The obituary contains nothing to indicate Bloomberg has new information on Jobs's health, at least in our quick skim.

But the reporting notes do reveal that near the top of Bloomberg's list of people to call in event of his death is Jobs's ex girlfriend Heidi Roizen (quite the Valley switchboard, apparently) and California attorney general and (like Jobs) cranky aging hippie Jerry Brown. Also, Bloomberg doesn't seem to have many people's cell phone numbers.

Retraction:

Story Referencing Apple Was Sent in Error by Bloomberg News

Aug. 27 (Bloomberg) — An incomplete story referencing Apple
Inc. was inadvertently published by Bloomberg News at 4:27 p.m.
New York time today. The item was never meant for publication and
has been retracted.

—Editor: Joe Winski, Cesca Antonelli

Steve Jobs obituary:

JOB, STEVE. APPLE FOUNDER, TECH VISIONARY. UPDATED AUGUST 2008

HOLD FOR RELEASE - DO NOT USE - HOLD FOR RELEASE - DO NOT USE

Steve Jobs's birthday: Feb. 24, 1955
BIO UPDATED AS OF 2008, by Connie Guglielmo

APPLE PR CONTACTS: Katie Cotton — -redacted- and Steve Dowling: -redacted- or -redacted-
People to contact for comment:
- Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak: -redacted-
- Jon Rubinstein, former head of Apple's iPod division. He's now
chairman at Palm. Contact Lynn Fox in PR.
- Heidi Roizen: venture capitalist who once dated Jobs: -redacted- or -redacted-. Heidi knows a lot of Silicon

Valley insiders and may put us in touch with others, including
A.C. Mike Markkula, the first VC to back Apple.
- Larry Ellison of Oracle (one of his best friends); contact
Deborah Hellinger in Oracle PR. -redacted-, -redacted-

- Jerry Brown (personal friend) and California AG. Try GARETH
LACY at -redacted- IN OAKLAND; -redacted- CELL, -redacted- or press office: -redacted-

- Al Gore: member of Apple's board of directors
- Bill Gates: Microsoft was among the first developers of Mac
software
- Bob Iger at Disney: who bought Pixar from Jobs
- Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google and member of Apple's board. Send
note to -redacted- or try David Krane: -redacted- or -redacted-

- Paul Otellini, CEO of Intel Corp. (Apple began using Intel
chips in its Macs in 2006). Contact Tom Beermann: -redacted- or
Bill Calder on -redacted-. Both in Intel PR
- Scott McNealy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems. Contact Shawn
Dainas in PR: -redacted-
- John Lassiter and Ed Catmull: Pixar-nee-Disney executives. Try
Zenia Mucha, -redacted- or Jonathan Friedland, -redacted-, in
corporate PR at Disney.
- Guy Kawasaki, one of the first Apple evangelists. -redacted- or -redacted-

- Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari, who bought an early circuit
board for the game Breakout from Jobs and Wozniak. (pr is being
handled by his daughter, Alisa Bushnell. her cell is: -redacted-; work is -redacted- work/message;-redacted-)

To contact the reporter on this story:
Connie Guglielmo in San Francisco at-redacted- or -redacted-

To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Cesca Antonelli at -redacted- or -redacted-

AAPL US <Equity> CN
MSFT US <Equity> CN
DIS US <Equity> CN

NI TEC
NI CPR
NI COS
NI US
NI CA
NI LEI
NI OBIT
NI WNEWS
NI RET
NI MUSIC
NI CONS
NI ENT

The robber barons, for one thing, are back. As our anonymous industry friend and Jezebel contributor Tatiana tells us, most modeling agencies these days are glorified human traffickers that occupy a place on the "usury" spectrum somewhere between Payday Loan shops and actual armed robbers. Agencies stick them in overcrowded model apartments and gouge them on rent. When they are not in "demand," they're forced to work for either clothes or nothing at all; when they are in demand, they're forced to walk 28 shows in a week and that sort of nonsense.

Ford was different. He instituted a five-day workweek, paid models every Friday even when clients didn't pay up, and ran a practically Victorian institution wherein models weren't allowed to host gentleman callers. I don't even think he knew how to get coke! Obviously all that shit is gone today. In any case, Ford sold out to a private equity firm in December and his son who is still involved in the company is apparently (duh) a modelizer.

We welcome any and all old Ford Model cards, hot Courteney Cox pix, links to that cute Lindsay Lohan-Mischa Barton catalog picture that surfaced sometime last year and/or clips of that retarded Xuxa show.

Jerry Ford, Man Behind The Models

*The nice ex-president with the homophonic name died in 2006, remember? Hah.
**On another note, Ford died of endocarditis, a deadly heart valve infection that generally results when a sick patient contracts a virulent strain of the sort of antibiotic resistant staph you may know as MRSA. More people die from MRSA every year than AIDS these days, but as the New Yorker recently pointed out, few pharmaceutical companies invest much money in developing drugs to fight infectious disease anymore because there is so much more money in developing drugs that might make us less fat or something.

The long-time Republican senator from North Carolina—who died today at the age of 86—disliked using the term "gay" to describe homosexuals because "there's nothing gay about them." The Hands ad (featured here) during Helms' 1990 re-election campaign played into the most basic of white fears of black political power and racial quotas. And the cranky politico took seeming pleasure in opposing every cause dear to the liberal heart, such as foreign aid or support for the arts.

Helms—who never secured more the 55% of the vote even in conservative North Carolina—foreshadowed the Republican political strategy of the last four cycles, ever mindful of the base and content to govern with the narrowest of coalitions. The only thing that can be said of the former senator is that he recognized race-baiting became less effective over time as older conservative voters died off, and the wedge-driving politics that he so symbolized has run its course.

The latest polls put Barack Obama—amazingly—only 5 points behind in North Carolina. An ad as crude and divisive as Hands—"You needed that job," the narrator tells a white man who's just received a rejection letter—won't play so well this time.

• Helms' courtly manner and mossy drawl barely masked a hard-edged conservatism that opposed civil rights, gay rights, foreign aid and modern art. [New York Times]

Felker started New York in 1968 as a "new journalism" window into the workings of the city's power structure—but one that defined the power structure broadly, and explored how the city's different spheres collided with each other:

Thirty years ago, not long before his fellow owners and Rupert Murdoch squeezed him out of the magazine he had founded, Felker defined New York very simply as a guide to "how the power game is played, and who are the winners." And Wolfe, his early superstar, has said that "Clay's real interest, although I'm not sure he ever thought it out conceptually, was status and how it operates in New York. ... In New York Magazine, Clay really wrote an enormous novel about the city. ... It was his vision, his plot—a huge novel called The City of Ambition."

Designed as a sort of urban-centric antidote to the New Yorker's more eclectic musings, the magazine fostered a ton of talent, including Tom Wolfe, Gloria Steinem, and Gail Sheehy, Felker's future wife. He lost the magazine to Rupert Murdoch in a hostile takeover in 1976. He would go on to hold a series of editorial jobs at a kaleidoscope of titles, including Esquire, the Daily News, the Village Voice, and US News & World Report. But none would approach the legacy that he left with New York.

Kurt Andersen says that Felker, the middle American emigre to the big city, simply took his mental playbook of how New York worked "literally, and published it in weekly serial form." And look around: that's what everyone—including us—is doing today. For that, we must all acknowledge that Felker's mark will never disappear, as long as this city stays full of smart people with a burning ambition to talk.

[NY Mag]

In the 1980s and 1990s, Carlin's comedy became both sharper as social commentary and emotionally darker, sounding even, at times, bitter. The comedian was treated for alcohol addiction after a fight with an audience at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas in 2004.

Below, Carlin's 1990 routine (NSFW) on how euphemisms undermine discourse in America. Post your own favorite routines in the comments.

[AP, Times]

So. We all know the basics of the story. Big fun guy from Buffalo, worked in the New York Democratic party machine for Mario Cuomo and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Made the switch to journalism, got hired by NBC in Washington, and ended up the bureau chief four short years later, in 1988.

In 1991, he took over Meet the Press and quickly became one of the most important names in DC journalism. His journalistic style was a civil, well-read version of the GOTCHA that would take control of cable.

“Lawrence Spivak, who founded ‘Meet the Press,’ told me before he died that the job of the host is to learn as much as you can about your guest’s positions and take the other side,” he said in a 2007 interview with Time magazine. “And to do that in a persistent and civil way. And that’s what I try to do every Sunday.”

This could be an irritating style. Russert's specialty was pointing out a contradiction in a politician's vast record of spoken positions. Oftentimes this meant a descent into entirely useless minutiae. Though almost as often it was enlightening, or at least entertaining. It's certainly preferable to the Chris Matthews method of shouting whatever comes to mind, no matter how crazy. And Russert always knew his shit, even when you were fairly certain he was missing the point.

From Meet the Press he dictated the conventional wisdom of Washington's political establishment—a harder trick to pull off in the days before Drudge, The Note, the internet, Politico, and the rise of what is essentially meta-journalism disguised as political analysis. Russert just selected some insiders—usually white, usually male, every week well into the 2000s (such is DC!)—and allowed them to spin their little hearts out. It's still engaging television, even when it makes you want to level Washington and maybe give Philly a second chance as Capital.

But it was as the country's wonky guide to electoral politics that he perhaps undid some of the damage of the institution of the Sunday chatfest. Because Russert and his whiteboard did an admirable, commendable job, every four years, of explaining our insane and anti-democratic political process to a nation that has always been unclear on the subject. The electoral college, slightly demystified, for one night. Civics lessons are rare on television, and effective ones should be applauded.

And yes, it's actually shocking, and sad, to think that this November all we'll have is John King and his Blade Russert touch screen wall, or Keith Olbermann and his pseudo-gravitas, or poor bored Katie Couric to guide us through that stressful Tuesday night nationwide farce.

Russert died at work, as we said, at NBC's Washington studios. He is survived by his wife, Maureen Orth, his son Luke, and, tragically, his father, the hero of Tim's happily non-self-aggrandizing 2004 memoir, Big Russ and Me.

(Attached: a video montage of some of Tim's notable television moments.)

NBC'S Tim Russert Dead at 58 [MSNBC]

(Michael Clayton clips via 29Guide.)

Well, the semi isn't technically dead yet but there's a healthy debate going on speculating that its days are numbered. And as any B-list celebrity can attest, when people start asking whether your career is dead, it already is. So that's the angle we're going with.

The Guardian offers a rather startlingly in-depth analysis of the viability of the semicolon, including "for" and "against" arguments from notable writers. It should come as no surprise that Jonathan Franzen takes an unabashedly pro-semicolon stance.

"I love a good semicolon, but this sounds like one of those Literature is Dead! Stories that The New York Times likes to run," he says. "I've never heard from a reader confused by one of my semicolons, and I don't remember ever throwing a book aside for being semicolon-free."

The late Kurt Vonnegut, meanwhile, takes the subtle approach and compares semicolons to cross-dressing she-males: "If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don't have the nerve to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts. But do not use semicolons," he has cautioned. "They are transvestite hermaphrodites, standing for absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college."

Semicolon is survived by colon, parenthesis and em dash. In lieu of flowers, please send anecdotes of times you have been confused by a semicolon to Farrar, Straus and Giroux, care of Jonathan Franzen.

While many thespians of his generation were students of the naturalistic "Method" school of acting, Heston would have none of that pussy crap, and prided himself on being a Movie Star who could win at yelling and hit the mark without tripping over the scenery. And scenery feared him. Because he could eat the hell out of it. But his style was wonderfully suited to the roles he chose. There is little room for subtlety when you're damning the maniacs who blew up the earth! Or when you're confronted by damned dirty apes! And no one's in the mood for James Dean's sissy-boy whining when you've just found out that your favorite snack is made out of people! I Am Legend? Heston's Omega Man would have ripped Will Smith's face off right off it's silly skull.

Sadly, Heston's last prominent role was as himself in Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine. Moore wanted to debate Heston over his appearance at an NRA rally in Flint, Michigan, in the wake of a six-year-old boy shooting a six-year-old girl to death there. Nobody won.

(Courtesy Jim Behrle, who notes that the lady in the wheelchair is probably also dead.)

Incidentally, this sort of stunt may feel like a cheap grab for readership in a dying industry, and it is, but it's also part of a long tradition in superhero comics of violating all traditional rules of literature. Superheroes have always died, resurrected, and revealed their identities without consequence. Why doesn't this ruin the brand? Well, when's the last time you bought a comic book? Modern film audiences don't need to actually read the comic to get the Batman brand, so DC can do what they like with comic-book Batman while film Batman keeps raking in money.

But still, they're killing Batman, dude, the real honest-to-god comic-book Batman, and the Times will write about the character's importance to America, making a sort of cultural obituary, and either Chuck Klosterman or the Freakonomics guys will explain how this is a zeitgeist, and DC might sell a few extra copies before its comics again fade into obscurity.

Buckley was born in New York City, to a wealthy Irish Catholic and a Southerner. The family moved to Connecticut, he was schooled in Paris and London, and he attended Yale—the perfect resume for a man who'd become a caricature of condescending East Coast snobbishness before that was turned into a Liberal trait. It was a caricature Buckley happily lived up to, dropping ten-dollar words into his prose with obvious obnoxious glee, tempting lesser writers to imitate his parody-of-erudition style at their peril. It's a perilous task because few can match his skill with a biting quip:

Ten years ago [Gore Vidal] wrote in The Nation an essay denouncing pro-Israeli activity in the United States as divided loyalty. The article and its implications were denounced by Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, as "the most blatantly anti-Semitic outburst to have appeared in a respectable American periodical since World War II." Mr. Vidal retorted by questioning the patriotism of Mr. Podhoretz and his wife, the author Midge Decter, and reacted to another critic of his article, a rabbi, with the sigh, "Luckily, I am used to being lied about." I commented at the time that anyone who lies about Mr. Vidal is doing him a kindness.

ZING, Gore!

Buckley zinged liberal-leaning author/essayist/blue-blooded creep Gore Vidal many times in his lengthy career, though not always with such class. In what is still arguably the greatest live TV moment ever, Buckley and Vidal got into a heated exchange on ABC news in 1968 that quickly turned personal (and AWESOME):

Listen to that dueling received pronunciation! In case you missed the meat of the debate in the crosstalk, Vidal called Buckley a "cypto-Nazi" (which Vidal later, accurately, corrected to "crypto-fascist"), and Buckley responded with, "listen you queer ['quee-ah'], stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I'll pop you in the goddamn face and you'll stay plastered."

Buckley and Vidal later repeatedly sued and counter-sued each other for libel and such, which was the style at the time.

Buckley founded The National Review in 1955, when the New Deal and World War II had basically made "true" conservativism temporarily obsolete in American letters and thought. He championed the candidacy of MAVERICK ARIZONA SENATOR Barry Goldwater, a dangerous nut who lost in a landslide, but whose followers and ideas would eventually come to dominate the nation's political scene.

The National Review still exists, Goldwater Republicans are still enjoying the fruits of their eventual success, and the conservative movement as a whole has seized upon the culture wars with such fervor that a high-falutin' fancy-talkin' New York college boy like Buckley would never, ever achieve such prominence in the movement he nurtured, should he come around today. Because he'd obviously be a big stupid quee-ah.

So fuck him for foisting upon us this anti-intellectual bullshit mess of a nation we've become, but we're glad that his followers helped destroy the intellectual heart of his ideology.

Buckley is survived by his hip satirical novelist son Christopher, his pale imitation of its former self magazine, and George Will's wardrobe and middle initial.

William F. Buckley Jr. Is Dead At 82 [NYT]

Booze-soaked former Trotskyite popinjay Christopher Hitchens, writing in Slate, is understandably outraged, particularly at the New York Times, who cleaned up Butz's language so much as to make one wonder what the fuss was all about (who doesn't want "satisfying sex"?). Also Hitch is outraged at the Muslims who control Canada. No, really.

Speaking of censoring obituaries, the Columbia Journalism Review tells us of the Des Moines Register's obit for a Mr. Ralph Gross, who wrote an article for CJR about "the state of present-day journalism." The obit fails to mention that said article was specifically about how terrible the Des Moines Register is. Any more egregious examples of obit white-washing? Send them our way.

(For our part, we plan on dying in a fashion so unspeakably filthy that no newspaper on Earth will be able even to allude to it. Feel free to send suggestions for that too.)

Truth and Consequences [Slate]
Rest in Piece [CJR]
Related: I Know Someone Who Really Is One Of Those Slang Words For Ladyparts [Choire SIcha]

Sacha Baron Cohen: Killing off Borat [Telegraph]