Last Friday, The Wrap reported that The New Yorker was being pressured by billionaire Hollywood power broker and Clinton pal Haim Saban to remove politically (and economically) sensitive portions of a massive new profile of Saban. It didn't work.

The Way We Live Now: Kicking 'em while they're down. The vulnerable, we mean. They're the easiest ones to kick, we find. Just laying there, on Bleecker Street, vulnerable. Daddy needs some $700 pants, so somebody's getting kicked.

The Way We Live Now: Playing chicken. Do the lesser nations of the world truly believe they can intimidate us with a mere poultry tax? We will crush you and your cheap knockoff Rolex imports! We're from The Hamptons, bitch!

The Way We Live Now: Standing up for our right to enthusiastic baristas. When all the employees leave your neighborhood coffee shop you're like, whoa, what should I do, just go work at the strip club, instead? Times demand it.

The Way We Live Now: Lying and saying we're anticipating the best. How could it possibly be so? We do that to reassure the kids, you know. Leave em in their poverty schools, learning to counterfeit. It gives them hope.

The Way We Live Now: Praying for a safety net. It's a little more fun plummeting off the precipice of financial doom when you don't actually know whether a net's there to catch you or not. Maybe! Feel the adventure!

Consumer insight from the top minds in advertising: people these days like free money.

The good news: the New York Times Co. made nearly $13 million in net income in the first quarter. Quite a turnaround from last year, when the company lost $74 million in the quarter! The bad news: Total revenues were down more than 3%. And while digital ad revenues were up 18% (the About.com group was up 30%, so don't get too excited, newspaper people!), that, of course, paled in comparison to the money lost in print advertising, which was down 12%.

The Way We Live Now: Trading one problem for another. We found a job, but lost a house. Found a place to rent, lost a place to buy. Found a car, lost a bus. Find a meteor, get alien disease.

The Federal Reserve is rolling out new $100 bills. Pity. We quite liked the current design: clean, uncluttered, bold, and crisp on the fingertips (or so we hear). Now it looks like a god damn child's crayon scratch pad.

You, the average sports-loathing homosexual Gawker reader, might be surprised to hear that as of late 2007, ESPN Magazine pap merchant Rick Reilly was the highest-paid writer in the country. But he's finally shutting up (a little). Thank god.

The Way We Live Now: Half-ass. Why do things properly when they will inevitably crumble with the next economic collapse? Our jobs are all short-term. Our schools are short-staffed. And now they want our booze. Is this how revolutions begin?

Forbes is seeking to put together a top-flight team of media bloggers! They offer bloggers the chance to write for "millions of Forbes readers." In return, bloggers get no money. Sound good?

KFC's nasty Double Down sandwich was the buzziest product rollout since KFC's Oprah-sponsored Grilled Chicken fiasco last year—which helped KFC lose $4.9 billion in sales and 1.7 market share points in 2009. This time is different, though. [AdAge]

The Way We Live Now: Caught between a rock and a hard place. The "rock" is the "Wall" of "Wall Street," and the "hard place" is the other "Wall" of unemployed zipper sellers, ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble.

It's like the last decade-and-a-half didn't happen! After a fierce back-and-forth between people with lots of money, The Brothers Weinstein—financed by Billionaire Ron Burkle—have bought back the storied Miramax name and catalog.

The Way We Live Now: Eating good in the neighborhood. The neighborhood is poor and strewn with corpses, and the eating is our final few precious cans of sardines. Still, it sure is good, relatively speaking!

Message from the economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York: although the recession is mostly over here in New York, our economy won't recover until Wall Street starts hiring again. So fuck everyone except Wall Street, as usual.

The Way We Live Now: Forcing the world to cater to our every selfish whim. Hey, the world does it to us, so why not? Charity must bring us profits! Vacations every week! Love thy neighbor only maybe! No hobo.

The Way We Live Now: Reacting quickly. No sooner did we issue a call for a savior to soothe our nerves and promise us that this recession is over, than one appeared. Riding a stock rocket to the moon!