After the New Yorker ran its controversial Barack Obama cover satirically mocking smears against the candidate, the presumptive Democratic nominee acted like it really didn't bother him all that much. "It's a cartoon," he told CNN. That seemed very reasonable! But it sounds like Obama was more angry than he let on. The New Yorker was shut out of much-coveted plane tickets for the senator's trip to the Middle East and Europe next week. Neither Washington correspondent Ryan Lizza nor, Politico's Mike Allen confirms via email, anyone else from the magazine is among the 40 journalists blessed with seats. Granted, some 200 people applied for tickets. But given the New Yorker's circulation, influence and often heroic coverage of not only politics but also the war in Iraq (George Packer), U.S. intelligence and covert military operations (Seymour Hersh, Steve Coll), American torture (Jane Mayer) and the inner workings of the Bush administration, it's hard to see the snub as anything other than payback.

Remember when it was sort of a big deal for people to mix up Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and noted terrorist Osama bin Laden? Late last year, it was major news when CNN confused them in two different segments — the network apologized in print, on air and personally via telephone. When Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney did the same, a Huffington Post blogger wrote, in commentary typical of the moment, that "the fear of terrorism makes the Obama-Osama name mix-up anything but off-color camp." The news media has had seven months to clean up its act, but hardly seems to have learned a thing. The cable news networks tallied three Osama-Obama slip-ups in the past week alone, TVNewser noted, including a third-time offense from MSNBC's Chris Matthews. After the most recent, by Dan Rather on MSNBC Friday morning, none of the four people on camera even bothered to correct the gaffe, even though Rather actually went whole-hog and called Obama "Osama bin Laden." Where's the outrage?

The media attention being paid to Senator Barack Obama's trip to Afghanistan this week has all the usual wing-nuts crying that the press isn't doing enough to cover Republican Presidential candidate George W. John McCain. "'The question really needs to be posed: Is this type of coverage fair?' said Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va. 'This is nothing but a political stunt.'"

It's a well-known fact that the monkeys have been plotting against us since the days of yore. But their terrible plans will get sped up quite horribly once they've mastered the skill of banking. That's right. Someone's been teaching the little hellions how to use money! "[O]ne can get some clues as to how evolution prepared us for money from the burgeoning research that seeks to present animals with economic choices. To gain perspective on human financial decisions, one may ask, what would monkeys do?Keith Chen and Marc Hauser at Yale University taught monkeys about resources that bear a strong resemblance to money. Monkeys don't care about money, per se, but they do care about marshmallows."

A memoir worth reading? Imagine that! New York Times media reporter David Carr's Night of the Gun comes out next month, and it's been treated to a nice nine-page excerpt in today's NYT Magazine. After detailing how he became a crack addict and how his dealer/girlfriend prematurely gave birth to his twin daughters (which you should totally read) he tackles the question of memoirs, which have been so sorely tarnished in the last few years.

Former Gawker editor and lucky bastard Choire Sicha got to interview Battlestar Galactica's Pretty Asian Cyclon Grace Park for today's LA Times. Lucky bastard. He opens up with a question about a certain leggy Maxim photo spread.

As any of my close friends will attest, I don't know a damned thing about music. But I do know when I like it, and I especially like it when it's used to wonderful effect in cinema or television. So what's your favorite example(s) of such use? As usual, the rules are loose and fast. It can be a bone fide musical number, or a scene that simply uses music especially well (Is that a "score"? I have no idea about this stuff.) Anyway, here's my first entry. Add yours!

So, you're Gillian Anderson, and you're about to reprise your iconic role as Agent Dana Scully for the first time in ten years in The X-Files: I Want to Believe, and your hi-larious interviewer from Newsweek opens up with these "questions": "I've got to confess. I don't know anything about 'The X-Files' [...] Why is it such a big deal?" What on earth can you say? Well, there's this.

Sure, plenty of the old classmates from the original Beverly Hills 90210 have signed-up to be the CW's revamp of the cheese-TV classic. But forget those suckas. It was just announced today that simmering, lazy-eyed, trouble-making beauty Shannen Doherty is coming back!

They get a little closer every day! Just yesterday one of the meat-crazed super-fish was defeated by a crew of life guards after it snuck up on some swimmers at Jones Beach. That's a real beach! Not some silly, pissy Hamptons beach where you deserve to be chomped into chum!

Come on! Can't us Star Wars fans have anything left to brag about? The millions and millions of fans who crammed theaters to see The Dark Knight starting at midnight on Thursday put the comic book movie into record-breaking territory. Which is nice, except the record it broke was previously held by Revenge of the Sith. Sigh.

Oh pooh! The moneyed slobs of the Hamptons are feeling the pinch of the recession this summer! Tiffy's gala will be positively ruined! "Trustees of the Children's Museum of the East End rejected a dinner dance at a rented farm in favor of a cocktail party on the museum grounds here, replaced a five-piece rock ‘n' roll cover band with a teenage jazz combo and slashed ticket prices to $150 from $450, but still only drew about 150 guests, half the number that turned out for the benefit last year... And there are still hundreds of tickets left for the annual Art for Life gala, also scheduled for Saturday night, at the East Hampton estate of Russell Simmons, the rap impresario." People, won't someone please think of the rappers?!

Relaunching your niche magazine in this miserable market and dismal culture? Get legendary designer George Lois on board! He cannibalized his old Esquire work for Radar, and now he's lending his talents to pretend Harvard Alum mag 02138 (can't believe we got the name of the mag right on the first try, sigh). If it wasn't late Friday afternoon we'd mock up a funny photoshop here. But now YOU CAN'T MAKE US. Anyway Lois is still awesome and cantankerous so it will probably be good, unlike the rest of that miserable magazine. The relaunch cover story? "The Harvard 100, the magazines annual ranking of the top 100 living alumni. " [NYP]

Do you ever read science magazines just so you have some interesting factoid to talk about and sound cultured? It's worthwhile. [60 Second Science]

Metro, the free paper best known for causing track fires on the NYC subways, ran a cover story yesterday that is totally indefensible, even by the lowly journalism standards of free morning papers. Radar spotted it: a front page splash about an innocent grad student girl who was supposedly attacked by four wild young black females because she was wearing a t-shirt with the slogan, "OBAMA IS MY SLAVE." The paper's one and only source? The untalented media whore designer who sold the mystery girl the shirt. (We would feel dirty giving him more PR than necessary, but it was this prick). But guess what, Metro: we got that press release too. And if this whole story isn't a hoax, I will personally buy one of those shitty shirts.

Chuck Philips, the LA Times reporter who wrote a huge front page story in March tying Puff Daddy to the shooting of Tupac Shakur-only to find out that this main source was a serial con man and the story was wrong-has been laid off from the paper, along with 150 colleagues. On one hand, Philips once won a Pulitzer; on the other hand, he tended to write things that turned out not to be true. Perhaps journalism's just not his field. Pinkberry franchisee maybe? He'll find something. [MTV News]

Well, it's been a year or two since the corporate world started its "green" advertising revolution, and it's worked. The problem is solved! The problem being the fickle consumer's desire to hear companies talk about how "green" they are. "After 18 months, levels of concern on any issue tend to drop off," explains one marketing wizard. Now we can all sit back and feel good about what we've accomplished! The earth is still destined for environmental ruin, but at least we'll be subjected to less marketing bastardization like this:

You might remember Jesse Washington: He's the Associated Press editor who last year issued an ill-conceived ban on Paris Hilton news that, after much to-do, was lifted in less than two weeks. Within a year, the AP went entirely in the other direction, telling staffers "everything involving [celebrity] Britney [Spears] is a big deal," a reversal Washington awkwardly, and overenthusiastically, joined, again making waves with the announcement that the wire had already written Spears' obituary amid the singer's psychiatric breakdowns. He also rather rashly said in a video interview that "if you want to know that it really happened [in celebrity news], then you're going to have to go to AP... If we put it out, you can bet the house on it that it really happened." That hyperbolic claim was undermined a few months later, when a source claimed "the AP misquoted me" as saying actor Paul Newman had cancer. Having displayed such a nuanced touch, what might Washington's future be at the wire service? Why, covering the sensitive topic of race and ethnicity! In fact, Washington beat out 448 other applicants for the position of national writer on such matters, according to an AP staff memo from U.S. News Managing Editor Mike Oreskes:

Ze Frank, whose awesome series of daily two-minute Web videos ended last year, told a New York audience at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater he landed a movie deal with Universal. As NewTeeVee points out, Frank follows in the footsteps of the Ask A Nina guys, who are remaking Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, and the co-founder of HomestarRunner, home to the series "Strong Bad Email," who just landed a deal to direct a movie with the guy from Napoleon Dynamite. It's great to see entrepreneurial videobloggers crossing over into mainstream media, but you have to figure that the blowback from struggling screenwriters and low-level TV and movie producers is going to make all the bitching about blogger book contracts sound positively celebratory. After the jump, two of my favorite Frank videos.

"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]