We've had quite a few people asking us where to access Nick Sylvester's now-notorious cover story from last week's Voice, especially since the Google cache of the article has been scrubbed. Like manna from heaven, a kind reader points us to a message board which has posted the article. We've reprinted it in full after the jump. In case you're wondering, the fabricated portion of the article comes near the end, beginning with the following paragraph:

• The Google cache version of Nick Sylvester's partially fabricated cover story on the effect of Neil Strauss' The Game has been wiped squeaky clean. If you know any remaining online outlets still carrying the article, do tell.

• The Village Voice gets its very own hipster-Blair, in the form of young Nick Sylvester, who fabricated parts of his cover story. Upon being caught, he fainted outside of editor Doug Simmons' office, only to find himself suspended upon regaining consciousness. Meanwhile, freelancers bitch about the possibilty of the story being a stolen pitch and Sylvester loses his indie cred by being asked to resign from his haute music-reviewing gig at Pitchfork.
EXHALE! And in other news:

These reports just in to Gawker HQ:

• Pitchfork, the indier-than-thou music site, fired admitted Voice fabricator Sylvester yesterday; his name disappeared from the site's masthead. Somewhere, halfway through a harangue about the reprehensible journalistic standards of online media as compared to traditional news outlets, a retired newspaper editor spontaneously explodes.

Most of us have identically "original" ideas. This is why TV networks, for example, will generally require that you sign a release before you pitch them a show. It's not that the TV execs want to steal your idea; it's that they don't want to get sued if they have someone else's version of your idea already in development. That said, let's consider the case of Dolly, the Truth About Cocks and Dolls blogger, who says acting Voice editor Doug Simmons stole her pitch — about New Yorker men and women playing The Game — and instead gave it to hotshot young Nick Sylvester. Simmons, talking to Gawker yesterday afternoon, denied the charge, saying this week's now-retracted cover story was Sylvester's idea, not his, and that he couldn't find any record of Dolly's pitch. As a public service, then, we're pleased to now provide that record.

"I'm still here, and in good standing," Doug Simmons, the beleaguered acting editor-in-chief of the Village Voice, told Gawker by phone just a few minutes ago. Then he laughed. "Well, maybe not in such good standing."

For the moment we'll ignore the Village Voice's repugnance in attempting to remove all traces of Nick Sylvester's at least partially fabricated cover story from its website. (Whether you like it or not, guys, you published the flawed work, and it's part of the historical record, and while of course you should attach an explanatory and corrective note, it's deeply disgusting to watch a newspaper — a newspaper! — try to throw inconvenient facts down the memory hole.) Instead we're treating it as a cat-and-mouse game.

Here's what we know: This week's Voice had a cover story by hotshot young Nick Sylvester reporting that men around New York are using Neil Strauss's The Game, about pickup artists and their techniques, and that women are increasingly aware of this and outsmarting their would-be seducers. We know said cover story has been removed from the Voice website. We know that the Voice's acting editor-in-chief Doug Simmons, to whom we were referred when we called because the paper's PR director has left the company, hasn't returned our message. And we're reliably informed that the newsroom — such as it is anymore — knows some sort of big shit is going down but isn't being told what.