Many comedians could really be such a nice young man if they'd only cut it out with the dirty talk and the swears.

Between the hours of 5 and 6PM on the eighth day of his anti-terror torture spree, pretend CIA Agent Jack Bauer will be ordered to stand down from your TV set. What should he do next?

Billionaire Richard Lugner—Austria's prince of nouveau riche—pays an estimated $150K each year for a celebrity escort to the Vienna Opera Ball. Lindsay Lohan landed this year's gig—but apparently bungled the details so badly, Lugner said das fuggedaboudit.

Malcolm Gladwell's next big New Yorker piece is on news reporting. Notes the Outliers author: "You can't start blogging at 23 and call yourself a journalist." Nah, you do that when you're 40 and creepy. [E & P Pub]

New Yorker classical music critic Alex Ross as career case study for the youngsters: "Ross started writing freelance reviews for Fanfare, a classical music magazine, which paid him $2 for each review.... Eventually, Mr. Ross says, he got a piece in The New Republic.... [TNR literary editor Leon] Wieseltier helped Ross get hired by The New York Times in 1992 as a 24-year-old stringer, writing about classical music for the culture desk. He was paid $80 for each piece (and people complain about The Times' stinginess today!). 'Of course, I was only paying $675 a month in rent,' he said. While at The Times, Mr. Ross got his first piece in The New Yorker. 'Louis Menand and Adam Gopnik were culture editors at the time, and they had been reading my pieces in The Times,' he explained. 'I wrote one piece a year for four years'—including the obituary for Kurt Cobain, because the magazine didn't have a popular music critic on staff. He was hired as the magazine's classical music critic in 1996."