1. English mutates as NBC trims all blurbs down to three words. It's the Friends-enthusiast attention span limit.
2. Songs To Wear Pants To: odd music written by a fellow named Andrew, tooled to your specifications.
3. Product placements coming for magazines: look for Larissa MacFarquhar enjoying a frosty Coke in her next 8000-word profile.
4. On his cracked-out architecture tour of the overpaid and over-rated, NYT architecture critic Herbert Muschamp goes into a swoon for Diller + Scofidio (and their mysterious new partner, "Renfro.")
5. If you'd like to know the first name of the heroine of Kill Bill — it was bleeped throughout the first film — it appears in the first paragraph of David Denby's New Yorker review, without so much as a spoiler warning.
6. Installment three of the dispatches from Gary Bentley, a 22-year-old rock loser from upstate New York, settling, with difficulty, in Manhattan.