• Lindsay Lohan's a silly, silly brat. The former movie star tried to pull imaginary rank by moving other celebrities' seating assignments to accommodate her sister and two friends. Her little plan took out Juliette Lewis and Christian Siriano's seats, but security stepped in when she tried to reassign Taylor Momsen. That has to sting. [Page Six]
  
  
• President Carter, who's making all sorts of news these days, thinks Kanye acted inappropriately the VMA awards. Carter, you're so hip. [CNN]
  
  
• Sad Mischa Barton's drunken days don't seem to be behind her, for the actress was slurring her words at the G-Star after party. She then danced by herself in the deejay booth. Can't this girl get her act together? [Page Six]
  
  
• Kendra Wilkinson and Hank Bassett Baskett must have thought they had a pretty good life, but now that fairy tale's crashing down: the Philadelphia Eagles just dropped Bassett from the team. [NYDN]
  
  
• Abercrombie & Fitch has filed an inane lawsuit against Beyonce because they think her "Sasha Fierce" line of products sounds too much like their perfume, "Fierce." [Reuters]
  
  
• Megan Fox admits that she's "aggressive, hurtful, domineering and selfish." We believe her. [LA Times]
  
  
• Madonna's brother thinks she looks like "Rachel Zoe gone horribly wrong." Eck! We can't imagine such a thing. [E!]
  
  
• That was fast! Burt Reynolds has already left rehab for his addiction to pain killers. [AP]
  
  
• Those royals sure can be rude: Queen Elizabeth's sister, Princess Margaret, burned letters sent from Princess Diana to the Queen Mother. Margaret thought she was respecting her family's privacy, she claims, but we think she was just being mean. [Telegraph]
  
  
• Jon Gosselin's lawyer is pissed that the family's former nanny is speaking out about how she had sex with him. Honestly, he should be commending her courage. [Us Weekly]
  
  
• Someone pulled a gun on Paris Hilton's "BF" Doug Reinhardt at a club in LA. He wasn't hurt, thankfully. Wait, who the hell is Doug Reinhardt? [TMZ]

Jossip offers names like Biggie, Tupac, and Anna Nicole Smith as comparison, but we've selected three other figures (Lennon included) who died famously and tragically to compare to Russert's death. We'll measure the impact (socially, on the media, etc) of each passing on a scale from 1-10.

The Respected Institution: Tim Russert, Heart Failure, June 13, 2008
Russert was a fixture of Washington press and politics. He was both jovial and stern, pleasant and probing. He was the kind of reporter who gave a good face to politics. To that end, every news media figure had some fond remembrance of Russert, some anecdote. Every news show in the land had (or is having) a special Russert retrospective. A "private" memorial service will be broadcast by MSNBC tomorrow.
Impact: 4. I suppose all of this is just something of a twenty-one gun salute from his colleagues. Some people, like Shafer, may criticize the coverage for being indulgent. Of course it's indulgent, these people are his friends and have newscameras in front of them. Whether some sinister network exec is standing in the shadows, rubbing his hands together, with dollar signs in his eyes seems mostly inconsequential. The lamentation and celebration seems genuine, heartfelt.

The Rising Star: Heath Ledger, Drug Overdose, January 22, 2008
The young actor, who had received critical raves for his portrayal of a repressed gay cowboy in 2005's Brokeback Mountain, was getting large buzz for a number of upcoming films, including this summer's The Dark Knight, in which he stars as The Joker, Batman's arch nemesis. Ledger's death, from a bad mixture of sleeping pills and other medication, was originally thought to be a suicide, but tests quickly disproved that. It seems as though it was just a dumb bit of bad luck. As the paparazzi was largely responsible for Princess Diana's death (see below), the paparazzi made themselves well known here too, this time as rabid spectators and (ahem) gawkers. When the news broke, legions of photographers rushed to the SoHo apartment where the 28-year-old's body was found, hoping to see the body brought out. And they did.
Impact: 5. The instant explosion of news about Ledger's death showed the blogosphere at its full, bellowing power. It mushroom clouded very quickly, with people speculating, trading gossip (was Mary-Kate Olsen involved?), and eventually criticizing the media's lasciviousness toward the whole matter. But news moved on fairly quickly, and it was all over within a week or so.

The Poet: John Lennon Shot and Killed, December 8, 1980
The strange, swirling brain of definitive rock band the Beatles, Lennon was as iconic a figure of the Western world's social, sexual, and political awakening as any other in the 20th century. Naturally, news of his death reverberated enormously with his fans and followers. A crowd of a 100,000 or so gathered in memorial in Central Park, not far from the scene of the shooting. News outlets covered the story non-stop, dogging the surviving Beatles for reactions. Central Park's Strawberry Fields was dedicated in his honor.
Impact: 8. As shocking a death as possible, given the nature of the incident and Lennon's iconic status. Though it had been ten years since the Beatles broke up, Lennon and wife Yoko Ono remained fixtures of the progressive music scene. Grief over his death was genuine and profound, and substantial and enduring media coverage reflected that. In the past two years two films about the assassination have been released.

The Heroine: Diana Spencer, Princess of Wales Killed in Car Accident While Trying to Avoid Paparazzi, August 31st, 1997
The death of Diana, ex-wife of the United Kingdom's Prince Charles, rocked the entire world. A grand tragedy in all possible ways — a lovely young mother of two little boys, a beloved activist for peace to boot, killed in the stupidest and most avoidable of accidents — 2.5 billion people watched her funeral. My mother, who had woken up very early in the morning years before to watch Diana's wedding to Charles, woke us up in the middle of the night to tell us what had happened. The world felt immediate then, everything felt close by — even though we were in a small summer house in Rhode Island and the tragedy was farway on a busy Paris street. I imagine that's how many others felt, as well.
Impact: 10. As big and devastating as these deaths get, one hopes. Loved for her kind nature and down-to-earth sensibilities, for many people Diana represented something universally good and hopeful in the world. When that was taken away, quite suddenly and under such frustrating circumstances, the sense of loss lingered for some time. That sadness, compounded with the scandal of the Queen's relative silence on the matter, made the frenzy over the story reach unimaginable heights. It seemed to go on for months and months (aided, I'm sure, by Elton John's "Candle In the Wind" redo). And who can forget that dreadful, defining footage (shown over and over and over again) of her two boys, William and Harry, walking in the funeral procession?

The real fact of the matter, though, is that many people have died since Friday, since this morning, since I started writing this post. Like I said earlier, nearly every one of those deaths deserves recognition and memorials and all manner of other things. As our world doesn't quite work that way, we're left here with the famous deaths and, strangely, I've been tasked to quantify the reactions. I'm certainly not assessing the import of the actual life, of the actual grief, but rather what the media and its followers did when they stumbled, carelessly or not, upon it.

She, worldly piece of work that she is, thinks everything would have been hunky-dory if Di had only got it on with Prince Philip, the Queen's consort. He fancied her anyway, and it would have kept the fuss inside the family. But Di aimed lower. Her first affair, Tina believes, was with Di's cockney bodyguard Barry Mannakee. For this flash, Tina pumped Di's pal Dr. James Colthurst, who helped the Princess tape all the dirt used by Andrew Morton in Diana: Her True Story, the H-bomb dropped on the House of Windsor in 1992. Not only had Diana admitted an affair, Colthurst said, but she thought Barry was "bumped off" when he died. Next came the red-haired Life Guards Maj. James Hewitt, her (and the boys') riding instructor. Later, when the discarded and broke Hewitt sold his memoirs, he was widely scorned as the Love Rat.

Was he or was he not the father of ginger-haired Prince Harry? Tina thinks so. "Well, I don't know what she was doing at the time," Prince Charles once responded, not too gallantly, when the subject arose. A succession of tall, handsome beaux, both before and after the official royal separation of Dec. 9, 1992, were dubbed "the Dianamen" and the "42 Longs" by her bodyguards. She fell hard for married art dealer, Oliver Hoare, becoming his "phone sex pest." She carried on with Will Carling, the rugby star.

[Washington Post]

Of course, like Diana's moniker, "The People's Princess," that's not totally accurate. Brown's career has been predicated not upon writing about The People, but about writing about The Important and The Powerful. But! Brown has a deceptive accessibility about her, and what makes her a good social journalist is that she is able to get people to say things that they simply wouldn't tell other people because she purposely projects a kind of warmth and empathy to her audience. So when, during the question and answer session, the first question came from a dreadlocked man with an open shirt, who thanked Brown for hiring his "kid brother" at Vanity Fair to "do his Bruce Willis thing," Brown barely flinched, and simply smiled beneficently.

She was wearing a fitted black dress with a black patent-leather belt, high-heeled D'Orsay peep-toed shoes, and large pearl studs in her ears. A black patent-leather drawstring tote was on the floor next to her. Her hair is longer these days, less Hillary Clinton-ish. Half of her left forearm was clad in a black (of course) cast, and she was heard saying to one of the Strand staffers that it was her "signing arm." (This is not the first time her left hand has been in a cast, either.)

Her discussion with Hoge repeated the themes of the book: Diana was a "total zero intellectually" who nonetheless had an amazingly high emotional intelligence quotient. Charles never fell out of love with his longtime mistress, Camilla Parker Bowles ("She'll be a grand old trout in a big hat" when she finally becomes Queen, Brown said), whom he married in 2005. She was fatally underestimated by her future in-laws (according to Brown, Prince Philip called her "the fifth columnist"), who were horrified by and jealous of the amount of press she got—press that she skillfully manipulated until she was unable to outrun it. And that poor doddering royal family, so stuck in the past! "They should have realized Diana was the best thing to happen to the monarchy since Queen Victoria, but they kept trying to rub her out," Brown said.

Hmm. Tricky choice of words there.

"I found Diana completely riveting by the end," Brown said—in contrast to how she felt apprehensive at the beginning about being able to maintain her interest in the former Princess long enough to write her book, which took her 18 months. So riveting, in fact, that she has developed a rather uncanny imitation of Diana's voice, which Hoge implored her to demonstrate to the crowd. She took a breath, and, with her chin pointed down in a sort of Diana-ish pose, simpered, "With Charles by my side, I think everything is going to be all right."

We happen to think that today's starlets are just acting out their dramas in the only way our everything, now, moremoremore internet culture will allow them to, and that the troubles Lady Di got herself into were just the '80s equivalents of today's scandals. Yesterday's ano is today's vagflash, you know?

But whatever. Tina goes on to muse about Kate Middleton, who she thinks has been shunted aside by the palace but not by the Prince—"Don't bet on the poised and private Miss Middleton being counted out as the future Her Maj." But Tina also wonders why she'd want the job—"Being Princess of Wales even post-Diana is almost a fate worse than death." Oh my god, craziness. Welcome to gossip-blogging, Tina! One of us! One of us!

Diana's Birthday [Salon]

Really there is only one blonde in this story and it's not Diana. By the end, I got the impression that Tina Brown didn't have much time for her subject, inserting herself into the text whenever she could, if possible in conjunction with a famous name. "Henry Kissinger told me", etc.

'Overblown and overhyped' [Guardian]

It's hard to imagine any revelation that would alter the shape of this sad narrative, which has been told overexcitedly (by, for one, Paul Burrell, Diana's butler, in "The Way We Were"—emetic book, emetic title) and soberly (by Sarah Bradford, in her serious and balanced 2006 biography, "Diana"). But the best book on Diana is the newest, "The Diana Chronicles" (Doubleday; $27.50), by Tina Brown. She is well qualified to tell this story, since it was Brown who wrote the Vanity Fair piece that first exposed the trouble in the Waleses' marriage, back in 1985.

We don't question the motives of reviewer John Lanchester, a brilliant essayist and author in his own right (the review itself is a knowing exegesis of the Diana story as a class conflict), but still, the blink-and-you-miss-it disclosure is a little off-putting:

Brown was the editor of Tatler, "the house magazine for the upper classes," as she calls it, from 1979 to 1983, when Diana burst onto the scene and married Charles; she was the editor of Vanity Fair from 1984 to 1992, when Diana was busy becoming the most famous woman in the world; she was the editor of this magazine at the time of Diana's death.

The Naked and the Dead [NYer]

Kensington, Md., USA: I am an Anglophile. I have traced my ancestry back to the 16th Century towns of Barchester and Holt, England.

My daughter is a university librarian/archivist living in England. For several years she was an employee of Conde Nast working in Hanover Square, London.

Diana was crafty, if naive:

Pleasant Ridge, Mich.: Do you believe Prince Charles would have wed Camilla Parker had Princess Diana not died and was still alive?

Tina Brown: I think he would have found it very much harded to marry Camilla if Diana had been still there haunting his house. The public loved her so much and Diana would have found delicious, fiendish ways to have made it somehow impossible.

Georgetown, Washington, D.C.:

Tina Brown: It has been truly marvelous to observe the light-speed changes in media distribution. But what�s moving just as fast are the ways that readers—that's you—are receiving that information and then bouncing it out again. All the world is now, literally, a critic. For publishers and authors that can be a daunting prospect. Mastering dynamic change also means that one must adapt. But I think the best approach is to engage this evolving dynamic is to engage it vigorously. Media is changing in unexpected and innovative ways, some of them harsh, but those changes must be viewed with a clear eye and met with an equally innovative response. Name your metaphor—dodo, ostrich, buggy whip or Betamax—hide from the change and it will hide from you.

We admit to being a tad perplexed about who this person is:

Missoula, Mont.: Ms. Brown: Since you published my one and only New Yorker piece, then ran a short Talk profile about me, I'll forever think of you as a very good editor, bordering on great. Now, since we're both biographers, we're on equal footing and I ask the question that I ask all my peers: If you could alter space and time and today — right now — ask Diana one question, what would that question be?

Tina Brown: I would ask her: "Diana, why didn't you stay home with Dodi that night in Paris at his apartment when all the press was pursuing you. What was it that made you zigzag all over Paris like a hunted deer?"

Tina Brown Chat [WaPo]

Giving an author's book away for nothing on the Web as a way to market books seems a mirage to me. All it does is feed the hungry angles of journalists and bloggers who plunder it without any of the author's context or nuance and makes the reader feel there is nothing new to learn from the genuine article when it finally limps on its weary way to a book shop.

Got that? So even if you scan the (compensated) excerpt of Tina's forthcoming Princess Diana biography in Vanity Fair, be forewarned: You need to read the actual tome if you want to get the subtle nuance Brown uses to suggest that the late royal was a vacuous schemer whose lack of regard for others was only exceeded by her lack of maturity. It's probably got something to do with the punctuation.

Waxing Philosophical, Booksellers Face the Digital [NYT]

PPA: The Digital Conference [Guardian]
Does Tina Brown have a web project up her sleeve? [Journalism.co.uk]

While admitting that Diana was, in fact, "a vain, scheming, immature arch-manipulator who brought misery to all around her, including the Royals and her own sons," Laurence seems upset with Brown for having the gall to write a book saying just that. Is there some sort of English complexity we're missing here?

And we're not sure who exactly is shocked to "learn" that Tina Brown will trample on the grave of someone she once pretended to be friendly with (or was!) in the pursuit of her own ambitions (and Laurence suggests that those ambitions are essentially publicity and college funds for the kids)—but if you've never heard of either Tina Brown or poor Diana Spencer before, this may be the perfect primer for the drama about to slowly, dully unfold. Also: Vanity Fair excerpt soon! —balk

Tina tells it like it was [The First Page]

So speculation, such as it is, centers around which American spy agency would be keeping tabs on Princess Diana. "American secret service" is rather nonsensical; the actual U.S. Secret Service works security for the President (and veep) and has a minor stake in counterfeiting, so they wouldn't likely care, unless Diana was plotting to assassinate Bill Clinton. The CIA claims innocence, even going so far as to call the idea "rubbish" in a very British turn of phrase. This sort of thing was always more the FBI's bag since J. Edgar Hoover days, but they wouldn't have much reason to work in Paris, much less on a nonentity like Diana, as who really cared about her anti-land-mine philanthropy. Of course, Bill Clinton didn't want the land mines out of the Korean demilitarized zone, so perhaps Diana had motive to take him out, thus earning her a Secret Service bug after all. Tune in Thursday for more warmed-over details on the death of some lady.

Media probe mystery of possible U.S. spying on Diana [Reuters]
[Photo: Getty Images]