kids, which, let's hope so, right? She's written a book about her pain!

Men who were problem-solving machines in finance have been laid off, and are now forced to do "family" activities. Silver lining: finally some dudes with real smarts to clean up these "PTA meetings" and shit!

Octo-mom has a website, and it's just horrific. Sorry. [Urgh]

Vanity Fair has a new excerpt from professional media beef-starter Michael Wolff's upcoming biography of News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch already said publicly that the book is flawed, but his problems with it seemed to center on how some of his business relationships are portrayed. The excerpt today, disappointingly, focuses on Murdoch's family life, and some of it is predictable. Friction between the new wife and the old wife and the kids from the old wife! Drama about succession! The only real interesting parts come when Wolff starts riffing on Murdoch's greedy ambitious kids and their Oedipal tendencies: Prue, Murdoch's eldest daughter, is a weirdo, says Wolff. But at least she didn't want to marry her mom, yuck!:

We've long wondered about the fascination behind television shows featuring huge-ass families. And uh oh, here comes another one - tonight, TLC debuts 17 Kids and Counting, a reality show about the Duggars, a 19-member family from Arkansas. Former high school sweethearts Michelle and Jim Bob (yes, really) are — huge shocker here — super religious (a.k.a. they clearly don't use condoms) and believe "that every child is a gift to be cherished." They have ten boys and seven girls with number 18 on the way, so they obviously need some camera crews to come in and liven things up. Michelle has been pregnant for nearly 12 years of her life. Excuse us while we die for a moment. Anyway, this will mark TLC's second foray into the overgrown-clan genre. Jon and Kate Plus 8, another show about two parents with way too many babes, has proved successful for the network - even stirring up some controversy from those who believe "raising children is not theater." But why do audiences tune in to see screaming parents and whining tots?It's the "how the fuck do they do it — and why?" quotient. I mean, these people have got to be straight-up clinically insane, right? How do they pay for all of the spit-up rags and dollies and bottles? How do the husband and wife not kill each other after bickering constantly? (Lots of make-up sex, perhaps?) Why do they want so many kids - are they weird and religious or just super charitable and giving? And most importantly: how the hell did that woman pop so many out? Oy. Be the answers what they may, the best part about watching these shows has to be that when those sweet 30 minutes are up, you've got to feel so much better about your own spoiled brats. For your sake, we hope there are only a few of them.

Raffaello Follieri always looked the part of the Italian aristocrat. Impeccably dressed and permanently tanned—like a more attractive version of Zach Braff—he arrived in New York as a dashing young business tycoon with inside connections to the Vatican and a plan to use those connections to make millions. In short order he landed stunning actress Anne Hathaway as a girlfriend and drew attention from some of the most powerful financial figures in America. His father was Pasquale Follieri, an Italian businessman and his son's partner in the Follieri Group, an shady concern that promised investors big returns from real estate dealings with the Catholic Church. But that's not all that Pasquale was; just two years after he helped establish his son in New York, he would be a convicted financial criminal, in an eerie foreshadowing of Raffaello's own fate:

The best way to destroy a neighborhood's low-key appeal is to trumpet said appeal in a newspaper, and such is the case with Tribeca and the New York Sun (though, to be fair, it's not as if Tribeca is undiscovered, nor is the Sun really capable of trumpeting much of anything to an effect). Nevertheless, the paper heralds the gold-paved streets below Canal as the latest neighborhood to undergo suburbification: there are real live families down there, complete with Maclarens and Bjorns and and freshly imported nannies. Not content to have merely conquered Brooklyn, child-rearing New Yorkers are moving downtown in droves to escape uptown social climbing, bringing with them exclusive preschools, indoor play areas ripe for networking, and overpriced kiddie cupcakes. If you're single or not yet breeding, you'd best get packing: these people are fertile-wombed Borg, and they won't stop until every last corner of Manhattan offers mother-baby Pilates.