Before Russell Brand started a YouTube news show and wrote a book about broken politics, he used to be in movies. It's true! Remember the time they presumably Got Him to the Greek? I kind of do! Anyway, Brand says he's probably not going to do that sort of thing anymore.

The Financial Times has a long interview with Lady Gaga conducted by British actor/author Stephen Fry which the paper will publish over the weekend. We were given a little sneak peek of what Gaga said to Fry during the exchange, and she makes some insane claims, including that she went bankrupt funding her Monster…

The new status symbol for hedge funders and corporate tycoons: feminine bracelets worn on their wrists next to their expensive watches. It's an "I'm so insanely rich, I get to break the rules" kinda thing, apparently.

In our third installment from the Spitzer Files—our collection of e-mails between Eliot Spitzer's flack and reporters at the height of his hooker scandal—we congratulate the reporters who actually try to learn things before they go on TV.

A group of British volunteers distributed a very slick-looking fake Financial Times in London today in a stunt expressly modeled on that fake New York Times put out by the Yes Men last year.

Want to complain about someone? Media people who love to whine, from L.A. to Austin to Washington, all turn to Twitter to air their beefs. Gripes from a Ryan Seacrest wordsmith and others today:

What was comely Web-video starlet Veronica Belmont thinking about today? How about Chris Nuttall of the Financial Times? VentureBeat blogger Eric Eldon? Cats, fags, gadgets, and Facebook preoccupied the Twitterati.

Steve Schwarzman's Blackstone Group has an explanation for that lawsuit by Financial Times which accused the private equity giant of sharing an account login and password to the FT website. A Blackstone employee tells the Observer that it was all the fault of the London office and the work of eight renegade…

You know we're in a deep recession when even billionaire financiers can't afford to pay for subscriptions to the Financial Times. In what will go down as one of the more bizarre (and unintentionally hilarious) lawsuits we've seen in quite some time, the newspaper filed a lawsuit against Steve Schwarzman's Blackstone…

At a time when some blogs are trying to reinvent themselves as news websites, the Financial Times, a U.K.-based rival to the Wall Street Journal, is considering a redesign adapted from blogs' reverse-chronological-order presentation of stories. [Silicon Alley Insider]

Although Barack Obama can count on one hand the number of houses he and his wife own, the candidate's first real financial security was derived from his success in the publishing world with his memoir Dreams from My Father. The powerful agent who helped turn Obama into a literary franchise is lawyer Bob Barnett, who…

Damn it feels good to be a gamer: The Financial Times has calculated that Nintendo will make $1.6 million per employee in 2008. That beats Goldman Sach's 2007 record — impressive when you consider Goldman's average salary was $660,000 per year, versus only $90,900 for Nintendo. (Photo by Geek on Stun)

This is what happens when you let an Australian-born media mogul buy an American newspaper and import his chief editor from Britain: Suddenly no one on staff can correctly identify the country to the north (for the record, it's "Canada" — just "Canada"). And to think we actually believed Robert Thomson would make the …

The morning news is terrifying even before the ominous opening of U.S. markets today, and was also scary hours ago before overseas markets opened and U.S. stock futures fell sharply. The bankruptcy at Lehman Brothers, the takeover of Merrill Lynch and the plea by insurance giant AIG for $40 billion in federal aid made…