We get tips. Lots of them. Sometimes Gawker features editor Tom Scocca responds to them. These conversations are memorialized here in an occasional feature we call Tom Tips Back.

In the olden days, in order to make a phone call to someone farther than shouting distance, you had to stand in one place and speak into a receiver wired to a wall, and if someone called you, you had to dash from wherever you were to wherever the phone was anchored. Most people still do this, apparently??

Last week, the blog world picked up an LA Times news story about a scientific study that had just been published in an academic journal, Communication, Culture and Critique. The title of the study: "Women (Not) Watching Women: Leisure Time, Television, and Implications for Televised Coverage of Women's Sports."

Douglas Britt (pictured) is the "Society/ visual arts writer" at the Houston Chronicle. And he's extremely busy! So he sent out the following 15-point email to "every gallerist/cultural group in Houston," our tipster says. Print out a copy, and memorize!

Where, exactly, are you supposed to start when the New York Times runs a Page One media piece on the word "douche"?

America's Paper of Record cannot afford to have its reporters sending text messages or calling 411 on their company phones. What a pitiful state of affairs.

If you happen to be a commuter train driver, it's probably not a good idea to be texting with a teenager while you chug along. Lots of people might die.

In a letter to a congressional committee, AT&T said it is "carefully considering" monitoring how its users surf the Web. In a similiar letter, Internet service provider Charter Communication said it had plans to do the same. ISPs Bresnan Communications, CableOne, CenturyTell, Embarq, Knology and Wow already track…

Well, the Internet was fun while it lasted, but now three of the nation's largest service providers are going to shut it down and throw us all back to the dark ages of telephones and postage stamps. "Some people use the Internet simply to check e-mail and look up phone numbers. Others are online all day, downloading…

Boa-sporting Mediabistro.com proprietress Laurel Touby continues unabated in her menacing campaign to misuse email—an invention originally designed to simplify communications. Her latest infraction: in order to promote an upcoming "Mediabistro Circus," she decided to save a little time by sending a mass email to her…