Okay, well, "eat" may not be the proper, scientific term, but a new study from a team headed by UCLA neurology professor Paul Thompson indicates that obesity - and its accompanying fat - can clog up that pretty little head, lead to "brain shrinkage," and may eventually cause dementia.

People with higher body mass indexes had smaller brains on average, with the frontal and temporal lobes - important for planning and memory, respectively - particularly affected.... While no one knows whether these people are more likely to develop dementia, a smaller brain is indicative of destructive processes that can develop into dementia.

The team also found that the brains of the 51 overweight people were 6 per cent smaller than those of their normal-weight counterparts, on average, and those of the 14 obese people were 8 per cent smaller.

Yowzer! So, basically, fat folk have teeny-tiny little brains and the leaner masses can feel even more superior. Great!

Now, before you go out and ostracize the overweight - this means you, admonished New York Times Style writer Cintra Wilson - some scientists pin the blame not necessarily on fat, but on the dastardly brain itself. You see, the areas impacted by the atrophy are the same regions that control metabolism and eating behavior, like whether you shovel it in like a voracious beast.

Regardless, we're pretty sure there's no need to worry about a demented overweight person going on a premeditated rampage: remember, the frontal and temporal lobes control planning and memory, which means any potential onslaught will either be a) massively disorganized or b) abandoned completely in favor of voracious snacking. So, never fear! Unless you're overweight, in which case you and your brain should be very, very afraid.

[Image via]

Credit checks on applicants have long been a device used by financial firms, the government and employers looking to fill positions dealing with the handling of money, but with credit reports available cheap and easily, more and more employers are using them to cast judgment on the judgment of others. So even if you've gone months without a job, you'd better be willing to give handjobs in the parking lot at Denny's if you have to in order to not fall behind on your cell phone bill, because otherwise you might never get a damn job!

Reports the New York Times:

Once reserved for government jobs or payroll positions that could involve significant sums of money, credit checks are now fast, cheap and used for all manner of work. Employers, often winnowing a big pool of job applicants in days of nearly 10 percent unemployment, view the credit check as a valuable tool for assessing someone's judgment.

"How do you get out from under it?" asked Matthew W. Finkin, a law professor at the University of Illinois, who fears that the unemployed and debt-ridden could form a luckless class. "You can't re-establish your credit if you can't get a job, and you can't get a job if you've got bad credit."

Even worse, employers are using credit reports to fill positions that have absolutely nothing to do with money.

"There's no relationship between being a personal trainer making $12 an hour" and having a good credit history, said Janet L. Newcomb, a career counselor in Huntington Beach, Calif. "People are being turned down for jobs on the basis of things that really have nothing to do with qualifications."

So yeah, it sucks to be unemployed, but at least there's free wi-fi in coffee shops! Oh, right.

Pic via

Yes, America is being overrun by the unclothed children of "progressive" parents. What's wrong with these people, these surely-communist progenitors acting as benelovent pacifists to tyrannical children who obviously can't control their sick, carnal desires to run around in their naked flesh? Are they, the parents, simply incapable of screaming "Put on some Goddamn clothes Pancho!" in the general direction of their little hedonistic snot-monsters? Don't they know that the olds of America simply aren't capable of handling such assaults to their delicate senses, or do they just not care?

Rachel Sarah, 36, a writer and mother in East Bay, Calif., said that until her 9-year-old daughter, Mae, turned 7, she liked to wear only a T-shirt in the summer, a preference that Ms. Sarah found healthy, but that Mae's grandparents could not accept. "My mom and stepfather were very insistent on her having clothes on for everything," Ms. Sarah said.

Although most days Mae ran half-dressed through the sprinkler or played with friends under a hose, she had to accept different rules when her grandparents were around. "Their view, I would say, is that little girls need to have their clothes on unless they're taking a bath," Ms. Sarah said.

And who could possibly be even more traumatized by the exposed nether bits of spoiled moppets than the olds? The gays, naturally!

Kevin Allen, 45, who used to work as a personal shopper, still recalls with horror the afternoon more than a decade ago when he was at a client's house, and the woman's two young granddaughters came into the room and began changing outfits.

"I was extremely uncomfortable," said Mr. Allen, who estimates the girls were 5 and 6. "I know the grandmother well, but I didn't know the children."

When asked to reflect on the source of his discomfort, Mr. Allen, who is gay, said he feared the situation could all too easily be misinterpreted. "Being gay, you're already thought of as a pervert by some people," he said. "If you look the wrong way at them or something like that, people are going to think you're having some kind of lascivious thought. So it's kind of not appropriate even in your own house. When other people are around, you should have modesty."

You see, the youngs have converted the olds into accepting this horseshit and now the olds are terrorizing the gays with their naked grandchildren. Good God this must be stopped! Bill O'Reilly, do something man!

Why Do They Need A Fig Leaf [New York Times]

[Pic via Cornell Chronicle]

Waxman's schadenfreude on our recent layoffs:

So, now Nick Denton is laying people off, just like those dinosaurs in mainstream media.

The difference is, mainstream newspapers fired real journalists.

OH SNAP.

What the Gawker empire represents is as transitory as the people he employs. Denton has indisputably proved that you can create a lucrative business model out of highly targeted blogs, fed by tightly managed staffs of journalists who've numbed themselves to nagging doubts that what they do every day is journalism.

Ha. I have no doubt that what I do here every day is not "journalism," per se. It's called "blogging," and it has elements of journalism. What an asinine argument. I expect far more accurate insults from an actual journalist, Sharon Waxman.

Denton is ripe for mocking, and he knows it... "Gawker Media is behaving like those big media companies that we mock so easily." (Used to? Does this mean they will no longer mock and smear and malign journalists at big media companies? Too late. Had I known, I might have stayed at The New York Times.)

We apologize for singlehandedly forcing you to quit your job at the New York Times in order to seduce venture capitalists into funding your upcoming "primary, multi-platform source for the best original and aggregated content, adapted for the digital age." Although, to be honest, we will continue to smear and malign journalists at big media companies, when necessary.

And while I'm at it,

Yes?

let me publicly lament the flight of talented colleagues, Jeff Leeds of the Times and Gabriel Snyder, once of Variety, to the world of celebrity infotainment, and the kingdom of snark, respectively. Leeds, one of the best music journalists working (or, rather, not working) has gone to Buzznet, where he will be the editor-in-chief. Snyder becomes managing editor at Gawker. Like other journalists, they have to eat, so one can hardly blame them.

And to think: they could have applied at The Wrap News.

[Waxword]

I take issue with a piece like this because I think it plays with fire. “She has started cooking with olive oil and occasionally butter, and has increased her consumption of nuts and peanut butter,” Pope writes.

Well I’m glad she brings up peanut butter. I ate peanut butter almost every day when I was losing weight, but careful Tara: I was also burning about 8 trillion calories a day up in Bedford with my trainer and on long hikes with my Labrador (whom I jokingly referred to as my ‘outdoor/backup trainer).

Also:

Nuts are a big deal: they pack huge fat content and they’ll keep you CHUNKAAAAY if you’re not workin’ it.

Oh baby. Well Emily, if you really want to be able to down all the peanut butter you want, I suggest you give this a shot:

The stairs squeaked as we went up. It was a narrow staircase, winding, just wide enough for your body. A nautilus, maybe 100 feet high. Not very stable. Dark, too, but for the holes shot by the tank. I slowed my step. The shot was loud inside the staircase, and I couldn’t see much, because the second marine was falling backward, falling onto Ashley, who fell onto me. Warm liquid spattered on my face. The three of us tumbled backward out the doorway. The second marine, although bloodied, was not hit...

After a long bombardment, the Marines are eventually able to go in and fetch Miller, who had been shot:

Miller was out. Two marines had pulled him from the tower, Goggin one of them, choking and coughing. Black lung, they called it later. Miller was on his back; he had come out head first. His face was opened in a large V, split like meat, fish maybe, with the two sides jiggling.

“Please tell me he’s not dead,” Ash said. “Please tell me.”

“He’s dead, Ash,” I said.

I felt it then. Darting, out of reach. You go into these places, and you think they’re overrated, they are not nearly as dangerous as people say. Keep your head; keep the gunfire in front of you. You get close and come out unscathed every time, your face as youthful and as untroubled as before. The life of the reporter: always someone else’s pain. A woman in an Iraqi hospital cradles her son newly blinded, and a single tear rolls down her cheek. The cheek is so dry, and the tear moves so slowly that you focus on it for a while, the tear traveling across the wide desert plain. You need a corpse for the newspaper, so you take a bunch of marines to get one. Then suddenly it’s there, the warm liquid on your face, the death you have always avoided, smiling back at you as if it knew all along. Your fault.

[NYT Magazine. Pic via NYM]

As you would expect, the reporter starts off the article by telling you that she has been in Williamsburg for a decade—way before all these gentrifiers got here. But in her discussion of McCarren Park and the accompanying photo slide show, the kickballers receive only a passing mention in a photo caption! Instead, the reporter's single source for the story of the park's rich variety is a 64-year-old Ecuadorean hot dog vendor. What does she know about Bloc Party? Sheesh.

[NYT. Note to hipsters: the last McCarren Pool Party is today and I walked by earlier, and there is no way you're getting into that motherfucker. Seriously, take up basketball instead.]

Salkin's story on the hot ukulele trend is out, and fits perfectly in his oeuvre. His past investigations have exposed chicks who eat meat, revealed how no one goes on vacations any more, and uncovered prepsters who hang out downtown—as well as their rival hipsters who hang out in Atlantic City.

We're now prepared to reveal Salkin's journalistic method to the public: He solicits you to hang out with him in casual settings and mines you for minutiae, which he then seasons with his patented significance-inflating sauce:

"I see you're no vegetarian!"

"Downtown is getting so preppy."

"Can you believe my dumbass roommate bought a ukulele?"

Lately I've been tying my shoelaces inside the shoe, to prevent those floppy strings on the outside. Others in Brooklyn are doing the same. Call me, Allen.

[NYT]

A Chevrolet billboard that used real pennies was stripped clean within 30 minutes. In Singapore, advertisers painted an extra yellow safety line on a train platform with the name “Wonderbra” on it, leaving commuters to figure out the message (that the bra’s lifting qualities were so forceful that wearers would have to stand back)...

Many people did not get it.

You can't ask for everything to make sense. It's hot outside. Stay tuned here for breaking news coverage of only the finest future publicity stunts throughout the summer and beyond!

[NYT]

David Blum at the NY Press uncovers a disturbing pattern of ongoing metaphor abuse that makes Carr appear to be a man at the end of his rope. We can only hope that this moment of clarity serves as a wake up call to him and all those who enable his root vegetable comparison habit. Here are Blum's findings, all taken from Carr's own work—starting with his current book and stretching back four long years:

Describing himself:

“Far from clinically handsome, I have a face that looks like it could have been carved out of mashed potatoes, and my idea of exercise was running the length of my body.”

“….with a face made out of potatoes, the Photoshopped picture will have to go a long way to make me any uglier than I actually am.”

“With a face that looks as if it were crafted out of mashed potatoes and a voice that sounds like a trash compactor that needs oil, I’m not a natural for television…”

About Tim Russert:

“He had a face that seemed to be carved out of potatoes, but he worked on television by working harder than your average talking head…”

Describing actors:

“To the Bagger’s eye, [Daniel Craig] has a face made out of potatoes—although the rest of him seems to be made out of titanium…”

“Directors tend to focus on [Steve] Buscemi’s visage, shooting his face so it looks something like what might happen to a bowl of mashed potatoes if it were sculptured [sic] by an ax.”

“And Detective Sipowicz [Dennis Franz], with a face that looks as if it were carved out of potatoes and the body style of a greeter at Home Depot, was an unlikely hero.”

About author Joe McGinniss:

“[McGinniss] had an old cap set against the Sunday morning sun, a handsome Irish face that could have been carved out of potatoes, and a glint of tragedy in his eyes.”

SEEK HELP.

[NY Press; pic via NY Mag]

Salkin is the Times style reporter who is seemingly responsible for chronicling every (fake) microtrend making the rounds of a certain NYC subculture. He's written about women who eat red meat on the first date, Paul Sevigny's quest to turn Atlantic City into a chic nightlife destination, and how nobody takes vacations any more. Savvy readers will also remember that it was Salkin who in January explored the question, "Has Gawker Jumped The Snark?" (GET IT?)—just as the site was hiring some of the top 20 most mind-blowingly awesome staff members in its history.

With his finger on the pulse of culture, it's natural that Salkin has a wide, hungry fan base. So he has a Yahoo group called "Salkin Stories" that sends out a newsletter so you can keep up with all his important doings! Daily Intel has his latest message (which they note "goes out to a lot of people, many who don't actually know Salkin"), and there are some things you won't want to miss:

1/ Olympics. Due to job and family responsibilities, the folks who were to join me in Beijing for the Olympics can not come. What this means is I have face-value tickets to numerous events and a FREE PLACE TO STAY for a few people. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. All you have to do is get yourself to Beijing. This will be my 7th Olympics and I have done all the hard work of ordering tickets nearly two years in advance and securing a place to stay. I did an apartment swap for my place in New York, so I have a place for free in Beijing.

Say no more, Allen! I am so there.

Closer to home, it’s time to continue the tour of NYC BBQ joints, this time with a trip to the much lauded Fette Sau in Williamsburg. Deal is there are outdoor picnic tables which fill up tres fast, so we need to get there early. I will be arriving around 6pm and would like you there not long after that (but if you want to come and maybe have to sit elsewhere, can come til 7). Let me know asap if you can come, so I can get a head count. We had about 15 people last time (at RUB) and it was great (although Hill Country’s Q was much better, meat-taste-wise).

I sincerely hope that with the help of Gawker readers you can beat that record this time, Allen!

He goes on to fill us in about an article he wrote in HEEB, all his stories in the Times, another story his friend is working on, and throws in an urgent request for any ukulele players to contact him. Okay!

And he has his own website, where he gives a brief rundown of the wild life led by a man named Allen Salkin:

Allen Salkin cast industrial films in Hong Kong, wholesaled rubber duckies in Las Vegas, picked oranges in Crete, peddled oil paintings door-to-door in Western Australia, penned stories for New York Magazine, Details, Heeb, Yoga Journal, The Village Voice and other venues, taught Journalism at NYU and MediaBistro.com, and wrote the book "Festivus: The Holiday for the Rest of Us." He is a staff reporter at The New York Times.

See you all at Fette Sau.

[Daily Intel; pic via January Magazine]

[Bloggers] and other Internet critics have already started to expose what they see as greenwash advertising. A French group called l’Alliance Pour la Planète, for example, cites an ad for a Japanese sport utility vehicle that was billed as having been “conceived and developed in the homeland of the Kyoto accords,” the international emissions-reduction agreement.

The Times' advice: "avoid vague and unsubstantiated claims — the kind that bloggers and other critics are quick to pounce on." That's the New York Times, conceived and developed in the homeland of the Son of Sam killer.

[NYT]

The photo of four rockets—the mark of a powerful nation:

The actual, undoctored photo: three missiles! Dude, so weak:

America owes a debt of gratitude to the New York Times for catching the fake—after it had already run on the top of its home page.

[All images above taken from The Lede]

On Monday—knowing that Carr's column was running—the network apparently gave the scoop about its hiring of ex-Hillary flack Howard Wolfson to Jim Rutenberg, a Times political reporter.

Today, with Carr's missive still hanging in the air, Fox News gave Times reporter Brian Stelter what appears to be the only interview with Fox News executive vice president Kevin Magee regarding Fox Business' hiring of WSJ columnist Walt Mossberg as a contributor. Magee was quoted in the press release announcing the deal, which would presumably make him the guy that every reporter on the story wanted to talk to.

The network is—at the very least—going out of its way to be helpful to the Times this week. But we haven't seen or heard any indications of a Fox News apology (public or otherwise) to Times reporter Jacques Steinberg, who was grossly caricatured on air last week for writing a factual story that the network didn't care for.

The straightforward interpretation of this is that FNC has decided to play nice this week in order to prove Carr's characterization wrong, or at least to indicate that they can rise above direct retaliation against the paper. The sinister interpretation is that Fox News PR has decided to pursue a divide-and-conquer strategy with the Times, being helpful to reporters it favors while freezing out others—like Steinberg—that it does not. The classic carrot and stick approach.

Because we're talking about Fox News PR, we lean towards the sinister interpretation. So the Times had better be careful to show some solidarity in the coming weeks. Hang together or hang separately!

Here are some other instances of Murdoch getting slammed, culled from an exhaustive list at io9 that you should read as well:

• Planet Fred—a movie about a tiny little alien who lives on the head of a media mogul who resembles Murdoch. Hard to believe this one isn't yet a classic.
• Max Headroom—a character named Grossman is an evil network boss who makes people's heads explode from too much advertising. True to life.
• Cold Lazarus—the book by Dennis Potter includes a Murdochian figure named Stiltz, who pushes fake, virtual experiences as a replacement for real ones. Eventually he gets killed. Draw your own conclusions.

Go read the full list at io9! And anyone who reads this book, please submit a report.

[Mixed Media]