Because TODAY has fallen behind Good Morning America in the ratings and "yum wine," Hoda Kotb is looking for a new best friend.

For millennia, humans have wondered what happens after we die. Finally, we have a definitive answer: this week, in an exclusive cover story, Newsweek reveals that "Heaven Is Real." And it sounds suspiciously like a DMT trip as described on internet drug forums.

Back in September, we thought Prefix magazine's freelancer rates of $6 per day were about as bad as it could get in a desiccated media landscape where writers are exploited like the railroad workers of old. Today, a company out of Portland, Oregon, is making Prefix's rates look downright extravagant.

It's no secret that the Washington Post Company, home to one of America's most important and revered newspapers, is floundering. The company's once booming education business, Kaplan, has cooled significantly in recent quarters, and ad revenues in both print and online are also down. Fighting to keep its head above water, the Post Co. has now done what many dying people do: turned to hospice care.

In a new Los Angeles Magazine story, writer Amy Wallace reaches out to embarrassed self-plagiarist and poet manque Jonah Lehrer to ask him what his future plans are. Lehrer doesn't reveal much outside of the fact that he is "writing something about the mistake and affair myself," but he adds that Wallace is only the third person to contact him for comment in the wake of his scandal. Almost instantly, Joe Coscarelli at Daily Intel was charging Lehrer with yet another mistruth:

Last Friday, French gossip magazine Closer published a series of photographs of Kate Middleton sunbathing topless. Yesterday morning, police in Paris raided the publication's offices of Closer magazine, searching the building and inspecting the staff's computers in an attempt to find the name of the photographer. And today, the photos were printed, for the fourth and fifth time, respectively, in Sweden and Denmark.

"MUSLIM RAGE," screams Newsweek's new cover story about last week's violent anti-American protests. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the well-known anti-Islam activist, is here to tell "us" (The_West) how to "end it." And it's true, isn't it? All Muslims are constantly raging about everything. So to pay tribute to Ali's article — which describes the protesters as "the mainstream of contemporary Islam" — and the subtle, smart cover that accompanies it, we've collected 13 striking, powerful images of MUSLIM RAGE.

Prefix magazine, a New York-based music and film publication, is hiring news writers for its website. But they can't just be any lame bloggers off the street, of course. Aware that this is a buyer's market when it comes to hiring writing talent, Prefix demands top candidates, noting in a Craigslist job posting that all writing applicants must have "an encyclopedic knowledge of music or film."

As a journalist, I am sworn to bring facts to light by any means necessary. So here is a picture of me in a tutu with a shoe on my head at Gawker HQ. (A size 9 1/2 men's Reebok Question, to be exact.)

The privileged young people of Harvard College are not often recognized for their integrity and backbone. They made a whole movie about how Zuckerberg stole Facebook from the terrible Winklevoss twins, for instance. And just last week more than 100 Harvard students came under fire for a cheating scandal that reportedly found them plagiarizing and colluding with one another on the take-home final exam. But today, two editors at the Harvard Crimson are returning some credibility to the ivy-est of Ivy League schools.

From today's Western Mail. LOL. "The caption error in today's Western Mail is under internal investigation," a spokesperson tells the Press Gazette. "We apologise for any offence this error may have caused." [@Gwennys via Poynter]

A few days ago, Pulitzer prize-winning leftist cocaine site Huffington Post broke the news that Louisiana's Rayville Elementary — currently receiving a "failing" grade from the state — won't allow white students to transfer out due a federal desegregation ruling from 1986. A perfect article to be circulated as evidence of reverse racism! And all it needed was a little bit of "here's the reaction around the web" padding courtesy a quote from the forum ADISC.org.

The New York Times' Julie Bosman reports that Jonah Lehrer, the precocious New Yorker writer who was caught fabricating Bob Dylan quotes in his book Imagine, has resigned from the magazine. Here's his statement, via Bosman's Twitter feed:

Mike Wallace, one of the original correspondents of 60 Minutes, has died at 93. Wallace worked for the program for four decades and entered semi-retirement in 2006. Since then, Wallace appeared intermittently on the show to interview such contentious figures as Jack Kevorkian and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. His most recent 60 Minutes interview was with Roger Clemens in 2008.

In 1857, in the midst of the greatest political strife a young nation had yet known, a group of prominent intellectuals and activists — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., and Harriet Beecher Stowe, among others — gathered together to create a New England literary magazine: The Atlantic. For more than a century, it was a leading voice for progressive causes, from abolition to civil rights, and a platform for some of the country's greatest literary voices. Today, it published a rage comic. "Props on the rage comic, Atlantic!" writes Newsweek.

Breitbart.com guy and Human Events editor-at-large Jason Mattera is " D.C.'s Bad Boy Reporter," and what says "bad boy" more than ambushing U2 frontman Bono for a "gotcha" interview about U2's taxes? Ha ha, except that Mattera actually ambushed a Bono impersonator, which may be why he couldn't really answer questions about U2's taxes:

Not for the faint of heart, Marie Colvin's last report from Homs, Syria shows the slow death of a baby boy. The city has been under siege for 18 days, resulting in thousands of casualties. Colvin was killed earlier this morning in the home where she was staying.

Those of you who caught the news (revealed, no doubt coincidentally, in two different articles published on the same day) that New York Times media wunderkind Brian Stelter and NY1 traffic reporter Jamie Shupak are dating — and have been for five months, apparently — may be wondering what we wondered this morning when we heard: What is Brian Stelter's romance secret? (Stelter, after all, is known also for wooing CNBC reporter Nicole Lapin.) We emailed to ask, and Brian tells us:

Today we reported that Chinese micro-blogs had exploded in rumors that North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un was assassinated this morning in Beijing. Now, we owe it to the internet to see if there's any truth to the rumors. We need you, Chinese Gawker readers!

Is it too late to give a Pulitzer to Murk Avenue's Donovan Strain? Because if figuring out the exact day on which Ice Cube had a good day (as described in his 1993 classic "It Was a Good Day") isn't Pulitzer-worthy, I don't know what is.