Retard Nude Harvard Porn Kid: Worth Your Vomit?

This is Matthew DiPasquale. He scored fives on ten separate AP exams. "Five" may also quantify his penis somehow, you can decide for yourself because Matthew DiPasquale was born in the second half of the eighties and so he quite understandably just founded a Harvard porn magazine whose virgin issue contains naked pictures only of himself, an endeavor whose only conceivable purpose have been to solicit the snarky derision of people who have given up trying to understand the credit crisis. So here you go, just-safe-enough-for-work photos of your newest seeker of microfame after the jump. "Micro" may also quantify his penis somehow. More »

Fame Is Worse Than Crack

Shalom Auslander, whose memoir Foreskin's Lament is one of the hot contestants of the fall season, confronts the perils of impending fame in this excerpt, in which he is photographed for a magazine. His thoughts on the matter are pretty much note-perfect. More »

Lindsay Lohan's Rehab Conquest's Band Just As Lousy As You Might Expect

From the "That's Life In The Inferno Of Postmodernity" files: One of the most popular bands on Google Trends right now is the Atlanta duo Dead Stays Alive, one-half of which "befriended" Lindsay Lohan while the two were in rehab. (Rumors that the two hooked up have been zinging around the gossipsphere; Lohan's rep is, of course, calling those tales "mean.") Tony Allen, the Dead Stays Alive member in question, has even been referred to as "famous" more than once, which I'm going to chalk up to people confusing him with the Tony Allen who played with Fela Kuti and The Good, The Bad, And The Queen, and not the fact that he was spilling his guts about Lindsay on Extra the other night. [Idolator]

"By Summer Of 2008 People Will Be Able To Approach James Frey With A Clearer Mind." Really?

Today's piece in the Observer is essentially about how agent Eric Simonoff tried to make it seem like publishers were clamoring to buy the James Frey novel—while really they were just vaguely curious to see whether it was any good. It closes with a quote from the man who got an exclusive on the project and bought it for a still-undisclosed but apparently large amount of money: Harper publisher Jonathan Burnham. "The point is he's written a great novel, and by summer of 2008 people will be able to approach James Frey with a clearer mind. Time will have passed." Well, of course he'd like to think so. Does anyone else? More »

Fuck The Bullshit, It's Time To Throw James Frey Down

"James Frey is a liar. His best-selling memoir, A Million Little Pieces, is a fraud. It is a seamless mass of falsehoods, told deliberately, for the purpose of making money." Back when Tom Scocca wrote those words in the Observer last January, it was nearly impossible to imagine the disgraced memoirist would ever sell another book to a major U.S. publisher. Sure, he'd have little tossed-off pieces in magazines every once in a while, or maybe he'd go back to writing screenplays. Hollywood doesn't care about this kind of thing! But the idea that Frey would sell what amounts to his third novel, for more than a million dollars, to Harper's Jonathan Burnham, seemed as unlikely as, say, Ron Goldman's family pimping a book by O.J. Simpson. And then it happened. A lot of things happen that shouldn't. More »

Book-Dealed Blogger Learns There's Such A Thing As Bad Publicity

Blogger Patrick "Bad News" Hughes's Diary of Indignities is in bookstores now, and hey! It got a writeup in the Gainesville Sun, Patrick's hometown paper! Let's take a peek and see what the critics had to say. More »

'How To Be A Publicity Whore' Author Underqualified

Remember little David Seaman? He's the helpful kid who wrote to us a while ago defending his pal Ned Vizzini against charges of assistant-hiring sleaziness, and who capped his email by asking us, "So how would we go about working in a subtle plug for me on Gawker?" Then he went and concocted a fake save Paris Hilton protest. Now he's out with a new proposal for a book called How To Be a Publicity Whore, where he'll presumably share some of the hard-won wisdom that got his first book, The Real Meaning of Life (surely you've heard of it? According to Bookscan, it's sold 4,000 copies!) so much attention. He's going to be giving the advice that people most need to hear: About "how you can make cheap talk and scandal-mongering work for you, whether you have a cause to promote or not."