· Literary novelists are beginning to confront 9/11. Finally! Actually, like this matters 99.9% of the adult reading population. C'mon, people: Vin Diesel had the number one movie this weekend. Vin fucking Diesel! We could fit the entire "literary fiction" reading audience in our kitchen and still have room left over for history's great Jewish basketball players. [NYT]
· Stop us if you've heard this one: A blogger walks into a White House briefing. "Ouch!" [Wonkette]
· A Florida prison approves letting prisoners read USA Today. Way to keep 'em ignorant yet sort of vaguely upbeat. But how are corrections officials gonna be able to use HipClicks to punish problem inmates now? [The Ledger]
· Were 80's ax-man Vito Bratta and Radar editor Maer Roshan separated at birth? [Panopticist]

· Our crazy sister site thinks she might know the Pulitzer Finalists. Let's hope the little birdies who told her are different from those Exit Poll birdies. Those birdies sucked. [Wonkette]
· Gosh, no one seems to have found the NYPress' Pope cover story funny. [Lowdown]
· Our brother site looks at what W might think of Lindsay Lohan. He calls it unfortunate juxtaposition; in New York, we call it subtext, 'cause we're pretentious snobs. [Defamer]
· Folio looks at Vice. Sounds like a good magazine. Wish we'd heard of it sooner. [Folio]

· Ari Fleischer: The man so dull, TIME snoozed on his interview. [Wonkette]
· How do you punish Armstrong Williams for taking cash to write government propaganda? By giving him a new gig on the radio, of course. [NYT]
· Adam Penenberg on the annoyance of pop-up ads. Luckily, we don't have to deal with this problem because we don't read pop-up books. [Wired]
· Martha Stewart's exit from prison will be a classy, private affair for her family and close intimates. And a flatbed truck for the fleet of reporters present. [Money, CNN]

· Spoiler Alert! The Daily Show with Jon Stewart's Rob Corddry does something funny and gets caught by so called 'real' journalists who rat him out. These people are truly shameless. [Newsday]
· Not everyone's happy about John Tierney's latest gig. [CJR]
· Garrett M. Graff tries to get White House press credentials but gets the old Heisman instead. Who's a guy gotta sleep with in the GOP to get a damn press pass? [FishBowlDC]
· God is Robert Novak's co-writer. The bad god. [WaPo]

· This is the Boondocks cartoon dropped by The Chicago Tribune today. Apparently they were upset that it was a one-panel instead of the traditional three. [Ucomics]
· Can you believe the amazing revelations in Ken Auletta's New Yorker article on CBS? Neither can we: for some reason, it ain't online. [NYer]
· Are you ready for Cookie, the new "upscale lifestyle magazine for sophisticated parents"? We're ready for the spate of trend articles headlined "Cookie Monsters" all about the well-dressed million dollar babies featured in the magazine. We're also ready for the business stories headlined "Cookie Crumbles" when Si Newhouse pulls the plug. [Reuters]
· How to get a gig writing for Los Angeles-area glossies without really trying. [FishBowlLA]

· Talon News, the rightwing news site that brought the world Jeff Gannon/James Guckert goes dark. Now we'll never find out the end of their important series on which gay Democrats are also child molesting Communists. [E&P]
· Chris Rock is the William F. Buckley of comedy? Kind of a stretch. Then again, in a piece on Buckley and The National Review from the July 1989 issue of SPY, Bob Mack recounted the following Rockian riff by the old man of the Right: "In November 1986 NR ran a cover story, 'Black and the G.O.P: Just Called to Say I Love You,' that outlined possible GOP stategies for attracting black voters. Presiding over the traditional post-issue recap, Buckley quipped, 'Maybe it should've been titled "Just Called to Say I Love You, Niggah."'" [Slate]
· US Weekly's Ken Baker helpfully forwards our brother site's content to Paris Hilton's hacked Sidekick in the same way we send our own posts to our grandmas. [im.a.hacker.la, via Defamer]
· America almost, like, stands by its ideals: Judge rules The Times can protect its phone records. [AP, Yahoo]

· Times writers obsessively check the 'most emailed' articles list on nytimes.com to bolster their fragile self-esteem. Can't they get their affirmation the old fashioned way: from their mommies? [NYO, fourth item]

· Perhaps paraphrasing Lloyd Bridges in the Airplane! series, Times editor Bill Keller says "This is not a time when editors swear off alcohol. [Columbia Spectator]

· Coming soon to your cell phone: Scott Turow? [NYT]

· Yet another chat with James Truman, the man who gave up a job with "a reputed $2m yearly salary, a town-car on 24-hour call, a lifestyle largely picked up on expenses, and imbued him with the power of a cultural seer in city dazzled by the sheen of glamour that Cond Nast confers, it was courageous to give it up." Yes, but his accepting a job as volunteer at a Leper colony? Now that is courageous. [The Independent]

· Okay, this Judith Miller thing has gone too far. Remember this phrase, 'cause your kids are gonna read it in their history textbooks and ask you why the world was so fucked up before they were born: "There is no First Amendment privilege protecting the evidence sought." [AFP, Yahoo]

· Rolling Stone looks at Sinclair Broadcast Group, and reveals "in the firmament of right-wing media outlets, Sinclair stands somewhere to the right of Fox News." It's still too liberal to land an on-air with the president. [RS]

· How Home Land author Sam Lipsyte overcame harsh rejection. By publishers. [NYO]

· Did The Times suppress a report on Bush's debate night bulge? [FAIR]

· Times' Hollywood reporter, author, and nice Jewish girl Sharon Waxman is profiled by The Forward. [Forward]

· Bernie Weinraub was in Hollywood so long, the indigenous art of lifting and remixing other people's work seems to have rubbed off on him. Tom Scocca compares Weinraub's recent farewell feature to Russell Baker's from 1998. [NYO, 2nd item]

· Those darn "NBC types" are so easily upset by what they perceive to be conflicts of interest in The Washington Post. [Lowdown]

· To hell with "sensitivity": Harper's reprints an article from 1890 (when Lewis Lapham was just an associate editor) about Nasr'-ed-Din El Khojah, the Muslim world's top comedian. [Harper's]

· Jay Rosen on the Blogging, Journalism & Credibility conference at Harvard. [PressThink]

· Max Boot is so off Sy Hersh's Christmas card list [LA Times]