Meredith Bryan observes in the NYO today that—hello!—niceness is back! On the internet, and in New York in general. Goodbye to cynicism! This interesting and somewhat true phenomenon will destroy us all, if we let it.

Common situation in an elevator: Mr. Mouthbreather near you has a ringing phone, which he answers, and talks into, loudly. He should be facepunched, right? Right! Ergo, Sunday Styles trend piece: People now vigilantly fighting back against manner-less, oblivious pricks.

Graydon Carter—the George Washington of Vanity Fair—was (allegedly) on a jet to Bermuda when layoffs hit the magazine last week. That's okay! Graydon (allegedly) has a very generous way of making it up to the layoff victims.

Amid all of the carnage at Conde Nast this month, rumors were floating that Si Newhouse was sheltering his three most precious magazines: the New Yorker, Vogue, and Vanity Fair. Well; the part about Vanity Fair, at least, was wrong.

It sucks to find out you're getting laid off. It sucks a lot worse to find out you're getting laid off because a lawyer yakked about it at high volume on a commuter train.

Recently the New York Times explained how hard it is to live on $500k a year. Twice! Now the paper reports: nobody's paying for business lunches any more! Is this just a made-up thing? Yes.

In Japan, CEOs take shame seriously. They're expected to work late, dedicate their entire lives to the good of a company, and try to ensure that they don't work their employees to the point of suicide. And when Japanese CEOs make mistakes, they're expected to make a big show of tearily flogging themselves in public (figuratively). But here in America? CEOs get to screw up as bad as they want and walk away with millions, with nary a tear nor a nice tip to the bellhop on the way out the door. Stan O'Neal! Bob Nardelli! Dennis Kozlowski! CEOS in the USA need to STFU and get way better at public humiliation. They problem is that in this country, CEOs are only too happy to trade the scorn of the public for a pile of money. Most Americans would do the same! (Unless the revolution comes, in which case it's up against the wall with all of you). So you can bitch all you want about golden parachutes that can top $100 million for executives who didn't do shit except lose shareholder money the entire time they were employed, but that CEO will chuckle to himself, have his flack issue a statement, and then go enjoy his millions and millions of free dollars on a private island somewhere, full of untold numbers of prostitutes. So America has worked out its own ways to humiliate these CEOs without their consent. The media trumpets their salaries all over the place, hollering louder about them the worse their company does. Their kids are shunned and forced to go to special, expensive schools. Actually, nobody sympathizes with CEOs except for other CEOs, and politicians. Now, however, every company is doing poorly. So our system for determining what executives to focus our class rage upon is broken. The American public is spread too thin. That's why we need to import some sort of Japanese-style public shaming ceremony here. CEOs can apologize for their sins and wallow in misery, we can all enjoy the schadenfreude, and then we can all focus our allotment of hatred where it belongs: on Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. And the CEOs will join us. America is unity!

Oh good, more attack ads! Not in politics—in the cutthroat world of soup. As we newly poor Americans gather our last remaining pennies from our decimated retirement accounts, hitchhike to the grocery store, and head for the soup aisle to ponder what watery concoction can best momentarily quiet our growling bellies, marketers are more determined than ever to ensure you pick their cheap concoction above their competitors'. So they're running ads savaging rivals like Progresso and McDonald's who are just wrong for America:

We have Olympic fever! But not as much as Beijing-ians. The Chinese government is like an overanxious mama, worried her kid might start picking his nose on stage at his preschool graduation. So they're bombarding the wayward citizenry with propaganda posters directing them how to act when all the weird foreigners get to town. The oddest thing is that they go to great lengths to explain how to make pale Westerners feel at ease, when in fact much of the etiquette advice seems totally unrelated to American life. It's a culture clash that will make you chuckle! Below, actual instructions to the Chinese: Whatever you do, don't ask what someone does!

Here is a prime candidate for immediate cloning: John Clifford, a 6'4, quick-tempered former police officer and a lawyer whose greatest pleasure in life seems to be riding the Long Island Rail Road and aggressively screaming at jerks who are talking too loud on their cell phones. Clifford was just found not guilty of charges stemming from his latest enforcement action, when he cussed out an obnoxious cell phone user he described as "a 19-year-old nitwit waking up one girlfriend after another." But this isn't even close to being the first time he's had to regulate on some yapping nitwits on the train: