Stephanie Clifford, a New York Times reporter who is 36 years old, has just received a seven-figure book deal for her first novel. It's already been optioned for a movie as well.

Oh gosh, something to be concerned about: people now are just going to cheap gyms and working out and leaving, rather than indulging in the "community" of group classes and flirting and juice bars. Will gyms ever be annoying again?

That white witch Alessandra Stanley doesn't like the CW's "Gossip Girl." In today's Times, she faults the show for not being as good as the books; while they "are often criticized as a devolution from Judy Blume's coming-of-age novels, they are actually closer to children's literature. Like 'Peter Pan,' 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' or the 'Harry Potter' series, these novels are fantasies and projections of an imaginary world where parents are dead or peripheral, and lost boys and girls struggle on their own with good and evil, or in this case, Bergdorf Goodman and evil." Oh yeah? Screw you, Bruno Bettelheim, you don't mess with the most amazing show OF THE YEAR. [NYT]

Largely because it's Friday afternoon (evening?) and we've had quite a day, we're reprinting the first 21 items on this guy's list of stuff he hates. Also, we agree: