• Why does Suri Cruise look so freaking weird? Because she's everyone's baby, a child of the whole wide world. Makes you feel fuzzy, don't it? [Defamer]
• Jessica Simpson and John Mayer aren't a couple, and that might have something to do with his relationship requirements: lots and lots of phone sex. It helps if your name is Misty. [RS]
• Total Eclipse of the Heart causes Belgians' eardrums to explode. The song is just that good. [Consumerist]
• For NYU students: how to fuck up your suicide attempt. [Wikihow]
• The Corcodevil is going for $50 off — now you only have to fork over $150 to look Satan in the eye and ask why you've been forced to buy in Bushwick. [NYT]
• Only 21% of reviews were hot for Katie Couric's first newscast. Let's see what she wears tonight, shall we? [Journalism]

Earlier: Suri: The Photo You Won't See in 'Vanity Fair', More Suri: "This Is Definitely Tom's Child"

SHE LOOKED LIKE A LITTLE GIRL WHO HAD TO GO POTTY [NYP]

So, last night marked a huge turning point in the struggle for American equality: Someone with ovaries read from a teleprompter all by herself. After the jump, a highly selective look at how our nation's critics responded.

Apparently, the Cruise family decided to go the Asian route on the casting of this one.

• The animal kingdom embraces the death penalty, celebrates the demise of Steve Irwin. [Daily Gut]
• OMG KATIE COURIC TONIGHT OMG CBS OMG LEGS.
• John Travolta: gaygaygaygay. [National Post]
• Did Jessica Simpson lip-sync on today's episode of The View? Is that why we were kind of digging it? [BWE]
• Preteen Observer publisher Jared Kushner knows when to pull punches: when advertisers are involved, obviously. Go ahead, son, you can admit it. [The Real Deal]
• The New Yorker gets polybagged, and nary a sideboob to show for it. [Living With Legends]
• The Lower East Side and East Village become sprinkled with random instances of public art. One man projected his video art onto Ludlow Street, where a dickbag might conveniently vomit on said artistic efforts. [Metro]
• After being charged with five counts of posession of just about everything, junkie Brit rocker Pete Doherty dodges the slammer after a judge admits to liking one of his songs. You know, here in the States, at least our justices pretend to be impartial to Snoop Dogg lyrics... [Daily Mail]
• Starbucks: terribly indie, boho. [Copyranter]
• Steely Dan turns towards indier-than-thou director Wes Anderson. Only classic rock can help him. [Steely Dan]
• Meachem, Newsweek, official, newsweeklies, yawn, dentures, blahblahblah. [Reuters]
• Fake hipsters hate on fake hipsters behind web show The Burg. It's the circle of post-post-life. [The Burg]
• R.I.P. Willi Ninja. [Keith Boykin]

From the New York Post, today:

• Katie Couric gets her nun on. [Tabloid Baby]
• Seth Mnookin wants some context from the press. Here's some context for ya: Seth Mnookin rides a scooter. [Seth Mnookin]
• "When we launched For Me a little over a year ago, we thought that there was a market for a young woman's lifestyle magazine which was not focused on gossip." Well, that's your problem right there. [FishbowlNY]
• Jodi Kantor gives you the angle on airports that Greg Lindsay couldn't. Don't try and do everything on your first day back, Jodi. [NYT]
• How much do we love Slate's "investigation" of brunch? Um, a lot, actually? Almost as much as we love their look at Chuck Klosterman? Slate, we're sorry we've been mean lately, full stop. [Slate]

Are the New York Post and the New York Daily News embarrassed about getting scooped by a blogger? Both tabloids splashed Katie Couric's Photoshopped photo across their pages this morning, 24 hours after TVNewser first posted a story about it...But neither paper bothered to mention that the photos first surfaced on this blog. Are they embarrassed to credit a blog?

• Are Jessica Simpson and John Mayer dating? Is Jessica's body a wonderland? Do daughters become lovers become mothers? Some other crappy innuendo-joke-laden John Mayer lyric? [People]
• Meanwhile, Nick Lachey and Vanessa Minnillo appear to be getting more serious about their relationship. Individually, they remain ridiculous. [Page Six]
• Brian Williams and Katie Couric have a competition to see who can have the biggest billboard. We can't wait to see who cares? [Page Six]
• Michael Lohan offers a detailed analysis of his prison-made editorial cartoon. That's funny enough. [Lowdown]
• Rush and Malloy say "The laughter has definitely gone out of Joe Piscopo's marriage now that the former Saturday Night Live star and wife Kimberly are divorcing." We say "Joe Piscopo was never funny." [R&M]
• "Rosie Drops Some pre-View Details." Retains all pre-View pounds. [TMZ]

The New York Post breaks the Couric-Photoshop story wide open, and what they find will shake you to your core:

Unbelievable catch by Brian Stelter at TVNewser, courtesy of an eagle-eyed tipster: CBS visibly altered Katie Couric's photo in its Watch Magazine, slenderizing her waist, arms and neck. Yowsers! TVNewser id's the first photo as Katie's official CBS photo, taken at the upfronts in May. Let's hear it for transparency and accuracy in the news! Paging Adnan Hajj...

• Gruff, avuncular voice may introduce Katie Couric. Or not. [NYDN]
• Domain for new magazine using common word as name already taken. [WWD]
• Virginia Heffernan and Jon Fine are hot on the trail of lonelygirl15. Imagine if they teamed up! It would be like Nancy Drew meets the Hardy Boys! Except, you know, about solving a YouTube mystery. [Screens]
• Even the nipple slips are third tier this week. [Egotastic]

Katie Couric takes over as anchor of CBS Evening News on September 5. Normally that would be all ye know, and all ye need to know. But in the networks' continuing struggle to remake every anchor into a hybrid of Cronkitean gravitas and Brokawvian humility, Couric has already been pre-killed by a tidal wave of overexposure. From a mawkishly overwrought farewell on Today to a ludicrously conceived "listening tour" and a $10 million ad campaign to build up her "trustiness," Couric is everywhere too much and too loud. And with so much overthinking about the hustle & flow of her newscast, it's obviously going to be The Katie Couric Show (with news).

Network news: it's the story that just keeps giving. Today the Times takes a long look at the increased level of network news competition in anticipation of Katie Couric's splashy-yet-deliberately-unsplashy debut as the anchor of the CBS evening news. NBC is hanging gargantuan banners of Brian Williams outside of the CBS studio (a technique taken straight from the New York Post) while Williams blathers on about the "anchor-viewer relationship"; ABC's Charlie Gibson is being marketed as "Your Trusted Source," which hearkens back to the late Peter Jennings, whose slogan was "Trust is Earned." Blah trust blah blah trust blah.

• Continuing in our Katie Couric Is the Center of Attention day, it seems that CBS will be offering Couric fewer perks than she received at the Today show. That is, assuming one considered expensing Ann Taylor knits a "perk" in the first place. [Page Six]

• K-Fed penetrates Britney for the money. As if there would be any other reason? [Scoop]

• After five straight nights of intense partying, Jennifer Garner collapses from "heat exhaustion" on the set of her new movie. [Gatecrasher]

• Charlie Sheen and Denise Richards have agreed to terminate a restraining order that prevents Sheen from coming within 300 feet of his children. Now Richards will allow him to admire his babies at the intimate distance of 295 feet. [TMZ]

• James Woods realizes his 20-year-old whore is a 20-year-old whore. [Gatecrasher]

• Brad Pitt drops off his adopted children, Maddox and Zahara, at the Warner Bros. lot daycare, where they play with the dirty children of common studio secretaries. [Page Six]

• Today in Rush & Molloy: Celebrities looove ping-pong! OMFG! Seriously though. McFly? August blows, yes, but isn't somebody out there fucking someone else? They don't even need to be that famous, really. Just spare us the ping-pong. [R&M]

Today in media news:

• Young people like iPods, social networking, the internet. Reading newspapers? Not so much. You're shocked, right? Who keeps putting up the money to fund these studies? [Guardian]
• Wait, young people! If you promise to watch the news, Brian Williams will read your e-mails and Katie Couric will blog for you! Not curmudgeonly uncle Charlie Gibson, though. He just wants you to sit down, shut up, and listen to what he's saying. [NYP]
• We would pay good money to see a bare-knuckle fight between Bill Cosby and Len Downie. Seriously. [Romenesko]

The Wall Street Journal reports that, as is appropriate for her new gig as CBS' shiny new anchor, Katie Couric will likely abandon her colorful Today show wardrobe in favor of something more serious and befitting of the evening news (guess that means no more pink jumpers or colorful culottes). There's a CBS promo airing that shows Couric in a dark suit sporting a pearl necklace, the suit suggesting that Couric is classy and trustworthy (the pearl necklace, on the otherhand, signifies her evening pastimes).