Gene Weingarten's nomination for Worst WaPo Styles Piece of All Time: This thing. "The Light and the Labyrinth." I read it but do not understand it? It has to do with a labyrinth *apparently*. Full analysis in the comments, please. And the conceptually worst Styles story of today is "Rich Kids Like Heroin, Surprisingly."


How is the media in Russia making money, these days? Sexy nude women and bloody murder. They've surpassed us already.


Hey, it is a story about The Onion, in the New York Times. The funny thing about The Onion is how boring its writing process is: "It's a very specific, regimented format...We spend hundreds of hours in the room deconstructing the jokes. I don't think there's anything comparable to the amount of material we generate and reject just to come up with the week's headlines." Actually that's the unfunny thing about The Onion.


The most important issue currently facing television viewers: Whether voiceovers in commercials next year will say "Two thousand ten" or "Twenty ten." Or maybe "Two thousand and ten." Regardless, as long as they remember to say "no homo" afterwards they'll be okay.

Passengers were witnessed jumping out of the bus to try and save themselves. Miraculously not only was the man in the video saved, but only 4 people were injured on the bus, none seriously.

The bus was finally stopped when it hit a raised plaza in the city centre.

Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock could not be reached for comment.

Craig Whitney, the man who kept all the thug motherfuckers in check as the Standards Editor of the New York Times, is retiring after more than four decades at the paper. You can read a very gracious speech about him by Bill Keller by clicking here, or just read this excerpt, which is Whitney's career highlight:

And along with Phil Corbett, his successor, he has worried about all the words that appear not only in the paper but, now, on the web (a recent exchange with a department head involved the appearance of the word "pooping" in one of our sites).

Poop well in whatever you move on to, Mr. Whitney.


Just like in America, Russia has cranky old ex-military wingnuts. But over there they seem to have slightly more influence! Example: Someone wrote a story ("media" peg alert!) about a kabob house called the "Anti-Soviet Kabob House." Uproar ensued amongst Soviet wingnuts! Somebody else wrote about how ridiculous this was and now he's subjected to even more intense wingnuttery, to the point where his life may be in danger. The moral of the story is, God Bless America, where our wingnuts kill journalists less often than their wingnut counterparts elsewhere do.


Is Time Inc. for sale? No, says Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes. He said at a conference that they'd still have it five years from now. Although if he could go back in time two years and sell it he totally would, in a flash.


Boy, the magazine industry sure isn't going to let Apple come between it and its readers, like Apple did to the music industry with iTunes. No way. The magazine industry wants to make its own iTunes-type thing, to cut out the middleman, and grab the dough. Well, you know how it is. Five years from now you walk back into the same bar and there's the magazine industry, sitting on the same stool, sipping the same beer, still talking about how it's gonna make that awesome new iTunes thing for magazines. Good luck, guys.

Julia Ioffe alerts us to this report out of Russia, where the owner of a tabloid chain is opening a Yellow Journalism School. It's just like regular journalism school except it might get you a job one day, zing! This delightfully Google-translated paragraph really says it all:

Secret skills tabloid journalist with the trainees will be divided itself Gabrelyanov. . It is planned to organize special courses on sports and secular journalism. By teaching will involve also other members of "News Media". In addition, Gabrelyanov hopes entertain the idea of teaching and her boyfriend.

Do you really want to get involved with these Russians and be forced to "entertain" someone's boyfriend, if you know what we mean? Why not be an intern for us instead? It doesn't cost you anything, and you will come out as ignorant as you went in, but meaner. Perfectly prepared for a job at the New York Post.

This American diplomat, who is 34 and married, is shown in a hotel room, in his underpants, and then we cut to the what is probably the same room but suddenly it is quite dark and someone is having sex with some lady, maybe, who knows. Blackmail! Oh and before all this the guy is maybe on the phone talking to a lady about something in Russian.

Scandal-mongering ABC investigative reporter Brian "One Source" Ross would like you to watch this wonderful video. Seriously, it is pretty great. We don't know if the FSB added the wonderful musical accompaniment themselves or if it should be credited to Brian Ross/Jane Birkin.

First, the scary facts about the banks, which seem unstoppable, like the blob:

J.P. Morgan Chase, an amalgam of some of Wall Street's most storied institutions, now holds more than $1 of every $10 on deposit in this country. So does Bank of America, scarred by its acquisition of Merrill Lynch and partly government-owned as a result of the crisis, as does Wells Fargo, the biggest West Coast bank. Those three banks, plus government-rescued and -owned Citigroup, now issue one of every two mortgages and about two of every three credit cards, federal data show.

Smaller banks can hardly compete with the new, improved banks, which face fewer regulations, and that has many worried that we're headed toward a good old fashioned oligarchy in which the banks, already coddled by the government, will again get away with financial murder.

Mark Zandi from economy.com griped, "You'll be left with very large institutions and small ones that fill in the cracks. But it'll be difficult for the mid-tier institutions to thrive...The oligopoly has tightened." Richard Fisher, the president Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, also invoked the o-word, saying:

[You] want to create a system that allows for others to grow, where no one has an oligopolistic power at the expense of others who might be able to provide financial services to consumers.

With their powers unchecked, the saved banks are raising rates on deposits and finding other sinister ways to nickle and dime their customers, who, sadly, have fewer places to turn. Thus the free market dries up, democracy crumbles, Americans find themselves living in a post-apocalyptic dystopia and the only winner is Glenn Beck, who warned of this all along. Thanks, Ben Bernanke!

Unless, of course, our government keeps an eye on things, create new regulations, curtail excessively stupid moves and stops the banks from growing out of control. But why would they do that?!

In a blog post, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone writes that the attacks are ongoing and "massively coordinated," but declined to elaborate, because then he'd have to kill you. Actually no, it's because he didn't want to "engage in speculative discussion." But a Georgian blogger is happy to speculate; he says it's totally the Russian regime.

The blogger, known as "Cyxymu," has been outspoken in his criticism of Russian tactics in the war over the disputed region of South Ossetia. Facebook's chief of security tells CNET (via Business Insider) that Cyxymu is the target of the denial of service attack on Facebook and Twitter yesterday and today. The blogger has accounts on both services, as well as on LiveJournal, Blogger and YouTube. Google, which operates the latter two, told CNET its systems "prevented substantive impact to our services," so we still have the keyboard cat.

First the subs off our coast, now Twitter attacks. How will the Russians vaguely annoy us next? Satellite TV jamming? Attack the iPhone app store?

(Pics via)

According to the Times of London:

The photos will inevitably trigger mass swooning by women all over Russia - as well as unfavourable comparisons of their husbands to Mr Putin's manly physique. They will also confirm the Russian Prime Minister's status as a gay icon.

Yes, well, you said it.

On his virility-proving camping trip, Putin also rode a mini-submarine to the bottom of Lake Baikal and attached a tracking device to a whale. During Obama's trip to Russia, Putin dressed in black and bragged of performing a wheelie on a motorcycle with a local biker gang. "He has also been shown co-piloting a fighter jet and shooting a tiger."

Observers say these comically extreme demonstrations of archaic tropes of virile masculinity suggest that the despotic ruler of Russia is a quirky Wes Anderson surrogate father figure and Russia is his shiftless, emotionally damaged Wilson brother/Jason Schwartzman. Russian state-owned television is expected to edit the camping trip footage into a quirky montage scored by something from the Nuggets box.

One of the conversations appears to back claims that Italy's leader has a giant bed with a connection, as yet unclear, to his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin.

After an exchange in which the prime minister seems to be offering a present to D'Addario, he says to her: "I'm taking a shower." He then asks her to wait on the big bed. She asks which one. He replies: "Putin's".

Right. Is that some sort of little joke or does Putin have a bed at Silvio's vacation home? And if he does, does he know what Silvio's doing in it?

We played this three times after getting it from our video department and can almost say with almost absolute certainty that yes, Sacha Baron Cohen has struck again! We're sure of it.

Yaroslav Yaroshenko, the top editor of the Russian monthly Korruptsiya i Prestupnost (Corruption and Crime), has died from head injuries he received when he was attacked two months ago at his apartment building. His deputy believes the attack was related to Yaroshenko's work. We're not saying that's true, we're just saying: all crime reporters in Russia should carry big ass shotguns.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Why is Fox Business Network the most trusted source of information on why the stock market is doing what it's doing? It's because of people like Matt Egan, a 24 year-old beat reporter on their web team: "I cover the stock market; it's my primary responsibility. I recap why the market is up or, mostly, why it's down." When he got the job, he says: "I had no idea about the stock market. I wish I had taken business classes. I bought a business textbook ahead of time. I read that, and started reading The Wall Street Journal every day. We had a month and a half to prep." That wasn't that long ago! I'm the same way, Matt. No knock on you. Just pointing out that Fox Business Network is where the experts are.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.The principal of a California high school confiscated hundreds of copies of the student journalism magazine because he said the cover—pegged to story about student tattoos—looked like it had a "gang tattoo" on it. How did he make this serious, and possibly illegal, censorious decision? "He said a custodian stopped him in the hall as he walked with a copy of the magazine and asked: 'Oh, you're reading a gang-tattoo magazine, huh?'" Sounds about right, yes.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Let's have one of those "bad newspaper news roundups" that you all love so much, shall we? 43 layoffs at the Waco paper; the New York Times Co's retirement plan lost $154 million; Freedom Communications is cutting pay 5% across the board; and nine layoffs at the St. Paul Pioneer-Press. Condolences to all newspaper employees everywhere.

The Lancet's publishing a study this weekend that says just that, as well as:

Russia's mortality rate in people aged 15-54 years was more than five times higher for men and three times higher for women than in Western Europe...Alcohol is responsible for about three quarters of the deaths of all Russian men aged 15-54 and about half of all deaths of Russian women of the same age, the data showed.

That is astounding and incredible and not really funny at all. That means the majority of Russians who die in their prime drink themselves to death, one way or another. Thirty thousand Russians die from alcohol poisoning alone, every year. Christ. Hot chocolate, guys. Is good.
[Reuters. Pic: Getty]

The novelist, recently based in New York, has been filing dispatches from Russia for the New Yorker, and may have been working on a story at the time.

Reports Russia!:

Gessen was researching a claim by one of the candidates of tempering with the voting ballots.

Gazeta.ru reports that the officials in charge of the election refused to take the reporter's questions and called the police instead.

Gessen is Russian by birth, but the "OMON" special forces unit confirmed he had an American passport before taking him away. One hopes this offers the writer a measure of protection against the brutal treatment Dmitry Medvedev and Vladimir Putin's authoritarian regime has accorded Russian journalists.

[Russia!]

UPDATE: Gessen has been released. Russia! quotes his friend: ""I just talked to him and he's fine. He was like "yeah I got arrested no big deal.'"

No big deal, Russian special forces squad, whatever. Pass the vodka.

So nonchalant/seen-it-all/I-eat-Spetsnaz-for-breakfast, these Russian literary types. (No doubt, we're glad to be able to say so. Godspeed, Keith.)

The photographer Pete Souza says he's sure the goofy looking dude on the left with the camera around his neck and the blond hair is Putin (more recent pic here), while he was a KGB spy. The Russians deny it and are reportedly "furious" about the emergence of this picture for some reason, maybe because it proves that Vladimir Putin was once a big fan of John Ritter?
[Telegraph via VV]

[Copyranter]

Because, you know, nothing says "new chapter in Russo-American relations" like A BIG RED BUTTON but that is just the beginning of this bizarre snafu: the button was supposed to say "reset" in Russian. Instead it says "overcharge." And the Russian Foreign Minister is all "ok nice work on the translation, morons," and Hillary tries to laugh it off but basically it's the Cold War again guys, let's all go see Watchmen.