From an email sent to Columbia's job-recruiting email list with the subject "JPMorgan Recruiting Event for LGBT Students":

• The latest in the Times' ever-growing stable of blogs is Wall Street and financial blog DealBook, edited by Andrew Ross Sorkin. We imagine that when Gawker alum Elizabeth Spiers gets her similar venture, Dealbreaker, up and running, these two will spend the spring mudwrestling one another. Kinda hot, no? [DealBook]
• Before you get all wet and saucy at the prospect of more pictures of Kate Moss blowing rails, keep in mind that these ones are from 1998 or so. And really, once you've seen her hoover one, you've seen her hoover them all. [Sun UK]
• Win yourself a free meal on 71 Clinton's last night of service. All you have to do is come up with the best answer to how you would spend $250 on food and drinks, in a single night, on the Lower East Side. If you want to win, we suggest refraining from mentioning Welcome to the Johnson's. [Eater]
• WASPdate continues to thrive, lending its support to plaid pants-wearing whiteys everywhere. [AM New York]
• New York mag puts out its Best of New York issue, and yet the "Best Way to Get on a Hipster Photo Website" strikes us as the worst of our fair city. [NYM]
• Frank Bruni gets highly philosophical on the issue of whether or not a restaurant should be re-reviewed. How one man puts so much thought into the star system, we'll never know. But bless him for all that he does. [Diner's Journal]

From Craigslist today:

Steven Soderbergh's upcoming murder-in-a-doll-factory movie, Bubble (if you don't have a doll parts phobia yet, watching the trailer should fix that), will be the first feature by a mainstream filmmaker to put the controversial "collapsing windows" distribution theory to the test i.e., eliminating the gap between a theatrical release and its pay-per-view and DVD releases. But the director's radical re-envisioning of the Hollywood model doesn't end there: He too sides with studio executives who are advocating massive upfront pay cuts for talent in exchange for them receiving a larger share of the back end. According to him, a star salary cap is not only cost effective, it will improve the quality of the movies:

• Judging from her Golden Globes appearance, actress Hilary Swank is not taking her impending divorce from Chad Lowe all that well. [Go Fug Yourself]
• Before you sacrifice your soul and take that i-banking job, know your banks and the types of assholes they employ. [Brooklyn to Harlem • Jared Leto takes his craft so damn seriously, he'll eat 2847145 Twinkies if need be. [Popsugar]
• Apparently Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's sonogram made its way to eBay; the site has since removed the auction seeing as, well, even we think that shit is mildly sick. [CourtTV]
• Bucky Turco of Animal has managed to find himself in our local tabloids oh, like, 600 times now. But if they can't spell your name right, it just doesn't count. [NYDN]
• Admit it: You're totally staying in tonight to watch Skating With Celebrities. It's like Dancing With the Stars meets The Cutting Edge, and you dare to pretend that this doesn't matter? Uh, TOEPICK, bitches! [Slate]

Today's LAT looks at the current tug-of-war between studios and talent over the always prickly issue of money, with studios complaining that movies are way too expensive for top stars and filmmakers to continue to get first-dollar gross, and actors and directors carping about the studios' creative accounting practices when they get to recoup shadily defined costs before doling out profit participation. Here are the arguments in sound-bite form:

This week's New York mag cover story is about how impossibly big your nest egg needs to be in order to comfortably retire; Time's cover story is about how the impossibility of a comfortable retirement.

The chart above comes courtesy of the evil souls at New York mag, who seem determined, week after week, to remind you of your place in Manhattan's social caste system. The latest attempt is a feature on your "New York Number," the amount you need stored up in order to gleefully quit your job or retire while maintaining your current lifestyle in The City. Complete with a handy quiz (like Seventeen for financial planners), you can determine the amount of your ideal nest egg and, most likely, kill yourself over the impossibility of ever living a life free of slave labor.

Again and again, the local edition of Craigslist has proven its utility as a virtual casting office, offering up on a regular basis exciting opportunities previously available only to those with a high-powered agent. The online community also recently made a successful foray into location scouting, and perhaps buoyed by that pilot program, now seeks to make a splash in the world of film finance:

Oil at $68 as Katrina Damage Assessed [MSN Money]

Today in Martha Stewart's Media Campaign 2005, MSO chief executive Susan Lyne and company chairman Charles Koppelman sat down to discuss Stewart's sweeping return to mass-market ubiquity. Naturally, the head puppeteer herself was present:

The good news this morning is that Goldman Sachs has generously deigned to remain in lower Manhattan. And it only took a bit of nudging to get the elite investment bank to stay. As the Times reports:

Because you're too lazy to buy your loved one a thoughtful gift, One Share allows you to buy — you guessed it — one share of any popular stock, complete with a charming commemorative certificate and frame. (It reminds us of the trend when people would "buy" and "name" a star as a perfectly stupid, useless gift. Nice to know that symbols of equity have reached a similar level of kitsch.) And wouldn't you know it, the share of the month is Martha Stewart Omnimedia! It's a back-handed honor, however: The shares are being sold at 10% off. Much to the chagrin of real investors, were sure.

The second we saw the lede, we knew it was going to be good: "By the time you've watched just one hour of the Fox show 'American Idol,' Rupert Murdoch has lost $7,990 on the New York Post." We're surprised it took the Daily News this long to issue the requisite taunt in light of Friday's resignation of Post publisher Lachlan Murdoch, but now that they have, we're anticipating some daily ankle biting from both papers' business desks. To make the inevitable retort run a bit more smoothly, we've gone ahead and taken the Daily News bitchslap and edited it so that the Post can easily slip it into tomorrow's paper:

Atkins Nutritionals, the late Dr. Robert Atkins' company, which manufactures all those scrumptiously delicious low-carb breakfast bars and shakes and faux-candy and all that, filed for bankruptcy protection yesterday.

BREAKING! We can finally calm ourselves after being in a cold sweat, no doubt, since August: the feds have lowered the terror alert for NYC (as well as Jersey and DC) financial institutions from Orange to Yellow. That's a calming step down from "high" terror to "elevated" terror, but not so serene as the "guarded" level. You saw this coming, conveniently post re-election, right? Anyhow, we're sure all of Wall Street's drones are going to sleep a little better tonight with this knowledge—or they would, if they weren't stuck in the office all night, poring over coke-sprinkled spreadsheets.
US To Lower Financial Sector's Terror Level [Reuters]

The IRS will be going after a stream of non-profit executives in the near future, claims the NYT and the WaPo. Thank God. Fucking do-gooders. Give 'em the chair! Art blog Modern Art Notes wonder if the IRS will be coming for our local museum directors, and quotes some recent tax returns:

Our totally awesome Special Correspondent on Complicated Financial Statements has come through with an excellent translation of Salon.com's 'Now We Make Money, No Really!' press release regarding their first quarter profits. Just as we thought: the phrase "pro forma profit" meant "not actually a profit." What? The internet isn't going to make us all rich?

Not only is super-store Barneys New York for sale (for half a billion bucks, give or take), but people are talking it up like it's a money mill. Right. That's why a majority share got snapped up in a bargain bankruptcy sale for $240 mil in 1999. Oh, but the enthusiasm is so contagious! And the staff is so cute!

Finally the Whitney Museum Board of Trustees have lost their fight to keep their recent embezzlement scandal out of the press. Yesterday, the Manhattan D.A.'s office announced it arrested two employees of the Whitney who voided ticket sales and pocketed the cash — to the tune of almost $900K.
2 Whitney Museum Employees Arrested In Embezzlement Case [NYP]
A note on the scam from a former co-worker follows.