Art show! Posing for a good mug shot is never easy. I say this from experience! They don't let you style your hair, and your makeup is usually confiscated by this point in the arrest process. (Try asking the cop to buy you a cup of coffee, then use the grounds as eyeliner.) If you're a celeb, you're going to want to look good: Los Angeles artist Rachel Schmeidler is turning celebrity mug shots into pop art, compiled at Hollywood's Most Wanted. It's been a busy year for her! [LA Times] Want to see a recent mug shot of reckless-driving Dawn Wells, aka Mary Ann from "Gilligan's Island"? Yeah you do.

In its new issue with Britney Spears on the cover, the Atlantic featured some oh-so-intellectual analysis of celebrity worship within a profile of the the founders of paparazzi firm X17, which is now online. The magazine also posted a trashier Web-only sidebar, in which the paps riffed on a series of their own photographs. Along the way, they mentioned how actress Nicole Kidman "really does have a unpleasant, grandmother-ish look," how singer Britney Spears "is being pumped full of drugs and that can affect her weight" and how actor Tom Cruise and wife Katie Holmes are "living inside the Scientology Center." You really have to read it for yourself, but here are some choice bits:

So The Atlantic's cover this month isn't on Iraq or subprime mortgages. It's on Britney Spears, you remember, that sweet girl from the "Hit Me Baby One More Time" video. The editors of The Atlantic don't think they're lowering their standards with the cover; they see themselves as covering an important story seriously (too bad Rolling Stone got there first). But really, there's no need to front. Britney Spears is the new weather: a topic we're all interested in. And if The Atlantic needs to put her on the cover to move issues, so be it. Just don't get so defensive about your identity crisis, guys!

The visual shortcut for celebs-in-philanthropy is Natalie Portman looking fresh-faced in a t-shirt — at least in Sunday's NYT Magazine article, "The Celebrity Solution." As PR man Howard Bragman puts it, "You can't just get $20 million a picture, you've got to serve turkeys to the poor, too." Our favorite part is the faux-naivete Portman adopts when explaining that her celebrity facilitates getting pet cause a meeting on Capitol Hill:

And she's telling her MySpace friends all about it! From the singer and Elvis daughter's latest post, titled "confirmation under the gun," she rails against "the media" for wildly speculating about her expanding belly and forcing her to confirm her pregnancy before she was ready: "They couldn't wait to find out if my weight gain was because I was just overeating, in which case It would be open season and they can do the old 'following in her fathers sad and unfortunate demise' story again. Or, less interesting for them, and probably much to their dismay, I could just be pregnant and therefore have a legitimate reason for weight gain at which point they should probably wipe the saliva off of their fangs and put them back in their mouths or they may expose the black little souls that they are." Tell us more, girl!

Large-headed, sensitive singer John Mayer is blogging again. Today, he gets a little meta ("I wouldn't traditionally take to a blog to explain a blog"), trying to explain the "Dear ex lover, please stop contacting me" post that has US Weekly conducting a poll about which famous ex he's talking about: Jessica Simpson? Cameron Diaz? Oh, it was a hypothetical letter, John explains.

The 150-year-old magazine the Atlantic, whose "influential and highly engaged readers turn to [it] for intellectual stimulation," has a very serious and brainy discussion of Britney Spears that necessitated her use on the cover, plus the word "Rabelaisian" inside the magazine. The Atlantic of course is just the most recent and highbrow magazine to take its cover downmarket in the pursuit of Serious Journalism; a somber Rolling Stone earlier this month did a big cover story on the "American Tragedy" of Britney Spears and, with a heavy heart, saw its website traffic double. New York magazine published a naked Lindsay Lohan in an artistic homage to Marilyn Monroe and melted its Web servers because it did not anticipate needing to deliver 20 million instances of art across the internet. For its part, the Atlantic intellectualized tabloid material by applying the term "gynophobic" to a Spears-related website comments section:

We report, you decide. This week in baby rumors, is Natasha Lyonne preggers? Last time we stalked caught up with our favorite crazee, she looked "clean, clear eyed and smiled a lot" with Chloe Seviggasygny. Now, our stalker says she has a bun in the oven. What do you think? Not is she pregnant, but SHOULD she be pregnant? What is in store for the baby, being the spawn of a celebrity? How much will Natasha get for the pics? Sighting after the jump.

Attached, Nicole Richie's million dollar baby. As in one-million dollars, the price paid by People for the exclusive. Holy buckets, you say—what an expensive baby! You, sir, are naive. This is the bargain baby! Shiloh Jolie-Pitt was worth $4m. Jennifer Lopez's new twins went for more than $3m each! (How awesome would it have been, actually, if Jennifer had sold one twin to People and the other to OK!?) Even Christina Aguilera's loser baby was worth $1.5! And once Angelina has this next phantom baby the photo will probably cost some outlet enough to publicly finance the presidential election. Or like ten minutes of Iraq! This is the business model that will save the magazine industry. And keep our celebrities the way we like them: pregnant and complicit in the exploitation of their families. [Related]

Maybe you thought you were going to Parsons design school to take pictures like Annie Leibovitz or make paintings like Jackson Pollock or whatever, but the joke is on you, hipster, because when you get there and settle in to your first class all of a sudden everyone will be talking about making internet sex tapes or maybe their fake 90-day suicide plan or titillating their way to cable news punditry, and it will be all be part of the curriculum. In a crumbling America that can't actually make anything except narcissistic "reality" entertainment, Parsons has taken the ingenious step of launching a class where grades are determined by internet fame. Professor Jamie Wilkinson even created proprietary software to track attention by monitoring not just traffic but also Twitter and blog posts, response videos and friend requests (our boss is already salivating). When does Julia Allison get to move into her new Parsons wing and endowed chair? Aspiring Web hottie Sarah Meyers's video about the horrifying future of education, after the jump.

First Chelsea Clinton left a nine-year-old Scholastic News reporter "crestfallen" by stonewalling her interview request, saying, "I don't talk to the press, and that applies to you." Around the same time, Chelsea's mom Hillary attacked Democratic presidential opponent Barack Obama for statements he made while in kindergarten. Now Gary Busey has taken child pundit abuse to new extremes, playing serious hardball with an 11-year-old StarzLife reporter outside the Oscar after-party of the United Nations Children's Foundation. According to StarzLife, "a'Busey" was "visibly intoxicated," yanked away the camera from the reporter and "proceeded to bend down and spit-yell right to the little girl's face." Busey has already apologized to his idol Ryan Seacrest for behavior earlier in the evening, but given that child reporters now get about as much respect as paparazzi, StarzLife wisely decided to just post the whole thing to YouTube and move on to the next belligerent public figure:

Britney Spears' new baby will no doubt be the first to auction its own "inside the uterus" exclusive photo deal if the tabloid Star is correct that her paparazzo boyfriend Adnan Ghalib is bragging about having knocked her up. First Ghalib supposedly married Spears in a secret Mexico ceremony, then Spears appeared in public with some kind of tummy bulge and now Adnan is said to be "made for life" due to the supposed pregnancy. The whole thing sounds insane, given that Spears was carrying a pack of cigarettes in the tummy bulge photo and that Ghalib has approximately 50 million reasons to prolong his relationship with Spears and avoid pissing her off by blabbing like this. "Insane," of course, means "entirely plausible" when you're talking about Britney Spears.

The record companies are total geniuses when it comes exploiting the internet, and one of them, Warner Brothers, has discovered an "Internet Blog" run by this fellow named Perez Hilton who is huge with the kids, apparently. He took two bands you had never heard of and used his "blog" to made them huge on iTunes and Myspace and now, well, you probably still haven't heard of them. But still, the probably giddy record execs are considering a deal that would give Perez "$100,000 a year as an advance against 50 percent of any profits generated by artists he discovers and releases through Warner Brothers." Sounds completely reasonable. After the jump, your new tastemaker has a supposed meltdown on MTV's Celebrity Rap Superstar.

Twelve minutes past midnight, Jennifer Lopez gave birth to a 5 lbs. 7 oz. baby girl, followed at 12:23 AM by 6 lbs. baby boy. The birth took place in a secure room of a Long Island hospital, hermetically sealed prior to J. Lo's arrival, guarded by security forces trained intensively in "pink drills" in recent weeks. The lockdown helps protect the $4 million to $6 million People magazine is paying for exclusive pictures of the kids, an exclusive that would be ruined by anyone lawfully and safely snapping a photo and sending it a competing media outlet, like say tips@gawker.com, which FOR A LIMITED TIME ONLY pays you $7.50 per 1000 views! Besides, J. Lo hardly needs the money, especially if she plans to practice the "tough love" she got from her own mom, as described in October to David Letterman:

UK tabloids are enjoying huge web traffic thanks to American celebrity scandals. Unfortunately for our trade deficit, we see none of that money. Even when the Daily Mail runs New York's NUDE LINDSAY LOHAN shots, without permission. (The photos, owned by Bert Stern, are under embargo—the Daily Mail just made up a little "nymag.com" watermark, slapped it on, and ran with them.) [FishbowlNY]

The celebrity weekly's cover story is actually about how the children of mentally ill famous woman Britney Spears are pretty much doing just fine, it turns out, under the care of people who properly strap them into carseats and wear underpants, but there's no denying the power of that headline. What do they know? Is Us Weekly willing to do whatever it takes to find out what Sean and Jayden know? There are lives on the line, people. The entire celebrity-industrial complex may depend on whatever actionable intelligence can be procured—by any means necessary—from these tow-headed youngsters. How do stars get glam? Who benefits? That's the real question, isn't it—why?—the "how" is just scenery for the suckers. Lufti, Adnan, X17, TMZ, it keeps people guessing like a parlor game, but it prevents them from asking the most important question—why? You're close, Us Weekly. Closer than you think. [Us Weekly]

A famous, rich musician of the "urban" flavor, who also works in movies, is offering an assistant job so simultaneously awful and demanding that anyone who agrees to take it is, by definition, unqualified. It will appeal only to the insane, the retarded and the pathologically insecure, and yet its requirements could only be met by an as-yet-undesigned cyborg or human-animal hybrid. Full ad here, highlights after the jump.

It sounds too ludicrous to be true, but unfortunately it is very real: financial news publisher TheStreet.com just launched a site that takes tabloid celebrity stories, gets your attention, and then segues into financial advice. The front page of the site, at MainStreet.com, recently included stories ostensibly about Shaquille O'Neal, Tom Cruise and Jason Biggs, but really about rolling over your 401(k), saving money on a motorcycle and buying a wedding ring. TheStreet.com cofounder Jim Cramer may have developed a taste for a large audience at his popular CNBC call-in show Mad Money, but this hardly the way to build one. The warmed-over celebrity news will not draw gossip hounds, while the financial advice would be better off on its own, for easy Googling when you need that sort of information. After the jump, how the site treated Heath Ledger's death, and other insane excerpts from this misguided mashup.

The writer who profiled Britney Spears for last week's Rolling Stone just cannot believe the audacity of Spears' handlers. One handler tried to sell her Spears access for $2 million, editorial control over her article and the right to name the cover photographer, the writer said on CNN today. This handler is called Klaus, and the Rolling Stone writer, Vanessa Grigoriadis, thinks he is "just really naive" and doesn't "understand the way that United States media works at this point." After the jump, Grigoriadis' full description of the cash demand and why she is, of course, dead wrong about the American media.

The ex-con illegal-immigrant paparazzi who follow Britney Spears around are not afraid to risk life and limb to give her the attention she so desperately craves. After the jump, watch an antlike swarm of paps brave traffic (and traffic laws) on a four-lane thoroughfare to surround Spears' car, and also listen to a Fox LA correspondent, hovering in his Sky Britney Helicopter, scoff at the insanity.