I had recently graduated college when Craigslist began to consume my life. I was 28, old enough to remember the joy of sitting in my kitchen with a pen and a cup of coffee, circling help wanted ads in an old-fashioned newspaper. But I don't need to tell you that Craigslist is way better than print classifieds ever were. It’s free, it’s instant, it’s hyper-local. Still, Craigslist does require a certain amount of street smarts; it can be a landmine of check fraud Trojan horses, fake website switcheroos and other gray-area opportunities. This isn’t news, of course. So while you wouldn’t want your grandmother using Craigslist, for fear she’d wire her identity to a Nigerian prince, those of us who’ve grown up with the seediness of the Web realize it’s no big deal. We know what to avoid on the Internet, the same way we know to avoid a dark alley on an unfamiliar street. Well, I thought I knew, anyway.

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Since I'm always looking for a great deal, I decided to email the poster:

Hi there,

Saw your ad on Craigslist regarding the room in Dupont Circle. At first I was like "What a bargain!" but then I got suspicious. What's the catch?

What amazing luck then, to open your listing and find that not only are you offering an amazing rate on a sublet in the heart of D.C., but you're throwing in 16 precious little angels as well! I am a huge cat fan, and I feel like I should be paying you for the honor of spending a month with Polly, Bitnum, Lightning, Lightning II (Question: Is this Lightning's offspring or another cat from a different family whom you've given the same name? It's a deal-breaker, so let me know), Bebop, Cappy, Apina, Grobor, Kyle, Leesha, Somtorious, Gleebok, Horatio, Bananana (I will assume this is the correct spelling, as I will not live in apartments with cats named after fruit), Hoppy and Duran. I would love to cuddle and hang out with these adorable fluffer-butts all day!

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But the day the show ended, I began watching "Lost." I watched it every day this summer, and I finished the whole thing in three months. I did this mostly out of spite as well, so that those same friends now had to listen to my own inane theories about the island being part of a giant government experiment or Locke being Sawyer's dad (don't know how I came up with that one), while they bit their tongues and tried not to spoil anything.

Maybe it was because I blew through the episodes so quickly and didn't spend over half a decade looking for answers that I wasn't that bothered by the show's finale. In fact, all things considered, I thought "Lost" tied up most of the big loose ends. It wasn't the end I would have written for the show, but at least now we know where those polar bears came from.

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Chris Lee is a Republican Congressman representing upstate New York. He 46 years old and married with one son. Except when he's responding to Craigslist personal ads. Then, he's 39 and divorced. And a lobbyist.

That is my single favorite detail in Gawker's embarrassing story of Representative Lee trying to pick up a woman online: The "cover story" a Republican congressman uses is that he's a lobbyist.

Here's what Lee wrote in response to this Craigslist ad:

i'm a very fit fun classy guy. Live in Cap Hill area. 6ft 190lbs blond/blue. 39.. Lobbyist. I promise not to disappoint.

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The Forward has the full back story here, but the basics are these: Former AIPAC official Steven Rosen was charged with espionage in 2005 for allegedly receiving and distributing classified information on U.S. policy toward Iran and other matters (the charges were later dropped). Soon after the charges were brought, AIPAC fired Rosen, with a spokesman saying that Rosen "did not comport with standards that AIPAC expects of all its employees." In response, Rosen sued AIPAC for defamation.

Which brings us to the new, 260-page document filed by AIPAC in the case and first reported on by Grant Smith. In transcripts of a recent deposition of Rosen, a picture emerges of a frat-house atmosphere at AIPAC headquarters. "Q" here is an attorney for AIPAC, and "A" is Rosen.

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My husband's nose apparently can only detect the odor when I push his face right up to the frame and command him to Sniff harder, dammit!, but every night I am welcomed to sleep by the unmistakable smell of fungus from someone else's bad storage decision. I know, honey, let's store the old bed in that corner of the basement we never use because of all the standing water!

If Craigslist cannot be held accountable for allowing the stench to waft into our home, I have to take responsibility myself, and what self-respecting American does that? Sure, I'm the one who found the bed frame online, the one who convinced my husband it was nicer than the one we were using, the one who stood in a random Seattleite's furnace room and forked money over for its sleigh-style splendor -- but I'm not the one who created the scent-free forum that allowed the stinky item to be sold to me.

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As this debate continues, it's important to hear from sex workers who do not fit the traditional narrative that stigmatizes all such persons as slaves, drug addicts, uneducated, criminals, emotionally damaged or unethical. To dispel some of those notions, let me present a completely different picture of who a sex worker can be.

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The day before had been magical -- a beautiful, warm, sunny fall Sunday in San Francisco. We lingered in the city too long but still had to buy groceries on our way home from an exhibit of watercolors and drawings from "Where the Wild Things Are." As we pulled into our driveway, I said to my husband, "I'll run in and start dinner. You bring in the bags." And that's the last thing I remember. The next morning, the glove compartment was open, papers hanging out. The GPS was gone.

I canceled four credit cards and ordered a new BlackBerry before I thought to check Craigslist. I didn't know what I'd find, but it occurred to me that pawn shops were the domain of desperate crackheads and that the savvy modern thief would hock stolen wares online. I did a search in a 40-mile radius of my neighborhood. My GPS was the first thing that popped up.

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Craigslist has been one of the few bright spots and success stories in the critical fight against trafficking and child exploitation. ... Even our critics grudgingly admit that we made giant strides, and that Craigslist has been virtually alone among the many advertising venues carrying adult ads in vigorously combating exploitation and trafficking.

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"A lot of the girls I've seen are ordinary college girls who wouldn't normally think of doing this," he says. "They come onto Craigslist to find roommates and buy a TV and click around and they find a post that I've written that's worded kindly and offers them help." As one john wrote in response to a question I posted on an online message board, "CL was the perfect launching pad for horny young women who wanted to give it a try without actually hitting the streets." (I'm dubious of the relevance of "horniness" in selling sex, but as a recent Salon personal essay revealed, the site certainly offers a quick in for newbies.)

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I was about to embark on a career as an escort.

The week before -- with $75 in my bank account, no more unemployment checks and hundreds of résumés and carefully crafted cover letters sent and ignored in a rotten economy -- I bypassed the typical job ads on Craigslist and went straight to the "adult gigs" section, just out of curiosity.

What I found was an eye-popping number of help wanted ads. These ads weren't looking for how fast you could type or if you knew PowerPoint, but they were also discreet about what skill set, exactly, was required. One posting caught my eye: "Make up to $2,000 a week!"

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At the start of the Labor Day weekend, the company replaced the front page link to the "adult services" section with a single word: "censored." It's a provocative response to mounting pressure from activists and 17 state attorneys general who argued that the site was enabling pimps and sex traffickers to exploit women and girls -- but it's unclear how much it will change. The "therapeutic services" section already appears to have absorbed a lot of the content you would have previously found in "adult services," although it is much more toned down. There are "full body" rubs, "four-hand massages" and promises of "SWEET & SEXY ASIAN MASSEUSES."

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Ed Geary, a spokesman for the Suffolk County sheriff's office, says Philip Markoff was declared dead by emergency medical workers at about 10:15 Sunday morning. The body was found in the Nashua Street Jail.

Geary says no additional information is immediately available, and an investigation has begun.

Markoff's trial was expected to take place in March.

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The calculations were made based on the number of adult ads posted to the site in February, and the fee of $10 for an initial post and $5 for repeat advertisements. Craigslist is known for being guarded about its operations and finances and CEO James Buckmaster declined to confirm the projections to the New York Times. Buckmaster also refused to tell the Times whether it would donate profits from the adult section to charity. Craigslist used to guarantee such donations, but all that changed after the company was strong-armed into instituting stricter human-monitoring of explicit ads and, as a result, upped posting fees and began calling the section "adult services" instead of "erotic services." That isn't to say that the company is no longer donating the proceeds, it just isn't making any promises.

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However, you're a lot more likely to be able to grab a Death Ride ticket than you are an IOU. I went to Craigslist and found only two parties interested in purchasing California IOUs and no one willing to sell. I also found a message from a Bloomberg News reporter who wanted to take a picture of someone who had received an IOU.

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I have a relatively minor problem, but given how frequently it eats at me, I've decided it's time to address it.

I've been dating this guy for a few months now. I met him online, of all stupid things, in the Strictly Platonic section of Craigslist because I was new to the area and wanted somebody to hang out with. This is relevant because he didn't know what I looked like when we started e-mailing, and we were friends for about four months before any sort of romance emerged.

This guy and I get along famously. We have a similar sense of warped humor, and damn it, we have fun together. The problem is that before anything romantic happened between us, he told me he didn't like blonde girls, or redheads either, for that matter, and that he was really only attracted to brunettes -- dark brunettes, with dark brown hair and matching dark features.

Do I have dark hair? No. I have strawberry blonde hair and light green eyes.

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The Smoking Gun

Amber and Brandon Herbert

Last week I discussed the plight of Robert Salisbury, a fellow in Oregon who came home to find loads of people stealing his stuff. When he confronted the looters, they pointed to print-outs of an ad they'd seen on Craigslist -- the ad said that the occupants at Salisbury's address had had to leave the state and that everything in the house, including the horse, were free for the taking.

At first authorities suspected that this was some kind of revenge attack. Last year Laurie Raye, a woman in Tacoma, Wash., suffered a similar fate. Officials later tracked the phony post to Raye's malicious niece.

But the recent plot in Oregon turned out to be much more devious, in a "Pink Panther" sort of way.

The perpetrators, police say, were a married couple, Amber and Brandon Herbert, aged 28 and 29.

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According to the Star Tribune, Katherine Ann Olson, a 24-year-old actress, had found nanny jobs several times on CL. She was last seen alive by her friends on Thursday morning on her way to meet a man about a job.

Late on Friday night, police found her car at a park in nearby Burnsville, Minn.; her body was found in the trunk.

Authorities later arrested a 19-year-old man whom they say placed the Craigslist ad. Savage police Capt. David Muelken told reporters, "We're confident we have the suspect in custody."

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Gurwitz's efforts highlight a new phenomenon in post-disaster charitable giving: highly specific in-kind donations, guided by the information available on the Internet and sent directly to local agencies or entities. Aid organizations discourage in-kind donations because they create logistical problems and are not always appropriate or needed. But with the Internet, someone who wants to donate, say, food or clothing instead of writing a check can find out who needs what and send it directly to them. And as sites like Craigslist show with their profusion of offers to help, the Internet may also be attracting new donors, or enabling existing donors to give in new and creative ways. Call it connected giving.

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