Some anxiety-addled, manic-depressive New Yorkers are in for a disturbing treat from this week's Look Book: your psychologist, Dr. Rosalie Mishkin, is featured. The lucky lady, who enjoys color-coordination and clothing from Lands' End, is stopped regularly by strangers who have to tell her how beautiful she is. In her weekly grilling of the fashionista roundtable, Intern Alexis gets some fashion therapy from Josh Tager, Nikki Darling, Jocelyn Carmichael, and Jonathan Swerdloff (no relation).

· McDonald's paying for hip hop product placements. Ice Cube is probably kicking himself right about now. [Business Week Online]
· Jan Herman thinks Paul Krugman "says in the mainstream media what many think in private, and he says it with coherence, persuasive logic and a level-headed marshalling of facts that most of us cannot match." [Straight Up]
· TV Newser asks: "CNN To Go High-Def This Year?" Heck, why not? As we saw last week, they've already gone high-dumb. [TV Newser]
· VH1 greenlights Being Bonaduce starring Danny Bonaduce (natch). Is it time for an intervention? (On the upside: fewer ironic music cues; no Michael Ian Black.) [USA Today, via TVTattle]

Please make our jobs harder. You're taking all the fun out of this.

Front Pages [BBC]

Sure we can.

Move over Ashton and Denise. Goodbye, Charlie and Demi.

The New York Observer's blog, The Politicker, has some excerpts from Rudy Giuliani's latest book, The Quotable Rudolph W. Giuliani. Unfortunately, it's not an authorized book, but rather a smear job by some right wingers who don't want the former mayor of Sodom-on-the-Hudson to run for president.

In his latest column for the Village Voice, Michael Musto takes a giant gossip shit:

Because nothing says "molestable" like Boba Fett!

It's day two of The New York Times' special series on celebrity gossip writers. Yesterday, as we've already pointed out, was Katharine Q. Seelye on Liz Smith and today, David Carr reports on—get this!—British editors at American tabloids.

Time for a quickie game of Media Pole Position for today's news:

We totally misunderestimated Liz Smith. She's not an over-the-hill, air-kissing virtual publicist for celebrities: she's a sly media prankster, a wickedly clever manipulator of credulous journalists.

We've got some bad news. The American Podiatric Medical Association has released its annual rankings of the "10 best" walking cities in America and, after holding the top spot in 2003, New York has plummeted to seventh place. A moment of silence, please.

Good work, New York Post: You successfully juxtaposed a nearly week-old photo of Madonna and Guy Ritchie in religious garb with another scare photo of Michael "The New Boogie Man" Jackson.

The sound you hear over at the Daily News isn't that of crickets, exactly — it's more the sound of safety (yawn). Weekday gossip monkeys Rush & Molloy and Lloyd Grove have returned from their vacations, thus kicking Ben Widdicombe — whose sasstastic Gatecrasher column was running daily while the elders were in Fort Lauderdale — back to the weekend edition. So the Daily News' gossip pages are back to being family-friendly and mild, at least compared to bitchy Ben. (Today's top story: Jennifer Lopez likes fur! Brilliant, but we get those press releases, too.)

In this week's edition of the New York Times Book Review, things seem a little...tame? No anal, no huffy Queenan, no sexed-up Safran Foer — just a big bucket of letters, Harvard musings, and a dash of Paglia. After the jump, Intern Alexis (also known as the East Village punkin who wants to blog about bedbugs) gives her weekly report.

Darn, no button for "This is related to news, how?"

· Memo to T.B.: Your exec probably meant Svetlana Stalin, and no, it was not a compliment. [Palm Beach Daily News]
· Liz Smith's pants are so, so on fire. [FishBowlNY]
· And all this time we thought blogs were what made you a mogul. Man, we are so, so screwed. [NYT]
· Speaking of blogs (or as we like to call them, 'Snicker, blogs, snicker, sob'), The New York Daily News makes them seem so simple, even an idiot could create one... A bigger idiot. [NYDN]

Now, put on your special Drudge decoder ring... Can you solve the mystery? We can! This matters because the item links to an article where, apropos of nothing, Drudge is referenced as a footnote.

WE HEAR...