Last weekend, the Electric Zoo music festival in New York was cut short after two young attendees died of drug overdoses. This calls for a party!

• LAT editor sticks it to The Man; refuses to make cuts requested by Tribune overlords. [NYT]
• Member of CBS Evening News' elderly demographic likes Katie Couric. [AP]
• City claims recycling has declined because no one buys newspapers anymore, but that fails to explain where people are putting the eight million Metros shoved at them as they enter the subway. [NYS]
• Dick-licking victim Mandy Stadtmiller wins "Funniest Reporter in New York" contest. The jokes, they write themselves. Or at least they're gonna have to for this one, because we've got nothing. [NY1]

• Blogs: worse than the sixties. [NYT]
• Walter Scott, Walt Whitman also guilty of "sock puppetry." [NYT]
• Joe Hagan throws pretty much everything but the revelation that Bill Keller loves "The Wire" into this profile. [NYM]
• New magazine to battle Portfolio for that all-important douchebag demographic. [NYT]
• Speaking of douchebags, it's hard to identify to twattiest statement in this profile of the Flavorpill folks, but we're going to settle on, "We've been called the Cond Nast of e-mail." [NYT]
• Apparently, people wanted to see pictures of Suri Cruise. [WWD]
• Bill Gates has no iPod. Thank you, Donny Deutsch! [copyranter]

Oh, they badass. Matt Spangler from thehappycorp sends photos from the WWW Dodgeball Tournament (if you can dodge a VC takeover, you can dodge a ball), mercifully leaving out the action shots.

Seven days a week the editor of Gawker, a weblog magazine, trolls through the crush of NYC media and brings the most interesting or despicable or (most likely) interestingly despicable new items to her readers' attention. With an addictively snarky tone, Gawker collects and cuts down to size the latest on urban dating rituals, gossip high and low, drugs, the literati (especially Tina Brown), and anything else that's seen as fit to print. In the ever-expanding world of blogs, this one well put together and ever-amusing merits a daily look. [Flavorpill]

Asks Flavorpill: What better way to nurse a New Year's Day hangover than with a downtown dose of spoken word from the city's celebrated poetry community? Alternatively, go back to bed.
New Year's Day Marathon Reading [Flavorpill]