• With his second seed born just weeks ago, Kevin Federline takes to Vegas for a weekend of binge-drinking, banquette-dancing, and trying to forget that he actually married to Britney Spears. [Page Six]
• Democratic congressional candidate Kirsten Gillibrand enlists Oscar-winner David Strathairn to act like Ed Murrow in her campaign video. Fantasy politics are the next big thing. [R&M]
• Star Jones and Al Reynolds finally get the hint and leave Manhattan, opting for Speedo-friendly Miami. Al just loves South Beach. [Page Six]
• Larry Birkhead, the photographer who claims to be the father of Anna Nicole Smith's child, files a paternity suit after Smith's pseudo-husband/lawyer Howard K. Stern tells Larry King that he's the father. We know the woman has money, but why is everyone so eager to get credit for fucking her? Seriously, it's no grand achievement. [TMZ]
• Mark Foley just doesn't understand why a bunch of naked kids would be in a hot tub and not think to invite him. [Lowdown]

Wow. Who knew the debates were this much fun? We're totally watching the next one. You know, unless we have plans that night. Whenever it is.

This week's edition of Newsweek features a cover story on famed photographer Annie Leibovitz, whose new collection, A Photographer's Life: 1990-2005, features many of Leibovitz's personal photos, both of her extended family and "the person she was closest to for that decade and a half—the late writer and critic Susan Sontag." The article then goes on to devote a decent amount of inches to Leibovitz's relationship with Sontag, telling us how close they were, how much Sontag mattered to Leibovitz, how they never lived together but had apartments facing each other's, how they would make sweet, sweet love on the floor of West Village pleasure dome. Wait, no — not that last part. In fact, Newsweek so carefully avoids any such mention to the point of absurdity:

• The new McDonald's advertisements in China are downright sexy. Funny how'd they'd encourage any sort of sexuality in a country where the female seeds get killed. [WSJ]
• Frat boys, mount up: tonight's the launch party for Times Square's latest horror, the Hawaiian Tropic Zone Restaurant and Lounge. It's the 700 cubic tons of sand you've always dreamed of. [The Real Estate]
• The 22-year-old founder of Facebook wants to sell for $1.5 billion, and the twit just might get away with it. You ready to kill yourself yet? Here, use our knife and be sure to cut vertically. [WSJ]
• Fox News partially sponsored the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association convention in Miami Beach. Don't tell Rupert. [New Times BPB]
• Wow: Weird Al is back. We didn't realize he was gone, but hey. [YouTube]
• You can do a lot in NYC in a single day and spend less than $100. You just might have to go to Luke and Leroy's. Sacrifices, people. [Gridskipper]
• You still have a chance to have your dirty secrets immortalized in print — the forthcoming Gawker book is still taking submissions, and it's about time you told someone about how your refusal to do anal with your boss ultimately cost you that promotion.

Our wanderlusting brother Gridskipper has been tirelessly running his "Most [Whatever] City" polls (if you recall, you dumped champagne on your head on Monday, when New York was declared the World's Sexiest City in a NSFW showdown); now, via a nomination process, New York is up against Detroit for the title of Most Masculine City. Really, the title should probably go to Detroit — if you've been there, you know what we're talking about. But because we are on a constant quest to rationalize a lifestyle in which $1500/month gets you a 100-square-foot studio apartment and a crosstown cab takes 7 hours of your time, we must win.

It's got nothing on Tuesday's explosion of gayness, but this transition from Clay Aiken interview to, well, something else, seems more than a little deliberate on GMA's part. When Diane Sawyer tells you to come out, you come out. Or else.

Some sad news to report: the Associated Press has put on its Jenny 8 Lee costume and is now writing for Sunday Styles. Or some similarly morbid situation is going on amongst the venerable newsgatherers, resulting in this altogether absurd trend piece on guy getaways, now dubbed "mancations." (Over/under on the word "mancation" appearing on the Today Show: 2 weeks.) Apparently, men like to get together with their old frat buddies and have fancy, manly vacations without their wives around, and hotels are now offering packages catering to these brave explorers of testosterone.

• If you want to win in the end, you've got to indoctrinate them when they're young. [LittleDemocrats]
• Whitney Houston's sober, and you've got Courtney Love to thank for it. Now just imagine how that all came about. [Idolator]
• Why in the name of God is Men's Vogue hosting a slideshow of Francesco Vezzoli's Caligula? This really doesn't help their case. [Men's Vogue]
• The New Yorker pacifies toddlers and puts to sleep people of all ages. [Flickr]
• Giorgio Armani designs tomorrow's issue of the Independent, affectionately called the Red Issue. Just like his skin. [Independent]
• Only hipsters would upload a video with puppets singing about hipsters. [Animal]
• Murray's Hill: an imagined sitcom with music by the Fray, sponsored by Sparks. [Leveraged Sellout]
• Kanye West is many things to many people. Many Gay things. [One D at a Time]
• Jane editor Brandon Holley abandons punk roots, gets engaged. Mazel tov, ya sellout! [FishbowlNY]
• Sad news for fans of excellent British automotive television: Top Gear's Richard Hammond has been in a car accident. At 280 MPH. [Jalopnik]

Gay American, former Jersey governor and current press whore Jim McGreevey kicked off his whirlwind talk show tour yesterday by submitting to a wildly awkward chat with Oprah yesterday (stunningly liveblogged by the Grey Lady — just scroll down), during which he actually read aloud our favorite passage from his memoir, The Confession. The utter lack of emotion as he reads of "a boastful, passionate, whispering, masculine kind of love" is the kind of audio you want to listen to alone, in a darkened room, with nothing but tissue and lotion. It's is followed by a sheepish eyeroll, which is almost as priceless as the seven second pause he takes before telling Oprah that making love to his wife "was special." Good to choose those banal words carefully, though we'd guess his wife would disagree.

• Willie Nelson and friends have been issued misdemeanor citations for posessing about 1.5 pounds of weed and 1/5 of a pound of mushrooms. And this surprises you not in the least. [Billboard]
• Bono tells the fashion crowd to "take your fucking finger food and fuck off." Which at least implies that someone was actually eating. Baby steps. [OAN]
• Did you miss the Brooklyn Book Festival? Aren't you lucky. [Galleycat]
• Cheers to the Times for throwing in a good old spoiler for fans of The Office. [NYT]
• It always helps to have your wife working in your favor on Amazon. [Greatest Living Poet]
• Greenwich Village reaches boiling point; gay teens and cranky old potheads to throwdown before November. [WaPo]
• Robert Hughes would like to thank radical Islamic terrorists for removing that "great ugly scaleless box of a thing" from the New York skyline. [The Australian]

Despite Gay American and former New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey's claims to the contrary, which are detailed at length in his forthcoming memoir, former McGreevey aide Golan Cipel insists that he never had a relationship with McGreevey, nor did he ever attempt to blackmail the then-governor. In an interview from Israel, Cipel said, "I was not his lover. I've never met a liar like Jim McGreevey. Cipel then added:

It's your rainy Friday morning gay porn fix, courtesy of Gay American and former Jersey governor Jim McGreevey! In his memoir The Confession, McGreevey writes of bedding Golan Cipel, the man who would eventually attempt to blackmail him, while his wife was in the hospital after delivering their daughter via Caesarean; we'll present this excerpt without comment, as its beauty speaks for itself:

For their October issue, Out interviews adorable Gay-of-all-trades and striped-shirt aficionado John Cameron Mitchell on the matter of his new film, Shortbus,which features explicit sex scenes but is not, mind you, hardcore porn. So how to go about shooting this brave new art?

We at Gawker would like to offer our applause to CNN anchor Thomas Roberts, who "acknowledged that he is gay while speaking at the annual convention for the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association in Miami last weekend." Roberts, reports blog Beantown Cuban, told the audience "how he's proud of his partner and how he has gradually come out at work over the years."

May this forever more be remembered as the day men's magazines became just as bad as women's.

"There is a theory that anyone on the planet is connected to any other person through a chain of six people," intones ABC's website for its upcoming coincidental conspiracy show Six Degrees. Unfortunately, it turns out that the whole six degrees of separation theory — a popular staple of party conversation, and the inspiration for a film about such a party conversation, which featured Will Smith gettin' all pre-superstar gay — may be a load of hooey. The theory was first popularized by Stanley Milgram, a researcher who had test subjects try to get letters to unknown (but named) recipients through their circle of acquaintances. The letters took an average of six leaps to reach their addressees, hence the six degrees of separation. Another researcher recently examined Milgram's original notes and found that 95% of the letters never reached their targets at all. But at least we still got a tasteful man-smooch from Will Smith, right? Apparently not, as Smith reportedly refused to actually film that scene, requiring a stand-in to take the gay heat. So many illusions, shattered. Bet that new ABC show rocks, though.

Look, everyone grieves in their own way.

In response to Radar's story this morning that he interned for the CIA while in college, CNN anchor Anderson Cooper has taken to his blog, where he explains that the gig was no big deal: