No more gorging yourselves on free information like vulgar little savages: The New York Times has announced it will be reinstating its paywall later today.

In order to keep readers updated on Frankenstorm safety bulletins, the New York Times has temporarily lifted its paywall for online articles. It has also temporarily lifted its policy of not posting absurd shit.

The New York Times Style section is the most purposely loathsome newspaper section in America and should generally be avoided at all costs. But if you must read it, why not make a game out of it?

In the face of mounting pressure from activist campaigns like "Drop the I-Word," the Associated Press announced today that it would continue using the term "illegal immigrants" in its immigration coverage if and when the situation calls for it. Drop the I-Word and its proponents—like journalist Jose Antonio Vargas, himself an illegal immigrant—argue that media outlets using the word "illegal" to describe people is a "racially charged" tactic that "confuses the immigration debate and fuels violence." Critics would rather newspapers and wire services use terms like "undocumented immigrant" or "unauthorized immigrant," instead. Despite those protestations, however, the AP appears to be resolute in its decision.

The New York Times has issued a very important correction to an article about the Libyan militia commander alleged to be one of the ringleaders of the Benghazi consulate attack that claimed the lives of four Americans, including ambassador J. Christopher Stevens:

The New York Times Magazine has suspended reporter Andrew Goldman, who conducts the magazine's weekly Q-and-A columns, for one month over an insulting Twitter post he directed at the writer Jennifer Weiner. The paper has also clarified its social media policy, encouraging it's reporters to always be nice on Twitter. (Which defeats the purpose of Twitter.)

In Murgatroid, Ohio—a perfectly average small American town, in a perfectly average American state, where perfectly average Americans do not so average things—the day begins, as it does elsewhere, with alarm clocks, the cries of cuckoo birds, and the collective "Thshhh" sound of apple pies being thrust onto windowsills from North Snooker Street all the way down to South Shoobadoop Avenue. The sun's rays, golden in that way that rays are, peek over the horizon. It is morning in Murgatroid. Once again, a small town full of Americans bestirs itself for the unexpectedly inspiring day ahead.

New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan has given a stern talking-to to Andrew Goldman, the freelance reporter who conducts front-of-the-book Q-and-A's for the New York Times Magazine. The ostensible occasion for the beat-down was a deeply misguided Twitter insult Goldman directed this week to the author Jennifer Weiner. But it was premised on the preposterous and malicious falsehood that Goldman routinely asks misogynistic questions of his female interview subjects. This is bullshit.

Today, New York Times staffers staged the golf clap of protests when about 300 staffers essentially took a smoke break at the same time. Now This News reports the walk out lasted about 10 minutes, which is understandable because oh my god why is it so cold in New York today?

Imagine what it must be like to be the editor of globalism's Rain Man, Thomas Friedman. Your job, ostensibly, is to hammer this man's prose into some semblance of logical readability, and yet he has built a fabulously lucrative career on his total lack of logic, readability, or, really, variety of any kind. Clearly, his editors have now made the only sensible choice: "Eh, just put that shit right in the paper exactly how he typed it on his Blackberry." (*Big shot of heroin*)

Maureen Dowd's column in today's New York Times created a mini-shit storm today, with several political pundits accusing her of using anti-Semitic imagery to make one of her typical points, which is that Romney is bad, etc. Basically, Dowd said Dan Senor, one of Romney's advisors, was a "neocon puppet master" who was trying to help neocons "slither back" into power. According to several "experts on American-Israeli relations," this sort of language is similar to ancient anti-Semitic imagery, like when Matt Taibbi called Goldman Sachs a vampire squid.

Kurt Eichenwald, the disgraced former New York Times reporter whose career went up in flames after he got caught secretly paying thousands of dollars to a child pornographer he wrote about, is on the comeback trail. Today he published an op-ed in the New York Times claiming to have evidence that the Bush Administration is guilty of "significantly more negligence" in ignoring 9/11 warning signs "than has been disclosed." That may be true, but save for a few interesting details, the evidence he presents has been in the public record for nearly a decade.

In today's New York Times, Obama family biographer Jodi Kantor writes about Obama's perfectionism and intense competitive spirit. While it's comforting to have a commander-in-chief so concerned with success, it's possible Obama takes it a little too far at times. Here are some of the more interesting factoids from Kantor's article.

New York Times reporter Mark Mazzetti e-mailed an advance, unpublished copy of a Maureen Dowd column dealing with the CIA to an Agency spokeswoman last year, according to newly released emails obtained by Judicial Watch under the Freedom of Information Act. Depending on whom at the Times you ask, that was either "much ado about nothing" or a "mistake that is not consistent with New York Times standards."

"Believe it or not, people without millions of dollars also like to drink coffee": a response to the NYT high line oped.

The latest Wikileaks farce came to a head this weekend, with Julian Assange thundering from a balcony at the London Ecuadorian embassy that Obama must end the "witch hunt," against Wikileaks. That Assange is holed up in the embassy after seeking asylum in Ecuador to avoid two-year-old Swedish rape and sexual molestation accusations, not a U.S. government investigation, proved no obstacle: His supporters are now seized by one of their periodic spasms of delusional op-ed writing, blogging and tweeting in the hopes of throwing up a screen of bullshit thick enough to hide the fact that this is a very straightforward case of a dude allegedly being a sex creep—not a shadowy conspiracy against a free speech champion.

Not to be a "yes-saying" critic, but an emphatic yes to Dwight Garner on the need for incisive cultural criticism.

The new CEO of the New York Times Co. is Mark Thompson, previously the Director-General of the BBC.

If bad newspaper columnist Frank Bruni ever decides to take his milquetoast musings to a new industry, he should consider becoming the guy who writes the little inspirational slogans that appear on marketing materials inside the Coca-Cola— Pavilion at the Olympic Games™. He's already had his tryout!

Robert Stolarik, a freelance photographer for the New York Times, had this happen to him while "taking photographs of a brewing street fight at McClellan Street and Sheridan Avenue in the Concourse neighborhood," according to the Times: