Frank McCourt, beloved Irish-American Pulitzer-winning author and retired schoolteacher, died today of complications relating to meningitis. He was 78. He'd been sick for quite some time after being treated for a bout with melanoma.

It's an open secret that Perez Hilton can't be bothered to blog all day long anymore. But for some reason he's never copped to using ghost writers. Until now.

Oh Pat. Rachel Maddow had crazy ole "Uncle Pat" on her show tonight to discuss the Sonia Sotomayor Supreme Court nomination and Buchanan went over the dark side with a "white people built this country and deserve more" rant.

Today Thomas Jane, the star of Hung, was on The View and he was molested just like all the other attractive males who go on the show. They're so grabby!

Current TV journalist Euna Lee—currently imprisoned in North Korea—summoned the Swedish ambassador to pass on a message to her husband: He must make sure he sent in their daughter's summer school registration form. *Tear.* [via BayNewser]

Tonight Barack Obama threw out the first pitch at the 2009 Major League Baseball All-Star game. Gambling websites have been taking bets on whether or not he would bounce the pitch to home plate! So how did he do?

Lizzie Grubman, lobster-faced PR woman and runner-over-of regular people, once had an assistant named Robert Rave. That since-disillusioned young man has now published a roman à clef about a boy working for a fearsome PR dragon. We've got a manuscript!

Anne Hathaway's New York stage debut in Twelfth Night at the Delacorte closed on Sunday, but not before she could do something rather... heroic. Wee hours line waiters were treated to pizza on Sunday morning, hand delivered by Hathaway herself.

Frank McCourt, the voluble Irish-American memoirist and retired New York City schoolteacher who wrote Angela's Ashes, is on his deathbed, according to the Belfast Telegraph.

We should've seen this coming: conservative blog Free Republic fired hate speech off at Malia Obama after this photo of her appeared, letting their commenters go to town. But the journalist who reported this as news isn't innocent, either.

ABC News has come up with video purporting to prove that Barack Obama did not lasciviously check out a woman's ass in Rome yesterday. We undertook a Zapruder treatment and determined that he probably did, but had no choice.

38-year-old Young Republican leader Audra Shay got in some trouble for lol-ing at racism. She is standing tough, though! So it is time to go back and find all the other crazy in her Facebook feed, for our own lulz.

Ali Wise, Dolce & Gabbana's party planner and publicist and all-around-gal-about-town, was arrested Tuesday for hacking into the voicemail of interior designer and rival socialite Nina Freudenberger. Scandale! We have the criminal complaint.

We knew that newsstands have been treating GQ's July cover, featuring a nude-but-not-all-hanging-out Sacha Baron Cohen is like porn. But a tipster at a Hudson News in Manhattan has noticed the decision has lead to some interesting juxtapositions.

A successful PR pitch starts with a subject line that grabs the eye. Congratulations to Eric Schwartz, who pitched us a spa review story with the subject line above. Aspiring writers, take note. Here's a taste of the story's magic:

Ruth Madoff—loyal, pampered, tight-lipped wife of the single worst financial criminal in American history—seems to be unpopular. But why?? Is it feminist backlash? Anti-feminist backlash? Or, uh, something else? Poll and analysis below!

Yesterday, Chrissie Brodigan said she was manhandled by a cop and arrested just because her pug dog threw up on the L train. But the cop says she's a raving anti-Semite! Let's explore this breathtakingly minor controversy.

All she wanted to do was get her poor little puking pug dog out of her tote bag on the L train. But then the cops arrived. And they were mean.

Fashion design competition show Project Runway is soon returning to us after a long hiatus, on the Lifetime network for ladies. And, in a new promo, the network makes very certain you know one thing: Good women watch Project Runway.

Last night on Fox News, Geraldo Rivera took a hit out on David Earls, a convicted child-rapist whose atrociously low sentence Bill O'Reilly has been demagoguing.