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!:

The New York Department of Education not only allowed Alec Baldwin into an elementary school, they're advertising this terrifying visit on their website! Ye gods he will eat those kids alive. Oh look, we found a video clip of his appearance:

At the Movies with Siskel & Ebert, in its heyday, was a pretty decent show. Watching The Hills at its prime was somewhere between having a handbag full of pudding repeatedly smacked in your face and finding a dead cheerleader in the trunk of your husband's car. So what would ol' Sisk and Eb say about The Hills had they reviewed it? Some YouTube video mangler has spliced in old footage from their review of the Harmony Korine/Larry Clark nightmare Kids with the promo clip for the next season of that MTV reality gloop. Watch the video after the jump.

Barack Obama, his wife Michelle, and his daughters Malia Ann and Sasha all sat down for an adorable interview with Access Hollywood. They are sitting in, perhaps, some sort of backlot western town set. Someone named Maria Menounos is being all Access Hollywood-y at them. But still, in the 30s seconds of interview available so far, we have to admit that we don't hate Barack Obama's kids. They're making fun of his ratty old clothes, all sitcom-like! This celeb media offensive seems to be paying off. Maybe Michelle should become a Best Week Ever talking head or something next? Hooray for no substance! Clip after the jump.

We give Ben Karlin shit because we've heard he's pretty much a dick, what with his idea-stealing from neighbors and all. Anecdotal evidence from anonymous commenters supports this. ("[H]e chooses to repeatedly compromise that talent by going out of his way to undermine those who work with him," you say. Ok!) Then he curated that terrible-sounding book about getting dumped. But he also used to write for Space Ghost! The New York Press would like you to know about the other side of Ben Karlin. They'd like you to maybe give him a second chance. The way they go about it is all wrong, though: did you know Ben Karlin is also an alternadad?

Living at home with your parents well into your 20s and even 30s: it's not so bad! A full third of 18-34-year-olds currently do it, a figure that's been rising for 25 years. And studies indicate that the politely-named "open nest" trend will keep going strong, which the WSJ says will mean that "the stigma traditionally linked to young adults' living at home will fade." We say: not bloody likely.

The Economist, the smartest magazine in the world, may not be the smartest magazine in the world any more. Oh, the articles are just fine (we assume. We haven't read it since that free trial subscription ran out). We're basing our judgment on the magazine's new ad campaign. Which is utterly baffling. What, exactly, is the message here? Is the clown-and-stuffed-animal motif too clever for me to comprehend? Quite possible, but the campaign still reeks of a weeded college student breaking into the ad agency one night and replacing the real ads with these. Disturbing. Two full-sized pics of the inexplicable things [via Copyranter], below.

How to teach young children about the ten Biblical plagues in an easygoing, child-friendly manner? It's a question that probably troubled the prophets themselves. JewishStore.com has the answer: plague-themed finger puppets, ready for all your children's Passover needs. Friendly, smiling locusts, frogs, lice—they're all there! And then they have the plague of darkness, played by, um, a black guy? Oh. Well. Perhaps it's not the perfect solution for your kids after all. Yikes. Larger picture below.

In honor of the 50th anniversary of the 64-crayon box, Crayola is tarnishing its sacred traditions with eight "newly named colors," supposedly selected by kids, most likely kids who eat crayons. The new names? "Super Happy (yellow), Fun in the Sun (orange), Giving Tree (green), Bear Hug (brown), Awesome (dusty pink), Happy Ever After (blue), Famous (hot pink) and Best Friends (purple)." Oh god, "Super Happy"? "Famous"??? Yeesh. Do not want. Some rejected crayon names, after the jump:

Hillary Clinton tried to scare us all with that "Ohmigod this here red phone is ringing in the White House at 3AM with some crisis and do you really want some young black man answering it?" ad. It failed. In the end, she couldn't even convince the little girl in the ad to vote for her—that girl, Casey Knowles, is now 17 and an Obama supporter. We don't know what's creepier: That a presidential campaign can just take decade-old stock footage of a child and use it in a national ad, to her surprise; or that ABC News refers to Casey Knowles as "3 A.M. Girl." That's just creepy [ABC]. After the jump, our current favorite remix of the Hillary ad—now with increased accuracy!

Internet predators aren't stalking unsuspecting kids nearly as much as they're being invited over, according to a study by the University of New Hampshire. Unlike the horrific narrative 20/20 likes to narrate in that annoying dramatic tone, the Internet is pretty safe as long as a kid doesn't think it's okay to talk to strange adults online, or about sex with any strangers online. (Some sex writers suggest that if teens were allowed or even encouraged to have sex with other teens, maybe they wouldn't be so horny when an adult asked for it. But that's just hippie talk!) But that story is too complex for any serious TV news show, as the British satire Brasseye proved in their classic "Paedogeddon" parody, shown below.

Dan Crowe, an art school grad turned author and editor, is providing some well-off parents with the greatest gift of all: vaguely tongue-in-cheek but suitable-for-framing critical essays analyzing their child's paintings of ponies written in a high-falutin MoMA exhibition catalog style. All for a little more than $250/pop ($380 w/ "good quality frame"). Among the celebrities who've had their tykes' work evaluated are Kate Moss, Tilda Swinton and one of the guys from Blur that's not Damon Albarn or Graham Coxon. The service is called "Kinbote's Bespoke Art Commentary Service," after Charles Kinbote—the increasingly insane academic who unreliably annotates Nabokov's Pale Fire—in a little joke drenched with so much precious fuckwittery that the whole enterprise could only have come from England.

Yet another student at N.Y.U. has killed himself, this time in a Water Street dorm. The school has abided by the family's request not to send out a notification email to the entire university in order to protect their privacy, but apparently, such sensitivity does not apply to speaking to the school's newspaper, which university spokesperson John Beckman, who may or may not be paid some sort of suicide-and-pot-princess overtime, did quite readily.

First they came for the strippers—and now Park Slope has apparently turned against Halloween completely and denied its precious and bright children candy itself. According to an irate reader, nearly every store along 5th Ave ran out of sweets before the sun had even set!

Last night on CBS's Kid Nation, the show on which unaccompanied minors live in a ghost town, learn autocratic values and do immature things to each other with only an apathetic camera crew to watch, hilariously evil baby-oligarch Sophia filled a bucket with what looked like crap (really rotting vegetables, oatmeal and baked beans) and told everyone there was 50 cents in it. You could see the brief apprehension in those juvenile eyes as they weighed values: Dignity? Or some nickels? (Look fast, it was a very fleeting moment!)

Cookie, Conde Nast's magazine for the hip, contemporary, with-it, sassy, stylish, modern mom, announced yesterday the launch of "MomtheVote," their oddly capitalized "nonpartisan political initiative" to engage moms in the political process.

I-banker blogger Mijka Samora has done the math, and realized that hiring an illegal immigrant nanny, paying her lower wages, and paying her off the books "puts a cool $16,000 in after-tax dollars in your pocket every year." This "nanny arbitrage" is epidemic because, Mijka says, of "the widespread, if misguided, notion that 'everyone else does it', and in the conflicted satisfaction of helping an illegal make a living." But even though Mijka is obviously correct that monies saved by using cheap illegal labor are funneled back into the economy, his other arguments for why the city's fiscal infrastructure might come crumbling down if labor laws were actually enforced are less buyable.

Strippers handing out candy to your children! It could happen to you! (If you live in Park Slope.) According to the Daily News, a half-dozen Scores exotic dancers are heading to Brooklyn's Middle School 51 to work the candy booths at this Saturday's Haunted Halloween Carnival Benefit for the Puppetry Art Theatre. And parents are outraged! Well, like one parent is outraged. It's Park Slope, parents would probably only get up in arms about this if one of the strippers said Carroll Gardens kids were better behaved or something.

Students at a Westchester middle school accidentally received a sex ed lesson that was informative, helpful, and totally awesome. Kids were given a brochure that "included material on oral and anal sex and how lesbians can protect themselves from HIV," and now all those annoying commuter parents are outraged and shocked. Thousands of childhoods sullied by descriptions of assplay!

Quick, where did this quote come from if not the Museum of Modern Art: "My kid could do that in ten minutes!"