I sort of loved how most of the actors Dan Winters photographed for New York's "New York Actor" photo essay looked basically like hell. This is not freaking Santa Monica. If someone invented indulgences for all the sins we commit against our skin we'd be the Avignon Papacy. But enough wishful thinking: Liz Smith reports today "some big name stars" were "not amused" by the harsh realism of his portraiture, which Smith credits to his past shooting spreads for Texas Monthly, "where they like things rough and tough." (This assertion appears to have no basis in fact, but it was fun checking out his portfolio.) So: who's the vain aging diva/o who told Liz she wasn't the only one who was put off by Mr. Winters' verisimilitude schtick? Let's examine the evidence:
Well I think we know who it's not:

This is Amy Lumet, the California socialite daughter of filmmaker Sidney Lumet (and granddaughter of chanteuse Lena Horne!) As you might have noted, she is voluptuous! Three years ago she told the Village Voice she wanted to be in Playboy; she apparently used to model. We bring her up today because of some highly unsubstantiated internet rumors that she had an affair with John McCain during the Gulf War while she was married to cancer-stricken conservative pundit P.J. O'Rourke and O'Rourke was on assignment in the Middle East, where John McCain's wife was coincidentally consuming some of the aircraft carriers worth of Percocet she took to cope with the pain of her loveless marriage. We might wait for more evidence as to the veracity of such a rumor if the mere existence of Amy Lumet were not so fascinating in itself.For instance, did you know…

The inclusion of a woman on a major party's presidential ticket is unprecedented... for the Republicans. The Democrats did it back in 1984, when Walter Mondale selected Geraldine Ferrarro for his suicide mission against Reagan. Ferraro was considered risky due to her inexperience, but her selection and her brash, confident campaigning bumped Mondale way up in the polls. The VP debate that year pit George H. W. Bush, who'd been in Washington for years in various positions of authority and who was considered something of a foreign policy expert, against Ferraro, who'd only been in the House of Representatives for a couple years. The result? See for yourself in the clip above, in which Ferraro fights back against condescension from Vice President Bush. Think of it as a preview of tonight's Biden/Palin debate, except for the fact that Ferraro is smart and can speak English.

There's blind item is causing a mild shitstorm on Fashionista today about a "publishing house" that has been "quietly paying interns - but only if they're of a 'minority.'" Commenters immediately called out Hearst, which, what do you know, we called them up and it turns out that like myriad other media organizations recruits local minority interns* through a separate internship program with special terms and specifications, one of them happens to be a salary of $12 an hour. Now there is something to get enraged about. Not. Who planted this fucking item? Don't tell me, I don't want to know. This is for you.Dear Disgruntled White Journalism Industry Intern Who Works For Free, What inspired you to get into journalism, kid? I'll tell you what got me into it: journalism. It is a shitty, vicious cycle I'm always meaning to break out the minute I quit abusing alcohol. But anyway: I was writing really bad music reviews for my college paper when it dawned on me that the dorks who listened to the police scanners and checked the logbooks for the "crime" beat were the ones with the actually glamorous jobs. Because there was all this crime on our campus! See, my school was an oasis of obscene mostly-white binge-drinking privilege smack in the middle of an impoverished swath of one of those dirt poor second cities that got abandoned by its economy sometime during the seventies and embarked on a ruinous adventure trying to smoke it all out through a crackpipe in the eighties. (Back then they used to solve problems by bombing them.) In any case, at some point - maybe like the very first weekend of freshman year - it occurred to me that there was no way "here" from "there." The nicest sweetest hardest-working most well-meaning person could be born ten blocks west of my campus and it was just never going to happen for her; worse, she wouldn't even think to aspire to it, though she might think to aspire to some of its shoe collections. I thought this was totally fucked up, and I am one of those people who when I think something is totally fucked up copes by writing about how fucked up it is - yeah, if I were one of those people who enjoyed actually helping I would not have this drinking problem - and anyway, that is what I chose to do, and the more I wrote about it the more I learned and the more I learned the more totally fucked up it became. Just like yourself I had to make some "sacrifices" to keep on this awesome career path. I didn't have money so I worked at Starbucks and took odd jobs the whole time I was working for free till eventually got a job that actually paid me to keep writing about it. It'll happen to you too, if you're masochistic enough! Money was not easy to come by because there were too many people who wanted to write for a living than there were readers to support them; and I'll tell ya, the past ten years haven't made things any easier on this side of that ratio! But hey, I was a white middle-class kid born in America; I actually did have a modicum of free will, and over and over again that will was to remind other people with free will of all the persistent little factors fucking up that sort of freedom for others, and guess what? Slavery is a still a big one. Racism is totally up there. Poverty = totally huge! Look I don't tell you this to be a scold; I am also here for the jokes and the glamorous lifestyle and because I'm a total hater and I don't pretend to think these heavy subjects are hitting you over the head if your internship consists of calling in resort wear for spreads in Harper's Bazaar. But think creatively for a second: why the fuck can't Harper's Bazaar pay you? It's really the same reason they have to give fashion editors "wardrobe allowances" instead of just paying them more money; we're all employed perpetuating the same myth about how life is lived, just in varying degrees of outlandish. If there were enough rich people buying the fancy shit they read about in magazines you'd be rich too; that would be how you found out about those magazines in the first place. But no, I'm guessing you're not. I mean, you are rich enough to accept an unpaid magazine internship in one of the world's most expensive cities, so you actually are pretty rich, but whatever, it's not enough for all the things you'd like to buy. Why is everything so expensive? How come bankers start at six figures and you'd be lucky to start at sixteen grand? Why do you even bother promoting $800 belts to readers who are like, nurses in the Midwest or whatever? Look, I don't know, I would never personally do that, but maybe you like fashion and glamour and "aspirationalism", because maybe you liked playing dress-up as a child or whatever. Maybe you're a dreamer. Don't abandon those dreams after one little glimpse inside the dream sausage factory! Because I have another inspiring affirmative action publishing story for you. Once upon a time a writer landed a job at Entertainment Weekly only to be informed by a co-worker that the editor who'd hired her got a $10,000 bonus because she was a minority. And Entertainment Weekly is not exactly Goldman Sachs! She was distraught when it happened, but she stayed in the business, and went on to become one of the most dedicated, hardest-working media members I have ever met. Because the thing is that as you grow up in the media the dysfunctional relationship between the fantasy world that made you want to go into the business and the ugly realities lurking beneath the surface of everything is pretty much the only thing that keeps you going. And if you really think a bunch of minorities getting a poverty level paycheck when the white kids work for free qualifies as an "ugly reality" you should quit right the fuck now. Because the thing is, no, affirmative action isn't fair, but I'd almost advocate keeping it around in its current flawed race-based state solely on the basis that "neither is fucking anything."

As everyone in America knows, there is so much more to beauty pageants than prancing around in high heels, nude control top pantyhose and a specially engineered swimsuit! They are college scholarship programs, for Chrissakes, otherwise why would noted college enthusiast Sarah Palin have even bothered? So you knew there was more to the Republican vice presidential nominee's 1983 Miss Alaska appearance than that thought-provoking swimsuit competition we saw last week. Yes America, it is time for the talent competition! Watch Sarah perform a lovely James Galway song on her recorder flute and enjoy her Renaissance womanhood.Side note: kudos to whatever Alaska viral video expert is being so savvy and National Enquirer-esque about dribbling these out for maximum "impact."

It's the rumor that's been burning up the internet for the last few days: in an upcoming issue of Esquire, actress Anne Hathaway will open up about her love of anal sex. After describing it as one of the most sensual things she's ever done and something that makes her feel "feminine in a very special way," the actress supposedly says, "Every woman should try it, otherwise they miss out on something amazing." While Hathaway has played her fair share of sexually provocative roles in films like Havoc and Brokeback Mountain, we were skeptical of her newfound candor; nevertheless, the rumor has only built up steam over the last few days (it was spread by Gawker, LA Rag Mag, and thousands of other sites). Emboldened by our investigation into Megan Fox's own magazine confessions, we knew we had to find out: are these Hathaway quotes for real, and if not, where did they come from?Our first instinct was to disbelieve the story; after all, virtually every profile we've ever read of Hathaway mentions how carefully and professionally she answers questions, concerned that her quotes will be taken out of context. Had Hathaway been emboldened after her split with boyfriend Raffaello Follieri, or was someone putting naughty words in her mouth? Turns out, it's the latter. We contacted Esquire for comment, and spokesperson Rhett Usry was shocked by the rumor. "Absolutely not true," he told us. "There is no interview with Anne Hathaway at all in the upcoming issue of Esquire." So where did the story originate? All signs point to this September 12 posting on Celeb.Dump, a photo-laden blog promising "Sexy Celebrity Pictures With Little To No Bullshit" (and headlines like "Stacy Keibler is so very hot" and "Jessica Simpson touching herself"). "Thanks to Miss M. from Esquire for letting me know" about the rumor, said the poster (who declined our repeated requests to comment on his tip). As for how this obscure bit of gossip hit the big time, we're betting it's due to a potent mix of wishful thinking, Hathaway's Rachel Getting Married press tour, and lingering conflation of the actress with Brokeback Mountain. Either that, or Follieri's got an axe to grind. Memo to Celeb.Dump: if your "source" claims to be Esquire's liaison to the Vatican, it may be time to place some calls. [Photo Credit: AP]

Is Sarah Palin merely a pawn for the powerful hunting industry, being used to lure in women to become the newest consumers in the sport's thrill kill cult? Well that would probably be an overstatement. But it is true that hunting interests have been recruiting women hardcore lately, and they're stepping up their big marketing push to ladies now that a fellow bloodthirsty vagina possessor has a shot at the White House. Turns out there's lots of money to be made on female hunters. And also lots of bad poetry! The number of men hunting has declined over the last decade, as humans move out of caves and into urban areas and find ways to distinguish themselves from Dick Cheney. So weapons manufacturers and their ilk are targeting women to pick up the slack. By offering them some dumb things like pink guns, which, savvy female hunters noted, was not very good camouflage. But Palin has been a hit:

The Wall Street Journal abandoned its restrained front page design just in time. The staid business newspaper has captured the month's growing financial alarm—and contributed to it—with dramatic headlines often stretching across all six columns of the front page. The growing point size of the headlines is a graphic measure of the gathering crisis. The first splash headline came on Monday 15th September as Lehman Brothers teetered. Since then, the Journal has given the panic treatment to eight more front pages, most recently in today's dire summary of the news: Bailout Plan Rejected, Markets Plunge, Forcing New Scramble to Solve Crisis. The month (and the Jewish year) is over. But it's not the last time newspapers will break out the big fonts. Click for high-definition version of the collage.

A November Vanity Fair story explores the "rivalry" between CNBC "Money Honey" Maria Bartiromo and the rookie anchor eight years her junior, Erin Burnett, whom they dub the "Street Sweetie." Both broads deny the existence of said rivalry; Burnett suggests it's a "male fantasy thing" and Bartiromo speculates that "maybe at the end of the day someone is doing this, planting this, because it puts more attention on the network." And like: mission accomplished! The two look stunning in the mag.* But like, hey, you know what else puts attention on the network? The actually-more-stunning collapse of finance as we knew it! So what do these two babelicious brunettes make of all that: anything? We don't really find out! Vanity Fair is too busy ruminating on how sexist the whole business of broadcast financial news is. Oh yeah, and the story is called "Who Is Wall Street's Queen B?"Burnett is depicted as the naive, bright-eyed boarding school popular girl who never had to pay her dues because Maria, the elder elegant Brooklyn-born street hustling Italian trailblazer, did it all for her. Maria doesn't really try to understand the "kids today" or their slutty outfits, as we learn through this admittedly awesome anecdote:

Ian and Moe were on Gossip Girl last night! Well, their names were at least. As the camera panned over Blair's carefully planned seating chart for her mother's Fashion Weeks show, there—among other New York notable types (Tory Burch! Anna Wintour! Adam Moss! Leanne Marshall from Project Runway!)—were Moe Tkacik and Ian Spiegelman, two of my very own esteemed Gawker colleagues. I'm so jealous that they got invited to a teen soap's imaginary fashion show. It's also just really fun when GG acknowledges the media that is so often acknowledging GG and the circle game continues in its weird, delightful, though admittedly incestuous way. Maybe next year I'll get to go! The clip featuring the seating chart is above, if you care to try to pause and find other names. Vanity Fair has a nice close-up, too. Read on for more recap. It's tough to know where to start on such an overstuffed (in a good way, I think) episode, so I suppose we might as well start with the grownups. Lily and Bart love each other in a brittle, Connecticut way that involves jewelry and expensive art collections that one buys to impress the other—almost like a roommate would, freshman year of college, with like Sublime and Scarface posters or something (old person!) Anyway, in the end Lily found out that an old nude photograph she'd taken, a Mapplethorpe, had been confiscated by the circle-the-wagons Bart. She was upset, until he showed her the entire dossier he had on his Nordic bride. One envelope in particular, whose contents are still a secret to us, seemed to shut Lily right up. Meanwhile her daughter Miss Serena was budding into a young socialite, traipsing about town with something hilariously called Poppy Lipton. She continued to (inadvertently) woo away former queen bee Blair's bitchy posse of friends, wowing them with paparazzi photos in which she did some awkward pose that looked like enormous strawberry face minus the enormous strawberry. All of this made Blair upset, especially when Serena was invited to sit front row, with her gaggle of vague "socialites," at Blair's mom's little fashion show. Shrieeeeekkkkk!! They were supposed to watch backstage together, it's their most cherished tradition. But times change, young Blair. Time and people and places zoom away from us faster and faster as we get older, and no amount of screaming and double crossing can stop the terrible march. But it doesn't hurt to try! Yes indeed Blair was in full scheme mode, pulling an innumerable amount of stunts at her mother's show's expense. She fucked with the seating, she chased away the models, and she switched out the final dress—worn poutingly by, of course, van der Woodsen. Oh, and that green Lisa Turtle cocktail party frock? Designed by Jenny. Wicked, bobble headed Jenny, who has insinuated herself into the Waldorf fashion world faster than you can say "child labor laws." The only, heh heh heh, problem is that she hasn't been going to school and Pa Humphrey is mad mad mad (because he pays a bamillion dollars for the silly school, because he is an idiot, or maybe the kids aren't all that bright, I mean, they couldn't go to Stuyvesant or any of the other good New York City public high schools? I mean, I know, the public school system is nowhere near perfect, and some high schools are probably not in great shape, but c'mon). He set up a meeting with Headmistress McCarnadoogle or whatever and Jenny told the old battle axe that she was fleeing academia with no intention of returning.

The Three Fates are almost done spinning the American narrative, Atropos readying her scissors to deliver one final snip. When the story is done the great heralding beacon of the end of days will burn brightly, in the form of a Britney Spears sex tape. Yes indeed the misbegotten pop star apparently filmed herself in flagrante delicto with her old creepy paparazzo boyfriend Adnan Ghalib, and now he's waving it around threatening to release it. How did we get to this point? Well, after the jump we'll take a look at three other celebrity sex tapes that, had our foresight only been as 20/20 as our hindsight, we could have recognized as the end of everything.

Gawker photographer Nikola Tamindzic had an imaged ready for this day. For higher definition, visit Home of the Vain.

I would say that this Sarah Palin business just isn't funny anymore, but then I couldn't illustrate the following news with a Flintstones picture. "Soon after Sarah Palin was elected mayor of the foothill town of Wasilla, Alaska, she startled a local music teacher by insisting in casual conversation that men and dinosaurs coexisted on an Earth created 6,000 years ago-about 65 million years after scientists say most dinosaurs became extinct-the teacher said."

Forget it — we're not even bothering with happy hour tonight. We're going straight for our Dirt Sandwich, a heaving helping of all the entertainment news and scandal that's fit to consume from the busy week behind us. This episode features the uniquely robust flavor of Clay Aiken's truth and consequences, the savory zing of Lohan/Ronson revelations, and a soothing aftertaste of Emmys, Dancing with the Stars and swimsuit legend Sarah Palin. How about some extreme face time with Joe Biden? Hungry yet? Fine — you can have the whole thing, crafted from scratch by Defamer's resident video-delicatessen wizardess Molly McAleer. Bon appetit!

With all due respect, Cecily von Ziegesar, I must dispute your contention that Barack Obama is Blair Waldorf. He is so totally not Blair. I realize that I could not be writing this post at all had you not blazed the trail by authoring the transcendent works of literature on which the meta-popular Gossip Girl television series is based, whereas I have watched said derivative television show exactly once. But perhaps in that relative ignorance I can claim a kind of wisdom you are too enmeshed, too beholden, too blinded by detail and deep-seated loyalties to your own creations, to possess. In that way you would be not unlike ex-Hillary Clinton aide Howard Wolfson, who last month described awakening "Rip Van Winkle"-like after his boss finally conceded to her charismatic young rival "to a world transformed by political currents we had stood against." Wake up and smell the green tea mimosas, Cecily! Like the country, Gossip Girl is bigger than you now.And when you glibly state, pollster-like, that "the truth is, Barack is just not blond enough or vague enough to be a Serena" as if that is just the accepted truth, like "America is not ready for a black president" or "socialism is for Europeans", you are failing to detect the paradigm shift underway that had the "smart money" backing the Serena as Obama metaphor all the way back in Season One:

Everyone is treating Sarah Palin like a vapid celebrity and it is just so patronizing! Here she is, four thousand four hundred miles away from her tanning bed, meeting all these important people with accents in her very most distinguished Nancy Pelosi outfits and president of Pakistan tells her she is "more gorgeous" than he expected her to be! Gossip columnist "nearly lunged" to check out the label on her jacket at a fancy dinner the other night. So sexist, right! And it gets soooooo much more offensive!Mainstream media outlets - and our very own Richard! - have dipped into the market for Palin family fan fiction. Two weeks ago this market seemed the exclusive domain of independent satirists like Something Awful - which portrayed a young Levi Johnston as harboring an elaborate Sarah Palin wet nurse fantasy - and Jeff Johnson's blog, which imagined Todd Palin as the type of dude for whom "whiskey makes him more sober." Well this week New York's blog went there, inspired by the Sarah Palin's real-life, closed-to-the-press meeting with Henry Kissinger:

Not only did John McCain ditch Late Show host David Letterman for Katie Couric and mislead him about it, it turns out the Republican presidential nominee spent the entire night in New York and didn't fly to DC until the next morning. So, in a reprise of last night, Letterman will spend a good chunk of his show this evening bashing the Arizona senator. "The economy just barely held on long enough for him to get back" to DC, Letterman joked. As theatrical as the Letterman-McCain feud has become, Letterman could probably score more points talking about the $700 billion banking bailout than about the mechanics of late-night TV booking. Here's to hoping that, when the full show airs, he does. (Click the video icon to watch some excerpts.)

Honestly it's just sad now. Sarah Palin looks genuinely upset that everyone mocked her for saying she has foreign policy experience because of her state's proximity to Russia. Asked to explain what sort of foreign policy experience that proximity lends her, she says her state is very close to Russia. Katie Couric just smiles politely. The new exclusive clip from the CBS interview with America's Saddest Joke is attached below. Click to view
Watch CBS Videos Online John McCain should be ashamed of himself.

Somehow, YouTube already has a copy of David Letterman tonight lacerating John McCain for skipping the Late Show and suspending his campaign in the midst of the Wall Street meltdown. As reported earlier by Drudge, Letterman became especially upset when he caught the Republican presidential nominee in a live feed from New York being interviewed by his own network's Katie Couric. McCain had personally told Letterman he was canceling because he was headed back to the capital to handle the financial crisis. Whoops.

John McCain has asked that this Friday's first presidential debate be postponed. He says it needs to be put off in order for him to "focus on the financial crisis," and he needs that time to fix this mess in his position as a Senator without any authority over any of it. Wtf. According to MSNBC, he's returning to Washington right now to personally solve this bailout thing. So—"country first," right? No time for debating, because Senator McCain—who is not on the Joint Economic Committee btw!—is asking Obama to join him in Washington. Jesus Christ. We're thinking this will very quickly come off as a "political stunt," and also make McCain look like a moron next time he trots out the "I lie about Obama because he wouldn't debate me 100 times from now until the election" line. But whatever, maybe it'll play well? For a day or two, anyway. But! What does Obama do? He calls it a cheap political ploy, hopefully, says he wants to debate right away. It is a sign, probably, that McCain's debate prep wasn't going well. It's a naked attempt to look on top of the news cycle and to insert himself into the economic debate, but canceling a debate won't instill confidence in anyone, will it? It seems desperate and reactive, especially in the face of bad polling for McCain. He's painting it as a post-partisan 9/11 thing, of course, and maybe that'll fly. Once again, we reiterate: there is nothing McCain can do about this. This is the stupidest and emptiest of political gestures. On the plus side, your Friday won't be wasted watching the debate! Update: Stuff we heard on the tv: The University of Mississippi (they're hosting the debate) say the debate is still going on as planned. Obama's camp is probably going to announce that they're going ahead with the debate soon.