Don't let the barroom slapfights and gangster garb fool you: Hud Morgan, the Men's Vogue editor turned aspiring screenwriter, can be delightfully helpful. For example, the ex-gossip nearly answered our question, "Is Hud Morgan Begging For His Old Daily News Gig?"

Lanny Davis, the most pathetic of the Clinton primary campaign dead-enders, just reviewed his own son's book, for The Hill's "Pundits Blog." He liked it!

Little right-wing creep kid Charles Stam sent a two thousand word letter to the editor of the Horace Mann Record, his high-school paper.

Google paid $125 million to settle copyright charges over its scanning of 7 million books. Today authors were told their cut: $60 to $300 per title. Woo?

It was upsetting enough for employees to hear the New York Daily News was ending its 401(k) contributions (memo below). The jokes about bigwigs' extensive stock holdings only made matters worse.

Alejandra Campoverdi zoomed from campaign intern to assistant to a deputy White House chief of staff with, we're told, no other political experience. But the "flirtatious" Obama staffer supposedly wanted more.

Ayelet Waldman, the writer and the overadoring and slightly stalky wife of Michael Chabon, emailed a lengthy account of the couple's AAA-list adventure at Barack Obama's inauguration. To 5,000 less awesome people.

Two of the hottest 2008 presidential campaign scoops belonged to the Huffington Post's Off the Bus. Arianna Huffington let the citizen journalism project stagnate, then gave it to her godson.

The rumor we heard about Brad Pitt knocking up Angelina Jolie isn't the most reliably sourced, but it is the most adorably sourced.

Time's international editor Michael Elliott is an up-and-comer, second only to U.S. editor Rich Stengel at the magazine. But leading an iron-fisted gutting of global editions made him bitter enemies.

A stalker emailed just a few minutes ago with this sighting: "Tracy Morgan at the AMC theater in Times Square. Standing behind him on the escalator as he bitches about Obama not caring about black people." Perhaps some sort of alliance with Jesse Jackson is in order! It worked for Sammy Davis Jr. Or maybe he was just quoting Jackson. Who knows.

A stalker emails: "Alec Baldwin came into Equinox on Broadway and 91st this morning trying to get into my spinning class at the last minute. He was denied because the class was full and lifted weights instead. Didn't have much of an attitude and was pleasant to the other people working out around him." Also:

Well then: the mysterious hooded and bearded man photographed supervising the painting of a new Banksy mural yesterday is not Banksy; it's Williamsburg artist R. Nicholas Kuszyk! As he informed us just now in an email with the intriguing subject line: "not banksy! it's kuszyk." Who is this be-aviator shaded man of mystery? A Banksy collaborator who also paints some nice robots himself! See here:

Less than four months after he "broadened" the Wall Street Journal's Page One desk, promoting P1 editor Mike Williams to deputy managing editor and giving him oversight over investigative re porting, Journal editor Robert Thomson is again reorganizing the storied team. Williams, a pre-Thomson veteran once rumored to be in the Rupert Murdoch lieutenant's crosshairs, stays in place. But his deputy Mike Allen is moved to a new job where he will "nurture investigations" in foreign bureaus, under the title Page One Projects Editor. Allen was recently billeted to the international desk for a stint assisting another Deputy M.E., Nik Deogun, so the change isn't entirely out of left field. Moving up: Alex Martin, a Newsday veteran at the Journal just three years. Thomson's full memo on the changes is after the jump.

It's a fact of life on the internet that when you are mentioned (and linked to) unfavorably by certain high traffic right-wing bloggers, you promptly start receiving some of the most remarkable hate mail you've ever seen. It begins immediately, peaks overnight, and continues usually for about 72 hours or so. Then everyone forgets about it or gets bored and only a few wackos send you the odd death threat for another week or two. (That cycle of mass hatred is not exclusive to pissing off the far-right—obsessive fans of certain celebrities act in much the same fashion!—but Malkin-readers are the form's purest expression.) For your edification, we've run some numbers on keywords used in the hate mail sent to us after we reprinted some of Sarah Palin's emails, an act of malicious terrorism that got us called all sorts of names by Michelle Malkin, Bill O'Reilley, and presumably many more. Why is this relevant now? Hah, two of our favorite conservative bloggers just got caught up in the same shitstorm of right-wing bile. Gentlemen, meet Kathryn Lean Lopez, editor of National Review Online! She is the mother of all Kool-Aid drinkers, according to Andrew Sullivan. She writes for The Corner, NRO's neat little group blog that really exists inside its own bubble of political fantasy and theological debate and name-calling and reality-denying. But K-Lo wrote a crazy column about how "the McCain campaign should stop trying to ruin their good thing — a vice-presidential candidate who was a breath of fresh air not only in the campaign but in American politics and culture — by over-preparing her and tossing her into hostile media interviews." Which led to this!

We're told a New York Sun editor emailed freelancers to tell them tomorrow will, indeed, see publication of the neoconservative daily's last issue, as previously rumored. At the start of this month, the newspaper said it was desperately seeking cash. It supposedly raised "a lot" of money in the following two weeks, but then came a brutal Wall Street meltdown that appears to have ended any hope for new benefactors. The Sun editor's brief email, forwarded by a tipster, is after the jump.

POINT: "This is tacky even for the Onion, not too funny," a tipster emails us. The story in question? "NASCAR Cancels Remainder Of Season Following David Foster Wallace's Death." Sample: "At least for the moment, drivers found it hard to think about the Sprint Cup. 'All race long on Sunday, I was dealing with the unreality presented me by his absence,' said #16 3M Ford Fusion driver Greg Biffle...'I first read Infinite Jest in 1998 when my gas-can man gave me a copy when I was a rookie in the Craftsman Truck Series.'" COUNTERPOINT: No, it's funny. [The Onion]

Here is one of the many charming emails your editors have received since we reposted some emails that were hacked and originally posted by Anonymous earlier today, and then called a phone number. Now the "bloggers post their hate mail so you can point and laugh" routine is dead tired, but this one invokes your day editor's mom! "You obviously are too immature to realize that this is a pregnant woman you are bothering. Ask your mom if she approves." We went to your day editor's mom for comment.

We just received a sternly-worded missive from the Orange Center Elementary School in Fresno, asking us to cancel their subscription to US Weekly. Presumably this is part of the wave of cancellations related to their totally controversial Sarah Palin coverage. This raises so many questions: what exactly is an elementary school doing with a subscription to US Weekly? And why did they e-mail us to cancel it?From: Wayne Werning [redacted] Date: Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 4:03 PM Subject: subscription To: ——@gawker.com Hello, Please advise how our school can cancel its subscription to US MAGAZINE so that we do not receive any more copies. Your publication has become offensive. Thanking you in advance, Orange Center Elementary School 3530 S. Cherry Ave. Fresno, Ca 93706

New York magazine should know that it's setting itself up by sponsoring an event called a "Highbrow BBQ." I mean, really. The cookout yesterday offered the public food from Top Chef contestant CJ Jacobson, along with a concert, for $25. And for that price, one could at least expect a big piece of chicken. But a disgruntled tipster tells us that all she got out of the experience was a bit of watermelon, some nasty taco sauce soup, and an apology from a bourbon-swilling CJ. Overblown ripoff, or just a griping, overly entitled guest? You be the judge! The full report: