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Dirty Cocktails, Dirty Money, Dirty Mailmen

Posted on Friday, December 11, 2009 8:04:30 PM

A senator accepted a bundle of cash; Susan Orlean imbibed something 'hard core;' and Ana Marie Cox touched someone again. The Twitterati had a lot of explaining to do.

Senator Cair McCaskill (D, Missouri) would like you to know she wasn't accepting a bribe from her lover in the cafeteria today. Everything in Congress is so hard.

Cinephile journalist Kristopher Tapley has had it with his idiot mailman.

No one can make a cocktail <a href="http://twitter.com/susanorlThe Huffington Post's Jason Linkins has alleged that Air America's Ana Marie Cox touched him unexpectedly. Show us, on the doll. (Not Ana's doll.)

Always with the Twitter self promotion, New York Times' Brian Stelter.



Did you witness the media elite tweet something indiscreet? Please email us your favorite tweets - or send us more Twitter usernames.

Facebookarazzi: Stalking Celebrities Just Got a Whole Lot Easier

Posted on Friday, December 11, 2009 4:54:27 PM

The implications of Facebook's recent privacy rollback will likely take months to reveal themselves. But it's already clear they go beyond Mark Zuckerberg's stash of intimate pics; we're already starting to learn new things about Hollywood celebrities.

Take Angelina Jolie, for example: Did you know the sought-after actress has just 27 Facebook friends, and they're almost all A-listers? Talk about a meticulously curated list:







Then there are the surprising affiliations. Will Smith, for example, is a member of the Facebook page "Jesus Daily," which posts bible quotes from Jesus each morning, even though the actor has made repeated donations to groups affiliated with the Church of Scientology; echoes the cult's "spiritual physics" rhetoric; has set up a middle school staffed with Scientologists; and has said Scientology is filled "brilliant and revolutionary" ideas. Smith was raised Baptist and has insisted he takes ideas from multiple religions. A look at his page (click to enlarge):




And you can send direct Facebook messages to a surprising number of celebrities, right from the "Send message" command in the upper left corner of their profiles, though it's not clear to what extent, if any, this has been affected by the new privacy framework, since some celebrities, like Tobey Maguire, still have messaging turned off. Some who have it enabled:

More, we're sure, to come.

(Top pic: Jolie, giving an interview to NBC's Matt Lauer in 2008, via INF)

Mark Zuckerberg Hates His New Facebook Privacy Policy, Too

Posted on Friday, December 11, 2009 2:43:20 PM

Facebook's CEO has urged his users to carefully review the new "privacy" settings pushed on them by his social network. He should have taken his own advice: He's apparently locked down his photos since we rifled through them last night.

Under Facebook's highly suspicious new "privacy" system, users are typically encouraged to share their photos widely, a move that helps Facebook become more like its fast-growing frenemy Twitter. In what seemed like a savvy PR move, CEO Mark Zuckerberg opened his own photos to the public last night. But after we ran some of the more interesting shots, he appears to have partially yanked them back.

Friends of friends can still see the photos. But one tipster and one Gawker staffer who share no friends in common with the Facebook CEO were able to see his photo cache last night and are no longer able to as of this afternoon; the pictures are definitely now shielded from such strangers. You can check for yourself by clicking here.

It's a dumb move, PR-wise: On the one hand, Facebook' own chief executive is illustrating that his privacy settings are so baffling that even he himself doesn't grasp their full implications. And, on the other, we already published the most embarrassing stuff! Sigh.

We can't think of what else Zuckerberg is trying to shield from public view; maybe it's one of these pictures we haven't run yet, but we doubt it. Oh, and the last two aren't of Zuckerberg, but of two different flacks for the social network, Brandee Barker ("you have a choice") and Barry Schnitt ("Facebook is changing, and so is the world changing and we are going to innovate to meet user requests"). We figure, if they didn't want these candid personal shots published to the world, they would have configured their oh-so-simple privacy settings accordingly.

UPDATE: Zuckerberg has updated his wall with the following message about an hour ago:

For those wondering, I set most of my content to be open so people could see it. I set some of my content to be more private, but I didn't see a need to limit visibility of pics with my friends, family or my teddy bear :)

This is baffling, since most of the strangers who can read this wall messageabout how the CEO "didn't see a need to limit visibility of pics with my... teddy bear" now cannot see said pics, with his teddy bear.

UPDATE 2: Spokesman Schnitt tells True/Slant, "[Zuckerberg] went through the transition tool like other users, evaluated the recommendations, and ended up accepting them."

"Now girls, only the most special ladies at Facebook get this t-shirt with my face on it... remember that it is a sacred honor and if I see so much as a single wine stain on there, you're out of Zuck's Angels for good..."

"Priscilla, I swear to God, I agreed to pose for a picture and a split-second later she was somehow under my arm..."

You might call this "the Twitter shirt," accompanied by the "Twitter money" cheer.

There are thousands and thousands of reasons Brandee Barker loves being Facebook's spokeswoman.

Barry Schnitt, meanwhile, can't even afford a proper t-shirt. On the bright side, he was the only one at his brother's bachelor party in Austin, Texas with a proper cowboy hat (that's Schnitt on the far left). Maybe it was the money he saved by using those company-issued shorts.

Facebook CEO's Private Photos Exposed by the New 'Open' Facebook

Posted on Friday, December 11, 2009 10:00:00 AM

Facebook controversially forced profile pictures into public and pushed users to share candids with the whole world. So now we're blessed with pics of the social network's young CEO shirtless, romantic, clutching a teddy bear, and looking plastered.

So at least this whole privacy scandal hasn't been for naught.

As a result of it, Mark Zuckerberg has gone from sharing very little of his personal Facebook content with the public to sharing a whole lot, True/Slant's Kashmir Hill has noticed. Where the public could see just one photo of the Facebook co-founder in October, strangers now have access to a cache of 290 shots, including snaps uploaded by Zuckerberg and those uploaded by people who have tagged him in their pics.

This opening may be a result of Facebook's new default settings; or could be a result of Zuckerberg trying to reverse the PR debacle of the new privacy system by opening up the content himself; or could be a combination of both. In any case, it springs one way or another from the privacy controversy. And as dogged but often frustrated chroniclers of Zuckerberg's personal side, we're thrilled. We just knew this new system would be a boon to gossips like ourselves.

We've looked at all 290 pics of Zuckerberg, here are our favorites:

With girlfriend Priscilla Chan, from her album "moments." Have you seen a sweeter thing, today? Probably not.


Aww, it's a pic Zuckerberg took of Chan from his mobile phone, around the Facebook office. He gave this the caption, "testing mobile photo uploads on [']cilla..." Hopeless romantic, that one.

And here's Zuckerberg testing his "light saber" on 'cilla, if you know what we mean, and we think you do. (We mean an actual toy light saber, for kinky role playing. Priscilla has just informed Zuckerberg that he must "do" Han Solo, while she does Leia.) Pic by Jocelyne Takatsuno.

In fairness, this is the bear that gave Zuckerberg the chutzpah to turn down Yahoo's $1.4 billion offer. Clutch it tight, Mark. From a trip to Lake Tahoe, photographed by Andrew Bosworth, a Facebook software engineer.

Zuckerberg (right circle) with his brothers in Harvard's Alpha Epsilon Pi, a Jewish fraternity, including spurned Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin (left circle). Photo by Sam Gross

"Hmmm, so if we triple the hypothetical revenues in this spreadsheet cell, our valuation goes to....:" Photo by Aaron Sittig, Facebook Design Strategy Lead.

Ain't no party like a Facebook party 'cause a Facebook party don't stop... until that guy licks the chip bowl. Photo by Skip Bronkie

Now we're not saying Zuckerberg is necessarily wasted in this "Lake Tahoe - Opening Night" vacation picture by Facebook engineering/product manager Scott Marlette. But there are an awful lot of "Lake Tahoe - Opening Night" vacation pictures in which one might reach that conclusion, is all we're saying.

Like, for example, this one, another picture that might give the naive observer the impression that Mark Zuckerberg got hammered on this "Opening Night," at Lake Tahoe, with his staff. Also by Scott Marlette. Thanks Scott!

This one also might lead the confused and bewildered to conclude that Mark Zuckerberg got drunk in Lake Tahoe on "Opening Night," pounded the beer in front of him and taunted a co-worker. Picture yet again by Scott Marlette, de-facto Valleywag staff photographer for the greater Lake Tahoe area.

Little known fact: In 2006, when it looked like Facebook's valuation might never reach eleven figures, Zuckerberg briefly considered a career in folk music. From Kevin Colleran's "random pics from my new camera, Aug. 2006."

At sister Randi's wedding last year. Now there's the nice Jewish boy you can bring home to your mother. By Kevin Colleran.

The early days: From the kitchen table at "the first Palo Alto Facebook house." Again by Sittig. Dig the preppy, Anthony Michael Hall look.

Hey hey easy there, it's called Facebook for a reason,photographer and Facebook "Engineer / Manager / Old far" Bob Trahan. OSHA does not recommend that monitors emit this level of radiation.

"And if elected student body president, I promise to restore proper security to the high school yearbook archives... the precious, precious yearbook archives... You're not recording this as video, are you Randi?"

Facebook Gets Shrill With Twitter Backer Over Privacy

Posted on Thursday, December 10, 2009 9:44:02 PM

Facebook's Brandee Barker set her fight with a Twitter-investing ex Googler to "public;" CNET staff jockeyed for a free street turkey; and Serena Williams got ready for her nail-baring closeup. The Twitterati got scrappy.

Facebook flack Brandee Barker decided to illustrate precisely why some status updates should not be shared with the world: her icy Twitter exchange with Twitter Inc. investor and former Google exec Chris Sacca was enabled and amplified by content shared with "Everyone" — the kind Facebook now advocates. (read from the bottom up).

Staffers at CBS' CNET are stockpiling food, according to tech blogger Caroline McCarthy. So much for this recession's supposed new media exceptionalism.

Lalawag's Sean Percival can tell you first-hand that while Paris might be the romantic "The City of Light," it runs on cold hard cash, same as New York.

Forbes' reporter-turned-code-monkey Taylor Buley let the difference between writing about tech news and writing about tech really sink in.

Serena Williams got her nails done... so she can shove things down your fucking throat! (On television shopping channels.)


Did you witness the media elite tweet something indiscreet? Please email us your favorite tweets - or send us more Twitter usernames.

Why Diddy Is the Perfect New Mascot for AOL

Posted on Thursday, December 10, 2009 6:12:47 PM

AOL has put Sean Combs very publicly in the middle of its directors and managers. A company banking on formulaic, mass-produced content could do worse than the rap mogul, who wished AOL shares luck. They promptly slid.

Combs, aka Diddy, aka Puffy, was inexplicably put forward by AOL as a company icon in the midst of its stock market re-debut, as evidenced in Kara Swisher's video for All Things D, excerpted above. The producer and entrepreneur does have a presence on AOL Music, so maybe that's why he was posing with AOL execs last night at a party on the New York Stock Exchange, the beating heart of Wall Street. "2010 is going to be an AOL year," Combs told the financey crowd. "Good luck tomorrow," the first day of trading following AOL's spinoff from Time Warner.

Shares of AOL closed down half a percent. Hopefully Combs can share more helpful words with the content-obsessed internet conglomerate on the art of creating profitable crowd pleasers in a notoriously crowded genre. Are the blog game and rap game really so different?

Craigslist's Dirty Secret

Posted on Thursday, December 10, 2009 5:54:39 PM

This is pretty huge, at least for those who buy the myth of angelic Craigslist: eBay has effectively confirmed that cyber cherub Craig Newmark screwed over an early employee to enrich himself, then tried to cover it up.

Valleywag was the first to report, back in 2007, how Newmark and co-founder Jim Buckmaster required the equivalent of a $16 million bribe from eBay to honor an early employee's 25 percent stake in the online classifieds company. The employee, purported Craigslist co-founder Philip Knowlton, had previously agreed to sell his equity to eBay in desperation, for a separate $16 million, after Newmark and Buckmaster tried to dilute his holdings with new shares. People would speak about the incident only anonymously at the time.

But an eBay executive laid out the same story in testimony today in Delaware court, saying Newmark and Buckmaster demanded $16 million and threatened to block the deal if they didn't get it — their ownership award to Knowlton be damned. Their demand amounted to "essentially extortion," the executive, Garrett Price, testified, according to NBC Bay Area and the San Jose Business Journal.



What's more, Price also testified that Newmark and Buckmaster asked that the payment be hushed up to protect Craigslist's altruistic image. That way, Newmark could continue to float preposterous, image-enhancing deceptions like this one, swallowed by Wired and printed as part of an August 2009 profile of Newmark:

Newmark abandoned the idea of running Craigslist as a nonprofit, which would have required him to learn and follow too many rules.... in the meantime he handed out a significant portion of his ownership to others as a way to avoid acquiring too much authority.

So on the one hand, Newmark is telling the press he's intentionally diluting his ownership in the company to keep his ego in check; on the other, he's frantically bolstering that ownership, a process he only halts when he gets a payoff, made to him, at the expense (effectively) of a major shareholder and former employee/co-founder. What's more, as a result of these shenanigans, his quirky indy SF startup is now partly sold out to a big bad tech giant.

Newmark has yet to take the stand. It should be interesting to see how he spins his way out of this one — not only in the court of law, but in the court of public opinion and brand image.

Google's Terrible Hiring Question: The Document

Posted on Thursday, December 10, 2009 2:43:53 PM

Google's hiring process is supposed to be a utopian system for identifying superhuman staff. Yet it needs a surprising amount of correcting. And we're trying to figure out if this "stage 2" interview test also needs fixing.

Sent in by the friend of an ultimately unsuccessful Google applicant, the test was supposed to be completed by the applicant within three days. It asks for a response to an imaginary request from an imaginary Google manager, for an analysis of whether the company — "Poogle," not Google, mind you — can hire 750 engineers in six months to launch a new product within 12 months (click to enlarge):

This is a terrible question. The only issue is whether it is an intentional one, designed to test the applicant.

It's terrible because doubling the number of engineers on the sort of product Google makes — software — emphatically does not make it ship faster, certainly not within the first six months of their work, and certainly not at the scale of 750 engineers.

This has been widely understood among software managers since the publication of Frederick Brooks' Mythical Man Month in 1975. As blogger and former Microsoftie Joel Spolsky summarized the thesis 25 years later:

When you add more programmers to a late project, it gets even later. That's because when you have n programmers on a team, the number of communication paths is n(n-1)/2, which grows at O(n2).

From Mythical Man Month:

Men and months are interchangeable commodities only when a task can be partitioned among many workers with no communication among them. This is true for... picking cotton; it is not even approximately true of systems programming.

When a task cannot be partitioned because of sequential constraints, the application of more effort has no effect on the schedule. The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many woman are assigned...

Since software construction is inherently a systems effort — an exercise in complex interrelationships — communication effort is great, and it quickly dominates the decrease in individual task time brought about by partitioning. Adding more men then lengthens, not shortens, the schedule.

Even when a software team can benefit from some organic growth (as opposed to Poogle's doubling), it's going to take on the order of six months just to get the new people up to speed on the existing code base and trained in corporate peculiarities, which at Google are significant due to the scale at which it operates (Ken Thompson, legendary co-creator of the Unix operating system and inventor of Google's new Go programming language, still isn't allowed to check in code there, having failed to jump through the requisite hoops, he recently said in the book Coders at Work ).

So "Poogle" shouldn't be asking whether it needs to hire more recruiters to add 750 new programmers to "Product X" in six months; it should be asking whether the feature list for Product X should be trimmed, the deadline lengthened or a subset of it easily split off into Product Y.

But maybe Google is asking candidates to come up with that answer on their own. Whoops.

Supporting documents supplied as tabs to the test:

This one goes on; we've cut it off:

(Top pic: Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Getty.)

Facebook Wants to Steal Your Friends

Posted on Thursday, December 10, 2009 12:13:16 PM

Facebook's new "privacy" settings are even more nefarious than they first appeared: The social network has formally nationalized your friends list, like some Cuban sugar plantation, and published it to people who hate you. You have no choice.

That's because the social network has codified this new state of affairs right there into its written "Privacy Policy." A comparison of the new and old policies reveals this addition:

Certain categories of information such as your name, profile photo, list of friends and pages you are a fan of, gender, geographic region, and networks you belong to are considered publicly available to everyone, including Facebook-enhanced applications, and therefore do not have privacy settings. You can, however, limit the ability of others to find this information through search using your search privacy settings.

Facebook users have just begun to realize this is happening. Reuters' aggressive financial columnist Felix Salmon took note of this exciting new "privacy" feature when his critics on an investor website published a list of his Facebook friends, presumably for hate-mailing. Former Gawker editor Doree Shafrir blogged this morning about how her once-hidden friends, network and fan-page subscriptions have suddenly been published.

I've now set my privacy settings so that only friends can search me [and find out you're a fan of Howard Kurtz! Oy! -Ed.]…which seems sort of counterproductive to the whole enterprise, doesn't it?

Indeed it does, and it's scant protection: Shafrir's friends are still listed to strangers on her profile page, if you can find it. There's a way to turn this off, too, according to Salmon (see update to his column), but anyone who shares a friend with you will still be able to see all your friends (I'm looking at Salmon's now, and we're not friends).

Really, as gossip bloggers, we at Gawker should be happy about all this; it certainly makes it easier to hunt down people willing to confirm gossip about their acquaintances. And it's satisfying to have our conspiracy theories confirmed — and quoted by civil libertarians at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who, along with the ACLU, have raised serious objections these "privacy" changes.

But there's something maddening about watching Facebook bumble its way into another privacy debacle, one approaching in its disastrousness the launch of the Beacon advertising/stalking system a few years back. If only Facebook's investors agreed. But then they're not exactly a pack of civil liberties advocates, now are they?

(Top pic: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, by Simon Doggett)

Shakeups for the Hard Core

Posted on Wednesday, December 9, 2009 8:08:45 PM

A news legend bid his typewriter farewell; people planned their post-New-York-Times futures; and the new wave were overwhelmed by work. The Twitterati were at a fracture point.

NPR's Daniel Schorr, who once worked with Edward R. Murrow, gave a heartfelt goodbye to his typewriter. On Twitter! Wow.

People were also talking about striking out in new directions at the New York Times, on buyout day.

Writer and ex Valleywagger Melissa Gira Grant has no fucking time. Or, rather, no "non fucking" time. It's fucking overwhelming!

Blogger and entrepreneur Tom Bridge isn't asking for a perfectly ordered society. Just the basics.

The Wall Street Journal's Colleen Debaise really appreciates your interview for her video "Creating Buzz," owner of Bill's Bar & Burger. Here, have some "check [it] out" buzz!


Did you witness the media elite tweet something indiscreet? Please email us your favorite tweets - or send us more Twitter usernames.

Facebook Begins 'Privacy' Con

Posted on Wednesday, December 9, 2009 5:49:00 PM

It would seem our conspiracy theory is coming true: Facebook's big push to give you "more control of your information" is actually an initiative to get you to give up control of your information. Step one: Frame greed as concern.

Facebook's 350 million+ users are being greeted by the dialog below, an "Important... Privacy Announcement" that "simplifies" and "adds" privacy controls:



But like Mark Zuckerberg's "Open Letter" last week, this is just the smiley pro-"privacy" wrapper around the real agenda, which, as Peter Kafka at All Things D wrote, is quite plainly to get you to abandon your privacy. Rival startup Twitter has taught Facebook that there's big growth in public internet sharing.

Thus — Ta Da! — these new default settings, which suggest users share their posts and information with the whole world. From Kafka (click to enlarge):



Inside Facebook's Eric Eldon got similarly liberal suggestions:



To make this scheme a bit more defensible, Facebook will now allow users to set their privacy level — i.e. to reverse the default choices — on a post-by-post basis, a feature long requested by users. Thus, Facebook will become an endless series of privacy decisions and dilemmas. It's enough to make you rush into the open arms of Twitter. Because while microblogging about your lunch might be narcissistic and pointless, it's definitely less narcissistic and pointless than deciding who should get to see the post about what you had for lunch.

Facebook: Asking you questions you don't want to have to answer about content no one cares about. Isn't social networking a joy ride?

Tiger Woods Sex-Spank Animator Is Free-Speech Hero for the 21st Century

Posted on Wednesday, December 9, 2009 4:09:32 PM

Today's governments are inventing tons of new ways to repress free speech. But there's a hero standing up for civic-minded journalism: The company that digitally re-enacts Tiger Woods spanking a porn star.

Perhaps you've heard of Apple Daily, the Taiwanese newspaper that makes computer-generated cartoons corresponding to real-life events, like a man attacking his girlfriend with a knife, or the controversial, creepy and mesmerizing Tiger Woods video excerpted above. These digital shorts have Apple Daily's parent company, Next Media, in hot water with the authorities; the Taiwanese government is blocking Next from launching new ventures, says the New York Times.

Which is an outrage, right? Unless you want to live in a world where the government just gets to decide who can make a speculative video of Tiger Woods picking out lingerie for his girlfriends, and who can't. Fascism lies at the end of a slippery slope, mind you.

Google Phones Too Geeky for Google's Fahionista

Posted on Wednesday, December 9, 2009 3:17:22 PM

Marissa Mayer knows her taste matters; that's why the Google VP walks the office in Armani and Oscar de la Renta. So when she showed off her cell phone in France, it should have been one of Google's. Whoops.

Instead, it was an Apple iPhone that the couture coder, fresh off her latest fashion-mag spread, showed to TechCrunch's Robin Wauters backstage at LeWeb:

Wauters: By the way, thank you for showing me your Google Phone backstage.



Mayer: (laughs) I didn't, that was my iPhone. And you know I can't comment on speculation.

Google's most stylish executive (by a mile) using the iPhone when she could lug a Droid, running Google's Android OS, or the mythic G-Phone, expected to be branded by Google directly? That's comment enough right there.

(Pic: An earlier incident of iPhone brandishing: Mayer shows off her Jesus-phone in 2007, when the device was brand new and Google had yet to release its Android phone OS. By Tamar Weinberg.)

The Infuriating Optimist (And His Blown Deadline)

Posted on Wednesday, December 9, 2009 2:07:53 PM

For a capital manager who's lost $6 billion in assets, Pete Thiel has an awfully rosy worldview: The Facebook investor is calling baby boomers the "dumbest generation" and, we hear, infuriating co-workers by calling for patience at his foundering fund.

Thiel's Clarium Capital was down 16.4 percent through November, the New York Post reported, with assets down to $1.6 billion from a historic high of $7.3 billion, capping a string of monthly declines we reported previously. And yet, in a lengthy interview with Big Think (embedded below), the PayPal co-founder sounds as imperious and sanguine as ever, calling Baby Boomers "the dumbest generation" for launching two massive financial bubbles in a row , and saying the country needs to get over its immediate financial pain and invest for the next 20 years (see excerpt above).

Both points have some merit. But a dot-com executive needs balls of steel to cast financial judgment on the generation whose recklessness made him hundreds of millions of dollars, particularly when he took that money and used it to start a now-flailing hedge fund.

And that bit about long-term thinking is scarcely comfort to Americans in financial peril — like Thiel's own managing director Jack Selby who, a Clarium insider tells us, ended up in heated fights with Thiel earlier this fall "about how blasé we can be about our recent performance." Thiel thinks Clarium can think long term; Selby purportedly thinks the bleeding must be stanched more quickly.

Jack is the one who has to market the fund; Selby actually has very little to do with performance. Peter's responsible for this mess himself and he knows it, as he vets all our big moves.

Selby reportedly said Clarium had to turn around its performance by the end of the year; Thiel retorted that this was short-term thinking. Selby then took offense, and Thiel — blowing his constant, almost robotic even temper — "blew up at him. We are under a lot of tension here."

With the end of the year fast approaching, it's inconceivable that Thiel's fund can meet his managing director's would-be deadline. Judging from his Big Think video, it doesn't look like Thiel is letting this affect his holiday spirits. Well, maybe he's on to something, again. Obsessing over money will do few people any good this Christmas. Even if they're supposed to be "managing" hundreds of billions of dollars.

Bringing Scandal to Sesame Street

Posted on Tuesday, December 8, 2009 7:48:07 PM

Nicole suggested sexing up Sesame Street; Debbie Gibson LOLed at a Krispy Kreme employee; and Susan Orlean's mind was controlled through the mail. The Twitterati got their kicks, one way or another.

Just a taste, here, of how Salon's Scott Rosenberg rolls, w/r/t Bay Area females. Line forms to the left, ladies.

Did Nicole Richie just call fracking Big Bird a "has been?" Yes, yes she did. But at least the reality TV starlet offered to basically hook BB up with a three-way, or drugs, or whatever, while she was at it.

A low-income donut worker trying to eat healthy played a starring role in Debbie Gibsons' personal irony opera.

Philip "Fuckedcompany" Kaplan is starting to feel self-conscious about his oral fixation.

The New Yorker's Susan Orlean is, presumably, frantically adding books on nirvana and emotional euphoria to her Amazon wish list. The war histories are right out.


Did you witness the media elite tweet something indiscreet? Please email us your favorite tweets - or send us more Twitter usernames.