In your to-the-point Tuesday media column: Mike Wise gets suspended, big layoffs at the Deseret News, CBS Evening News is in the dumps, and Nick Sylvester speaks.

Harvard Law Professor Charles Nesson has humiliated Village Voice plagiarists, conducted frightening YouTubes in his Second Life persona, and successfully litigated on behalf of Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. He's found another person to bring justice to in Joel Tenenbaum, a Boston University student who is being sued by the RIAA for downloading seven songs as a teen. In doing so, he'll file a lawsuit that directly challenges the RIAA's ability to willy-nilly sue anyone it likes. Does this crazy-ass lawyer have a chance of succeeding?Joel Tenenbaum was a teenager when he allegedly downloaded just seven songs over a P2P service. The RIAA sued him last year and attempted to bully him into a settlement, but Tenenbaum wouldn't budge. Nesson just filed a counterclaim challenging the weight and premise of the RIAA's original suit in this brief (pdf):

Lil Wayne is the tattooed, drugged-out New Orleans rapper who, for some reason, causes spasms of hero worship among white internet rap critics. The extent of the enthusiasm for him has always been a total mystery to me, but it's almost comical watching rap nerds try to outdo each other with their verbose online praise for Wayne, who would certainly rather be drinking vast quantities of Robitussin and liquor than reading their bullshit. Anyways, he got booed off the stage at his recent concert in London, and then showered with bottles on his way out, for good measure. Guess the crowd didn't read all the right blogs before they went to the show. After the jump, two recent examples of internerd Wayne worship, and the video of his ill-fated exit in London. I must admit I find this highly enjoyable.

Sunday Styles has a semi-anti-semitic-seeming profile today of one Sion Misrahi, who parlayed the family bargain men's store into Lower East Side real-estate moguldom, thereby transforming the old neighborhood from ethnic enclave to liminal hipster space to liminal yuppie space to crappy modernist condo wasteland. The Times throws bones to both the Post and Time Out for being earlier to the Lower East Side No Longer Cool party, but conspicuously fails to mention the above post from Riff Market, personal blog of brigand/hero Nick Sylvester, apparently written by fellow music kritik Chris Ott as a parody of some whiny chick named ultragrrl. Whatever! The point is "i fucking hate the lower east side," from a post dated way back to May 9. New Media Revolution! Yes, those are the Sprouse Twins.Lower East Side is Under a Groove [NYT]

Life is way to short, particularly ours, but Idolator points you to a lecture given at Harvard School of Law by wunderkind fabulizer Nick Sylvester. We didn't even get as far through the video as the Idolators did, but, you know, we are sort of honored to be part of his personal Power Point presentation.

Our overly hip siblings at Idolator have it on good authority that our old friend Nick Sylvester — the former Voice scribe who admitted to fabricating quotes for a front-page article — has returned to his old, old gig at the temple of indie superiority, Pitchfork. Apparently Sylvester slipped back in a few weeks ago and has been editing some reviews, though you won't see his name on the masthead:

Well, look who turned back up on Pitchfork's masthead. We know, we know; that whole taking-a-stand-for- journalistic-integrity thing gets boring real fast, don't it?

So you were once a Harvard wunderkind, a spritely hipster with real talent, but then you blew your decent gig at a major alt-weekly by fabricating, of all things, the details in your cover story. You got canned, your editor resigned, and your name became synonymous with journalistic jackassery. For such a young guy, you fucked up pretty badly.

It's Friday and it's been a long week, so why not pass along an out-of-the-blue and entirely implausible rumor that just showed up in the inbox? A tipster passes along some speculation about our old friend Nick Sylvester:

Buried down towards the bottom of the Letters in this week's Village Voice:

• The publication and paychecks have moved on to a better place, Cargo's moderately crappy swag lives on. [601am]
• Nick Sylvester offers the world's most incoherent explanation of what happened with that little mess he made at the Voice. It makes more sense if you get stoned before you read it. [Riff Central]
• Highly entertaining Jane editor-at-large Jeff Johnson steps down, presumably because of creative wanderlust. [Fitted Sweats]
• Alas, poor Krucoff travels all the way to the Javitz Center only to learn that the auto show lacks the sufficient skin-baring car sluts one would hope for. [Young Manhattanite]
• A new affliction: "Afflufemza," the condition of uncontrollable vomiting in regards to phrases like "motherhood is hot right now." [Powell's]
• It took just 10 minutes for every gay man in Manhattan to go broke buying Madonna tickets. [NYDN]

Some amusing but probably baseless emails we've received lately:

• Because God is inexplicably protecting Maer Roshan, Radar still looms over us. Well, kind of. Maybe not. Maybe so, with Jesse Jackson's son in the mix. And whether or not the mag that Maer built comes alive, it sure is fun to speculate and send Roshan into a secretive frenzy.
• Our sick and psychotic Gawker Stalker Maps continue to destroy the world, prompting George Clooneyto don his Batman suit and unite his flacky friends against our satanic practices. The New York Press agrees that we're bad people and, moreover, just snarkity snark snark snarky.
• Naomi Campbell assaults her staff again — and this time, it's over a pair of jeans.
• Hell of a week for masthead changes: Wall Street Journal's Weekend Journal editor Amy Stevens saunters over to Conde; the Observer's Ben Smith relocates to the Daily News; more changes at Spin; and Newsweek executive editor Dorothy Kalins suspiciously heads upstairs.
• Breaking: Just like any student at any college, NYU kids like to party.
• Circulation desperation sets in, and free papers are everyfuckingwhere. And if they're free papers from the Post, you'll find them at the dump. Or China.
• It took way too long, but the Village Voice's doe-eyed young fabulist Nick Sylvester finally gets fired.

We just got word that rock-writing wunderkind Nick Sylvester, who fabricated part of a recent Village Voice cover story but inexplicably was not fired when his boss was, has finally been fired. We don't have hard-and-fast confirmation on this, but we know a letter was recently drafted by acting editor Ward Harkavy breaking the news to young Sylvester, and rumor is the letter has been delivered. We're also hearing that Voice vet James Ridgeway, the political and investigative for the paper, has been let go, too. Got any info on this? Let us know. Updates as we get confirmation or details.

Acting editor-in-chief Doug Simmons has been fired from the Village Voice, according to several sources at the paper. Word is that Mike Lacey, the editorial top dog of Village Voice Media, made the announcement at the troubled alt-weekly's 3 p.m. editorial meeting today. Simmons, the paper's managing editor until editor-in-chief Dan Forst resigned soon after the New Times deal closed in January, assinged and edited last week's now-retracted cover story, "Do You Wanna Kiss Me?," by Nick Sylvester. Sylvester subsequently admitted the piece contained a fabricated final scene.

Even at the magic kingdom that is the Village Voice, where "making shit up to publish in the paper" doesn't also mean "fired," we figured that "suspended" would at least mean "won't have a byline in the very next issue."

OK, so yesterday we posted the original, as-printed, not-fucked-with version of the manufactured final scene to Nick Sylvester's now-retracted "Do You Wanna Kiss Me" Voice cover story. And that original version cited "Steve Lookner, DC, and Vali, three TV writers who had flown in from L.A. for the weekend." (Later, that became "Steve Lucien, DC, and Vic" in the online version, before it was removed.) All parties now agree that the trip Sylvester described did not happen, but a question remains. Who are those three?

You already know all about the cat-and-mouse of finding the now-retracted Nick Sylvester Village Voice piece. And you already know how we feel about a newspaper — a newspaper! — that tries to scrub inconvenient truths from the historical record. But the funny thing about the disappearing act is that the print issue remained on stands the whole fucking time. So while Simmons and his cronies were busy removing all signs of Sylvester's malfeasance from any website that hosted it, you could still pick up the damned thing on street corners throughout the city.

• A very special collection of letters to the editor regarding the Village Voice's grounded houseboy Nick Sylvester. Dismay isn't quite the word to cover public sentiment. [VV]
• We hear that Democratic gubernatorial candidate Tom Suozzi has hired former New York Press editor Harry Siegal as his policy director. Siegal saved the Press, so maybe he can — er, nevermind.
• The House & Home section at the Times gets an extreme makeover, kind of. [Architect's Newspaper]
• More on Kate Moss' totally unexciting drug use from 1998: She traveled with her stash in a Faberg egg. The woman is nothing if not classy. [This Is London]
• Writing about how Matt Haber wrote something that you actually wrote two years prior is deliciously meta. [FishbowlNY]
• MySpace: the movie. [Big Shiny Thing]
• Yanni is arrested for domestic abuse. Being forced to watch his Live at the Acropolis VHS during our junior high music classes, we can't help but feel relieved that he's off the streets. [CNN]
• Twee music is fine. Twee comics, not so much. Fine by us — too much twee and comic geeks in this world, anyhow. [Salon]

• Penguin wins auction for Alan Greenspan memoir with an offer believed to be nearly $9 million. Obligatory question: Irrationally exuberant? [NYP]
• The dude behind the allegedly forthcoming mags Everything for Men and Everything for Women is a con artist and a felon. Unlike most mag people, who are merely con artists. [WWD]
• Arthur S. holds his State of the Times meeting; reporters question why he gets paid so much and they so little. [Media Mob/NYO]
• ABC's Bob Woodruff reportedly now conscious and talking, though heavily medicated. [ABCNews.com]
• Air America could lose its New York affiliate on April 1. We'd be bummed, if we ever listened to it. [NYP]
• The Jew and the gays brought Oscar his second-worst ratings since 1987. [WP]
• Does Diane Sawyer want to anchor World News Tonight? One gossip site says so. [TMZ]
• Candace Bushnell to launch weekly Sirius Satellite Radio show giving advice to women. First piece of advice we'd like her fans to hear: "They're just cupcakes. Stop waiting on a line around the corner for them." [NYDN]
• Will Nick Sylvester be a Stephen Glass, a Mike Barnicle, or a Janet Cooke? [Media Mob/NYO]