Oh no! Not the Swedish model! Look carefully at that terrifying blue and yellow Nordic Cross; it is our generation's hammer and sickle.

Robert Jaffe, a VP at Cohmad Securities who hooked up Palm Beach socialites to Bernie Madoff's awesome investment scheme, was a fashionable gentleman—"at one time named [high-end clothier] Louis Boston’s best customer," reports WWD. Now?

Want a scapegoat for the economic crisis? Mark Zuckerberg looks pretty good right now. Facebook's young CEO dreams of a world where we instantly know each others' emotions. To our peril, we're already pretty close.

Remember how Oprah once threatened to ruin the life of novelist Jonathan Franzen by selecting his book for her club and thereby making him lots and lots of money? Walmart might do the same to Apple's iPhone!

America hated the first "bailout," according to pollsters. Until pollsters described it without using the term "bailout," which made Americans much more supportive of it. So Barack Obama's multi-billion dollar economy-saving expenditure plans were soon referred to as "stimulus packages," which connotes happy visions…

Now that you're just rich instead of super-rich, you're gonna find out if your mistress really loves you. Will she stick around even if you can't keep her in the manner to which she is accustomed? The WSJ cited a new survey [of 191 people worth over $20 mil] in which "more than 80% of multimillionaires who had…

The art world is suffering from diminished expectations for the obvious reasons. At last night's Christie's auction, their much-vaunted Francis Bacon work "Study for Self-Portrait"—estimated to go for $40 mil—didn't sell. In fact, nobody even bid, the NYT reported. It was like an Ebay auction from hell! (Last May, a…

Oy, chto budet! Sad young literary novelist Keith "Konstya" Gessen, self-exiled to his motherland of Russia, usually confines his rantings to n+1, little-read novels that we make fun of, and his Tumblr. But today, he wrote a Diary column about how the financial crisis is affecting Russia for the London Review of Books…

Ever get so desperate that you'll visit a psychic or voodoo lady to divine a money ritual? (There was once an unfortunate incident with a santeria priest in Brooklyn that we won't get into here....) It's not just for working-stiff Take Five players and superstitious viejas anymore. Professionals are obviously freaking…

Sometimes, don't you wish you didn't have to get out of bed every morning, and could just wander the city all day, window shopping and drinking at whatever goddamned hour you choose? Time Out has a roundup about where recently laid-off media and finance proles go to drink, and they featured our former writer, the…

If there's anything more random and inane than work, it's the very randomness and inanity in which we are laid off and/or fired from our jobs. Today is the third installment of Layoff Horror Stories (send yours, or your tales of unemployment-related ennui and depression, to tips@gawker.com—have you put on pants…

Good morning! In the midst of recovering from the Dow's freakoutpanicmeltdown ("This recession is already deeper than the 2001 downturn," intones today's Times), we have another round of layoff... horror stories. There's a "classic banking fuckup" that almost ended in a "trading floor riot," a post-9/11…

We called it the Great Magazine Die-Off, but it is the work of an angry Media God. We should take this time to reflect what we have done to irritate him so, for He is smiting us, laying off people in great multitudes, and killing magazines. He's about to pair us up two-by-two and load us all onto a big boat (the seas…

This is from dating columnist and startup Nonsociety lifestreamer Julia Allison's Twitter. Welcome to how the other half lives! (Her salary at Star last year was $100K—just so you know.)

Surprise! In response to the recent financial panicmeltdowncrash, people are being more cautious about spending millions of dollars on works of art. It's not a disaster yet—although sales were slow and "softened" at London's recent Sotheby's and Christie's auctions (as well as at last week's Frieze Art Fair), there…

More tenuously-concluded recession sex! Two "econometricians" looked through 46 years of Playboy's Playmate of the Year cover models, and compared their physical attributes with the year's economy. Their findings: "Consistent with Environmental Security Hypothesis predictions, when social and economic conditions were…

A Wall Street panicmeltdown? We've been through this before. Tired of 1930s breadline comparisons, Jennifer 8. Lee takes us back to the Panic of 1873 on the NYT's City Room. Some historians think it's eerily comparable to the current situation: it "came after a building boom created by easily obtainable mortgages and…

Looks like old Viacom chief Sumner Redstone is the first media mogul to take a significant hit from the present awful economic climate for media companies (Pictured: Viacom's stock chart for the last year). And by "significant hit," we mean "being forced to sell $400 million worth of stock."

The weekend looms, but hard times are already upon us. We made a handy guide on how to have fun and fight for your rights to party (and survive!) during the financial freakout. Ready for a rent party?