By now we've all agreed that Vanessa on 'Gossip Girl' is beyond annoying. Like, back off, sister! Give Serena and Dan the space they need. God. But the thing that most confounds us about this underminer? Her wack clothes. As New York's Fiona Byrne puts it, "What exactly is Vanessa's deal? Why does she dress like an extra from a New Kids on the Block video?" Well,
we've got an answer now, straight from the mouth of Jessica Szohr, who plays V. "In the book, Vanessa was very gothic, always in black, with piercings and when we started the show, they wanted to make her kind of Lower East Side ... tight skinny jeans, high-tops, and things like that," Szohr explained. "I had just moved here so I wasn't aware of the neighborhoods, so when I was doing homework for my character, I went to the Lower East Side." Ah.

This week's New York Times Modern Love column is by Thomas Anthony Donahoe, who donated to a Boston-area sperm bank "30 to 40 times over a couple of years." Now, surprise, he's got kids appearing left and right. It's full of circuitous locutions and meaningless extraneous details like "A young waitress with a soft-spoken accent (Portuguese, I think) briskly delivered us cups of coffee." He also talks about how he doesn't want his college-age sperm-donee kid to know that he made a living, basically, from donating sperm. Guess what? Now he does, because you wrote about it in the New York Times! "The nurse at the donation center said my recipients showed positive inseminations," Thomas discloses toward the end of the article. Awesome! If indeed Thomas "made" this first kid "what he is"—and we're sure that bit of biological b.s. got the kid's lesbian moms all riled—then we're gonna pass on the kid's inevitable, terrible memoir.