Marc Jacobs: former addict turned narcissistic gym-goer. That's the takeaway from GQ's new profile of the ubiquitous fashion designer, and perhaps that's exactly what one should expect. He's really good friends with his personal trainer! He has a tattoo of SpongeBob! He had a bad childhood! But now he's fabulous and not on drugs and working out at the David Barton Gym for hours before peacocking around town! The real lesson here is that if you write about fashion designers like Marc Jacobs, you're working with a limited palette from the start. But we'll fill you in on the specifics—including his mom's bad taste, his own self-loathing, and his friendship with "Easy," after the jump.

Daily News reporter Shallon Lester wasn't satisfied just secretly yearning to be friends with Paris Hilton, like most entertainment reporters. She wants to actually be her friend! On TV, at least. (Pictured: an actual photo montage of what the two would look like if their heads were in close proximity, via the NYDN). So the intrepid journalist ventured out to the auditions for the upcoming MTV show and small step towards the apocalypse "Paris Hilton Is My New BFF." How could a trained, professional journalist possibly blend in with a crowd of fame whores? It wasn't that hard at all!

When Dave Logan agreed to appear on Fox Business to promote a book on corporate culture, he probably had some faint hope the six-month-old cable channel was less of a viper pit than its News Corp. sister network, Fox News. Any such delusions were quickly dissolved when host Stuart Varney tore into Logan for being an academic egghead and asked, "This is the United States of America, it is a highly competitive economy, you claw your way up on the backs of others - didn't you know that?" After Logan stood his ground and recounted the lessons of 11 years inside American corporations, Varney scampered a retreat and tried, unconvincingly, to end on a friendly note. Presumably, Varney will now be forced to spend the next few months in ambush interview boot camp with Roger Ailes and Bill O'Reilly. Clip after the jump.

The rich and famous old ladies of the website WowOWow were talking about privacy and stalkers, and the book The Devil Wears Prada came up as a cautionary tale: Beware your office servants! Devil, of course, was written by a former assistant to Vogue editor Anna Wintour and was believed to be a lightly fictionalized portrayal of Wintour. WowOWow's Judith Martin, aka Miss Maners, described the book as "a huge argument for separating your business life from your personal life. Your personal assistant - so-called personal - should not be doing things in your private life and therefore she wouldn't be privy, or he wouldn't be privy to it." Oh, excellent: This is exactly the sort of catty backbiting we had hoped for from WowOWow. A lengthier exchange:

The future of newspapers? It's like a trippy mural on the side of a VW bus in a bad movie about the '60s. But with a couple more buzzwords and nonsensical statements of purpose! The LA Times, stiff suffering from every single problem a daily newspaper can suffer from, even under new, Sam Zell-approved management, took 25 editors on a staff retreat this weekend "to figure out how to stop the bleeding and regroup as a newsroom for the digital future." When they came back, they had an inspiring memo from editor Russ Stanton and the graphic you see above. Click to enlarge.

Whoa. Super-book-publicist and nice girl Sloane Crosley has a new book of essays called I Was Told There'd Be Cake. There are fourteen essays and, in a level of obsession we both admire and relate to, she has created detailed dioramas as well as videos for each of them. (We discovered this on publishing blog Galleycat, via a certain Emily Gould!) The following diorama-video involves what happens when you have people over for dessert... and one of them poops on your bathroom floor.

A couple days ago, Huffington Post's "OffTheBus," a political blog inside the political blog that is the rest of HuffPo, broke a story: Barack Obama thinks Americans are bitter! You have hopefully heard about this by now, as it was all over the TV all weekend, this whole "Barack Obama thinks economic troubles color people's world views" crisis, so we will spare you the details and instead point and laugh at OffTheBus's poor Jay Rosen detailing all the varied and confused ways every single media outlet on Earth refused to give them credit for a legitimate scoop. "Mayhill Fowler's Obama quotes were shown on screen, but Meet the Press made no mention of her, or OffTheBus, or the Huffington Post." Hah. It gets more convoluted from there because NO ONE UNDERSTANDS INTERNET STUFF.

Sharpe James is the old-school corrupt machine politician who ran Newark as his own personal fiefdom as mayor for 20 years before being unseated by Cory Booker in 2006. James' overall distasteful nature was aptly chronicled in the documentary Street Fight. So anyways, there Sharpe was last Friday, standing on the curb after his daily corruption trial, waiting for the bus, and—bam!—a bird crapped on his head. And it's all caught on tape. Was that bird god? That's for god to know, and for us to speculate upon. The instantly classic video is after the jump—the big moment comes about 55 seconds in.

Does anyone here read Missbehave magazine? It's a fun, loopy girlmag. Singer Kelis ("I'm Bossy!") has her own advice column, the fashion spreads are bright and colorful and out-there. Shmancy writers, like Cintra Wilson, occasionally contribute. There was an article on how to dress like a stripper a few issues ago, and a Heatherette spread starring Lydia Hearst. It's "downtown" without the overly-precious, gushy NYLON sensibility, and some of the writing is satisfyingly freewheeling. Folio reviews the mag so far, pointing out that the "mag's models are less kempt, more ordinary, and more overtly sexual than most." Oh noes! Oh yes. How could you not love something with a swimsuit spread starring furries?

A judicial panel in Iraq has dismissed all charges against Bilal Hussein, the AP photographer who has been held by the US military for two years on vague, unsubstantiated charges of working with terrorists. The panel has ordered Hussein to be freed, presumably bringing his ordeal to an end. [Earlier]

Here's how two online news outlets handled their coverage of Howard Kurtz's story on Fox anchor Megyn Kelly. At the top, liberal blog ThinkProgress asserts that Kelly was hired at Fox because she is a conservative tool. Below, the Huffington Post says she got the job because she's totally cute. Takeaway: one can use a Kurtz column to make any point about any media subject, and also Megyn Kelly is pretty hot for a Republican.

WARNING: The Associated Press would like to call your attention to the fact that your teenage son, daughter, friend, or relative is, right this very moment, in all likelihood, engaging in an explicit sex act that they are planning to distribute to the world via cell phone. It's true! In a fact-based story titled "Teen Dating '08: Nude Pix On Cell Phones," the news service urges you to "Forget about passing notes in study hall." Why? Because "some teens are now using their cell phones to flirt and send nude pictures of themselves." Nooooooo! Don't you kids know that dirty cops will be looking at those picture in no time?

Here, finally, is a video clip of Julia Allison's Sunday appearance on Howard Kurtz's CNN media extravaganza, Reliable Sources. I'm not somebody who can detect human emotion, but doesn't it look like Howie has a crush on her? You can really see it in his eyes. Click to watch the instantly classic clip, which includes Julia's request that all you haters "go for it!"

Harry Winkler was an old-time boxing photographer who lived in California and spent most of the 1920s and 30s taking iconic photos of boxers. His collection is notable for capturing the humanity of professional fighters, picturing them less in the ring (though there is some of that) than in their everyday lives—on the rowing machine, at the ball game, shooting dice. For his full archive of thousands of photos, see here. We've selected ten of the best examples of his collection, which can be found after the jump.

• Housewives proclaimed their same-sex lust for a lesbian fitness trainer.

Climate change superstar Al Gore banned the press from his appearance Friday at the tail end of the RSA Conference on information security in San Francisco. The move seemed like a joke: Surely, Valleywag's editors reasoned, the roomful of high-IQ IT professionals carrying wireless communications devices into Gore's presentation would blog, tweet and shoot the whole thing. Gore would be streamed live to Qik via multiple videophones. No need for a pro journalist to sneak into Gore's talk and liveblog it, as I used to do with Steve Jobs keynotes. Web 2.0 had it covered. So what really happened? The only on-time account of the event came from CNET reporter Robert Vamosi, who used his conference speaker badge to get past security. Vamosi posted a thorough report less than an hour after Gore began. Hey Robert, didn't you get the memo? You're supposed to be out of work by now.

In 1999, BusinessWeek production manager Nicholas White went outside to smoke a cigarette and, upon returning, got stuck in an elevator. For 41 hours. The story of his ordeal is woven through Nick Paumgarten's new New Yorker feature about elevators, and is, predictably, the most interesting part. It's amazing how much 41 hours in a small metal box altered White's life forever, for the worse. And—oh yes—there is (sped-up) security camera footage of him the entire time. It's mesmerizing, because you can imagine him slowly going insane, which is exactly what's happening. Below, the video, and the article's summary of White's life since he was rescued. Let this be a cautionary tale to all of you who may find yourself similarly ensared in this most primal of New York office drone nightmares!

It's rare that a reality show performs a true public service, but if this new Miss Rap Supreme show on VH1 can actually uncover a single talented female rapper, it would be doing America a favor. Think about the current status of our most famous female MCs: Lil Kim went to jail, Foxy Brown went to jail, Remy Ma is going to jail, and Lauryn Hill, the best of them all, is behaving like a crackhead. Who are young women supposed to look up to, public intellectuals? Ridiculous. I have high hopes about the idea for the show, which is the logical demographic successor to last year's painful version, The White Rapper Show. MC Serch is back (and still employed)! And he's finally teamed up with Yo-Yo! Miss Rap Supreme premiers tonight at 10. I have no idea whether any of the girls on it are good rappers or not, but they do look reliably crazy, which is half the battle. The full trailer, below.

Anonymous CBS News employees complained to the Times about how Katie Couric was getting too much attention and the rest of the company was going ignored. The paper went ahead and looked at the rest of CBS and, what do you know, it turns out Evening News host Couric "may be the least of" CBS's worries. Its prime time ratings are down 20 percent, viewers are the oldest among major networks, the news and sports websites are behind rivals, the Early Show just lost its executive producer and the news division is laying off people and cutting back budgets. Meanwhile, CBS chief Les Moonves (pictured) saw his salary rise to $37 million last year, more than twice what Couric is believed to make. Anyone else want to complain to the Times about how they are not getting enough attention? [Times]

With just three guys in a plain office building on Manhattan's East side, investigative website TheSmokingGun.com revealed the LA Times' Tupac Shakur story was based on fake documents, exposed lying memoirist James Frey and found out that Fox News host Bill O'Reilly is into loofahs. The site modestly attributes much of its success to the recent digitization of court records and such, but it probably helps that its editor is a "veteran Mafia reporter" who knows where to look, and when, for the juiciest records: