The hearing for the self-proclaimed mastermind of the September 11th terrorist attacks, plus four other conspirators, got off to a chaotic start on Saturday, as the defendants ignored the judge, refused to acknowledge the proceedings, and generally pursued other interests, including light arts and crafts.

In your cool-person Thursday media column: Neel Shah's style secrets exposed, a job appears in the media(!), the NYT's web delay explained, and Donald Graham doesn't give a fuck about your hit pieces.

The Economist Group, which owns Roll Call, just bought Congressional Quarterly. CQ was formerly owned by the nonprofit Poynter Institute. The Economist Group is controlled by a trust including one Rothschild. Pearson PLC (owners of the Financial Times Group), owns a 50% non-voting stake.

Maybe. There's a report out there of shipments of the latest issue of The Economist being held back in customs. In the issue is an article about the Sri Lankan government's "unpleasant triumphalism" over the Liberation Tigers. [ICT]

Some magophiles point to such bygone magazines like Vector, Fluxus art magazine Avalanche and T+L Golf as the world's best magazines. Happily, they're wrong. The best magazine is still extant. It's called The Economist.

Newsweek, which traditionally (dentist's office joke), has for the first time ever correctly identified an overarching trend in American society and formulated a reasonable response, unaccompanied by any special "The Historical Jesus" stories!

The rumors appear to be true: Newsweek will amputate up to one million copies from its 2.6 million circulation, according to Wall Street Journal sources, and no fewer than 500,000. There will be an unknown number of layoffs, announced Thursday, to be achieved through voluntary buyouts like the 111 from last spring.…

My Wired essay "Kill Your Blog" has spawned a charmingly identical piece in The Economist's print edition this week. Same theme, same Jason Calacanis quote from July. But read this part out loud: "A decade ago, PDAs were the preserve of digerati who liked using electronic address books and calendars. Now they are…

It's always fun to get slammed by a disaster and then to look back and discover that some people had been warning you about it forever. Well, The Economist has been publishing scary covers warning of DOOM for years, and they are compiled in a nifty slide show here. We've put together a tasty little sampler after the…

" The Economist is spoofing the game Twister, distributing pizza boxes that improbably bear its name and sponsoring a performance of political satire by the Second City theatrical troupe ." [Times]

Ruh-roh, Kim Jong-Il is sick, what happens when he dies? Hell if we know!! And will we truly know tomorrow or whenever this guy gets back to the executive assistant charged with Explainer-ing it for Slate? Not really! As literary Tumblrer Keith Gessen pointed out while trying to make sense of the whole Ossetia mess,…

We don't need any energy technology breakthrough to solve the climate-change problem. At least, that's the Tthesis posited by The Economist in a debate sponsored by everyone's favorite multinational oil company, British Petroleum Beyond Petroleum. The ayes are having it so far. Joseph Romm from the Center for…

If you're running for office, you really want your communiciations director to be at least respected by the journalists it is his or her job to manage. Hillary Clinton's flack was the oft-sweatered Howard Wolfson, who, it turns out now, was universally reviled. We already told you about how Vogue's Julia Reed called…

The Economist, the smartest magazine in the world, may not be the smartest magazine in the world any more. Oh, the articles are just fine (we assume. We haven't read it since that free trial subscription ran out). We're basing our judgment on the magazine's new ad campaign. Which is utterly baffling. What, exactly,…