Ex-First Look editor Matt Taibbi has landed a new feature-writing gig at Grantland. Taibbi has also returned to writing for Rolling Stone.

Earlier this week, New York magazine’s Andrew Rice reported that journalist Matt Taibbi had left First Look Media, the journalism startup of eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar. Today four of Taibbi’s former colleagues reveal, in a detailed blog post published on First Look’s own site The Intercept, why exactly Taibbi left the company. It’s not pretty.

Matt Taibbi's new street-level study on the crumbling of America is a shocking, important read. It focuses on Camden, New Jersey, which has all the crime problems of Detroit and none of the fancy expensive art to sell.

The most recent Matt Taibbi story about financial chicanery and corruption concerns the ratings agencies, who happily doled out AAA ratings to packages of shit right up until the whole economy collapsed in 2008. Just how duplicitous were these allegedly impartial pillars of finance?

In your cloudy Friday media column: a journalist murdered in Brazil, the latest Matt Taibbi uproar, Timesmen are momentarily glamorous, Gay Talese's reading material is so Gay, Newsweek's big positive news, and an illustrated NYT paywall hack.

In your politically advantageous Thursday media column: Juan Williams speaks, Matt Taibbi is outgrowing his wild days, Tina Brown is rapidly approaching "feud" status with Newsweek, and a funny video, about Newsweek, on the internet.

In your gleaming Tuesday media column: big news at True/ Slant, The Atlantic's selling mad ads, the NYT gets a new media reporter, and every last thing is for sale at Shape magazine.

This memo went out recently from Coates Bateman, editorial director of True/ Slant, to all the bloggers there. The subject: "Name calling within posts."

Just like angry former expat Matt Taibbi, the editor-in-chief of the Russian edition of Newsweek, Mikhail Fishman, likes to party the Moscow way. But it may all be a set up by the Kremlin. Or maybe not. Who knows?

"'Fuck you,' [Matt Taibbi] snarled, and then picked up his mug from the table, threw his coffee at me, and stormed out." It would be awesome if the final scene of this new Vanity Fair piece on the history of The Exile was a complex, multi-player joke by Matt Taibbi and Graydon Carter on everyone else in the media. Otherwise it's just bizarre. I mean it would be bizarre if Matt Taibbi were besties with Graydon Carter, but not as bizarre as Matt Taibbi snapping violently because a reporter failed to praise his work. Although maybe he still has the ol' horse semen running through his veins like journalistic fire!
Anyhow the whole story is great, read it all.

Once a day we like to take a second to point out a comment that we found especially funny, interesting, or (maybe someday) uplifting. Today we get a reaction to Haiti and big bad Republicans.

Matt Taibbi translates David Brooks' "Why Haiti is Really Fucked up" column in the NYT last weekend: "Although it is true that Haiti was just like five minutes ago a victim of a random earthquake that killed tens of thousands of people, I'm going to skip right past the fake mourning period and point out that Haitians are a bunch of lazy niggers who can't keep their dongs in their pants and probably wouldn't be pancaked under fifty tons of rubble if they had spent a little more time over the years listening to the clarion call of white progress, and learning to use a freaking T-square, instead of singing and dancing and dabbling in not-entirely-Christian religions and making babies all the fucking time."
[True Slant]

Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi famously called Goldman Sachs the "great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money." Turns out Nazi cartoonists came up with that image first.

It must pain Jann Wenner to see his other properties start succeeding where flagship Rolling Stone squandered possibilities and descended into irrelevancy: online. Now that US Weekly's site has heat, Wenner's finally starting to line up RS's strategy of "whatever."

Maybe you heard yesterday about how things are going great over at Goldman, like $1,000,000 for each employee great? So surely there were some sick banker celebrations going down last night, right? Not if management can help it!

• Cablevision is planning to launch an entire cable network devoted to nothing but wedding shows. So now you'll be able to watch Bridezillas 24/7. Yay. [B&C]
• It may not be over for Vibe. Quincy Jones, who founded the magazine in '93, says he's looking into buying it back and keeping it alive as a website. [Ebony]
• Spin reportedly laid off 20 percent of its staff yesterday. [Gawker]
• Gannett Co., the largest newspaper publisher in the U.S. by circulation, is reportedly cutting between 1,000 and 2,000 jobs at the company. [WSJ]
• More bad news for CNN: MSNBC is now in front on weeknights and Campbell Brown's nightly show continues to plunge in the ratings, too. [NYT, TVBTN]
• CNBC's Dennis Kneale doesn't like it when bloggers mock him. Will acting like a nut on TV fix that? No, but it sure makes for amusing TV. [Dealbreaker]

Looks like those clever backdoor bailouts orchestrated by the plethora of carefully placed henchman throughout the highest levels of government has paid off—Goldman Sachs will pay out the biggest bonuses in its history after a "spectacular first half."

Fans of Matt Taibbi, frequent Bill Maher guest, 2008 NMA winner and Tom Friedman's worst nightmare on steroids, have long wondered why Taibbi blogs for True/Slant and not Rolling Stone. It's time for some answers!

In 2005, Matt Taibbi wrote a takedown of NYT mouthbreather Tom Friedman's unique idiocy that remains the greatest thing ever written about the mustachioed private-jet-frequent-flyer. Now Taibbi has a new piece; top ten anti-'stache material.

New York magazine's daily online chats about the election are usually just mildly interesting, since the journalists involved tend to be overly polite to one another, because who knows who you're going to be sending a job application to someday? Even Gawker Media veterans and that Daily Kos maniac act all pleasant. But Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi has never been one for such fraternal niceties, and when nymag.com threw him a sparring partner from National Review, the predictably caustic lefty went to work with his fangs, at one point typing, "tell me you're not ashamed." It was awesome and just really uncomfortable at the same time. Highlights: