On Friday ex-New Yorker scribe Dan Baum began telling the story of his employment at the magazine through a medium rarely synonymous with narrative storytelling—-Twitter. As of this writing he's up to 1399 words!

Mid-week, everyone needs to freshen up. Barbara Walters craves a clean break from ABC, reportedly; Robert Pattinson needs a shower and Bruce Willis might never be able to wash off the slime.

• Matt Lauer's "deer incident" won't keep him down for long. He's reportedly in "good spirits" after undergoing surgery yesterday to repair a separated shoulder and will be back to work in a few days. [Star]
• How did Bruce Willis meet his new wife, Emma Heming? He picked her out during a casting call, just like any normal person. [P6]
• Lindsay Lohan is sick of "people telling lies" about her since she's "really a good person" who just wants to put in a honest day's work. Got that? Good. [People, Us]
• Barbara Walters is planning to quit ABC in the near future so she can "spend more time with her boyfriend, Dr. Robert Butler." Or at least that's what "industry insiders" are telling the Enquirer. [NE]
• The cutbacks at Condé Nast continue: Editors like David Remnick and Ruth Reichl have been forced to take the subway! [NYP]

Last month Cityfile unveiled, oh, a hundred or so domain names of famous New Yorkers' names that it had bought, just because it could. Conde Nast immediately marshaled its team of high-powered attorney warriors!

New Yorker editor David Remnick is badgering his writers to blog more, and to be more vicious/cutesy while they're at it, just like real bloggers! It's absolutely adorable.

• New Yorker editor-in-chief David Remnick has confirmed he's writing a book about "Barack Obama, race and politics in America." [Politico]
• David Shuster is the new host of MSNBC's 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. [NYT]
• Vogue was the most profitable magazine at Condé Nast this year. [P6]
• Crain Communications (AdAge, Crain's New York) is laying off 60. [NYP]
• The list of layoff victims at CNN grows longer: Jamie McIntyre, Kelli Arena, Linda Stouffer and Rusty Dornin are all on the way out. [TVN]
• The Day the Earth Stood Still was No. 1 at the weekend box office. [NYT]

Dominick Dunne is 83 years old today. New Yorker editor David Remnick is 50. Winona Ryder is turning 37. Dan Castellaneta, the voice of Homer Simpson, is 51. Art gallerist Mary Boone turns 57. Actor Richard Dreyfuss is 61. Gabrielle Union is 36. Olympic swimmer-turned-swimsuit model Amanda Beard turns 27. Actress Joely Fisher is 41. And social fixture/Cinema Society founder Andrew Saffir is 42 years old today.

Cranky old John Updike has always used his bully pulpit at The New Yorker to blast popular writers who didn't fit his idea of fiction. As he's gotten older, his hatred of anything he doesn't understand has become commensurately more transparent, earning the ire of Salman Rushdie, Tom Wolfe, and David Foster Wallace. And when you use that power to throw both Toni Morrison and William Faulkner under the bus in that magazine while making sure to say that you find her white characters the most convincing, we have a problem with you, you old bastard.In 1975 Anatole Broyard wrote in The New York Times that as a critic, John Updike was "too kind." In the years since he seems to have taken that diss to heart, relentlessly smearing even the most slightly ambitious work that's not in his preferred, realistic style...of men who only think about sex. He starts off this truly wretched review in this week's New Yorker with the following bon mot/machete, "Toni Morrison has a habit, perhaps traceable to the pernicious influence of William Faulkner, of plunging into the narrative before the reader has a clue to what is going on." This is nothing new for Updike — as his prose has gotten more journalistic and dull over time, his level of tolerance for more exciting stylists is inversely proportional to his own ineptitude, and he's made many enemies. (Salman Rushdie once said after Updike criticized how he named his characters, "Why not? Somewhere in Las Vegas there's a male prostitute named John Updike.") He needs to take a cue from the man who said, "Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt." That of course was John Updike, more than three decades ago. The 76-year-old Updike pretends to be more politic before throwing Morrison under the bus, as if it were impossible to know exactly what he thinks of A Mercy. Ironically, his language becomes more circular and winding than Morrison as he puts her down in the most condescending fashion possible. Does he know how transparently pathetic he sounds?

Be this guy he knew who got a newspaper column because he was a really funny bartender. Oh, and also be talented? [BigThink]

The newspaper industry is in the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. The biggest kiosk seller this month was a highbrow liberal weekly that featured a tabloid satire of a presidential candidate and his wife. The biggest newsmaker this month was a supermarket tabloid that caught a former presidential candidate visiting his extramarital baby mama, and the major journals of record won't even blog about it. Surely this is the End Times of big media. What is to be done? Where are our journalistic standards headed? And how long before what you see above becomes an actual New York Times Magazine cover? It may just be the economy, but all the apocalyptic chatter about the "death of the MSM" is starting seem prescient. For years, newspapers have been struggling to reconcile the Internet's up-to-the-second information spigot with old-fashioned standards of reporting. It's hard to keep track of how many "blogs" the Times now has, or how indistinguishable most of their substance and style are from what you'd find in the print edition. Apart from writing cloyingly and belatedly about the new media revolution and its cultural implications, what has the Gray Lady really done to ensure its continued relevance? Judging by its books, not much—it actually asks more of its shrinking readership. By close of trading Thursday, the stock of the New York Times Co. was listed at $12.48 per share, half the price it was a year ago. The paper then announced it'd be increasing its daily newsstand price by 25 cents, beginning August 18. Oh, the company also posted double-digit losses in ad revenue this quarter, citing the worst month so far as June, with July fast closing in. Circulation is down (profits here are only up because of previous price-gauging), 100 reporters were laid off this year, and everyone's wondering whether the Sulzberger clan will simply call it quits and switch to a small soy agribusiness in northern California. It'd be more wholesome than acknowledging that this century's Huey Long got his freak on. Other media empires are hurting, too. McClatchy Co., Lee Enterprises Inc. and E.W. Scripps Co. all claimed profit falls by almost half of last year's earnings. And most industry analysts expect the locust year to extend into well next. That must mean more bullshit trend pieces.

David Remnick wasn't the first New Yorker editor to try and drum up a little controversy with an imflammatory cover: In the Guardian today, British journalist Alexander Chancellor recalls another time that a satirical New Yorker caused a bit of mayhem, namely the 1993 Valentine's Day drawing by Art Spiegelman featuring a Hasidic Jew kissing a black woman. Naturally, the New Yorker editor who signed off on this was Tina Brown. And, as Chancellor explains, she knew exactly what she was doing! Brown "conducted extensive consultations before publication to gauge how fierce the reaction would be. She seemed to decide that the publicity benefits would outweigh the offence caused."

• Vogue has a fancy, new IMG-produced Web-based reality series! And it only cost $31,000 a minute to put together. [WSJ]

New Yorker editor David Remnick went on the Charlie Rose last night to talk about the whole to-do over the Barack Obama caricature cover. OH GOD JUST LET IT END, right? Remnick kind of feels the same way. But he did take a fun swipe at useless Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz, and also talked about how his magazine is totally in the bag for Obama and will probably endorse him, so maybe everyone should stop hating him, a position that seems likely to cause some sort of problem for the magazine down the line. He also repeatedly lavished praise on Daily Show host (and New Yorker defender) Jon Stewart, who he called "our greatest press critic." Find out what special favor Remnick did for Stewart by clicking on the thumbnail at left for the clip, and also have fun trying to figure out if Remnick truly believes that "this [cover] image may be too complicated to work out for some people" (his words) or that such a notion is elitist, as he also seems to argue.

New Yorker editor David Remnick went on The Situation Room today to answer to Wolf Blitzer about his magazine's ridiculous Obama cover. "There are gonna be a lot of people who aren't going to be sophisticated New Yorker readers," Wolf asserted, "who are going to look at this cover" and assume it is an accurate portrayal of reality. Remnick—typical hate-monger!—says this is condescending. In the attached clip, watch Wolf claim that the cover could've appeared on "a neo-Nazi magazine." Context is meaningless! No one gets anything anymore! Remnick says some crazy thing about being Colbert in Print, but no one gets jokes without studio audiences to explain what is supposed to be funny. (After the jump, in a calmer setting, New Yorker political writer Hendrick Hertzberg holds up the cover and grins. He almost giggles!)

This is the problem with being an editor or publisher or writer or cartoonist or even blogger and having some small lingering trace of a sense of irony-sometimes you accidentally assume that the Vast and Mysterious "Audience" shares that subversive French sense. Thankfully, after what will presumably be a full week of Outrage and Demands for Apologies, David Remnick and his New Yorker will never make that mistake again. As you might've seen, the cover of that influential publication this week shows Barack Obama dressed as a Muslim, and he is Terrorist Fist-Bumping his aggrieved wife as a flag burns in the Oval Office. This obvious and heavy-handed satire has enraged Democrats and liberal media critics because now they are pretty sure this nation of child-like imbeciles will believe it to be an un-retouched photograph from the FUTURE. New Yorker editor David Remnick defended the cover to the Huffington Post. Did you know that sometimes that magazine makes "jokes"?

When I saw a tall, dark-haired, model-esque woman sliding through the pre-awards crowd at the National Magazine Awards in the Rose Ballroom on 60th St. last night, my canny journalistic sixth sense kicked in. "She sure doesn't look like a magazine writer," I thought. Later, she strode out on stage during the awards ceremony. It was Padma Lakshmi, supermodel. "Fiction. It can...raise fire in the loins," she purred. Half of the audience shifted in their seats. "The sharpest weapon an editor has at her disposal is her pen. (Pause). Or her tongue." It really drove home the primary question in everyone's minds: Isn't this supposed to be, like, a magazine thing? What the fuck are all these famous people doing here? And Julia Allison? An attempted explanation, and some terrible, terrible cell phone pictures to sum up the night, after the jump.

Blogger Michelle Malkin is an impressively craven and vile human being, a dangerous demagogue who properly belongs grouped with slavery defenders, flat-earthers and Nixon apologists interned forever in the extreme fringes of the popular discourse, and she's too humorlessly vapid to plausibly attempt Ann Coulter's "it's just a joke" defense. But all that said, she reached her peak of influence and fame a couple years ago, thank god. Still, we'd love to read the New Yorker's forthcoming profile of the reactionary sophist, because maybe it would answer those burning questions about how much influence her insane husband has on her "writing" or maybe it'd just be a ripping good exploration of moral bankruptcy. Unfortunately, shrill Malkin won't cooperate with Rebecca Mead, because Rebecca Mead is a real reporter. Here is a fascinating series of emails demonstrating how not to butter up an unwilling subject.

Guess who my new Facebook buddy is? Go ahead, guess. All right, I'll tell you. Eustace Tilley. Okay, not the Eustace Tilley, but I am now officially a fan of the New Yorker on Facebook. That magazine is so hip — first they hire cool kid reporters Kelefa Sanneh and Ariel Levy and now they're on Facebook! I have a link to my awesome blog on my Facebook account, do you think David Remnick will check it out? He'd definitely see from my elaborate explanations of what I did last weekend that I could be the next voice of the magazine. Do you think facebook messaging him some poetry I did in high school would be too much? [via ETP]

Remnick is editor-in-chief of The New Yorker and a demigod to both aspiring freelancers and denizens of liberal enclaves all over America.

Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter and New Yorker editor David Remnick hustled to beat each other on profiles of Eliot Spitzer, notes the Observer; technically Graydon won with publishing online first, but Remnick won with extended access. Yeah, yeah. Apart from that silliness, we hear that Spitzer's press minder who was handling the reporters is kind of an idiot! After Nick Paumgarten's New Yorker profile was already in edits, Spitzer's guy was asking him, "What's going to be in the piece?" That's just sad. Real political operations—see Team Clinton—don't have to ask, because they already know.