In honor of Emdashes' new bloggy feature in which reader questions will be answered by real! live! New Yorker staff members, we asked you to voice some of your more pressing queries. A list of your need-to-know issues:

So we caught up with our old college friend Ben while we were on vacation last week, and he excitedly informed us they'd he'd recently made it onto Overheard in New York. He'd been in New York and hadn't called? No, Ben explained, it was actually Brian's story; Ben thought it would be good for Overheard and so submitted it. Brian lives in New York now? No, Ben continued, Brian lives in Florida. So how did Brian's story, not-actually-overheard in Florida by Ben, make it onto Overheard in New York. "Oh, said I heard it in Central Park." Ben smiled.

Emily Gordon of EmDashes has roped two anonymous New Yorker staff members into participating in a Q&A with her readers:

As the nation revels in the ongoing delight that is World Cup soccer (yay! rah! is it still going on?), blogstress and comedienne Susie Felber nips into one of the writery/soccery blogs that has popped up, The New Republic's "Goal Post: Franklin Foer and Friends on the World Cup." Susie explains that she was led to the site by a spam from TNR, which promised:

Love Foreign Policy but wish it were published with more frequency? Good news! The folks at Washingtonpost. Newsweek Interactive have plans for a new "collaborative blog" called PostGlobal, where twice weekly, according to Editor & Publisher:

The HuffPo's virgin media blog Eat the Press has an entertaining new time-waster: the People Ranker, which charts the levels of buzz in the blogosphere. Just enter a string of names, and the fun little gizmo spits out popularity contest-style results. We love it — it's so much easier to be snotty and judgmental when you have concrete data.

• Times Baghdad bureau likes 'em young; Times Mag editor Gerry Marzorati likes 'em late-30-something and in business. [NYO]
• And James Wolcott likes 'em monocled and on a compiliation DVD set. [New Criterion]
• Seth Mnookin says Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown is a plagiarist, if not necessarily by the legal definition. Brown says Mnookin is a pain in his ass, if not necessarily by the legal definition. [NYT]
• Huffington Post launches a media blog, "Eat the Press." Clever, eh? [HuffPost]
• Laddie McLadlad Greg Gutfeld also launches a blog, "The Daily Gut." Clever, eh? [Jossip]

We're not particularly Hamptonites, and in fact we really enjoyed our lovely weekend in the city. But we still found ourselves a touch curious about how the first big vacation weekend went out on the East End. Good thing, it occurred to us, that there's a spiffy new blog to tell us about all what goes on out there on the fabulous weekends of the summer season.

• Just in time for the long weekend, it's a Paris Hilton nip slip. Personally, we find the footage of her writhing around in the sand, trying so hard to be sexy for her new video, to be far more comical than stupid ol' areola. [TMZ]
• And yet again, another exploration that blogging and menial desk jobs do not always mix. Thanks, we think everyone's got it now. [NYT]
• Jeff Koons brings his sculptural magic to the park at 7 World Trade Center; we don't care if balloon flower sculptures have been all over the place, there's still something about it that just looks dirty. [Animal]
• Kaavya Viswanathan finally joins the ranks of JT Leroy and Go Ask Alice. [Wikipedia]
• The Morning News releases its 2006 Editors' Awards for Online Excellence. We're honored to be noted for our creepiness factor. [TMN]
• An ode to the hipsters whose time has most definitely passed. [Gazpachot]
• We write for everyone, even high school dropouts. [Muckraked]
• Another reason to love Frank Bruni: while on his grand fast-food tour, he got lost because his companion was reading Us Weekly aloud, distracting Bruni from the road and luring him into the world of Charlie and Denise. We've all been there, buddy. [Diner's Journal]

From The Superficial this morning:

• Leave no stone unblogged, Times launches one on New York politics, called Empire Zone. Catchy, eh? And it's even got video. [NYT]
• Philly group imminently set to buy Inquirer and Daily News from McClatchy. Unless they don't. [NYT]
• Who will public-edit the public editor? Tom Scocca, of course. [Media Mob/NYO]
• Newspapers acknowledge need to adapt to changing media landscape, express wonderment at newgfangled "horseless carriages." [AJR]
• CBS Public Eye stakes out controversial stance opposing what's-on-your-iPod-stories. See, Memogate never would have happened if only this important site had existed sooner. [CBSNews.com]

[Click to enlarge.]

• Ohmahgah, the NEW APPLE STORE WILL OPEN TOMORROW THANK YOU LORD STEVE! Curbed has a sneak peek inside the new 5th Avenue cube, and reportedly the cult leader himself will be present when the store opens. Now wipe that drool off your face and work on losing your virginity. [Apple Insider]
• The Daily Mirror reports that Brangelina have already cut a deal for their forthcoming baby, reportedly to the tune of $4.9 million, all to go to UNICEF. Assuming, for once, that the UK press isn't on crack, we're thinking People won this one. [LSE]
• Lindsay is Biggie, Paris is Tupac, Nicole is Diddy, Mary-Kate is Snoop Dogg...this could go on forever. [BWE]
• State Senator Ada Smith pretends she's Tony Soprano. [The Daily Politics]
• Off the blow (we think), Jay McInerney now has his appetite back. Watch him blog about it, then recoil in horror at his use of "Babbolicious." [H&G]
• ThursGay Styles does it again. [NYT]
• Yesterday we'd thought about making a Heather Mills/missing limb joke, but bit our tongues. It's reassuring to see that the Post, on the other hand, did not. [NYP]
• 10 Things I Hate About Commandments. [You Tube]
• Naomi Campbell takes her abusive parade to Dubai (hey, Vanity Fair said it was hot) for her birthday. She's supposedly rented 18 floors of the Burj al Arab hotel, and she'll be throwing shit on every single one of them. [Made in Brazil]

• Because it's clearly a matter of national import, Freakonomics tackles the issue of Britney Spears. The conclusion: car seats are kind of bad, but Britney's is downright dangerous. [Freakonomics]
• Master publicist Richard Edelman loves the bloggers. If you're not careful, he might snatch you away. [WSJ]
• For you forlorn fans of Arrested Development, there's a chance for happiness at the Bluth family estate sale. [The Real Estate]
• Former Rolling Stone publisher Steve Deluca has a tattoo on his penis. Do you actually want further details? Didn't think so. [Jossip]
• Desperate to save The Bachelor, ABC casts an inbred as the lead. [Popwatch]
• A brief study of trade mags and lazy art departments. [Fishbowl]
• Work for Jon Voight, if only for the chance to be near the man who helped make Brangelina. [Craigslist]

Last night's Publishers Lunch weekly roundup brought news of yet another prominent blogger's book deal:

It's been a year since Arianna Huffington launched The Huffington Post (and, of course, the same amount of time since noted media analyst Nikki Finke described the site as, "the sort of failure that is simply unsurvivable. Her blog is such a bomb that it's the movie equivalent of Gigli, Ishtar and Heaven's Gate rolled into one."). David Carr takes a look at HuffPo and finds the site to be an overwhelming success, proving that a model based on dodgy celebrities, no-name web-types, and the siblings of even-less impressive bloggers is certainly sustainable as long as you also provide a space for ineffectual lefties to rant in the comments against anyone who fails to share their blinkered, doctrinaire world view. Huffington takes a bit of stick for social climbing ("with the finesse of a ballerina and the ferocity of a fullback") but if your alternatives were hanging out with Peter Daou and Nick Denton, you'd be kissing Condi Rice's ass too. Carr concludes that Huffington "has introduced the sparkle of celebrity to the frat-house world of blogging," which is the best explanation we've seen so far for why reading Greg Gutfeld makes us feel like we've been date raped. Thanks, Arianna! We'd always wondered what the dude who does Mr. Burns' voice on "The Simpsons" thought about the Army Corps of Engineers; now we know!

• Lindsay Lohan admits to having an asscrack double on Saturday Night Live. Is nothing real anymore? Is nothing sacred? [Defamer]
• You know, we don't get fantasy sports leagues. Dudes check that shit every three minutes, and we don't have the heart to tell them that it's not real. But a fantasy celebrity league? That's about as real as it gets. [ESPN]
• Blogfight, resolved: Michael Malice runs back to Overheard in NY. [NY Overheard]
• Rebecca Traister spends way too much time figuring out why college boys are having erectile dyfunction problems. We have the answer in two words: coke cock. [Broadsheet]
• Abercrombie & Fitch will do just about anything to lure the Gays. [Consumerist]
• Oh, happy day: it's a socialite blog! Meet Melissa C. Morris, who has no problem marrying a man called Chappy. [Melissa C. Morris]
• One in seven of New York's east Asian immigrants is carrying Hepatitis B. Just something to think about when you start flirting with the locals at Winnie's. [NYT]

If you haven't been following the blog of insatiable archfiend of real estate, Barbara Corcoran, you really should. Purportedly written by a "mouse" hiding within her new offices (but clearly penned by some bored underling), it refers to the CorcoDevil as "blithely unaware" of what's going on around her and notes that she has a two-page list of things "she wants everyone else to fix." Our favorite, however, is today's item:

But the more I've thought about the subject and the more research I've done, the more I've realized that the print-vs.-online debate has become as much an outdated cliche as the old Ginger-vs.-Mary Ann barroom argument. Why choose? This is 2006 — why not just have a three-way?

• OH MY GOD IT'S SO FUCKING AMAZING OH YEAH TOM CRUISE! You, too, can experience the joy of Tom, by watching the live webcast of him walking into the movie theater at 7pm. [Yahoo]
• An ad agency sues a blogger for defamation. Sigh. [AdAge]
• We don't know how we missed the photos of Diane Von Furstenburg at Monday night's Costume Institute Ball, but we're really glad that we did. [Papierblog]
• Back when New York was listing its 123 reasons to love New York, they included a group of bright young things and predicted that at least one of them would be famous by 2010. Kaavya Viswanathan was in said group. How prescient. [NYM]
• In additional Kaavya digs, we're enjoying her July 2005 Times piece on her love of Harry Potter books. Has anyone thought to compare those texts to Opal Mehta? [NYT]
• People magazine keeps their racism subtle. [Jen Is Famous]
• Bonnie Fuller poses for the cover of Lifestyles magazine. And for the record, her face is frozen like that. [FishbowlNY]
• But at least the Bonnster's Toronto book party gave bloggers the chance to gorge themselves on chocolate-covered strawberries and mini-bruschetta. There's never too much when it comes to finger food! [OMG Blog]