Five months prior to Riverhead's release of a "heh!"-funny essay collection whose publication surely has nothing to do with her connections, the Observer has seen fit to lengthily profile Vintage publicist Sloane Crosley. She's non-threateningly pretty, often listens to people when they speak to her, claims to have an

Now that he's up and died, Norman Mailer will—like Kafka, Borges, and Anna Nicole before him—forever be denied his Nobel, a prize reserved for alive people only. But, no matter! London's Literary Review has just named Mailer's pulp Hitler novel The Castle in the Forest winner of its annual Bad Sex in Fiction award.…

According to yesterday's Crimson, a crisis has been brewing up in Cambridge ever since Harvard computer labs upgraded to Microsoft Word 2007. Scared and confused students complain that the upgrade "has created incompatibility problems and is difficult to navigate."

Turns out the Cold War really was the clash between two radically different ways of life. And it continues. Here in the First World, for instance, thirtysomething creative-classers wear ridiculous clothing out of nostalgia for the halcyon leg-warmer days when their parents dressed them. Over in Russia, however,…

Here's a late update on the horrific story that's been riveting our city's leading citizens for close to half a year now: CW11 News at 10 anchoress Kaity Tong remains homeless after being chased out of her Chelsea duplex in July by some sort of killer toxic mold unleashed by the ongoing condo conversion of the O'Neill…

Just like that Woodward "Bush at War" volume of the same name, today's Post article "Plan of Attack" promises an inside account of high-level military planning—"sure-fire tactics [to] make a successful Black Friday." It's practically a slam-dunk for a good Christmas season. The insider in this case is Marina Vataj, "a…

The hard part about writing News You Can Use isn't finding the solution; it's proving there's a problem to be solved. Consider today's Times, wherein dining reporter Julia Moskin has a nice Thanksgiving Eve article (accompanied online by a thrilling instructional video) about a new low-stress, expert-approved way to…

Don't worry, you'll still be able to poke anyone you like, but soon Facebook will stop forcibly conjugating "to be" for you. Right now, Facebook's "status" feature automatically places an "is" in front of whatever you declare your status to be. For instance, "Aleksey Veyner is a douchebag."

A court in Paris has fined Sony BMG and MTV Online 80,000 euros and ordered them to stop broadcasting Britney Spears's 2005 video for "Do Somethin'." Why? Not because it is a horrible perversion of Pavement's Heaven Is A Truck nor even because watching it will erase instantaneously two years of higher education. No!…

Friedman's oblivious egomania, Dowd's insouciance to basic norms of logical argument, Kristof's admirable ambulance chasing: all such other Times op-ed superpowers pale in comparison to David Brooks's truly awe-inspiring, magisterial laziness. Like a frat boy funneling a brew, he sits waiting for ideas to trickle down…

Step aside, public editor Clark Hoyt! The Times's impulse for self-assessment takes a more material(ist) turn today with architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff's review of the new Renzo Piano-designed Times HQ on Eighth Ave. and 41st Street. Ouroussoff—as far as architecture critics go, really an unimpeachable guy who…

Remember when manly-man long-shot Dem candidate Joe Biden called Rudy Giuliani "the most under-qualified man since George W. Bush to seek the presidency"? The Delaware senator cattily continued: "There's only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun, and a verb and 9/11." Well, actually, "I" is a pronoun, so…

In the great "these things go together" corporate tradition of LVMH, Disney has created a $4 billion "Princess" division "almost by accident" to combine the considerable assets of Belle, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Snow White, Jasmine, and Ariel. ("Pocahontas and Mulan are usually kicked off the throne. Disney says…

Tasked with the peculiar and peculiarly thankless job of explaining Cam'ron to your mom, Times pop nerd Kelefa Sanneh does more than keep up with the Frere-Joneses. He also has steadily built up a jaw-dropping catalog of double and single entendres based on the recordings, videos, and live performances of the…

Vivacious redhead Paige Davis has agreed to return as host of a new HD version of the once-geisty TLC home-swap design show Trading Spaces. What does this all mean? Well, for one thing, that the Broadway dreams of one Paige Davis, who's played Roxie in the stage version of Chicago —she's a thespian on the level of …

Screw the backlash to the backlash to the backlash! This must be said: Britney Spears's Blackout is an astounding music record. Go put it on now, and just try to argue that "Heaven on Earth" isn't so much a better faux-Joy Division song than anything in years—and these are the same years that every person with a Y…

Lee Gomes's "Portals" column in the Wall Street Journal usually addresses the question concerning technology with a boomer-friendly sort of phenomenology—as in, "gee whiz, look at this phenomenon!"—and little else. Today's edition seems at first no exception: Gomes has discovered a YouTube "bulging" with all sorts of…

Judith Regan's not an anti-semite: She's an Italophobe! As the full 70-page text of her $100 million lawsuit against HarperCollins and News Corp. reveals, Judy herself is the victim of a "smear campaign." Remember those awful claims that Ms. Regan, upon her post-If I Did It dismissal, made mention of a "Jewish cabal"…