The New York Times is hiring, hiring, hiring! You can be a freelance writer even—that is, for "online content startup" LifeWire, which, when it launches, will provide "original and syndicated lifestyle content to Web publishers." You can be a "business producer," a confusing title for what actually sounds like an entertaining job—it's one of those newfangled jobs where you're a packager and a photo editor and a triage nurse and actually a journalist too. There's a travel and style editor job to oversee web producers; an open blog producer job at New York/Region; a homepage producer. That's a lot of hiring for a paper that's having its first layoffs in a while!

The wonderful thing about Digg? Critical thinking is not required. You can vote for stories based on your personal belief system, not whether they're, say, true. Take, for example, a brief New York Times story about UPS's cost-saving route software. Digg users translated this into a tall tale about UPS saving 3 million gallons of gas by elminating left-hand turns. Computers save the environment! It's a tale that comforts geeks who believe software will fix everything.

Everything about today's Joyce Wadler and Abby Aguire's "Who Invited the Dog?" in today's Times is incredible. Including: "Ari Henry Barnes, who works in a New York law firm, is so devoted to his cat, Romeo, that he wipes the animal's behind every time he does 'a stinky boom boom.'" And: "A legion of two animal experts interviewed agreed that taking an unexpected animal to a party is impolite." [NYT]

I just published my first in what will be a whole lot of New York Times personal technology articles for non-nerds. "A Universe of Gadget Advice" leads those of us (read: me) who can't follow the gadgetspeak on Gizmodo through the hell — well, the heck of online last-minute gadget gift shopping. NYT techniology [sic] editor Damon Darlin turns out to be a perfectly nice guy who gets my jokes. And then edits them into English. I'll be writing about cellphones, cameras, TVs, and any Web 2.0 stuff that survives Ted at Uncov. I'm pretty sure I'm now the first writer to simultaneously contribute to the NYT, the Wall Street Journal and Gawker Media. Look, you've got your creepy life goals, and I've got mine.

So that giant hippie freak Choire was deeply moved and whatever by today's Times story on the sad state of the Bronx Family Court elevators. Pinko commie softie. Elevators are a privilege, not a right! If they've got a reason to be in family court, then they probably don't deserve modern mechanical conveniences anyway.

The New York Times, despite recent cutbacks, still employs an army of copy editors, right? Right. But none of them appear to have tended to technology editor Damon Darlin's biography recently. Or is that techniology editor? "He is most interested in the consumer side of techniology, particularly in supply, demand and pricing," says the Times.

Squash: it's a vegetable, a verb, and a gay racket sport. So it's only natural that it's apparently huge in the Ivy Leagues. Which makes it the secret to gaining admittance into those terrible schools, according to last Sunday's Times. Because "a high percentage of the nation's most prestigious colleges field teams," obnoxious parents seeking an edge for their kids are now forcing them to play the elite, expensive game. "'Squash is "hot" right now,' said Kenny Scher, the executive director of the New York-based Metropolitan Squash Racquets Association, which organizes leagues and tournaments." Just like it was seven years ago, the last time the Times wrote this piece.

"The Ethicist" is Randy Cohen's long-running advice column in the New York Times. Each week, Gabriel Delahaye's "The Unethicist" will answer the same questions as "The Ethicist," with obvious differences.

Gadget reviewer David Pogue of the New York Times has run so short of ideas that he's recycling a decade-old idea: Criticizing the absurdity of today's Web 2.0 domain names. But in rehashing what everyone else already knew, Pogue reveals just how far behind he is. "These are all actual Web sites that have hit the Web in the last year or so: Doostang. Wufoo. Bliin. Thoof. Bebo. Meebo. Meemo. Kudit. Raketu. Etelos. Iyogi. Oyogi. Qoop. Fark. Kijiji. Zixxo. Zoogmo." Fark? Last year or so? Drew Curtis's Fark.com as a collection of interesting headlines has been around since at least 1999.

The mega-million-dollar counterfeit luxury goods industry took a major hit yesterday, when a ring of Chinese knock-off smugglers that imported $200-million of faux Ralph Lauren and Baby Phat was thoroughly busted by the feds. Twenty shipping containers full of fake goods were bribed on through the ports of Jersey. A sad day for the aspirational but working classes! Christmas just got a lot more expensive for the ladies who love fake handbags and cruising Canal Street.

Are you married to a New York Times staffer? Or are you Simon Rich, spawn of Frank Rich? Thanks to an in-house Times email, we know exactly what you're getting this Christmas: "Fleece pullovers." Or maybe pens! "Avoid the holiday crowds by doing your gift shopping inside The New York Times Building," they entice. Everything's under $80!

Kim Severson writes in the Times today that the entree—that big thing you eat at dinner—is dead. It has been replaced by crudi, tapas, side dishes, salads and other non-entree things. Bald bear chef Tom Collichio agrees, saying, "Eating an entree is too many bites of one thing, and it's boring." Big ol' cook Mario Batali signs on too! "As a diner, the idea of me chewing 17 bites of one thing and another 17 bites of another is absolutely boring, and not how I want to eat." Which all means in the words of Ms. Severson, "The entree is Walter Cronkite." Blech! That means I fucking ate Walter Cronkite last night with some homemade applesauce and roast fingerling potatoes! You know what though; that dude is delicious! Interesting game: Substitute literary terms for culinary ones, and you have a regurgitation of the old media/new media debate. Wasn't it just months ago Pilates-loving Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. said, "Reading a paper is too many bites of one thing, and it's boring"?

New York Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni is "a sucker for overpriced candles," is currently obsessed with Travis' second album, The Man Who, and loves the New England Pats. Also! Sometimes he eats baguettes so hard that "I sometimes have to change my shirt afterward because of the jam stains." Mignon! [Refinery 29]

From the mailbag: "One or more of the giant glass windows apparently fell off the side of the NY Times building. There are fire trucks everywhere along 40th Street."

The weekly Weddings and Celebrations section in the 'New York Times' is your guide to who is superior to you—and who is worse than whom. But don't you know: They're all winners, because they're newly-married, and you're single again, or thinking about a divorce, and just generally losing all the time. It's like the brilliant Ann Magnuson always said: Maybe you should have married Junior, the Vietnam vet parking attendant! Would it be so bad?

Until now, the New York Times matched employee contributions to charity at $1.50 for every staff dollar donated. In January, the company will reduce that rate, and only match non-profit donations dollar-for-dollar—up to $3000 a year per person, according to a company-wide email from publisher Arthur Sulzberger sent this morning.

"The Ethicist" is Randy Cohen's long-running advice column in the New York Times. Each week, Gabriel Delahaye's "The Unethicist" will answer the same questions as "The Ethicist," with obvious differences.

Each Friday, NYT.com General Manager Vivian Schiller and 'Times' deputy managing editor Jonathan Landman write an in-house email on the subject of The Future and The Internet and The Newsroom. This week, do your own textual analysis: "Look at the nytimes.com homepage, or any section front. There's lots and lots of stuff. Words. Pictures. Headlines. (Big ones and little ones.) Ads. (Little ones and big ones.) Video. Vertical things. Horizontal things. Icons. Navigation bars. Tabs. It's a riot of activity. It's built around information—getting it before impatient users, grabbing little bites of attention span. Look again at T Online. Not so much stuff."

T Magazine: The Website is here! IT IS CRAZY how much of Natalie Portman's face is on it, too! You will note that the website has invented a new way to arrange content: By words, pictures, products, video and something else which is probably their junk drawer. (Finally, words get relegated where they belong!) Because of this, and its Flash-heaviness, they have also possibly invented new advertising categories, which is kinda cool. Anyway, it is conspicuously not intended to be a web version of a print project. (It was designed by createthe, who make such slick little websites that they often baffle the user on first visit—they HATE letting you scroll by traditional methods.) Also they have turned Horacio Silva, once upon a time proprietor of Chic Happens, back into a blogger, which is hilarious.

"It's been kind of a depressing day," said Bill O'Meara, president of the Newspaper Guild of New York, when we asked him how Times staffers were taking the news today of layoffs in the newsroom. "It went all through the building very quickly, people were not happy," he said.