But it's cool. It was worth it.

Let me back up a bit. The email that I sent to those applicants included a list of 42 job application dos-and-don'ts that I wrote after seeing so many different people make the same mistakes. It was frustrating to see people unknowingly sabotage their chances of finding work by making easily avoidable errors. So I wrote my email and sent it to all of the applicants. My list contains mostly common sense things like “check your spelling” and “don't talk badly about your current or past employer.” (You can read the entire thing here.)

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Why "American Pie," when it's a song about a dying era? Who knows? I would have gone with "We're Not Gonna Take It" or "Lust for Life." But more importantly, Newsweek has responded to this video via Facebook, claiming it had nothing to do with the article:

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See, I have no problem with tearing apart Bristol about her role as an abstinence-only spokesperson when it's rife with hypocrisy; after all, didn't Bristol say after she had Tripp that she thought not having sex was unrealistic? But as far as I know, Bristol has never said anything about opposing plastic surgery. She isn't running for office or preparing to do any more TV shows, making her especially undeserving of the intense, mean-spirited media firestorm that envelops actresses when we start to wonder if their nose is looking a little more button-y.

Sure, it's hard to look away from the noticeable differences in Bristol's face. But as a Gawker commenter pointed out, the same outlets that called her fat eight months ago, when she was on "Dancing With the Stars," are now accusing her of having surgery. Go figure: During the week we kill bin Laden, it only takes four days until the Palins' minutiae starts dominating the news cycle again.

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We can argue over whether Lee actually needed to quit, but what was really striking about the drama  -- besides the lightning-fast speed at which it all played out -- was the way Gawker itself chose to justify its scoop, in the eighth paragraph of writer Maureen O'Connor's report:

Yesterday, we reached out to Rep. Lee, whose support for "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and vote to reject federal abortion funding suggests a certain comfort with publicly scrutinizing others' sex lives.

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Twitter said Monday that hackers broke into an unspecified number of accounts and sent spam promoting acai berry drinks. Twitter says the passwords came from an earlier breach at Gawker Media, which runs Gawker, Gizmodo and other technology and media sites. People who used the same passwords for both sites were vulnerable.

Twitter says it doesn't know how many of its 175 million users were affected. It says it proactively reset passwords it suspects were compromised. Twitter says only a small number of accounts were affected.

Attacks on social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook are popular because people are more inclined to click on links appearing from friends, rather than e-mail spam.

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In case you didn’t know, Assange is the Australian computer programmer behind WikiLeaks, a massive — and massively successful — effort to disclose secret or classified information. In a series of recent dumps, he unveiled thousands upon thousands of classified documents from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Military and other government officials insist that WikiLeaks is doing serious damage to American national security and is going to get people killed, including brave Iraqis and Afghans who’ve risked their lives and the lives of their families to help us.

Even Assange agrees. He told the New Yorker earlier this year that he fully understands innocent people might die as a result of the “collateral damage” of his work and that WikiLeaks may have “blood on our hands.” WikiLeaks is easily among the most significant and well-publicized breaches of American national security since the Rosenbergs gave the Soviets the bomb.

So again, I ask: Why wasn’t Assange garroted in his hotel room years ago?

It’s a serious question.

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A long, and convincing, post by Steve Jobs explaining why Apple is determined to destroy the Flash format.

An interesting and informative look at some of the legal issues pertaining to Gizmodo's iPhone prototype caper. I was particularly intrigued by the difference between "information" and physical "goods."

But the shield law in particular makes a clear distinction between receiving goods and receiving information. Information is protected, regardless of how it was obtained, but goods are not. Says Lawrence, "We're talking about accepting an actual device, a cellphone. If you look at it as an object, as someone's phone, then Jason Chen and the publication are trafficking in stolen goods. But if you look at it not as a phone but as a collection of information about Apple and Apple's marketing plan, it becomes newsworthy and thus protected. That's what makes this case so interesting."

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In 2000, Brown was sued by Jennifer Firth, who was then serving on the Wrentham, Mass. Board of Selectmen, a position Brown had held earlier. In the suit, Firth said that she'd volunteered on Brown's campaign for the state Senate, and that during her work for him, he'd harassed her. Afterwards, she said, he had defamed her, telling law enforcement and others that she'd sent him anonymous hate mail.

It's strange, Nolan writes, that these allegations never came up during this year's special election, when Brown beat Democrat Martha Coakley to take over Sen. Ted Kennedy's old seat.

"[W]hy did Democrats and members of the national press fail to even bring up the fact that Scott Brown had once been accused of sexual harassment and defamation in the myriad stories about him prior to Massachusetts' special election in January?" Nolan asks in his post.

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Ever since the news broke that former Gawker editor Emily Gould would be writing the cover story for this weekend's New York Times magazine, he and I had been sharpening our knives. It has never been clear to me how much people outside the media world know, or care, about the personalities of Gawker, but for those of us toiling away in this insular, navel-gazing industry, complaining about Gawker is its own sport. It's fun! Leave us our few pleasures! Yes, it's wrong to cast stones, but Emily Gould keeps handing us all these fine, weighty rocks: There was her appearance on "Larry King Live," where she eye-rolled her way through an interview with guest host Jimmy Kimmel; there was her incomprehensible, embarrassingly overreaching kiss-off on the site itself; there was her Web site, Heartbreak Soup, chock-full of overheated prose; oh, and someone fucked someone else, and there was a big story about it all, and I totally forgot to care. All of which is to say that when I saw the cover of the magazine -- the beautiful, vulnerable, damaged Gould spilled across a disheveled bed, power cord curled like a tourniquet beside her tattooed arm (Elizabeth Wurtzel for the millennial age!) -- I gagged. I gagged on my own gagging.

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But anonymity is never really the sociopath's goal, least of all now, when the mentally unstable have the media savvy to know how to get their message across, whether they're marching into Hillary Clinton's campaign office with fake explosives taped to their chests or mailing detailed videotaped tomes to the appropriate department at NBC News in order to clarify the nuances of their upcoming suicidal killing spree.

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On-screen, Schaeffer, a native New Yorker, has tried to style himself as a Woody Allen-ish figure, though his creepy-crawly persona is more paranoid and kinky than Allen's (and substantially less funny). Schaeffer's characters -- all full of pseudo-spiritual romantic heehaw, and affected, self-conscious tics -- have tended closer to bone-chilling than endearing.

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What's the most upsetting thing here? That there are video games based on witch trials? Sure, that's bad -- the inherent misogyny of characterizing women as witches is uncomfortably Salem-circa-1692.

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Because the tone here is light and no such project would ever actually get off the ground (even if they went ahead with it, they'd likely run into reluctance on the part of most women), this isn't worth a big overreaction. But the notion that menstruation, synchronized or otherwise, is incompatible with a serene work environment deserves to be discredited. Presenting the period as a liability just helps marginalize women, and creating an office- or industry-wide menstrual calendar should become a priority around the same time that someone undertakes a comparably gross-out project like keeping track of male workers' bald spots or sexual function. Gawker wonders, "If creating a calendar is in fact possible, would doing so represent an egregiously lowbrow and disgusting exploitation of men's fascination with a biological process that, if they experienced it themselves just once in their cramp-free lives, they would never want anything to do with again?" I submit a resounding yes!

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Robert Lucas manages the family's building and told the Post, "We've heard about a missing girl in Aruba for years. But has The New York Times ever been here? Has CNN?" When asked about the role of race in the slow media pick-up on Chanel's murder, her mother said, "I've wondered about that."

Gawker congratulated the column for its boldness, particularly considering that the Post "covers bad things happening to pretty women with laser-like intensity." Whether Peyser's insight will penetrate the higher editorial ranks at the Post in any permanent way is yet to be seen. But, as Gawker suggests, "Peyser should be congratulated for using her column to point out the mainstream media's lack of interest in victims of color, as should the Post."

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Louis Vuitton, Louis Vuitton,
Mulberry, Mulberry?
Nappy bag dilemma  Lulu, Kate or Anya?
Shopping spree, buy all three.

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The Post, which traditionally makes cover girls of beautiful, wholesome, young, white murder victims (not so much old, ugly or black ones), on Monday plastered its front with an image of Catherine Woods, under the headline "Beauty Slain." The Post called Woods, who was stabbed to death in her apartment, "an aspiring Broadway dancer." The inside story acknowledged that her boyfriend "told cops she was an exotic dancer" but also her parents' counterclaim that their "beautiful 21-year-old daughter was a dancer who had appeared in an off-Broadway production called 'Privilege.'"

Those eagle-eyed kids at Gawker noticed that the News treated the story a bit differently, outright reporting that Woods was a "topless dancer" at Flash Dancers, though some club managers told the paper she had never worked there. Unsurprisingly, Woods did not appear on the cover of the Daily News.

Because it's not as important when strippers die.

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