Given the popularity of the after-school program, in which Daly introduced a countdown of hit music videos and interviewed musicians, all while tweenage girls shrieked in the studio, the joke was lost on no one. Amid the candy-colored universe of Britney videos, girls who wanted to meet Justin so bad, and in-studio Mariah breakdowns, the stolid host seemed ... well ... a bit dull.

Maybe there's a reason why vanilla is such a popular flavor. Carson Daly -- a massive tool, we all agree -- is the MTV star who survived. Sure, you probably don't watch his late-late-night talk show "Last Call." But somebody does: It was recently renewed for a 13th season. He's the host NBC turns to on New Year's Eve, to counter first Dick Clark and now Ryan Seacrest on ABC. When speculation grew that Matt Lauer was on the outs on "Today," Daly's name not only made the list of potential replacements, but he seemed to be trying out, subbing for Willie Geist during the 9 a.m. hour and joining the panel of "Today's Professionals."

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The tweet is a blunt method of getting the point across. It comes after an even more sharply worded retraction of a Kurtz column that claimed newly out-of-the-closet NBA athlete Jason Collins never mentioned his fiancée in his Sports Illustrated confessional essay. (Collins did mention the fiancée.) Kurtz went on to attempt to clarify his misreading in a manner that only muddied the waters, claiming Collins "downplayed" his past relationships with women and had misled readers about his relationship -- something fairly beyond the scope of the Collins article, and untrue besides.

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And yet there's an audience Collins may have to work to win over -- gay writers, who have been taking him to task since he came out.

Bloomberg View's Josh Barro, for instance, implies that Collins, who is in the twilight of his career at 34, has been dragging his feet and shirking "an obligation to lead" for years:

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"I’d just be like, 'Wait a second, there’s no rules that anyone’s asking me to follow. No one’s checking in with me.'"

Part of Badgley's liberation in playing Buckley came from the fact that there wasn't any input from the Buckley estate. "Greetings From Tim Buckley," which takes place before Buckley's rise to fame and premature death (by drowning, at 30), does not use any of Buckley's music; the filmmakers did not obtain the rights to his music. Indeed, a competing Buckley biopic titled "Mystery White Boy," endorsed by Buckley's mother, Mary Guibert, and set to star "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark" stage actor Reeve Carney, is in development at present.

Guibert has been a gatekeeper for Buckley's legacy on film, rejecting proposed projects about her son both for being too truthful and not truthful enough.

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The show, which features a slowly dwindling group of female impersonators fighting for RuPaul's approval, has traditionally determined eliminations and winners on the basis of its judges' whims. However, RuPaul asked viewers to show their support for finalists Roxxxy Andrews, Jinkx Monsoon, or Alaska by retweeting, commenting on Facebook and Instagram, and reblogging on Tumblr.

It's a novel way to help determine a winner -- judging won't just be based on how the queens did on the runway but how their personalities came across to those watching at home. ("Ru has not made his final decision" but will be informed by the queens' popularity, a Logo representative said via email.) And it's one that's shown results for the small cable network Logo, whose representatives boasted in an email to Salon that they had received 60,000 Facebook comments and 15,000 retweets.

"The queens have no knowledge of what’s headed their way as the season unfolds," wrote a Logo representative. "They didn’t see it coming or have prior knowledge."

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Marc Maron has become one of the most successful among the vanguard of podcasters; his show "WTF," in which he interviews comics and entertainers including Amy Poehler, Conan O'Brien and Fiona Apple, has built Maron an enviable public persona since the show's launch in 2009. He was even named one of Salon's "Sexiest Men" in 2011.

The show averages 230,000 listeners per episode, according to online syndicator PRX, but has the power to move the culture, as when comic Todd Glass came out in a meandering, compelling fashion or when Louis C.K. talked about his tense, rivalrous friendship with the host.

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That's one of the central questions in the ongoing investigation of the bombings at the Boston Marathon. Ms. Tsarnaeva was the wife of the late Tamerlan Tsarnaev and sister-in-law to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the respective suspects 1 and 2 in the case.

But unlike the Tsarnaev brothers, she is a New England native and a convert to Islam, and by all appearances a devout one; she has recently been photographed leaving her parents' Rhode Island home in the traditional hijab.

According to her attorneys, Tsarnaeva is fully cooperating with the investigation into the incidents in Boston; she had been the subject of federal scrutiny once authorities became aware Tamerlan Tsarnaev was married.

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Britney Spears, in 2007 and early 2008, was notable not merely for a particular sort of aimless wandering through Los Angeles but for an alternately hostile and coddling relationship with the press. She'd alternately romance a paparazzo and scream at the cameras who followed her around. An Allure magazine cover from the period, for which Spears consented to be photographed but not interviewed, said it all: "Britney Spears Tells Us Nothing -- and Everything."

Spears and the paparazzi, as documented in Rolling Stone and the Atlantic, had a symbiotic relationship. She rejected and sought their attention, all at once, on days-long, caffeinated drives to nowhere. But by now, with a return to apparent health and two albums and a season of TV under her belt, Spears is no longer the object of prurient interest she'd once been.

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The author of bestsellers including "Along Came a Spider" and "Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas" currently occupies spots on four different New York Times bestseller lists with three discrete books. (Those would be "Alex Cross, Run"; "Now You See Her," written with Michael Ledwidge; and "I, Michael Bennett," written with Ledwidge also.)

Despite his success in a strain of genre fiction not often recommended in classrooms, Patterson has become, suddenly, the closest thing the publishing industry has to an ambassador. The multimillion-seller author placed an ad last weekend in the New York Times Book Review and in Publishers Weekly (depicted below) advocating for government intervention -- the same sort of bailout Goldman got -- in order to save an industry besieged by bookstore closings and consolidation of the few remaining major publishing houses.

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The film was laborious to complete: Rushdie told Salon that the process of getting around protestors motivated by his since-ended fatwa from Iran's Ayatollah made him feel "like the end of 'Argo'" when he finally departed the Sri Lanka set. The struggle was ironic, considering that "Midnight's Children" tells an allegorical story of the birth of India, and the eventual strife between Hindu and Muslim on the subcontinent.

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Next to nothing, aside from supposition and close-reading of Tweets, is known as yet about the possible motivations of the suspected bombers.

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Kanno-Youngs, who attended Cambridge Rindge and Latin School with Tsarnaev in the class of 2011, said that he'd seen the photo of the suspect circulated by the FBI, but "even if the thought crossed my mind, it didn't ring an alarm. It was too blurry, I thought it could never be."

The Globe intern said that Tsarnaev never discussed politics, and that he was "one of the most peaceful religious people I know." Kanno-Youngs even had reached out to warn Tsarnaev after seeing the FBI photos "just to say be careful because these people might try and think it was you."

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CNN identifies the feed as Tsarnaev's.

Since the bombings on Monday, Tsarnaev or an impostor has been tweeting vaguely taunting ripostes, including a rebuttal to a story about a victim of the bombing: "fake story."

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Before the attacks, the account's operator tweeted random thoughts about "Game of Thrones" and "Breaking Bad" as well as a message about media conditioning:

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In January, he apparently encouraged those who were thinking about committing suicide to do so.

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National awareness of last night's events in the Boston area began with shots fired on the MIT campus at approximately 10:20 p.m.

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A police officer at that Cambridge university died and is believed to have been shot by the suspects.

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The "white hat suspect" had, immediately previously, robbed a nearby 7-11.

Subsequently, the pair of suspected bombers carjacked a Mercedes, but dropped its owner off alive at a gas station.

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Followed by the police by car, the suspects threw explosives and exchanged gunfire in the streets of Watertown, Mass.

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Col Allan's statement reads:

We stand by our story. The image was emailed to law enforcement agencies yesterday afternoon seeking information about these men, as our story reported. We did not identify them as suspects.

Update, 2:28 p.m.: The New York Post has published a story indicating that the two young men are not suspects:

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One problem: They're not actually the suspects.

That's what CBS's John Miller stated this morning. CBS News was one of the outlets, unlike CNN, the AP and Fox News, that did not report an arrest during yesterday's flurry of misinformation; the Post, meanwhile, has been pilloried for its reporting in the immediate aftermath of the bombing, including its claim that 12 had died.

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"No one who does this in a breaking news environment has not had this happen. You feel that you've let down the organization and the audience. It is a very difficult moment."

Brown, who is now a professor at Arizona State University, told Salon that his students had asked about the King reporting throughout the day. "I told them it never would have happened this badly on my watch," he joked, before turning serious. "The role of the anchor is to say: This is true. And these things are very chaotic. [CNN should have indicated] 'What we can say for sure is that the case moved significantly today." Brown suggested that King and NBC News' Pete Williams were using sources from entirely different spheres, with Williams operating with federal sources in Washington, while "my guess is that [King] was getting stuff from local or law enforcement or courthouse people; his sources were state people."

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This scoop was credited to CNN reporter John King, who, as of this writing, is not on air. Less than an hour later, CNN declared there had been an arrest.

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Other news outlets chased CNN, with the Associated Press and Fox News reporting a similar story shortly after 1 p.m. in each case.

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But by 1:43, CNN had cited the Department of Justice and Boston Police Department in their claim that no arrest was made.

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CNN's tweets about the events in Boston today link to a liveblog whose URL ends "source-arrest-made-in-boston-bombing/." King's reporting for CNN, preserved in the liveblog, indicates that the police "identified a suspect based on an analysis of video from a Lord & Taylor department store near the site of the second blast, and that video from a Boston TV station also helped."

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